White wars: Western feminisms and the `War on Terror'

Abstract

The War on Terror is reconfiguring the practices that constitute whiteness through its definition of the West as endangered by the hatred and violence of its Islamist Other. Critical race and feminist theorists have long defined `whiteness' as a form of subjectivity that is socially constructed, historically contextual, and inherently unstable. The equation of whiteness as a social identity with the socio-political category of the West has been seen as particularly problematic for its implication in colonial and imperialist projects. These theorists have also noted that the economic and political power of the West has enabled white subjects to exalt themselves even as they have sought to define the nature of the Other. This paper examines how three feminist texts engage with the hegemonic discourse of the War on Terror and its (re)constitution of whiteness.

Keywords

feminism race war on terror whiteness

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Amos, V. and P. Parmar (1984) `Challenging Imperial Feminism', Feminist Review No. 17: 3—20.

Barker, M. (1981) The New Racism. London: Junction Books.

Bessis, S. (2003) Western Supremacy: The Triumph of an Idea? London: Zed Books.

Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso.

Cherki, A. (2006) Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. N. Benabid. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Chesler, P. (2003) The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Drinnon, R. (1997) Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Norman and London : University of Oklahoma Press.

Dyer, R. (1997) White. London: Routledge.

Eisenstein, Z. (2004) Against Empire: Feminisms, Racisms, and the West . London: Zed Books.

10.

Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, Inc.

11.

Fanon, F. (1986) Black Skin, White Masks. London : Pluto Press.

12.

Frankenberg, R. (2004) `Growing up White: Feminism, Racism, and the Social Geography of Childhood', pp. 139—66 in A. Price and S. Silva-Wayne (eds) Feminisms and Womanisms. Toronto: Women's Press.

13.

Galeano, E. (1973) Open Veins of Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

14.

Gilroy, P. (1991) There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

15.

Goldberg, D.T. (2006) `Racial Europeanization', Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(2): 331—64.

16.

Hall, S. (1996) `The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power', pp. 184—228 in S. Hall , D. Held , D. Hubert and K. Thompson (eds) Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

17.

Hochschild, A. (1999) King Leopold's Ghost. Boston : Houghton Mifflin.

18.

Huntington, S.P. (1993) `The Clash of Civilizations?', Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22—49.

19.

Johnson, C. (2000) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt & Company.

20.

Lewis, B. (2002) What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21.

Lewis, R. and S. Mills , eds (2003) Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Routledge.

22.

Lopez, A. J. , ed. (2005) Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire. Albany : State University of New York Press.

23.

Mamdani, M. (2004) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon Books.

24.

Manji, I. (2003) The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change. Toronto: Random House .

25.

Mohanty, C.T. (1991) `Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses', pp. 51—80 in C. T. Mohanty , A. Russo and L. Torres (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

26.

Morton, S. (2003) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge.

27.

Rashid, A. (2001) Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

28.

Roediger, D.R. (1998) Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White. New York: Schocken Books.

29.

Thobani, S. (2002) `War Frenzy', Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal 27(1): 5—11.

30.

Thobani, S. (2003) `Saving the West: Reflections on Gender, Race and the War on Terrorism', Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly of Writing, Politics, Art and Culture Special Issue: Women, Race, War and Resistance, Part 2: 9—34.