Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy

Zillah Eisenstein

Jul 2013 · Zed Books Ltd.

About this ebook

In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleezza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

About the author

Zillah Eisenstein is one of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time and Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York. She has written feminist theory in North America for the past twenty-five years. Her writing is an integral part of her political activism. She is the author of Against Empire (Zed 2004), Hatreds: Racialised and Sexualised Conflicts in the 21st Century (1996), Global Obscenities (1998) and ManMade Breast Cancers (2001).