Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 12:54:42 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: White men et al.


Just to clarify what the phrase "white men saving brown women from brown
men" means.  The original context comes from a discussion about British
attempts to outlaw sati. Consequently, the phrase is meant to be read
either ironically (as that phrase "we had to destroy the village in order
to save it") or as a particular racial fantasy that underlies British
colonial relationships. If I remember correctly, Spivak cites it in
relationship to Freud's A Child is Being Beaten-- As a cultural fantasy,
it goes beyond individual good will...Not to speak for anyone on the list,
but I think they invoked Spivak's phrase in the ideological context of the
film in the following manner: "enlightened Westernized brown men saving
brown women from Islamic fundamentalist brown men." Reminds me of
Kureishi's My Son the Fanatic, incidently. Question also arise about the
male critique of feminism.  Insofar as "men" and "women" occupy a
different enuciative symbolic positions, the critique of patriarchal
structures cannot be the same (scare quotes are meant to save me from
critiques of essentialism). One of the things I've noticed about a lot of
"male feminism" is how Oedipal it is...fathers against sons fighting for
the mother. So I don't think it is a critique against feminism per
se...just how feminism sometimes gets deployed/effaced in a masculine
Oedipal struggle... Joe F 




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