The Western-Centric Nature of Intersectional Feminism (Still)

Sex-specific modesty codes are still not feminist.

Zoe Williams’ recent piece in The Guardian once again collapses criticism of illiberal religious norms into accusations of bigotry. This has prompted me to revisit my 2017 essay on how intersectional feminism continues to fail Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists. The problem hasn’t improved.

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Zoe Williams has written a simply infuriating piece for the Guardian - “Islamophobia isn’t just socially acceptable in the UK now – it’s flourishing. How did this happen?” Williams raises the problem of a form of anti-Muslim bigotry that functions on reasoning akin to racism. This is a genuine problem impacting Muslim Britons or Brits with names that indicate a Muslim background or Brits who appear to be of South Asian origin. Unfortunately, Williams does not develop this or distinguish it from legitimate criticisms of illiberal tenets of Islam or customs associated with Islam, and consequently throws Muslim and ex-Muslim liberals, progressives and feminists under the bus again.

Despite the ongoing pleas of Muslim feminists living both in the Western world and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran for Western intersectional feminists to stop using images of women wearing sex-specific “modesty” veiling as an empowering symbol of Muslim women, the Guardian chooses to use one of little girls appearing to be between 5 and 8 doing precisely that. Williams addresses a YouGov Poll, the results of which could have been discussed thoughtfully to provide a granular and principled consideration of the question of whether Islam is compatible with British Values. (I’d suggest ‘liberal values’ would be more to the point as Britons have a variety of ideas about what British Values are, some of them illiberal, and the answer to that is “No, but British Muslims vary considerably.”) Instead, Williams writes,

This is the first year the community has included the question about the hijab, which strikes its own particularly depressing note. The hijab was a hot talking point in the early to mid-2000s, when military support for the US in its interventions in Afghanistan was often rhetorically justified by the toxic misogyny of the Taliban. Veils of all kinds came to represent the subjugation of women, to the dismay of many at the time.

But 20 years have passed, during which time we’ve seen Boris Johnson use the burqa in what was condemned as a racist callout to Telegraph readers, and the French experiment with banning full face veils – such as a niqab or burqa – in any public place, a chilling curtailment of, if not technically a human right, then what instinctively feels like any woman’s birthright to wear whatever the hell she pleases. Understanding has deepened, in other words – of the racism that anti-veil rhetoric often disguises, and the fact that to make a judgment about who’s controlling a woman and the extent of her autonomy, you have to know her pretty well. Or at the very least, have met her.

It is illiberal and counter-productive nonsense for feminists or progressives to try to counter anti-Muslim bigotry by supporting anti-feminist and regressive customs like sex-specific modesty codes endorsed by the most rigidly socially conservative interpretations of Islam, while ignoring the feminist and progressive Muslims vocally objecting to precisely that.

Feminists, radical or liberal, do not typically believe they need to speak to every woman before making a judgement about whether concepts of ‘modesty’ that apply only to women are feminist or not. They are not. Liberal feminists, who focus more on women as individuals than as a sex class will usually oppose banning ‘modesty’ veiling. We find it fairly easy to both condemn sex-specific modesty dress codes on liberal and feminist grounds as a form of extreme social conservatism that constrains women and defend women’s rights to be extremely socially conservative and thus constrain themselves at the same time.

Radical feminists typically take issue with this liberal feminist position on the grounds of their scepticism about whether women really ever freely choose to so constrain themselves, or whether they are being coerced by community pressure and cultural conditioning, if not by law. This is a coherent objection and we do need to ensure that Muslim women facing family or community coercion are able to access support and protection to escape that family or community. Intersectional feminists often seem to believe that only Western women are subject to intense cultural pressure when it comes to their appearance and sexuality while Muslim women are somehow magically free of this and able to exercise full autonomy. This is incoherent nonsense.

I have frequently described what originally brought me into addressing the problem of intersectional feminism. It was my observations as a liberal feminist within the New Atheist movement. Many of the liberal feminists within that movement were ex-Muslims but while intersectional feminists accepted ex-Christians like me criticising illiberal aspects of Christianity, particularly in the way it impacted women and same-sex attracted people, ex-Muslim feminists and gay rights activists trying to do the same with their former religion were simply ignored. Those of us who had never been Muslim and were also white who tried to support them and help amplify their voices were accused of having racist and colonialist attitudes.

I became very concerned about the state of this new form of “feminism.” It was in 2015 when a petition to criminalise ill-defined ‘misogyny’ as a hate crime received more than 58,000 signatures but a petition to strengthen multi-agency responses to ‘honour’-based violence in rigorous and practical ways received only 406 (and consequently was not considered by parliament) that I began to focus intensively on the problem of the ‘woke’ left. My first long-form essay on the Western-centric nature of intersectional feminism and how this fails Muslim women was published in 2017. It is that which I want to share again now, because the problem has clearly not improved. (Here)

It addressed a myriad of ways in which intersectional feminists were failing (and continue to fail) to support Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists campaigning for the rights of women. It concludes,

It is a mistake to assume that intersectional feminists’ downplaying of human rights abuses in the name of Islam reveals an indifference to the wellbeing of Muslim women and a desire to claim a higher victim status for themselves but it is an understandable one. The reality is that intersectional feminism works by essentialising and valorising, elevating and romanticising cultural stereotypes of minority groups and focusing solely on abuses committed by white westerners and that this is rooted in a desire to redress past wrongs and their lingering consequences. However, there is also a desire to build a ‘woke’, self-flagellating, western liberal identity which is narcissistic, divisive and essentialising. It impedes Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists, liberals and reformers from critiquing and/or reforming their own religion and culture and demands they act as foil to it. It detracts from shared humanity and individuality and attempts to force individuals into cultural stereotypes. It is western-centric, orientalising and fails to defend women’s rights and freedoms consistently. Please stop doing it.

Please…