How did afghanistan became the first feminist war?
Because of the war on terror, argues Rafia Zakaria, American feminism has been varied from a” movement that lived in opposition to the state, as a critique of its institutions and mores to one that serves the state’s interests through any means imaginable.” Nothing exemplifies this woeful turn more, she says, than the Oscar-winning movie Zero Dark Thirty, in which the feminine lead ( played by Jessica Chastain) is exalted as a torturer who can more than keep up with her manly colleagues when it comes to breaking the bodies of real and suspected terrorists.
In Against White Feminism, Zakaria makes the case that Western feminism has been substantially interested in achieving equality between white women and white men, again and again at the expenditure of black and brown people. The 9/11 attacks, for case, led many feminist organizations to support the irruption and occupation of Afghanistan and to push for top-down aid programs that did not take into account what Afghan women wanted or demanded.
It is an instigative book that reviews feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Betty Friedan to Eve Ensler and forces a re-evaluation of how best to empower all women around the globe, who are frequently struggling against sexism that’s deeply entwined with state power.
Born in Pakistan and now living in the United States, Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife and writes at Rafia (Unedited) on Substack. In 2017, Nick Gillespie surveyed her about her book Veil for Reason. Listen to that here.
SOURCE
https://reason.com/podcast/2021/10/06/how-afghanistan-became-the-first-feminist-war/