Feminism and Empire - Glass

The readings this week on Feminism and Empire largely address the impact of empire, war, imperialism, and capitalism on women. For this week’s blog post, I will focus on the piece by Mohanty and colleagues. In Mohanty’s book, she and her colleagues work to unpack the ways in which women are simultaneously contributors to, need protection from, and excuses for U.S. war and empire. Mohanty opens her work by explaining that “over these war-filled years women have served as motivation and justification for US war” (Mohanty 1). The book itself is a “closer examination of the impact of imperialist war on people within and outside of the USA in terms of their daily, lived realities” (Mohanty 3).

Mohanty explains that for feminist analysts, “what becomes immediately apparent is that the US militarization has meant a new mobilization of historically embedded colonial practices and rhetorics of male superiority and white supremacy; of female vulnerability, inadequacy, and inferiority; and of the subjugation of oppressed masculinities of men of color” (Mohanty 3). A common theme in Mohanty’s piece – and the other essays in this same book – is that of women both as protectors and needing protection. On the one hand, women are enlisting to fight wars in higher numbers than ever, which, in the big picture, work to advance empire. Women are enlisted to encourage their children to fight these wars. Women are expected to support the wars that will supposedly liberate “poor, oppressed” women in the countries being annihilated. And women are expected to maintain a femininity all that renders their bodies with “visibility/invisibility/hyper-visibility” (Mohanty 7). While women are working to progress empire, they are also needing protection from it: women who enlist in the army are warned that “no woman was to be anywhere on post unescorted or alone at any time,” for example (Mohanty 10).

Mohanty and her colleagues try to unpack the reasons why women are upholding a system of patriarchal power that serves to rape, pillage, and murder their very existence, bodies and livelihood. This is the point of the work that becomes particularly interesting and important to my own research interests: politics of motherhood. As I was reading the part of her introduction that explains complicity, I felt particularly upset by the overly-simplified way Mohanty problematizes how mothers “also have become protectors and military suppliers, raising money to send flak vests to their children because the US government has not provided the proper equipment to the soldiers” (Mohanty 9). Women who are also mothers show complacency in war and empirical efforts by not only “sending their [sons and] daughters of to war” but also by providing military weaponry that keeps them safe. It left me wondering, “What are mothers supposed to do” in this instance? Beyond the basic “would do anything imaginable” love of a mother, moms who do not participate in this level of protection are not only seen as unpatriotic, but uncaring, unfeminine, and deemed “bad mothers.” The mothers who are most likely to “send their children” off to war, as Mohanty and her colleagues point out, are mothers of color, lower-income, and with fewer choices.

This week’s readings have brought up one main discussion question for me:

We see how empire and war largely impacts female-sexed, woman-gendered bodies, particularly those “othered” in the form of people of color and low-income individuals. How does empire also serve to reify what it means to be a ‘good mother’ in times of war? Who is expected to ‘give up their babies’ in times of war, to procreate, and to take on more ‘masculine’ roles during these times?