November 17&19 BlogPost

In the article, “The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age Empire,” by Cynthia Enloe, discusses the following feminist historians in order to demonstrate through interviews and featured articles, ‘where were the women?’ in regards to post-invasions, as well as war in Afghanistan and Iraq. While, Paul Amar also introduces similar regions, but in regards to sexual harassments towards Egyptian Muslim women in “Charging the police with Sexual Harassment in Egypt.”

Enloe touches upon the functioning of brothels and sexual relations on teal plantations in regards to their correlation with ‘empire-making’ and the feminist standpoint. This standpoint is observed on Muslim developing countries by analyzing Muslim women as, tea pickers, nannies, teachers, wives, explorers, and so on… because of the following factors mentioned, “The United States imperial enterprise from the vantage points of parlors and brothels. To make sense of putative American empire-building, we have to become much more curious—curious about the marriage aspirations of factory women, about the gender dynamics inside soldiers’ families, about sexual policies of the U.S. military forces…”

However, Amar discusses on recent Egyptian Revolutions of January and February of 2011, as well as the global and domestic feminist struggling to be in the ‘political sphere;’ portraying the feminism literature content in regards to critical theory on security state practices. Thus, both Enloe and Amir portray that of assertive female agency through “politics of respectability and strange bedfellow processes of NGO-ization, this state-allied, pro-enforced demobilization of class-based movements for democratic change. Also, “creating a national identity in countries such as Afghanistan has meant foe many women advocates crafting comparative judgment’s about both past and present foreign rulers and about rival male led local parties, each claiming to represent the nation each claiming to know what is best for the nations women’s.”