Against White Feminism Read online

  So even while it has not spent or allocated new funds toward realizing the feminist foreign assistance policy and is continuing to sell arms to countries such as the United States and Saudi Arabia, Canada is enjoying the inherent virtue signaling that comes from adopting something “feminist.”26 The scenario deserves the attention of feminists because it (yet again!) reveals how the branding of feminism is directed largely toward white women, in this case Canadian white women, who want to feel good about their country and gloss over all the many unfeminist acts in which Canada is complicit.

  It is not only CIA agents and development bureaucrats and nation-states that have co-opted the language of feminism; it is also journalists. If the former create and manage the conditions of war, the latter shapes its narrative. The image of the War on Terror as a feminist war to deliver rights to women around the world could not have been established without State Department spokeswomen, CIA operatives, and other women directly associated with the war project. But American journalists, female journalists in particular, created a narrative for the War on Terror that reaffirmed it as one fought by a feminist America against antifeminist, primitive, patriarchal, and premodern countries that were too apathetic or too weak or too traitorous to fight terror in their homelands themselves.

  In one such 2015 article from the New York Times, journalist Alissa Rubin calls out “women’s shelters as the most provocative legacy of the Western presence in Afghanistan.”27 It is an alarming claim, given that by the time the article was written, the most provocative legacy might have been the graves of 11,000 Afghans killed in the war just that year, a record high adding to the total of hundreds of thousands of casualties.28 The very idea of helping women or establishing shelters, Rubin tells Times readers, was “a revolutionary idea in Afghanistan—every bit as alien as Western democracy and far more transgressive.” While it is undoubted that women taking refuge at government-run shelters was not a recourse that existed before the arrival of the Americans, it is also true that violence against women in general was increased by the American presence, and the breakdown of family and tribal support structures.

  A scene from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a movie starring Tina Fey and based on Chicago Tribune journalist Kim Barker’s memoir The Taliban Shuffle, is representative of this condescending dynamic. In the book, Barker describes her interaction with an Afghan woman who befriends her at a wedding as feeling like “a first date with a mime.” Afghan women are mimics trying to mime the liberation modeled by white women journalists who have come to write the stories about them and teach them about feminism.

  Heroines of American journalism writing in publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post and reporting for major television networks have all played a similar role of legitimizing America’s neoimperial project in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Middle East at large, promoting a narrative that violent military incursions are designed to liberate women and deliver better societies. Thus they also underscore their own superior status as white feminists, with their values of rebellion (over resilience), risk (over caution), and speed (over endurance) as the ultimate feminist values. Afghan women emerge as no more than prototypes whose wishes always align with what white feminists think they should want, rather than as people with independent political positions and perspectives.

  Some of the tactics deployed by white women in particular in reporting on the Middle East and on Muslim women are a savage allegory of the self-serving nature of white feminism. Many offered a “friendship,” or rather the construction of a framework of “sisterhood,” to gain access into the lives of the women they wished to report on. Åsne Seierstad, for example, author of the bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, freely admits that she capitalized on the Afghan cultural formality of offering hospitality and moved into a family’s house to get material for her book, and that she “never mastered Dari,”29 but it seems she felt completely entitled to represent the innermost thoughts of the women of the family who spoke only that language. The resulting stories, for which the writers are paid (but the subjects/tellers are not), betray their subjects’ confidence or, at best, appear startlingly insensitive to their subjects’ feelings. Worse, having no enduring relationship to the community, these white writers generally disappear from the lives of their subjects the second the stories are filed, apparently with no regard to the emotional, political, and practical consequences of their exposures and betrayals. Such consequences are exemplified by a lawsuit that the bookseller’s second wife brought against Seierstad for defamation and negligent journalistic practices. Among other things, the suit alleged that Seirstand’s disclosures of certain sexual behaviors had forced some of the women to emigrate to avoid the censure or worse that they would have suffered as a result of those disclosures if they had stayed in Afghanistan. Ultimately, a Norwegian appeals court reversed a lower-court judgment against Seierstad, but the case dragged on for more than a decade.

  The intimate space in Middle Eastern and Afghan households have proven maddening ciphers for Western journalists seeking to decode the mysterious lives of Muslim terrorists and their women. The consequence of this segregated arrangement has meant that male journalists reporting from Muslim countries often have access to only half the world and hence half the story. Some, like the photographer who accompanied Times journalist Rod Nordland in Afghanistan, have pretended to not understand that men are not permitted to enter certain spaces, barging into women’s quarters to take pictures—in this case, of a young woman, the subject of a story Nordland was reporting on honor killings, who had retreated to the women’s quarters of the house expressly to avoid his invasive attentions.30

  The segregation of female space has in turn created opportunity for Western female journalists looking for ways to succeed in the often sexist, male-dominated field of war correspondence. Like the securo-feminists of the world who want to establish their equality in inflicting torture on Brown men, white women journalists have been eager to establish their equality in war journalism by reporting on the inner lives and sad situations of Muslim women. Their priority is not feminist solidarity but gender parity with white men in professional advancement.

