Abstract:
As Hester Eisenstein shows in her essay in this issue, the sudden concern for women has come from neo-conservatives like George W. Bush, who are not known for their support for feminism. Yet feminism is `essential¿ to the war on terror, Eisenstein writes, enabling Islamic societies to be condemned as `uniquely oppressive to women¿ (Eisenstein this issue). I explore this appropriation of feminism as Orientalist feminism, a feminism that is ultimately about constructing a binary opposition between a civilised West and an uncivilised East. My main goal is to explore how feminists can respond to this discourse.
