Photo: An Afghan woman adjusts her scarf made from an Afghan flag, while attending a gathering held by the Afghanistan Women Council to discuss presidential candidates in the upcoming election in Kabul, Afghanistan on Tuesday, Aug, 11, 2009. Afghans will head to the polls on Aug. 20 to elect a new president for the second time in the country's history. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)


The difficulty in watching, hearing, and reading about the repression of women's rights in Afghanistan is that so few in Euromerica or Afghanistan actually even attempt to let those affected by repressive policies speak for themselves. Women, conceived as a monolithic collectivity, and women's rights continue to be used as a justification for imperialism in a manner that denies the history of women's activism in Afghanistan. Of course, there are dangers for women and women's rights activists in speaking out in Afghanistan, but there is an eerie parallel here with Spivak's critique of the colonial condemnation/nationalist defense of sati:

"Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the "third-world woman" caught between tradition and modernization,"

- Gyatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

Whether such subalterns can in fact speak and know their conditions, is another debate...

Labels: afghanistan, rights, south asia, women