War has a devastating effect on women, feminist perceptions are required to attain peace

Riley, Mohanty, and Pratt 8, FEMINISM AND WAR: Confronting US Imperialism, Robin L. Riley,
Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Minnie Bruce Pratt editors, Zed Books. 2008
This is the context in which the essays in this volume examine and challenge US imperial wars
crafted as rescue missions in the name of democracy and 'civilization.' These wars, with
their disproportionate and annihilating effect on the lives of women, with the ensuing
traffic in gendered bodies, with the manipulation of racialized discourses of male
supremacy and female helplessness as justification, raise profoundly feminist issues,
and require a complex, anti imperialist feminist engagement. In fact, as Angela Davis
suggests here, what is required are particular feminist 'habits of perception ... habits of the
imagination' that allow us to envision and work toward 'the world without war.' Or, as
Micere Githae Mugo writes in her poem 'In praise of Afrika's children': 'What song! shall I sing! in praise
of! our children! living in! the mass graves! of apartheid! of capitalism! of imperialism?! What sung!
shall I sing?'
Empires are masculinist; post-colonialism sidelines gender issues
Nolan 66 Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism, and Feminist Critique in Contemporary Ireland, Nolan,
Emer, 1966- Volume 42: 1&2, Earrach/Samhradh/Spring/Summer 2007, pp. 336-361 (Article), Published by Irish-
American Cultural Institute, p.336-7

The cultural analysis of empire has often been heavily masculinist, focusing overwhelmingly on the
activities of administrators, civil servants, soldiers and settlers, explorers and travelers, and on the involvements of male
political leaders, intellectuals, and writers in the shaping of imperial and anti-imperial cultures.
However, there is now a growing body of feminist scholarship that attends both to the role of women as
agents of empire and as participants in anti-imperial struggles of various kinds.1 In addition,
historians and cultural critics have begun to examine the ways that racial and sexual politics
intersected in the elaboration of colonial administrations.2 In Ireland, the study of imperialism in the disciplines of
literary and cultural studies has been mediated primarily through the development of what is now commonly referred to as Irish postcolonial
studies. For a variety of reasons, the reception of post- colonial studies in Ireland has often been quite hostile.3 The most obvious lines of
critique have stemmed from historical revisionists, who have usually dismissed postcolonial studies as simply a
recoding of a cultural nationalism that revisionists believed they had largely discredited. From a
different angle, Irish feminists, too, have been generally wary of postcolonial studies. Most of the leading
figures associated with the area are male, and several were prominently involved with The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing (1991), Volumes IIII. Feminists were angered by this anthology, on the basis that it did not give due recognition to women writers and
feminist scholarship. Other women critics have accused postcolonial studies of reinstating the national
questionand thus sidelining issues of genderat the very moment in the 1990s when feminist
campaigns were finally beginning to make significant progress.4