Critiquing Western Feminisms Attempting to "Save"

Lila Abu-Lughod continues our discussion on critiquing a Western feminisms that have natal origins within the larger frameworks of Eurocentric foundations that have defined what we understand as "the West" and the "Orient." As colonial legacies of empire have unraveled throughout history, there has been a pervasive and invasive need to categorize and render whole communities under Western-sanitized labels of difference in hegemonic knowledge production and epistemologies. Abu-Lughod critiques this presumption of patriarchal backwardness that is projected onto Arab and Muslim communities from the social political standpoint of the West. Indeed, It is only through ourselves in the West that we can critique something else and Abu-Lughod does not fail to articulate that in "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" She lifts the clouded veil on western feminist frameworks that center on the Eurocentric and superficial aspects of women's liberation and empowerment that mean different things in different physical and literal contexts.

There is a vast generalization about Islam being inherently misogynistic, and therefore in need of Western imperialism, intervention, occupation, and colonialization of culture; but this idea is conflated by images of the Orient,  what Edward Said has termed as  Orientalism. The veil of Western feminist rhetorics use these arguments to justify their position within the larger White Savior  tendencies of Western democratic military intervention to solidify "freedom" as The West knows it. Abu-Lughod's other piece, "The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt," provides an outline of how selective repudiation as a dynamic of post colonial cultural politics has reshaped the gender norms for women living in places regarded as "too complex" by the universalist language of hegemonic Western humanitarianism that parades around as radical and emancipating feminism. As Abu-Lughod points out, cultural  transplants are treated selectively and "self-consciously made the object of political contest," how do we see ourselves also doing this when we learn about communities that have marginalized broadly from our own positions in the West?