Sexual Decoys
Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving critique of the United States from the point of view of a US citizen. She charts its most recent forays into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the violations at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. She argues that these share much with the domestic problems of the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated and that this distorts the way women in political life are used by the system and that they threaten genuine democratic rule. Eisenstein argues for women to counter fascistic elements and envisages a politics that heightens democracy around the globe and believes that feminism must be at the centre of the changes.
2007 | ISBN 9781876756635 | Paperback | 218 x 140 mm | 142 pp
Reviews
'Sexual Decoys is the most sane and sensible work of scholarship I have yet read. ... Eisenstein paints a picture of a dystopian world, which is all the more unsettling because it is the reality we live in. This is a work which strips naked the theatrical excesses of cultural propaganda. Sexual Decoys is both fascinating and terrifying at the same time. It is a book you may need to recover from after reading, but it is the most necessary and honest analysis of current culture and economics I have read in a long time.'
–Evelyn Hartogh, m/c reviews
'...raises provocative questions...Smart and witty, sobering yet uplifting, this book is essential reading for all of us committed to social justice.'
–Ms Magazine
'Zillah Eisenstein has won deserved praise for her trenchant indictments of gender and political issues. Her latest book tackles both of these topics head-on.'
–The New Statesman
'For Zillah Eisenstein politics is like the air we breathe and the ideas we live - always deserving our deepest attention. In "Sexual Decoys" once again, Eisenstein brilliantly draws us into the profoundly complex gendered politics of war, mobilizing startling constructs like sexual decoys, patriarchal imperialism, neoliberal feminism, and racialized fascist democracy to sharpen our analytic feminist lenses and demystify war cultures. A smart, challenging book for everyone concerned with what it means to live ethically and accountably in the USA of the present.'
–Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Professor of Women‘s Studies, Syracuse University
'Zillah Eisenstein's latest feminist text is a provocative, insightful reading of the gendered and racialized complexities of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq and the ways in which the metaphor of "sexual and racial decoys" can be deployed to illuminate contemporary US government machinations here and around the globe. Very little escapes Eisenstein's critical gaze: the Bush administration, Laura Bush, Condi Rice, Hillary Clinton, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, neoliberal/imperial feminism, diversity in the academy. Sexual Decoys is sure to be controversial because of its biting critiques of both conservatives and liberals.'
–Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Director of the Women's Research & Resource Center at Spelman College
'Zillah Eisenstein's Sexual Decoys is an incisive critique of the rightwing mobilization of gender and race for imperial designs. The book insightfully illuminates the contradictions of war waged in the name of spreading democracy. Asking whether terrorism is the new version of the old communist menace, Eisenstein contextualizes current militarization policies, and boldly exposes their noxious fallout for democracy.'
–Ella Shohat, New York University
'In Sexual Decoys, Eisenstein has written a passionate and exhaustively detailed indictment of the anti-woman crimes of U.S. imperialist aggression. In particular, her work calls on women within the U.S. to resist the claim of "protection of women" by a capitalist system intent on exploiting and degrading women and sexually oppressed minorities throughout the world.'
–Minnie Bruce Pratt, Poet-activist