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Misreading Feminism & Women’s Rights in Tehran: Beyond Chadors, Ninjabis, & Secular Fantasies
http://ajammc.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/misreading-feminism-in-tehran-beyond-chadors-ninjabis-secular-fantasies/
It is nearly impossible to read any article about Iranian women and not spend the entire time rolling your eyes. Historically, the Western media has tended to make liberal use of Orientalist and infantilizing depictions of Iranian women as, alternatively, trapped in the harems of their turbaned overseers (a historically pre-1979 trope applied liberally to all Middle Eastern women) or militantly crazed and clad in black “traditional garb” (a post-1979 trope specific to Iranian, and later Islamist, women).
Since 9/11, meanwhile, these depictions have become increasingly politicized within the War on Terror “white men saving brown women from brown men” paradigm (so brilliantly identified by Gayatri Spivak & explored by, among others, Saba Mahmood & Lila Abu Lughod). Despite the increase in rightwing rhetoric calling for war on Iran, however, the charge that Iranian women are mistreated and must be saved (like their Afghan sisters, as NATO and some neo-colonial minded collaborators at Amnesty International would have you believe) has not quite caught on.
The recent controversy over the Iranian women “ninjas” offers some insight into why it has thus far been quite difficult to convince Americans of the need to save Iranian women. On 2 February, Press TV ran a clip describing the increasing popularity of ninjutsu, a Japanese martial art, among Iranian women in a dojo in Karaj, a Tehran suburb. Reuters subsequently ran a story on the video with the headline, “Thousands of Female Ninjas train as Iran’s Assassins,” and on 18 February, the Telegraph ran a story entitled, “Iran trains ninjas as potential assassins,” one of many other news outlets that wrote pieces about a secret army of Iranian women ninjas that were being trained for war. Of course, this was all utter nonsense, though few of the agencies- besides Reuters- bothered to correct their mistakes.
(snip)
The Iranian women “ninjas” themselves, sufficiently pissed off at Reuters for starting this whole insulting mess, subsequently sued the agency for defamation.
...
It is nearly impossible to read any article about Iranian women and not spend the entire time rolling your eyes. Historically, the Western media has tended to make liberal use of Orientalist and infantilizing depictions of Iranian women as, alternatively, trapped in the harems of their turbaned overseers (a historically pre-1979 trope applied liberally to all Middle Eastern women) or militantly crazed and clad in black “traditional garb” (a post-1979 trope specific to Iranian, and later Islamist, women).
Since 9/11, meanwhile, these depictions have become increasingly politicized within the War on Terror “white men saving brown women from brown men” paradigm (so brilliantly identified by Gayatri Spivak & explored by, among others, Saba Mahmood & Lila Abu Lughod). Despite the increase in rightwing rhetoric calling for war on Iran, however, the charge that Iranian women are mistreated and must be saved (like their Afghan sisters, as NATO and some neo-colonial minded collaborators at Amnesty International would have you believe) has not quite caught on.
The recent controversy over the Iranian women “ninjas” offers some insight into why it has thus far been quite difficult to convince Americans of the need to save Iranian women. On 2 February, Press TV ran a clip describing the increasing popularity of ninjutsu, a Japanese martial art, among Iranian women in a dojo in Karaj, a Tehran suburb. Reuters subsequently ran a story on the video with the headline, “Thousands of Female Ninjas train as Iran’s Assassins,” and on 18 February, the Telegraph ran a story entitled, “Iran trains ninjas as potential assassins,” one of many other news outlets that wrote pieces about a secret army of Iranian women ninjas that were being trained for war. Of course, this was all utter nonsense, though few of the agencies- besides Reuters- bothered to correct their mistakes.
(snip)
The Iranian women “ninjas” themselves, sufficiently pissed off at Reuters for starting this whole insulting mess, subsequently sued the agency for defamation.
...
Very interesting article about the complex situation faced by feminists in Iran and the necessarily multi-faceted nature of feminism itself.
1 replies
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