NYC Event -- Feminisms in the Time of Empire: Complicities, Contestations, and Solidarities (29 September 2012)

Feminisms in the Time of Empire: Complicities, Contestations and Solidarities

Saturday, 29 September
12:00-3:00

Institute for Public Knowledge
20 Cooper Square

Discourses of race, gender and sexuality have served an important ideological function within imperialist projects. The current phase of US imperialism is no exception. Today, this project calls on increasingly explicit forms of Islamophobia, forms that circulate in news programs, on subway billboards, in the interrogation rooms of Guantanamo Bay, and in YouTube videos. Questions related to gender continue to be central to this circulation. Discourses of queer rights have joined those of women's rights on the front lines of a purported battle between Civilization— liberal modernity as embodied by "the West"—and Barbarism—as connoted by "Islam." Within this discursive economy, ostensible signs of misogyny and homophobia signal the dangers of (always impending) Islamic extremism.

Why is it that despite trenchant critiques by numerous scholars and activists, narratives of "saving Muslim women and queers" hold continuing appeal for many in the left as well as in the right? What are the implications of the entanglement of Islamophobic discourse with Liberal invocations of feminist and queer rights? Speakers at the roundtable address these and other questions, and consider the possibilities and challenges of forging feminist solidarity across the Middle East and South Asia in the imperial moment. Representing a variety of disciplines and geographical locations, these activist-scholars interrogate the epistemologies that produce popular and scholarly understandings of gender/sexuality and Islam. Topics covered include the representational politics of gender and sexuality in the Arab uprisings, pinkwashing and the persistence of gay persecution narratives, nativism and celebrity activism, the "ventriloquising" of Islamophobia, and the recasting of secularism as "lifestyle politics."