Lazreg really goes to town on arguing that “global feminism’ is a horrid problem which is solely the fault of the west and the puppets that are paraded around on the international lecture circuit. She pontificates at great length her distain for the treatment of the “Other woman” as someone who lives in a bad society and needs freeing and, prior to that, careful documentation for consumption by western audiences. She argues that all western work on the study of the “Other woman” is garbage and only serves to sensationalize and perpetuate lies and half truths about women from societies other than those of the west.
It seems to me that Lazreg must have been passed up once too many times to be a guest lecturer or was turned down by one too many publishers and now she’s become a very bitter and jaded academic. I dare say that she lost her academic marbles. This short piece seems only designed to lash out at the rest of the academic community in a very blind and indiscriminant manner. She harshly criticizes everyone from her own students through other academics through the “Other women” lecturers and authors. Never once did I see any real suggestion for improvement on the current system. Regardless of whether or not what Lazreg says is true, it’s entirely unconstructive to spew such academic bile in the faces of her peers without offering up some possible solution. In engineering, that would be like saying a dam will fail and kill a million people but not suggesting any methods to stop the event from occurring.
I agree with her that many people do trivialize the “Other woman” and make all of her efforts and endeavors into a fight against the system in which she lives. In fact, I’m sure that I’m even guilty of such things. In today’s gogo western world of 10 second sound bytes and instant information 24/7/365, if the topic isn’t sensationalized a bit, no one from the general population is going to bother looking at it. For that matter, most undergraduates wouldn’t take a women’s studies class if they didn’t expect to read some exotic tales of far off places and far out women. Some might even be so lucky as to see national geographic style photographs of women in “traditional” dress scratching out a meager existence in sub Saharan Africa. What the students aren’t told is that an anthropologist paid the women either in cash or in food or some other valuable commodity to pose in outdated clothes doing things which they wouldn’t usually do. I’ve known enough anthropologists over the years to know that this is the modus operandi for a good chunk of the anthropological community.
But I digress. Agreeing with Lazreg is one thing. Agreeing with her method of delivering the message and the “academacized” nature of her writing (lots and lots of unnecessary big words and tons of verboseness) served more to hurt her argument rather than help it in my eyes.