Monday, September 25, 2017

New Feminists? By the great Joan W. Scott

""Many of these new feminists and nationalists turned their attention to the veils worn by Muslim women, arguing that they were the very symbol of the immigrants’ purported backwardness, the sign of an intolerable gender inequality alien to the West. The push to rescue Muslim women, Farris argues, was the result of what she terms the “ideological convergence” of calls for gender equality with xenophobic anti-immigrant campaigns—the “femonationalism” mentioned in the subtitle of her book. Femonationalism, she explains, “describes, on the one hand, the attempts of Western European right-wing parties and neoliberals to advance xenophobic and racist politics through the touting of gender equality while, on the other hand, it captures the involvement of various well-known and quite visible feminists and femocrats in the current framing of Islam as a quintessentially misogynistic religion and culture.” ""