Transnational Feminism

After reading all three of these articles, I found Bunch's discussion of security to be most intriguing and surprising to me. Perhaps it is from my own bias and sole interaction with Westernized media, but I have never considered 9/11 in the negative ways that she discussed. Bunch analyzed the incident with recognition to its hurtful impacts on human rights and human security. She pointed to how we used such a catastrophic event in our history as a way to curtail human rights and instead demonize Islam as a whole and justify a heavy increase of militarization.

Militarization, as explained by Sylvanna Falcon, is an ideology that is full of gendered effects, which she pinpoints to be prominent on women at the US-Mexican border. It has close relations with militarized border rape, sexual assault, and escalated violence against women in forms of serial, multiple, and mass murder of Mexican Women. What confuses me the most from this then is why a system/strategy that is so commonly associated with atrocities such as these is continually being supported and given power to? Militarization is an ideology that is embedded with the issues of hyper-masculinity, patriarchy, and threats to national security that dominate our nation.

I think it is important to look at this reality in a wholistic view, however. Militarization does not root directly from terrorist issues, war, and tragic historical events, I think that it goes deeper than that. All three of the articles had a similar underlying theme: Transnational Feminism. Lughod discussed our own lack of knowledge of other cultures in the United States that comes from the non-existent transnational feminism. Our lack of knowledge pushes us to over-simplify other nations' cultures and associate them only with the things that concern us, these typically being negative. It can even be said that this lack of knowledge and lack of global feminism extends our justification of militarism in that we act on what we believe to be true of everyone, such as hating all Muslims because one Muslim group performed an terrorist act. I think that Bunch said it best when she said "Women's activism must be both local and global." All feminists should raise there voices for one another, spreading knowledge and promoting greater understandings of cultural, political, government, and civil beliefs and actions.

Natalie

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