If I can't have my Kalashnikov, I want no part of your Universal Sisterhood

So I was going to post a long boring rant about how I just submitted my first conference paper abstract (aren't I wonderful) and my fears of public speaking and blah blah blah. But, as College Girlfriend would say, F that S.

Instead, I'm going into orbit about this: Student sit-in in Pakistan defends mosques on government-seized land (NYT - Times Select). Here's the L.A. Times version.

No, I'm not angry about women (armed with sticks!) proclaiming "Sharia or martyrdom" in a children's library in Islamabad.

I am, however, furious with the kind of blind, white, Western women's-libber pseudo-feminism that produces the following knee-jerk reaction to this moment of activism: these women are fools because they are working for their own oppression. See, for example, this (perfectly nicely toned, I think) blog post, and then the fuckwits in the comments thread.

I'm sorry, but last time I checked, a woman in a niqab weilding a Kalashnikov is an image that requires a little more nuance, thoughtfulness, complexity than Ye Olde False Consciousnesse Argvmente.

This article comes a little closer to permitting the Jamia Hafsa protesters, oh, I don't know, some kind of - what's the word - agency (that's Smarts & Guts in plainspeakin' English). But its author, who, I'm guessing - based on the name Joanne Payton, her residence in London and her profile's poorly chosen Virginia Woolf quotation - is neither Pakistani nor Muslim, feels the need to prescribe a course of action for the protest. These women just need to recognize the universal laws of the Universal Sisterhood and all will be solved! They need to understand what I in my cosy flat know about "ideological and practical state violence."

For serious, okay. She uses the term "universal sisterhood."

Now, I'm no cultural relativist. Neither do I feel comfortable, for a number of reasons, taking a definitive position on the protest, its aims, or the women involved. But I would like to issue a demand for complexity. I would like us, especially as feminists, to pause before powerful images, actions, and words. I would like us to absorb them, contemplate them, turn them around and look at and through and around them. I would like us to take as many positions as possible, see where they lead, and then choose the one that leaves us all the most open space. I would like us to stop being prescriptive. I would like us to stop accusing each other of operating against our own best interests. I would like us to stop talking and start listening.

I would like us to embrace the difficult, the paradoxical, the tough-to-digest. Please. It's high time.