A Decimation of Women, Part II: The Case of The Taliban and Their Destruction of an Entire Culture
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.
The Taliban will not permit Afghan women to work or effectively venture outside of the home. They force women and girls to wear impossible body and face-covering garments that impede movement, sight and safety in extreme heat, and beat them in the street if they do not comply or attempt to go to the market–to do anything except the one kind of ‘work’ permitted women, which is begging:
Latifa described life under Taliban rule the first time around, in 1999: “The apartment resembles a prison or a hospital. Silence weighs heavily on all of us. As none of us do much, we haven’t got much to tell each other. Incapable of sharing our emotions, we each enclose ourselves in our own fear and distress. Since everyone is in the same black pit, there isn’t much point in repeating time and again that we can’t see clearly.” [1]
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) described the sudden imposition of the Islamic State’s Sharia Law upon womens’ lives: ‘Taliban restrictions on the cultural presence of women covered several areas. Place names including the word “women” were modified so that the word was not used. Women were forbidden to laugh loudly as it was considered improper for a stranger to hear a woman’s voice. Women were prohibited from participating in sports or entering a sports club.’ [2] Though they have not been resumed during the current Taliban reign (due to international economic sanctions, warnings and censure predicating their 2021 takeover), the public executions of women in the former football stadiums and other public forums were commonplace–used by the Taliban to terrorize women and girls into compliance. [3]
Women and girls are now cut off from education or the practice of their former skills and professions. Afghanistan, like other nations in the region, is suffering from drought and famine, with poverty, job loss, unemployment, and starvation at record levels.
Depriving girls of secondary education translates to a loss of at least $500 million U.S. for the Afghan economy over the past 12 months according to a recent Unicef assessment (August 14th, 2022). If the current cohort of girls were able to complete their secondary education and participate in the job market, girls and would would contribute at least $5.4 billion U.S. to Afghanistan’s economy.
The imminent human and economic catastrophe threatening Afghanistan is wholly artificial and unnecessary, caused by the Taliban’s brutality, cruelty toward, and oppression of women and girls held under their rule in that country.
[1] Latifa (2001). My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the Taliban. New York: Hyperion. pp. 29–107. ISBN0–7868–6901–1.)
[2] “Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)”. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
[3] “Filmed by RAWA: Taliban publicly execute an Afghan woman”. Retrieved 1 November 2015. See also Krikorian, Michael (February 16, 2003). “Documenting truth in dangerous places”. Los Angeles Times.
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Posted byYvonne Owens, PhDAugust 16, 2022Posted inUncategorizedEditA Decimation of Women, Part II: The Case of The Taliban and Their Destruction of an Entire Culture
Published by Yvonne Owens, PhD
Yvonne Owens is a past Research Fellow at the University College of London, and Professor of Art History and Critical Studies at the Victoria College of Art, Victoria, BC. She was awarded a Marie Curie Ph.D. Fellowship in 2005 for her interdisciplinary dissertation on Renaissance portrayals of women in art and sixteenth-century Witch Hunt discourses. She holds an Honours B.A. with Distinctions in History of Art from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, an M.A. in Medieval Studies with Distinction from The Centre For Medieval Studies at the University of York, U.K., and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in History of Art from University College of London. Her publications to date have mainly focused on representations of women and the gendering of evil “defect” in classical humanist discourses, cross-referencing these figures to historical art, natural philosophy, medicine, theology, science and literature. Her essay, “The Saturnine History of Jews and Witches,” appeared in Preternature (Vol. 3, №1) in 2014, her book chapter, “Pollution and Desire in Hans Baldung Grien: The Abject, Erotic Spell of the Witch and Dragon” appeared in Angeliki Pollali and Berthold Hub, Eds., Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography, her essay “The Hags, Harridans, Viragos and Crones of Hans Baldung Grien” was published as part of the Hans Baldung Grien: New perspectives on his work, International Conference Proceedings (October 18–20, 2018), Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in 2019, and her book, Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art: the Witches and Femme Fatales of Hans Baldung Grien, Bloomsbury London, in 2020. She also writes art and cultural criticism, exploring contemporary post-humanist discourses in art, literature and new media. She is co-Editor with Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju for an anthology of essays titled Trans-Disciplinary Migrations: Science, the Sacred, and the Arts, forthcoming in 2021 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. View more posts
