American feminist letter to Bosnian rape victims
anecdote · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 3 talks
Bosnian women who had been serially raped during the war received a letter from American feminists asking (in a Butlerian vein) whether they thought women had an eternal feminine essence or a performatively enacted identity, a grotesque mismatch of register that Žižek uses to illustrate how Western feminist theory can be a form of neo-colonial insensitivity.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“Do you think that women have an eternal feminine essence or do you think that woman's identity is the result of performatively enacted practices of repetition?”
“do you think that woman has an eternal non-historical essence, or do you admit that woman's identity is performatively constructed and so on.”
“Do you, poor Bosnian women who were raped, do you think that woman has an eternal substantial essence, or do you think that feminine identity is constructed through performative discursive practices?”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
postmodern narrativization
×1
UNESCO tolerance
×1
liberal superego
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
W. J. T. Mitchell1Caroline von Schlegel1Werner Kraft1Costis Lapavitsas1Elvis Presley1Salah Abdeslam1Karsten Nordal Hauken1Pim Fortuyn2
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Bosnian women who had been serially raped during the war received a letter from American feminists asking (in a Butlerian vein) whether they thought women had an eternal feminine essence or a performatively enacted identity, a grotesque mismatch of register that Žižek uses to illustrate how Western feminist theory can be a form of neo-colonial insensitivity., illustrating postmodern narrativization,feminist neo-colonialism,UNESCO tolerance
In the mid-90s an American feminist group wanting to show solidarity with Bosnian raped women sent a letter asking whether the women believed in an eternal female essence or a performatively constructed gender identity, Žižek calls it an example of obscenity., illustrating Western cultural imperialism,liberal political correctness,limits of human rights export
At the end of the Bosnian war, an American feminist sent a letter to Bosnian rape survivors asking whether they believed women have an eternal substantial essence or whether feminine identity is constructed through performative discursive practices, causing the Bosnian women to nearly die laughing., illustrating liberal superego,political correctness as imposition,double blackmail