Text

theses

This project examines how women traveling from North America and Western Europe to Afghanistan in the era of the War on Terror go about making media about Afghan women, and considers the experience of contemporary travelers alongside those of European women who traveled to the Muslim world in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. This work expands on and revises existing cultural studies scholarship on the representation of brown bodies in a post 911 world, using an anti-colonial lens to examine the work of journalists, independent documentary filmmakers, and activists. It pays particular attention to the varied ways in which the concept of feminism is deployed to advocate for or against ongoing military occupation of Afghanistan. This project asks: what is the relationship between feminism, Afghan women, and the War on Terror? It examines articles, broadcasts, images, films and websites, produced about Afghan women alongside interviews, memoirs, and other materials these traveling women make about their own experiences of being “liberated” women working within the danger of the war zone and the “traditional” culture of Afghanistan. It examines intersections of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class with gender through an analysis of the term traveling women use to describe their experience of being foreign and female in Afghanistan – the ‘third sex.’ This work traces how the ‘third sex’ come to be in Afghanistan after 911, and how they access Afghan women. This makes visible the networks of media, military, and non-governmental agencies they rely on there and how these relationships shape news output in the war zone. I then parse out the conflicting perspectives of liberal feminists and radical feminists as they emerge online in the discourse on militarism and Afghan women’s liberation, making visible the relationships amongst Afghan and non-Afghan feminist organizations and media outlets. The conflicts that emerge amongst liberal and radical feminists are indicative of the challenges that arise when feminists attempt to articulate cross-cultural, global, concepts of gender equality and liberation. These challenges are compounded by the context of the War on Terror, and the use of humanitarian logics to rationalize military endeavors.

ETD_5291

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Isra Ali

doi:10.7282/T3JW8BZR

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.