Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College, and her work on global women’s issues has been published in outlets such as the New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
Khader applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop, and reported the following:
Page 99 picks up in the middle of an anecdote about author and lawyer Rafia Zakaria’s experiences in school and cuts to the heart of one of the main problems with white feminism.Visit Serene Khader's website.The truth, at least as Zakaria saw it, was that her classmates were rebelling into an established subculture, one that didn’t deviate from mainstream Western culture as much as they may have hoped. The subculture is familiar enough that we can mentally populate Zakaria’s classroom with one-night-stand detail sharers and sex column advice readers...without knowing any of the individuals involved. It was a subculture that had the veneer of feminism, and some genuine engagement with both feminist and queer politics, but with accompanying heavy doses of plenty other ills of Western culture.White feminists, and other faux feminists, often assume that the goal of feminism is to free women from social or cultural expectations. Zakaria, like many Muslim women, was on the receiving end of this assumption from classmates who assumed that her religion meant she was sexually repressed, and that she would be better off if she was more like them. This type of assumption extends into policies that oppress women of color such as laws around Europe and North America that prohibit the wearing of hijab.
But the idea that feminism aims to free women from culture does not just cause harm; it is deeply logically flawed. Page 99 is about the fact that it is impossible for anyone not to be influenced by unchosen cultural norms. None of us chooses things like the language we think in, which types of foods or working hours seem “normal” to us, whether it seems normal to eat with utensils or our hands. Inheriting unchosen practices is not necessarily good or bad, and it is certainly unavoidable.
Once we recognize this, we can see that feminism needs to be grounded in some set of values besides freedom from culture. We can also see another important possibility for fighting patriarchy and white supremacy at the same time—that it is possible to fight sexism from values that are rooted in culture. The chapter goes on to discuss feminists who argue that gender equality is a Muslim value.
The Page 99 Test works because it shows, like much of the book, that white feminism is deeply connected to the idea that feminism is a movement for individual freedom. It also works because it shows the value of philosophical arguments for social justice—being able to see the implications and downstream consequences of our ideas can help motivate us to seek better ones.
--Marshal Zeringue