Hillary Rodham Clinton's Orient: Cosmopolitan Travel and Global Feminist Subjects

Hillary Rodham Clinton's Orient Cosmopolitan Travel and Global Feminist Subjects CAREN KAPLAN The East is a career. —Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred In the springof1999, HillaryRodham Clinton, die FirstLady ofthe United States, embarked on a twelve-day trip to Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco accompanied byher daughter Chelsea. Billed as a "bridge-building" tour, the official purpose ofthe trip was "to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, Tunisia's good record of educating women and girls, and Morocco's experimentwith political pluralism and religious tolerance" (cnn 1999). In many ways, the trip followed the parameters ofnumerous overseas tours made by Clinton since 1992. The hallmark agendas ofHillary Rodham Clinton's visits abroad have been women's rights, education, and democratic political systems. Reportage of the trips, at least since Clinton's high profile participation in the Beijing un conference in 1995, focused on "women's issues." Most coverage of the tours outside die United States positioned Clinton as an avatar ofglobal feminism; she addressed women's health, literacy, education , work, family life, and political rights. Thus, following the lead of many previous excursions, the mother-daughter trip to North Africa could be described by a reporter for cnn as one "largely about the empowerment ofwomen, about giving them choices through economic opportunity, education, better health care and family planning" (Crowley 1999). Reading the press coverage ofHillary Rodham Clinton's trip to North Africa in 1999 provides an opportunity to examine the emergence ofnew feminist subjects at the turn of the century. IfWestern feminism is an [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2001, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 219-240]©2001 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 219 integrai part of modernity, new feminist subjects may be construed as postmodern. That is, the feminist subjects of die current moment are fully embedded in die complex politics that structure the contemporary world and cannot be viewed as a pure alternative to a patriarchal or colonial past. Rather, in some new feminist subjects we can identify continuities with the past diat recuperate and rework nationalisms, racisms, and many forms ofeconomic, cultural, and political inequalities. Specifically, in certain globalized feminist discourses in this postmodern moment a kind of cosmopolitanism is generated that produces and recuperates forms oforientalism, old and new. Cosmopolitanism, with its promise of freedom to move about die world and its interest in the mixture ofdifference, calls out to many feminists in the present moment. The power ofcosmopolitan travel to establish the identity and career ofindividuals appears to constitute a kind of right in and ofitself. That is, the ability to travel freely, to move about to meet and see odiers or to gain a newview ofthe world, is valued highly in Western modernity and is an integral part ofthe claim to subjectivity and personhood in many feminist discourses. That travel is never innocent, however, is not acknowledged fully in cosmopolitanism. Feminist travel enacts its own imperialisms often in the name ofpersonal or gender liberation . In some of the press coverage ofHillary Rodham and Chelsea Clinton's tour ofthree countries in North Africa in 1999, we can see the imbrication of orientalism and cosmopolitanism in representations of contemporary globalized feminism. Feminist Orientalisms: The Romance of Cosmopolitanism in Global Feminism ...(W)e had been taught to diinkoftheEastas the opposite oftheWest. So once itwas established that the collapse and decay ofEurope was a simple, inescapable fact, the renaissance and flowering ofthe Orient became a fact equally obvious. For Europeans, the Orient held salvation and a new life. It had medicine for our ills, and love to spare.... (Nizani932, 73) In his groundbreaking text on the powerful practice ofrepresentation known as "orientalism," Edward Said argued that the Orient holds a "special place in European Western experience" (1979, 1). It is the site of Europe's most enduring colonial interventions and it serves as the 220 CAREN KAPLAN primary standard of"otherness" for a culture that views itselfas always already at die center of the civilized universe. This potent discourse of otherness operates for Europe in ways that differ significandy for the United States. Indeed, Said argues, the construct ofthe Orient is generated by France and Britain above all other nations (ibid.). Yet the United...