Imalah ’s Reviews > Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption > Status Update
Imalah
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"White colonizers manufactured similar moral panic in response to the practice of “sati,” or as Europeans called it, widow-immolation. (In Sanskrit, “sati” refers to the woman who dies, not the ritual, but because I am primarily referring to European accounts I will use “sati” to mean the ritual.) The rite—which was not strictly a religious practice—involves a Brahmin widow casting herself on her husband’s funeral py
— 10 hours, 33 min ago
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Imalah ’s Previous Updates
Imalah
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As theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak pointed out in her analysis of sati, the British saw highlighting and then abolishing the practice as part of their civilizing mission in India; they would “save” the native women. In contrast, Hindu men alleged that the women wanted to die. Thus two patriarchal systems, with white men on one side and Brown men on the other, erased the woman and there is “no space in which the
— 10 hours, 22 min ago
Imalah
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"The HRW definition does not prescribe that honor killing is specific to people of color. That is an implicit white assumption. A label of honor killing would never be attached to any of the thousands of white-on-white cases of intimate-partner violence. It is the presence of a Black or Brown male perpetrator that fosters the idea that a crime is determined by the cultural or religious identity of those involved."
— 17 hours, 2 min ago
Imalah
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"If my husband, who is of Pakistani origin but had spent his entire life in the United States, were to have killed me, it would automatically have been called an act of “honor killing,” because both of us were Muslim."
— 17 hours, 17 min ago
Imalah
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Åsne Seierstad, for example, author of the bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, freely admits that she capitalized on the Afghan cultural formality of offering hospitality and moved into a family’s house to get material for her book, and that she “never mastered Dari,” 29 but it seems she felt completely entitled to represent the innermost thoughts of the women of the family who spoke only that language.
— Apr 27, 2026 02:00AM
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10 hours, 32 min ago
funeral pyre, and it was rare in India even at the time. Large parts of the country did not practice the barbaric ritual at all; in other regions, it was restricted to certain castes. In the seventeenth century, when the British first encountered sati, witch-hunts, trials, and burnings were still being conducted across Europe and in the American colonies. 15 Yet despite the many similarities in the “spectacle” of burning women, and the purportedly moral underpinnings for doing so, white people apparently only recognized violence against women when it was perpetuated by what they saw as primitive “other” cultures."
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"It did not matter that poor and largely powerless women at home in Britain could be subject to torture and then being burned alive at the stake with a cheering audience from the village in attendance, nor that the practice of sati was at least in some cases nominally consensual, arguably a tiny step more shocking than the very non-consensual process of witch-burning. The Indian ritual was primitive and extremist and its European counterpart was a normal part of the maintenance of order."
I don't know how I feel about this, but interesting comparison