  Some white female journalists have pointed to this in their public statements: famed anchor Katie Couric called the Gulf War a proving ground that made the female journalist a “ten,” and the steady supply of wars since have produced many more tens.31 Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Lara Logan of CBS, award-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario, and many lesser-known reporters have descended into the women’s spaces of Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia. A trove of journalistic exposition, much of it highlighting the secret, underground, hidden nature of these spaces, has followed, captured in photographs, front-page stories, and bestselling books that have burnished the profiles and shored up the finances of these white feminist heroines.

  In 2015, for example, Lynsey Addario’s memoir, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, became a widely feted bestseller, optioned for film. In it, Addario describes how she chose her job with the New York Times to prove herself as a woman in the male-dominated realm of war photography. The success of her series on women in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, “Women of Jihad,” led to a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2009. Addario has come to specialize in intimate images of foreign, largely Black and Brown women published in top Western magazines. One particular contribution, featured on the cover of Time in 2016, shows a nearly naked Sudanese teenager, pregnant with her rapist’s child—an image that no magazine would feature of an American girl. Discussing her 2018 photo book, Of Love & War, Addario’s own bravery at going out into a war zone is front and center, while the heroism of the civilians actually enduring war, imposed by the United States and its allies, never comes up.32 Addario describes how her access to women’s spaces and even her own experience of motherhood helped her reporting, but never acknowledges or questions the opportunism of how she has deployed this “
sisterhood,” or how whiteness and Americanness played crucial roles in her work, or the power she holds over what part of Afghan women’s lives she makes “visible” to the white and Western world.

  For many white feminist writers, going “behind the veil” of their benighted sisters? has been a reliable path to success. Former Chicago Tribune journalist Kim Barker’s memoir, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was turned into a movie featuring comedienne Tina Fey. Katherine Zoepf, who reported from Egypt and Syria for the New York Times, released her own book, Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World. In 2019, Dionne Searcey, the West Africa correspondent for the Times, released her memoir, In Pursuit of Disobedient Women, the book’s very title alluding to the fact that disobedient women (read: women who behave as white feminists think they should) are very hard to find in that region. This list goes on.

  It is a convenient coming-together, the gendered divisions of the Muslim world with the individualistic feminist goals of the West, in a time of constant war. Through the tempering medium of a white woman who functions as a moral legitimization chamber, issues of torture and subjugation are transformed into little celebrations of white women’s bravery rather than exposures of American cruelty. Americans looking at Addario’s photos or Searcey’s reporting for the Times about Boko Haram will not consider the real impact of the War on Terror, or of America’s role in it, simply the “courage” of white women who, like Gertrude Bell a hundred years earlier, have gone riding into the field, realizing their potential as men’s equals through the enduring benefits of white privilege revived by American dominance.

  There is an assumption in this kind of reporting that bringing the stories to light is somehow beneficial for the women themselves. In one interview, Lynsey Addario says that her photography of Afghan women was an attempt to reveal to readers “who these women really were—if they could see them in their homes, with their children . . . it might offer a more complete picture.”33 In the same way that the purported goal of feminist rescue legitimizes the violence of war, so the claim to be helping their subjects gives white feminist journalists moral carte blanche to use lies and subterfuge freely. When Addario wanted to photograph a secret girls’ school under the Taliban, she used a camera “concealed in [her] bag.”34 When an Afghan man (Addario seems to organize her reporting primarily through them) objected to her photographing “his” women, his protestations could be discarded because of their repugnant chauvinism by our highly principled feminist reporter, who unfortunately forgets to tell us in her book how or whether she obtained consent from the women themselves. Addario may have been more careful about getting consent (despite not knowing the language) in other cases, but in this incident, it is unclear if she did so, and her failure to address this in her book suggests that it was not consent, but the photos that were important. There is no discussion of the damage that would be done if the secret school is exposed through her photography. (Of course, it is not only white women who have been accused of this mistake. Steven McCurry, the photographer who took National Geographic’s iconic 1985 photograph of the “Afghan girl,” recently has been accused of failing to get the girl’s consent, a charge he denies.)35

  When subterfuge is not necessary or not possible, white feminist reporting relies instead on the sort of camaraderie that can elicit details. Katherine Zoepf’s prologue in Excellent Daughters finds her ensconced with a group of female Saudi teenagers, one of whom is about to get married. Everyone shares confidences (for example, the bride hopes for a Disney-themed wedding). Zoepf calls on her upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness to assume the task of revealing to us the secrets of these young Saudi women she has befriended. Through Zoepf’s words, one feels invited into the fold, escorted into that mysterious world where Muslim women share secrets away from the gaze of men, and usually also the Western reader.

