Nussbaum Has Some Sharp Followers

Martha Nussbaum, with whom I am becoming increasingly familiar with through reading Amartya Sen, wrote an excellent piece for the The Stone, a surprisingly engaging and intellectual commentary provided by The Times, on the narrowly rejected burqa ban in Spain.  Like any good intellectual, she doesn’t focus exclusively on the legislative incident but instead finds the deeper concepts at play and how they relate to other historical concepts dealing with religious freedom, civil liberties, and human rights.  I’m still digesting her arguments, but I found this one comment particularly piercing, especially from a East-West, post-colonial point-of-view.  The reader said:

I am fairly taken aback by the rash of ethnocentric and fundamentally sexist responses in these comments. There are so many mentions of “saving” and “freeing” these women from the tyranny of their own religion, side-by-side the proposal for an obliteration of their agency. A woman’s body does not need to be policed by the aesthetic preferences of the West.

At the core of the burqa ban is a deeply rooted fear of the ‘other’, and the traditionally heroic Western desire to salvage the dignity of those unfortunate enough to have been born low on the scale of cultural hierarchy.

Those poor girls from the East.  Only the enlightened wisdom from males and feminist in the West can save them!

Or not.

Comments and controversies such as these remind me why people like Edward Said are important.  I’m also reminded of a quote by Karl Marx that has a troublesome connection to the burqa ban controversy:

“The Orient [re:  Muslim women]  cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”

Advertisement