Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy

by Zillah Eisenstein

In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women's rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleezza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

Genres: Politics, Feminism, Theory

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York. She has written feminist theory in North America for the past twenty-five years. Her writing is an integral part of her political activism. She writes in order to share and learn with, and from, others engaged in political struggles for social justice. She writes about her work building coalitions across women’s differences: the black/white divide in the US; the struggles of Serb and Muslim women in the war in Bosnia; the needs of women health workers in Cuba; the commitments of environmentalists in Ghana; the relationship between socialists and feminists in union organizing; the struggles against extremist fundamentalisms in Egypt and Afghanistan; the needs of women workers in India.
Throughout her career her books have tracked the rise of neoliberalism both within the US and across the globe. She has documented the demise of liberal democracy and scrutinized the growth of imperial and militarist globalization.

She has also critically written about the attack on affirmative action in the US, the masculinist bias of law, the crisis of breast cancer and AIDS, the racism of patriarchy and the patriarchal structuring of race, the new nationalisms, and corporatist multiculturalism.

Reviews

[Johan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Highly political with no intentions of hiding her stance. I'm not entirely convinced about her thesis that black and female politicians like Condi Rice are sexual decoys. But the chapters about how war blurs the lines between men and women are interesting.

[Izetta Autumn]

Hmmm...I wonder how this might be applicable.....

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here