Solidarity, Sexuality, and Saving Muslim Women in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

Desiring SolidaritySolidarity is a fundamental-even constitutive-concern of feminist theory and politics. Like a specter it haunts feminist imaginations periodically. Yet it is a slippery term. Certain expressions of feminist solidarity, we know, often gloss over divisions the name of unity. The pursuit of solidarity along these registers, I suggest, expresses a longing as much as it represents a political goal.1 Perhaps this desire (for home? for the transcendence of privilege and so a point of arrival?) explains the persistence or at least periodic revival of a language of sisterhood that is otherwise discredited.The trope of global sisterhood is especially powerful today; its affective power allows for its reinvention different idioms at different times. Most recently, neoliberal discursive regimes Euro-America have revived both global sisterhood and a politics of salvation/caring, deftly folding them into corporate marketing strategies. So it is that, for instance, the Whole Foods grocery store chain solicits donations for its microcredit programs for women in the developing world, as part of its stated mission to produce a future without poverty. In the same vein, the French luxury cosmetics company Clarins's FEED 15 campaign, as an expression of its humanitarian values, provides meals to hungry children worldwide through the World Food Program.2 Both ventures appeal, different ways, to a global cosmopolitan feminist sentiment located the North. By implication, the present of women and children Europe and the United States excludes poverty and hunger.3In this short essay, I am mainly interested the discourses of solidarity and sisterhood opened up by the collapse of Rana Plaza Savar, Bangladesh, 2013, which over eleven hundred garment factory workers were killed. Not surprisingly, First World solidarity with Third World workers figured centrally the coverage following the disaster. As horrifying images of the tragedy and its aftermath circulated across global media, the incident was rendered a spectacle for consumption. Like other such events, it was open to the most incendiary mobilizations.The new socially conscious Pope Francis immediately denounced as slave labor the working conditions Bangladeshi garment factories (Bangladesh 'Slave Labor' 2013). A year later, at a conference convened by the International Labor Rights Forum called Women's Rights the Apparel Industry: Ending Violence, Empowering Voices, a participant declared, We want to take these women out of The head of the National Organization for Women, a rousing speech, also condemned as slave labor factory work places like Bangladesh and Honduras.It is not my intention to caricature individuals or impugn their motives. I do not doubt the sincerity of individual concerns, feminist or otherwise. My interest rather is the work of the trope of slavery. Like trafficking and forced labor, slavery performs a specific discursive-ideological function. Its persuasive power lies representing extremes such as the Rana Plaza collapse as being outside the legitimate liberal capitalist system rather than constitutive of the system itself.In contrast to such incendiary calls to solidarity, a more informed and nuanced transnational activism around sweatshop labor foregrounds the essential complicity of Northern corporations and Bangladeshi capitalists the making of incidents such as the Rana Plaza collapse. This is critical terrain, which labor activists Bangladesh work side by side with activists the United States.4 For the most part, however, antisweatshop campaigns hinge on the power of the affluent Northern consumer to save poor Third World women through the former's ethical consumption practices. Solidarity is decidedly vertical.The Marketplace of SolidarityAs indicated earlier, feminist solidarity of a neoliberal kind has been marketized the global economy. …