Responding to Orientalist Feminism: Women’s Rights and the War on Terror

Among many other legacies, the September 11 terrorist attacks will be remembered by some for catapulting women’s rights to the centre stage of global politics. As the US launched the War on Terror in Afghanistan and then Iraq, the liberation of women from barbaric regimes became a powerful rationale for intervention. Meanwhile, in post-9/11 Australia, protecting ‘Aussie’ women from sexual assault, and Muslim women from ‘oppression’ have become battlecries against the ‘barbarism’ of Arab and Muslim cultures. In many other Western nations too, concern for women’s rights has become politically mainstream.