Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism (review)

Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism aims to "make visible the ways in which the USA has gendered, racialized, and sexualized its practice of imperialist wars—that is, wars being waged through military and economic policy to advance and consolidate the profit-driven system of capitalism" (3). The collection of essays, engendered by the 2006 Feminism and War Conference in New York, is broken into four sections: Feminist Geopolitics of War, Feminist Mobilizing Critiques of War, Women's Struggles and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Feminists Organizing Against Imperialism and War. Through poetry, story, and essay, the text makes clear that "this is the time for feminist revolutions" (McFadden 66).

The book is most powerful when examining systemic oppression in U.S. society and its connection to the larger geopolitical context of U.S. imperialism. Angela Davis argues that we must "place state violence, war, prison violence, torture, [and] capital punishment on a spectrum of violence" (25) in order to understand the complexity of U.S. militarism. Nellie Hester Bailey connects the systemic inequality of gentrification and the feminization of poverty as unrecognized forms of war. She explains that "gentrification is class warfare waged against poor and working-class people of color. This catastrophe is directly linked to U.S. imperialist war, and is happening not only in Harlem but throughout the country" (236). While much of the text specifically analyzes the brute force of militarism utilized to uphold U.S. hegemony, Breta Joubert-Ceci theorizes that neoliberalist policies of privatization and deregulation are also a war front. She argues that the U.S. dominated institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have proliferated capitalism to violently exploit Latin America's resources and labor, as well as the global South.

The authors attempt to reclaim the importance of feminism to anti-war movements after the Bush administration co-opted feminist rhetoric to excuse the imperialist endeavor in Afghanistan. Jennifer Fluri argues that the Afghanistan war had nothing to do with confronting Islamic patriarchy. In reality these efforts entail the imposition of U.S. governmental discourses on human rights, proliferated through the systemic destruction of people in order to ensure military superiority and impose a "free" market structure (Fluri 155). Similarly, Elizabeth Philipose states "Muslims and Muslim states are held as the example par excellence of misogyny in the Western imagination, an imagination that provokes the colonialist narrative that white men, in their enlightened masculinity, have the duty to save brown women from brown men" (113).

The third section analyzes the continued neocolonialism that results from U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. An integral component of analysis is the critique of what Shahnaz Khan terms "colonial feminism." She argues that "Western" values, like democracy and freedom, have been used in the rhetoric of the "war on terror." This process has been fueled by the idea of saving women. Reiterating Chandra Mohanty's important theories of the monolithic construction of Third World women as victims and First World women as liberated or liberators, she analyzes the conditions of women's lives in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war on terror. Despite claims in the United States that the war has been won, Khan argues that there is a misunderstanding of the history and geopolitics of the Middle East. Upon further analysis, it becomes apparent that these women have not reached equality; rather they have been pushed further into economic exploitation through sex work and poverty. Isis Nusair furthers this argument through the lens of Edward Said's Orientalism to discuss the sexual violences at Abu Ghraib, which were masculinized violence constructed to systemically dominate through continued assumptions of orientalist logic (182).

The final section speaks to the radical potentialities of feminists organizing against war. As Leslie Cagan points out, war is the antithesis of feminist principles because, "all of the values of feminism are contradicted—if not rendered impossible to achieve—by the realities of war and the...