Religion, Culture, and the Complexities of Feminist Solidarity

Transnational feminism was once conceived as the solidarity of sisters, united in the task of confronting global patriarchy in its various local forms. During more recent times, this conception has attracted and received severe criticism. Particularly postcolonial feminists have questioned both the assumption of a unitary, quasi-organic worldwide gender order, and the notion of global sisterhood. Furthermore, they have successfully suggested to shift the attention towards differences and power between women, towards occidentalist biases in transnational feminist scholarship and practice, and towards the othering of sexism as well as the long tradition of instrumentalizing the task of womens’ liberation for colonial, imperial, and nationalist ends. These suggestions have led to important redirections in the field of feminist scholarship—both of the transnational and of the methodologically national kind. While I find these shifts highly important, in my Paper I nevertheless want to problematize one of their effects: namely, what I see as critical Western feminism’s tendency to refrain from critical engagements with cultural and religious contexts that are different from its own in order to not reproduce the othering of sexism that is rightly problematizes. Taking Pakistani feminist debates on the agency of women in the religious right as a starting point, I will discuss some of the implications of this reluctance, and try to sketch out what an attendance to it might mean with regard to the theorizing and practice of feminist solidarity.