After 20 years of conflict, the Taliban finally seized power in Afghanistan. Notorious for their suppression of women’s rights, concerns regarding the safety of women in Taliban’s Afghanistan are being voiced globally. However, the outcry by feminists from all over the world is being overshadowed by one voice: that of the west, particularly America. A dangerous landslide to imperialist rhetoric seems inevitable as the deteriorating women’s conditions are made to seem inseparable from, and by extension a consequence of, the US withdrawal from Kabul.
A CNN op-ed titled ‘America has Abandoned the Women of Afghanistan’ reads “…but one thing is different now: Afghanistan’s women tasted freedom in the last 20 years, and took it upon themselves to rebuild their country.” While the article does point out frequent US co-opting of a feminist agenda, it still firmly believes that American presence helped the condition of women in Afghanistan, reflecting the popularly held view of the West. It is thus quick to allocate the role of a saviour to the American government and people. The American government is, thus, assigned the responsibility to liberate Afghanistan’s women and rescue them from the Taliban. This is a confusing yet dangerous argument.
A CNN op-ed titled ‘America has Abandoned the Women of Afghanistan’ asserts that American presence helped the condition of women in Afghanistan, reflecting the popularly held view of the West. It is thus quick to allocate the role of a saviour to the American government and people.
Amongst a multitude of other factors, this argument arises because feminism is generally considered a product of the Western legacy. In that narrative, third world feminisms then become a mere imitation of the West. And when these various types of feminisms try to diverge from western feminism, they struggle to find legitimacy. An unspoken rule is formed- it is not the East that decides the characteristics and norms of feminism, but the West. The western woman becomes the primary unit of analysis, who’s experiences dictate the courses of feminism.
This is evident in how ideas conceived in the West are transported to the non-West without any alterations to suit the conditions of these new locations. Liberal feminism, inexorably married to consumerism and individualised ideas of empowerment, is a great exhibition of this export.
The division of the world into spatial dichotomies of the West and the East, of the Global North and the Global South, of the First World and the Third world are more than linguistic categorisations of convenience. They arise from a culture of knowledge production that understands the West as what it’s not- the East, the Other. The West is synonymous with human rights, democracy, freedom, feminism, and every quality a nation-state must aspire to be. The East, on the other hand, is underdeveloped, poverty stricken, authoritarian, and violent. It then becomes the mission of the West to transport its good western values onto the nations and states of the east. It must civilise the East, also known commonly as the white man’s burden.
This has two direct consequences. Firstly, this civilising mission has been used to colonise territories in the Global South for centuries. In contemporary times, this manifests itself through a facade of human rights or democracy and often leads to neo-imperialism. Secondly, by associating values such as women’s rights intrinsically to the West, we create for ourselves an inescapable cycle wherein to implement these values we must adhere to the western model of the world.
Also read: Building Transnational Solidarities: How Can Local Feminists Get Involved In Global Politics
There are two main schools of feminism that deal with this issue: Third World Feminism and Transnational Feminism.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty popularised third world feminism in her work ‘Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’. She employs a powerful critique of western feminism and white feminism and their mischaracterization of Third World women’s oppression as just a worse version of their own oppression: “By subscribing to the cultural imperialist conception of Third World cultures as hopelessly backward and patriarchal, white feminists view Third World women’s oppression as simply worse than that of white women in the West.”
It is true that gender as a category to understand oppression of women is imperative. But in a gendered body’s interaction with its social world, new systems of oppression are often realised. Yet when the complexities of a Third World woman’s oppression is viewed through the lens of a western woman’s experience, her oppression is measured solely in comparison to that of the western woman’s. The role of the nation as the location and historical context to understand and analyse a third world woman’s experience to arrive at new and fresh paradigms is thus an important part of third world feminism.
Third World feminism has been located in several revolutionary nationalist struggles against colonial or imperial powers. Anti-imperialism is one of the core features of Third World feminism. This has often led to the criticism that women are compelled to overlook their gender-based oppression to first confront oppression in other arenas. The employment of the term ‘Third World’ has also