  Implying puerility in girls more at ease discussing Disney than their future husbands, or irredeemable backwardness in those who find controversial the issue of talking to a man before being married—Zoepf makes her condescending judgments available only to her readers and not to her Saudi “friends.” In other journalistic forays, she focuses on a secret society in Syria, then turns her attention to boy-crazy husband-hunters in liberal Lebanon, relying on the sex-and-the-Orient mix (the chapter is titled “The Most Promiscuous Virgins in the World”) that reliably entertains Western readers. Despite knowing this, Zoepf expresses surprise that some of her subjects ask her why she’s more interested in these sorts of salacious stories than in “serious Lebanese girls,” the ones fighting for better education, harassment-free workplaces, and more equal relationships. To everyone else, the reason should be clear: Zoepf might or might not be trying to elevate and explicate the struggles of other women—or to challenge American ideas about Muslim women—in service of constructing mutual feminist understanding, but what she is actually doing is creating white feminist clickbait.

  The lack of accountability in depicting her subjects comes to a head in Excellent Daughters when Zoepf discusses the reaction some of her interview subjects have had to some of her stories. In Syria, she interviews Enas, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a woman who runs an all-female madrassa. Following the story’s publication in the New York Times—which “included comments by Enas and her best friend Fatima, as well as a large photo of Enas kneeling on a carpet at the girls’ madrassa where she taught”—Zoepf received a distressed phone call from her teen subject, whose exposure in the newspaper could mean a “frightening visit to the madrassa from the mukhabarat, the infamous secret police,” and subsequent surveillance and harassment.36 There is no helping going on here, with the lives of women like Enas laid on the line for the careers of women like Zoepf.

  This is the predictable outcome when intimate access becomes the story and building meaningful sisterhood is sublimated to personal ambition. Apart from anything else, it is essential to remember that the purported intimacy that these journalists perform should not be mistaken for expertise. Addario can speak neither Dari nor Pashto and by her own admission does not know “much about Afghanistan aside from Times articles” she has read while on the elliptical.37 Zoepf has studied Arabic, but the extent of her proficiency is unclear.

  The dueling feminisms at work in the uneasy journalist-as-feminist paradigm mirror the tension between the collective versus individual that are threaded through the history of women’s empowerment. The feminism of sisterhood alleges a universal female affinity bound by the fight against patriarchy; it is by appealing to this idea that Western female journalists gain access to the intimate spaces of women of color. It is easy to tell Afghan or Nigerian women how you, too, are a mother, or you, too, have felt frightened walking down the street alone at night, manufacturing the emotional bonds that forge trust. Ultimately, however, it is the feminism of a ruthless individualism that motivates the behavior of too many white women journalists.

  Whether it’s serving in the ranks of the CIA and hunting Osama bin Laden, or the “soft” warfare of reporting stories such that they by and large support a neo-imperial, U.S.-centered worldview, white feminists have been front and center in the War on Terror. Carrying forward the racial hierarchies and self-interested exploitation of the colonial era, white feminists have identified progress not as renouncing wars and empire but as competing with white men at the tasks of neo-imperialism.

  White feminists in the colonial era were all about spreading their civilized ways, but neo-colonial white feminists want to illustrate their courage and compassion—often while providing moral subsidy for cruelties inflicted in feminism’s name. Times may have changed, but the commitment of whiteness to extracting value wherever it can—and dominating the narrative to frame this extraction as benevolence—persists.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sexual Liberation Is Women’s Empowerment

  I first learned about sex-positive feminism in a graduate seminar at a large M
idwestern university. Every Tuesday and Thursday, the long, bare classroom in the basement of one of the care-worn Liberal Arts buildings on campus would fill with students eager to talk about their hook-ups, their predilection for one or another kind of erotica, and their general affirmation of the transformative capacities of the sexual act. For those who weren’t there, sex-positive feminism stands for the precept that women are not free until and unless they are sexually free. In the competitiveness that graduate seminars breed, my classmates rambled on about threesomes, triumphant and unceremonious dumpings of emotionally attached lovers (who has time for attachment?), and in general lots and lots of sex. Every class unfolded almost as a sort of performance, where sexual identity was what defined each and every student. Nobody wanted to be “not liberated,” and so everyone shared, or rather overshared, compulsively.

  Our smug white professor, nose-pierced and wild-haired and duly sporting the scarves and baubles of the well traveled, encouraged it all as a grand doyenne of ceremonies. The question of how and when sexual liberation had become not simply the centerpiece but the entire sum of liberation for a graduate seminar on feminist theory never came up, nor did any discussion of sexual identity and radical politics. The year was 2006.