Feminist Discourse in Service of Empire

Tahmena Joyan

‘Afghan Girls Seek Change Through Murals’; ‘Afghan Girls Defying Death Threats to Pursue Their Passion’; ‘Skating Makes Afghan Girls Feel Free’.

In Skateboarding Won’t Save Afghan Girls, Sahar Ghumkhor notes that Western journalists often depict women in Afghanistan in norms-defying scenarios in order to showcase the country’s ‘progressive’ transformation over the past two decades. To what extent do these headlines hold truth?

The military intervention, orchestrated by the US and the UK, has exerted irretrievable damage upon Afghanistan’s socio-economic fabric. The Bush administration considered the mission to liberate the oppressed population, in particular women, of a poverty-stricken and war-ravaged country. In fact, the US intervention has served to destroy opportunities for female citizens to secure their voice and presence on the political stage, primarily, by funding the Taliban to rise to power, and later waging a ceaseless war.

The narratives that depict women of Afghanistan as rebellious or unconventional often treat their choices as mutually exclusive, suggesting that women in Afghanistan must defy all aspects of their identity and beliefs to attain a sense of the liberty glamorised in Western societies. These narratives serve two purposes. Firstly, these provide a veneer of moral legitimacy to those who did and continue to cheerlead a war with no end in sight. Secondly, it eases public protestation against the military intervention.

Rather than address the core issues confronting women in Afghanistan, liberal journalists have encouraged the adoption of western standards of personal freedom, which neglects the very role of the western powers in providing the pre-conditions that have led to the present debacle. The same girls portrayed in the Western media as defying gravity in a restrictive society are the same girls being bombed by the North Atlantic Alliance, destroying their homes, communities and any progress made thus far.

Moreover, the Western saviour complex hijacks the narratives of young women in Afghanistan, whose public engagement through arts, music and sports are viewed as tokens of defiance against their own communities. Instead, these must be understood as attempts to relieve the pain of their condition and in defiance of the calamities induced because of Western military intrusion. In other words, their activities are miscommunicated as an act of rebellion against the communities they are, in fact, trying to build.

While some may consider the Western narrative as empowering women, or justify it as the media’s attempt at redemption, the dangers lie in the fact that such accounts side-line the activities of numerous women who, prior to and throughout the war, have participated in the political realm. Western media’s failure to highlight such accounts has led to a perception that Afghanistan’s society is naturally calamitous and socially stagnant, and a foreign hand must guide its women to their liberation – a further neglect of truth.

Any attempt to speak against the portrayal of Afghanistan’s women in Western media will face countless attacks from Western feminists who, like Laura Bush, fall under the illusion that the objective of the war was indeed to liberate women from Afghan men. The hypocrisy however lies in the fact that they have pushed women into victimhood to the wealthy arms-selling instigators of war.

Had the West carried any regard for Afghanistan’s women and Western journalists dedicated their work to serve truth, the stories making the front page would not cover obscured narratives to serve the agenda of western intervenors. Instead, alongside the stories of defiant young women, the accounts would tell the stories of the thousands of other women whose victimhood do not derive from a ‘tradition-inducing’, restrictive environment, but from the hands of Western leaders whose actions destroyed a society in which existed a possibility of men and women nurturing and pursuing their ambitions.

However, such accounts do not mediate for western intervention, hence their voices remain unheard, and their stories untold.

The views expressed in this entry are the author’s own and may not reflect those of other authors for Diaspora Writes.