W5D2

 Lila Abu-Lughod and Paul Amar both consider the victimization of women (literal and rhetorical) and its justification and production of violence by security states, Abu-Lughod, asking us to consider whether “Muslim women really need saving” (Abu-Lughod, 783) and Amar analyzing “sexual harassment politics in the global south as a crucial laboratory for testing and reformulating the mix of emancipatory and repressive governance practices that constitute contemporary gender-sensitive ‘human security’ regimes” (Amar, 299). Spivak’s “white men saving brown women from brown men” could summarize the situation each author delves into, but what is valuable in Abu-Lughod and Amar’s analysis is the approaches each offers for challenging and deconstructing this paradigm. As Amar writes, “this article reveals the queering power of new metaphors of masculinity, class struggle and global female insecurity. The conclusion generates a critical theory of security-state practice and illuminates alternative global-south feminisms that contest rather than facilitate securitized and militarized appropriations of internationalist gender and security interventions” (Amar, 299). I would like to extend this analysis of internationalist gender and security interventions and alternative global-south feminisms as their effective underminers to projects of racializing, queering, and destabilizing happening in Black liberation movements in the United States. Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, a text taught today at Yale and elsewhere, takes on the legacy of transatlantic slave trade and slavery within the United States, offering a critique of American racism and simultaneously upholding it. Amar writes in “Turning the gendered politics of the security state inside out?” that “the harassment and sexual brutalization of women, whether working-class women or middle-class political protesters, is matched by the quasi-racialization and parahumanization of working-class male youth in urban Egypt” (Amar, 315). Wright’s 1930’s set novel, in which a twenty year old black chauffeur murders a young radical white woman and is later defended in his trial by a sympathetic white lawyer exists has its own specific context but is affected by and can be analyzed alongside Amar’s assertion that “conversations in critical race theory concerned with the logic of hypervisibility (Reddy 1998; Yancy 2008) focus on processes whereby racialized, sexualized subjects, or the marked bodies of subordinate classes, become intensely visible as objects of state, police and media gazes and as targets of fear and desire” (Amar, 305). This process is illustrated in Harper Lee’s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird as well as Wright’s Native Son. Both novels feature trial scenes in which white men are called upon to defend black women against other white men and women. This white saviorism is inherently problematic and when considered alongside Amar’s directive to “turn the gaze back on the state to reveal the interests, histories and power relations that generate certain race, sex and moral subjects and metaphors” (Amar, 305). illustrates the untenable position of both the white male savior and the white male ally. Abu-Lughod writes, “When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her? (Abu-Lughod, 788-789). Who “you” are in this context really matters. Amar describes one type of “savior” writing that “they sensed the chance as ‘gallant, protective real men’ to utilize the sexual harassment campaign, extending their prerogative power to ‘protectively’ detain women in public, and to round up working-class boys in ways that would degrade and depoliticize their collective aspirations” (Amar, 319). Although this example is quite obviously violent and oppressive, Abu-Lughod shows us how this violence can be parsed out of any type of saviorism and is not limited to police, or white men, white women, or the “global elite”. How then should those of us in privileged positions go about our interventions (historical interference inevitabilizing such intervention (Abu-Lughod, 786-787)) without taking on the role of savior? Abu-Lughod argues for developing an appreciation of difference without a reliance on cultural relativism. Amar cautions us that “when subjects are hypervisibilized, they remain invisible as social beings: they are not recognizable as complex, legitimate, participatory subjects or citizens. One route for subjects to escape the logic of hypervisibility is to strive constantly for respectability. This route entails a historically classphobic (demonizing the working class), gender essentialist moral practice consisting of self-disciplinary practices that are depoliticizing and aim for assimilation” (Amar, 305). Achieving respectability via the project of othering is an inconsistently effective neoliberal strategy which may increase an individual’s security but ultimately corrupts their agency. As Amar writes, “Parahuman subjects are thus hypervisibilized subalterns who become fetishized subjects of politics while their ability to act in emancipatory ways is buried by multiple intersecting modes of sexual, cultural, moral and social fantasy and discipline” (Amar, 306). Wright’s Native Son ends with a speech by the young man’s lawyer in which he lambastes American racism and whiteness and lays the blame for his client’s crime at society’s feet, concluding that any human being socialized as a black man was within that context could not be expected to act humanely or civilized as an adult, being inevitably a product of his backwards environment, a native son of the United States. Although written by a black man, the stereotyping of the book’s main character and the seeming inevitability of his descent into savagery have been decried by many black liberationists precisely for reinforcing the conceptualization of the African American man as parahuman and incapable of emancipatory acts, dependent on the educated, liberal minded white man for his defense, preservation, and civilization. Abu Lughod asks, “Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation?” (Abu-Lughod, 789). Amar offers as example, El-Nadeem, a coalition which defies “NGOization” and rejects the lure of respectability, offering support to “middle-class women protesters and prostitutes, male hustlers and workers alike” (Amar, 313). By rejecting the victim/perpetrator narrative foisted upon these hypervisibilized (/queered) categories and offering solidarity and support, not where it is “deserved” but where it is needed, alliances are able to reveal and disempower the hegemonies which seek to destroy them.