The U.S. war on Afghanistan was framed as a war to liberate women and it is closely related to how the U.S. ‘gender project’ (post World War 2) translates into the oppression of women in ‘Third World’ countries. Such opportunistic use of gender not only harms women in the U.S. by giving them a false impression that liberation has been achieved at home (by shocking them using imagery like the Taliban Swat video that was ‘leaked’ to the press recently and thereby binding them to the system that oppresses them nonetheless, through incremental advantage), it harms women in Third World countries as well. Since only cultural images are pushed without corresponding structural change in those countries by the U.S. and since women are vested in that structure, it means that without creating alternative opportunities for women they will be isolated and alienated in their own societies or be exploited as cheap labor by multinational corporations.

The U.S. would never seek structural change in those countries because it benefits from their dependency in a core-periphery relationship, which means that those societies will remain underdeveloped and hence feudal and patriarchal which has grave implication for women, more so than the detached cultural or religious explanations commonly offered. This deeply implicates the U.S. in the oppression of women in those societies. Further, since middle class women in those countries become translators of such opportunistic use of gender by the U.S. elite, any ‘feminist movement’ that has a middle class bias in those countries is bound to alienate the vast majority of women whose lives are completely detached from the minuscule middle class those countries have, thereby dividing women against themselves. The U.S. ‘gender project’ post World War 2 that aimed to re-domesticate women through a state supported ‘nuclear family’ and segmented labor market where women’s jobs are an extension of the domestic ‘service’ sphere is thereby translated into a global gender project through use of cultural imagery that in turn merely results in the manipulative use of women’s labor and ferments feudal relationships rather than bring any real ‘liberation’ to oppressed women both within the U.S. and outside.


M. Asadi
asadi.org