1 Responding to Orientalist Feminism: Women’s Rights and the War on Terror

Among many other legacies, the September 11 terrorist attacks will be remembered by some for catapulting women’s rights to the centre stage of global politics. As the US launched the War on Terror in Afghanistan and then Iraq, the liberation of women from barbaric regimes became a powerful rationale for intervention. Meanwhile, in post-9/11 Australia, protecting ‘Aussie ’ women from sexual assault, and Muslim women from ‘oppression ’ have become battlecries against the ‘barbarism ’ of Arab and Muslim cultures. In many other Western nations too, concern for women’s rights has become politically mainstream. As Hester Eisenstein shows in her paper, the sudden concern for women has come from neo-conservatives like George W. Bush, who are not known for their support for feminism. Yet feminism is ‘essential ’ to the War on Terror, Eisenstein writes, enabling Islamic societies to be condemned as ‘uniquely oppressive to women ’ (2010, page 16 in the original paper). This paper analyses this approach as Orientalist feminism, a feminism that is ultimately about constructing a binary opposition between a civilised West and an uncivilised East. My main goal is to explore how feminists can respond to this discourse.