"Civil Society?"

Inderpa Grewal's work Transnational America was an interesting take on the idea of the extension of states beyond the means of boarders. Specifically I favored her section on "Managing Human Rights: NGOs and Civil Societies" because of the topics that really paralleled texts that we had read earlier in the semester such as Lila Abu-Lughod's "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" such as when Grewal writes, "In the context of the US, the state, and the discourses of American nationalism produced female subjects who saw themselves as 'free' in comparison to their 'sisters' in the developing world, and these attitudes often pervaded the encounters between women's groups, as at the NGO meetings of the UN women's conferences" (142). This in addition to the entire notion of women's rights as the gateway to human rights that Grewal writes of reminded me of Abu-Lughod's mention that, " the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the dignity of women" in which was in a statement given by Laura Bush following the decision to invade the Middle East post 9/11. The two statements map human rights and protections against "terrorism" (whatever, the current definition of terrorism may be) moving in opposite directions to and from their in-statement of women's rights. Also, in the way that Grewal discusses the notion of the "free" woman and the notion of "sisterhood," implied the nature of the statement Chandra Mohanty stated in her "Under Western Eyes"when she commented on the state of sisterhood as, "sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender, it must be forged in concrete historical and political praxis" (Mohanty 57). The entire notion of the idea of what a "free" woman is and the divergent global understandings of such a notion is the underlying theme of Lila Abu-Lughod's text as well.
Finally, Grewal even ties in the research that she and Caren Kaplan published in "Scattered Hegemonies" when she includes, "the influence of nationalisms and nation-states in creating certain kinds of NGOs and groups was an important one, visible most particularly in the US and Western Europe within 'global feminism'...the hegemony of first world women's groups to affect women's lives nd women's groups worldwide by creating a 'common agenda' that produced women as their subjects and as a target population" (Grewal 143). The monopolizing of the term "global feminism" by western imperialist nations has continually created a system "prone to reproducing the universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures" (Grewal and Kaplan 17). They further their warning of the dangers of such an idea as "global feminism" by stating, " Conventionally, 'global feminism' has stood for a kind of Western cultural imperialism. The term 'global feminism' has elided the diversity of women's agency in favor of a universalized Western modernity" (17). Ultimately, the aims of many Western NGOs and their roles in forming "civil" societies has been mainly the subtlety imperialize the new host societies to further the western notions of "civil" and to reinstate Western ideals of "human rights."