“Sex and the Muslim Feminist”
“sex positive feminism stands for the precept that women are not free until and unless they are sexually free. In the competitiveness that graduate seminars breed, my classmates rambled on about threesomes, triumphant and unceremonious dumpings of emotionally attached lovers (who has time for that?) and in general lots and lots of sex. Our smug professor, nose-pierced and wild-haired and duly sporting the scarves and baubles of the well-traveled, encouraged it all. The question of how and when sexual liberation had become not simply the centerpiece but the entire sum of liberation in general never came up. The year was 2006…
I had cuddled up with alienation just as soon as I began my graduate program… Being Muslim and female was an identity that rhymed effortlessly with repression and oppression in the view of most liberal academics and students… The Muslim feminist is either left out of the conversation or included only as an example of a deviant type, demanding liberals’ suspicion and vigilance…
Of course the loss of interested in a critique of sex cannot be pinned on the academy alone. The emphasis on sexual freedom permitted the taming of radical feminism to fit the capitalist society from which it emerged. If sex was understood as a commodity that women were choosing to consume, then its problematic aspects could be disguised…
Feminism, as it had survived in the American mainstream, was sex positive, and questioning whether the calibration of equality or liberation against the amount of sex consumed was not of much interest…. In the years that followed, imperialism was also invited to the party: after 9/11, the idea of that sexual liberation was necessary for gender equality was deemed one of many reasons to wage war on countries where attitudes towards sex were different from American attitudes…
I had broken every gender norm I had been raised with, had chosen education and independence, and all the struggles that came with it. The seminar’s pre-occupation with sex, particularly its frequency and variety, seemed trivial to me, unconnected to the feminism that I was trying so hard to model for my daughter. It hurt to be judged inadequate somehow by those whose class and color seemed to make them better equipped to define the terms of feminism.”
I cry for her. The hiding, the burden, the forbearance. I bet people call her strong all the time and then end the conversation without listening or learning.This is a really interesting critique of sex positivity. I’ve sort of discussed this with friends around the edges, but we could never quite name why it felt constricting. But the commodification of sex, making it a neutral part of capital, pretending that there are no social constructions imbedded within it…
Related: “Dear American misogynists: Afghan women are not oppressed for you”; “The Fetish of Staring at Iran’s Women”; “WHITE MEN TALKING ABOUT THE NIQAB: A BRIEF HISTORY”; “Hijab gives Muslim women the chance to practice feminism in their own way”
