More than 45 guests attended Dr. Moon Charania’s book launch at The SoundTable restaurant on Edgewood Ave on Nov. 1 to celebrate her book Will the Real Pakistani Women Please Stand Up? Empire, Visual Culture and the Brown Female Body. This book is a series of case studies that focus on the portrayal of Pakistani women in the global media.
The book is situated in conversation with transnational feminism, visual culture and queer theory where it explores photographs and a film on Pakistani women in a post-9/11 context.
Charania analyzes Hollywood films, British documentaries, newspapers and mainstream U.S. magazines and traces sensational female figures of Pakistan— all of whom have been subject to patriarchal violence—highlighting the imagery of exploitation and eroticism. Charania’s examination of these images address questions of spectatorship and fetishism in the age of globalization and the racial and imperial politics of liberal feminism.
Charania was inspired to write the book after 9/11; one of the major cultural impacts that contributed to the increase of Muslim women in the media, which contributed to violent practice in the U.S. The U.S. erases the violent patriarchy that happens within its borders and enforces patriarchy in American women’s lives everyday.
Chapter two, the most popular in Charania’s book looks at human rights victims and practices. Charania said, “The central argument is how human rights uses photographs to create the narrative of the oppressed Muslim woman and how human rights practices work within a white orientalists logic.” Her position in this chapter is a feminist anti-orientalist perspective to question the way human rights practices might contribute to furthering the oppression of Muslim women.
At the dimly lit tapas venue, over champagne, chocolate truffles and Spanish appetizers, Moon says it was her mother who taught her to question nation and empire. In her toast she said, “For my mother…who gifted me the intimacy of my Pakistani-ness, weaving into my crevices the lines of nations, while simultaneously mocking all nationalisms as nothing more than overly played out, passionate masculine parodies.”
Charania’s book were set up and sold by Charis Books, an independent feminist bookstore for $45; she signed 25 books. Charania is a visiting lecturer of sociology at Spelman. She has published essays in various journals and collections, most recently, in “Sexualities.” She has taught Feminist Studies, Global Perspectives on Violence Against Women and Sexuality and Islam at both Tulane University and Georgia State University.