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57transnational feminism as critical practice
[
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
2005, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 57–82]©2005 by Smith College. All rights reserved.
amina jamal
Transnational Feminism asCritical Practice
A Reading of Feminist Discourses in Pakistan
Introduction
This essay is a speculation of some conceptual strategies that couldenhance our understanding of feminist politics and rhetorical practices inthe nation-state of Pakistan. I hope that this process will also aid efforts todelineate the emergent configurations of the cultural political space of thetransnational as it has been altered by the events of 11 September 2001 andthe ensuing war on terrorism. In their struggles at a variety of family,community, and state
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levels, self-defined feminist and human rightsgroups in Pakistan have traditionally resorted to liberal notions of citizen-ship, gender-neutral ideas about rights, and universalism of the publicsphere. Their reliance on these universalist concepts of rights and freedomhas intensified in the past two decades as a strategy against oppressiveregulation of political and social life in the name of Islamization. Given thepresent international pressure on Pakistan to crack down on “extremists,” we can expect an intensification in accusations of “anti-Islamic” and“Westernized” against those who are pursuing a secularist agenda inPakistan. These processes, along with their mirror opposite, that is, thehysteria that the spectre of Muslim terrorism raises in some Westernsocieties, are hardening the rhetorical divide of Islam versus West. At thesame time debates about the relationship between Islam and democracy have intensified among Muslim scholars following September 2001. In
58amina jamal
challenging the obscurantism of Muslim leaders and appealing fordemocratization in Muslim communities, many scholars, includingMuslim feminist scholars, present their arguments in a manner that oftenreinscribes rather than disrupts the dichotomy between tradition andmodernity—Islam and the West.
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In this situation, I argue that feminist critical theory faces urgent demands to reject the division of the world intozones of traditionalism and modernity, particularly in questions related to women, religion, and the postcolonial nation-state. We need intensely nuanced accounts of the relationships among Islam, women, and moder-nity in a manner that highlights the specificity of Muslim women’sappropriation of modernity in different contexts of struggle.It is important to situate Pakistani feminist discourses in the latest worldorder in which Western democracy and culturally specific notions of universal human rights and freedom have become the major discursive weapons in a conflict of “Western civilization” versus “Islamic obscu-rantism.” For we cannot simply assume that third world activists’ deploy-ment of modernist and Enlightenment concepts somehow exoneratesthese notions from their tendency to univeralise, essentialize, or construct abstract subjects as argued by some feminists (e.g., Moghissi 2000).Conversely, we cannot deny the appeal and strategic importance tofeminists in Muslim societies of the universal rights and equalitarianimpulses of modernity when compared with the parochial, culturally relativist, and exclusionary agendas of ultra-right groups. I argue that attention to the local, national, and global context of feminist activism inPakistan may help move the analysis of Pakistani—and other Muslim— feminist discourses beyond notions of either an essentialist, globalfeminism modeled on the first world or false consciousness about thecolonial origins of modern political concepts that needs the correctivelogic of contemporary Islamist activism.
Liberalism, Postcoloniality, and Catachresis
Noting the importance of the contemporary feminist insistence on“difference” as opposed to a globalized notion of sisterhood, DenizKandiyoti (1995) has pointed to the disjuncture that exists betweenfeminist theorizing and activism at the transnational level and the strate-gies of feminists in many Muslim societies similar to Pakistan. She recalls
59transnational feminism as critical practice
that it was the activism of various groups of women, whom mainstreamWestern feminist theory and practices traditionally marginalized, whichdirected feminist attention toward power differences rooted in the struc-tures of race, culture, class, histories of colonization and migration,sexuality, and so on. While this challenge to universal feminism hasenabled more contextualized analyses of women’s lives and opened new spaces for coalition building, it has unsettled traditional feminist demandsfor gender equality that were based on developmentalist and moderniza-tion discourses (Kandiyoti 1995).In addition to women’s activism, Kandiyoti also points to a number of global influences that have changed the context for international feminist discussions (1995). She argues that widespread awareness of the failures of developmentalist projects of postcolonial states coincided with theoreticalcritiques of the premises on which ideas about development and socialtransformation were based. Such critiques derived from poststructuralist theories in social sciences that denounced both the narrow epistemologi-cal foundations of Western humanist thought as well as the effects of suchassumptions on colonized societies. This critique of modernity also reso-nated with feminist critiques of gender-biased and masculinist premisesof universalist discourses about rights and citizenship in the West. Bothpoststructuralism and feminist criticism, therefore, focus on processes of exclusion and inclusion in the construction of the universalist subject of modernity. According to Kandiyoti, one of the by-products of this conjunc-ture is a general distrust of the universal doctrine of human rights and itscondemnation as a tool of Western imperialism. In light of Kandiyoti’sdiscussion, it is easy to understand the dilemma for Muslim feminists, who—being positioned in a complicated network of cultural, colonial, andimperialist histories and gender relations in their societies—must rely ondiscourses of abstract citizenship and universal human rights as a meansof transcending culturalist power struggles being enacted at the local,national, and transnational levels. Thus feminists in Muslim societies, asKandiyoti indicates, must develop strategies “to accommodate diversity and difference without undermining the legal and ethical grounds on which the right to difference itself can continue to be upheld” (1995, 20).As she rightly emphasizes, this is more than an academic issue in societies where political groups invoke religious authority to define the limits of social behavior.
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