Imalah ’s Reviews > Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption > Status Update

"In her essay “Who Defines ‘Mutilation’?” Courtney Smith challenges the “hegemony of Western feminist discourse” surrounding female genital cutting (FGC) by conducting an analysis of what a group of Senegalese women thought about breast implantation versus what a group of American women thought of FGC. The comparison is directed at pointing out how much cultural frames influence our judgment of various practices (a

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

"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

"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."

"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."