Naghibi suggests that the visibility of Muslim women–whether veiled or unveiled–has caused a great deal of anxiety for Western feminists, who have largely ignored the indigenous presence of Muslim women’s activism. During the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), for example, Iranian women participated in protests, acted as couriers and even took up arms. Naghibi argues that such actions threaten feminists’ perceptions of themselves as liberated and modern in contrast to imprisoned and backwards Persian women, and … as leaders of the international women’s movement..... Millet had been one of a handful of Western feminists (including Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer) who visited Iran in the ’70s and invoked the solidarity of “global sisterhood.” But their incursion, Naghibi argues, actually undermined women’s struggles in Iran, both by encouraging the growth of an elite feminist movement that neglected lower class and rural women, and by creating an association between feminism and the West–an association that made it easy for the women’s movement to be crushed in post-revolutionary Iran... inthesetimes/article/3310/unveiling_muslim_feminism
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 09:52:33 +0000