Response - Rachel Becker

Rachel Becker

March 5, 2012

Response – Week 5

            Stabile and Kumar (2005) explain that through Orientalism, the West constructs itself as the stable norm and constructs the East as a romanticized, yet volatile, other.  I have learned in my race and ethnicity classes that this often leads to Asian women being sexualized or made mysterious in movies and tv shows.  They lose their identities and ability to act as individuals if they are constantly construed as women without any deeper character.  They are only useful in helping to move the plot of a film along, and often attempt to foil the main character whom the audience is supposed to root for.  This devious characterization can be used to justify American suspicion of Asian and Arab people.  It also justifies the invasion of foreign countries, apparently.  If we have been trained to think that we are the ideal, that these people are not trustworthy, and that they are hurting their women (who obviously can’t defend themselves), then it makes sense that public support would be higher.  I was aware of some of the history that lead up to our war in Afghanistan, namely that we had funded a lot of the weapons and people that eventually came to power and that we, in turn, had to defend against, but reading about the entire history was startling to say the least. 

            Stabile and Kumar (2005) write, “In reality, the Taliban’s brand of extreme Islam has no historical roots in Afghanistan.  Rather, it is the product of US and Saudi involvement in the region; a fact that directly undermines the idea that the Taliban’s repression of women is natural or endemic, and stems from the ‘tribal’ nature of that society” (p. 769).  It is even more outrageous, then, that we would pretend that further involvement from the United States would be helpful here.  I feel like we’ve acted as though we were able to civilize the East with our Western achievements and freedoms, but Afghanistan was much better off without our “help.”  The pictures posted of Afghanistan in the 1970’s show a far more liberal lifestyle than we would associate with that location now.  I find this attack in the name of freedom for women particularly ironic given the attacks on women’s freedoms that the United States is considering now.  The question of whether a woman should be allowed to choose to have an abortion is under constant deliberation.  Just this past week, Virginia tried to pass a law that would require doctors to give a woman a vaginal ultrasound 24 hours prior to her being able to get an abortion.  Not only is this a physical violation, it serves no medical purpose at all.  The only goal here is to shame women into choosing to keep their babies while still technically allowing them the right to choose.  And, of course, these decisions are headed by men who will never have to experience this violation.

            Amira Jarmakani says that she is interested in “demonstrating how the rhetoric of globalization enables a set of assumptions about time-space compression whereby images of Arab womanhood continue to function as nostalgic foils for twentieth- and twenty-first-century ‘progress’” (p. 140).  These images of Arab womanhood that she references are, of course, veiled women.  This implies that progress has to meet the Western ideal and that any other choice is a lack of opportunity and somehow backwards.  The fact that some women are still veiled gives us the mistaken impression that there is still progress to be made; it provides a reference point for us as we attempt to be more evolved.  It also gives us an opportunity to go in and “rescue’ those who we see as disadvantaged.  Of course, this can only be very shallow progress, if it progress at all, if we go in with no understanding of the conditions and only a romanticized notion of the past.

            I couldn’t help but suffer from second hand embarrassment when I read the lyrics to “Addictive” by Truth Hurts.  The song itself is a generic R&B and pop song that is overly sexualized.  The twist here is that it has been made exotic with the addition of some Bollywood flair.  It reminded me of people who get tattoos in another language because it seems mysterious or powerful to them and then they find that they’ve permanently marked themselves with the word for rice or something.  The only reason to do that is because you’re appropriating a piece of a foreign culture that seems exciting to you.  This song is not helped by its Indian theme – it’s still just a not very impressive song, but it takes advantage of other cultures in the process of its presentation.  The idea of cultural fusion seems wrong here because there is no collaboration.  The Indian artists are not being paid or credited for their contribution.  To steal from Jane, this seems like a form of musical imperialism.  The American artists have “discovered” something new and they are bringing it to American audiences.  It has been removed in context and meaning from its original purposes and instead shifted to suit ours.