By Marke B.
To a slightly lesser extent than the invasion of Afghanistan — where Taliban assholes are still spraying young girls’ faces with acid — the occupation of Iraq was touted as a women’s liberation project. We were the white knights coming to tear the veils off and throw open wide the doors to fancy new schools, theaters, community centers, and business opportunities.
Boy, that turned out to be quite a bit of presumptive hash. In the giant WTF that followed “shock and awe,” many learned the limits of such blanket assertions — but of course the deaths of tens of thousands are still seen here as nothing but a big fat lesson for Westerners. What about the people who had to live through it all?
One incisive complaint is that the West has failed to include enough voices from Iraq to give a fuller picture of the occupation’s effects — both the disastrous and the hopeful. Iraqi women, especially, seem even more invisible now than before the invasion.
Co-authors Nadje Al-Ali, Reader in Gender Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and Nicola Pratt, Lecturer in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of East Anglia, just released a new UC Press book that attempts a corrective. What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq is the first book to examine how Iraqi women have fared since the invasion, and attempts to “expose the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the ‘new Iraq.'”