Purplewashing in Representation and Messaging

RepresentationPurpose Washing
Written By Jennifer Case

Image Source: Decolonize Palestine

Definition and Example

Purplewashing is derived from “whitewashing,” except it uses purple, which is traditionally associated with feminism. Similar to whitewashing, purplewashing is “when a state or organization appeals to women's rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.” Femwashing is used interchangeably with purplewashing; and femvertising, colonial feminism, and femonationalism, which will be discussed later, are concepts that are intertwined with purplewashing.

In my whitewashing blog post, I mentioned that Saudi Arabia frequently whitewashes its human rights violations against its own citizens: Nowadays, the monarchy attempts to appeal to the international community and Saudi youth by implementing social reforms. In the context of purplewashing, recent reforms (e.g., legalizing women’s right to drive and getting rid of many male guardianship rules) are seen as more progressive towards women’s rights, but in reality, gender equality is not achieved and is not a true goal.

Women can now drive, but the activists who led the campaign to achieve this were imprisoned, and most of them are still imprisoned today, four years later. Divorced, widowed, or single Saudi women have been granted the right to live independently without permission from their guardians, and they can attend sport events, travel for Hajj, and get passports without approval as well. Yet many guardianship rules are still in place and women can still be put into horrific “care homes” at their guardians’ discretion, which causes some women to flee the country.

Femvertising and Purplewashing in Marketing

Research has shown that millennial and Gen Z consumers are much more socially conscious when they make their purchases, and companies have shifted their marketing strategies accordingly. Companies have started to capitalize on women’s empowerment and monetize International Women’s Day, but many don’t truly work to achieve gender equality in general or are not even gender inclusive themselves in their own core business practices (i.e., hiring, promotion, work environment or conditions).

“Femvertising” has been defined as “pro-women, counterstereotype advertisement,” but I quite like how Nosheen Iqbal put it: “Behold! The advertising industry, once bent on selling us sex is now selling us its disgust with sexism.” You see #feminism or #unapologetic with these femvertisements, but are they just faux feminism?

Companies like Dove, Cover Girl, and Swiffer have used feminism to advertise their products but were notorious for perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards or traditional gender roles. Famous women athletes are used as examples of “girl power” in advertisements, yet “only 0.4% of the total commercial investment in sports goes into women’s sports, according to Athletes Assessment.” To avoid purplewashing and faux feminism in marketing, women’s empowerment needs to be more than just checking off a CSR box or attracting socially conscious customers.

Purplewashing in the Military

Militaries around the world purplewash, aiming to use women in their ranks to project a false image of equality and modernity, but I have decided to focus on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) because many have researched Israel’s purplewashing and it relates to my work as a translator. From a women’s rights perspective, Israeli women’s inclusion and participation in the IDF is a great achievement in gender equality, but Israel intentionally uses this to try to appeal to international communities and to cover up human rights violations and war crimes.

Image Source: Instagram

IDF women soldiers have become famous for being “the world’s sexiest soldiers,” which Israeli government officials admitted is an attempt to appeal to young American men. There is a “Hot IDF Girls” Instagram account that features IDF soldiers posing in sexy outfits alongside pictures of them in uniform and links to an organization that collects donations and provides “humanitarian support and comfort” to IDF soldiers. Now, you may think, ‘What? Women in the military can’t be beautiful? Most Israeli women serve in the military, and none of them are pretty?’ Of course, beautiful women serving in the military is not the issue. The issue is the targeted nature of Israel’s purplewashing: the IDF purposely focuses its ‘sexy’ propaganda on men in a country that has given it $150 billion in aid, most of which was military assistance. According to the Rolling Stone, “it’s fair to say that IDF soldier thirst traps are part and parcel with the official IDF’s general strategy to use social media to win hearts and minds across the globe.”

While the IDF proclaims its women soldiers are empowered, the IDF has not exactly been women-friendly. In 2020, there were over 1,500 sexual harassment complaints (mostly from women), yet only 31 indictments were filed. The IDF is not the only military that has a sexual harassment/assault issue, but it is one of the most famous for its “empowered women.” Despite its failures in handling these cases, the IDF does pat itself on the back for having more complaints (rather than soldiers staying silent) because of an “increase in awareness and the confidence of female soldiers in the military.”

The IDF is deployed to the Occupied Territories to protect Israeli settlers and control the Palestinian people living there: IDF actions demonstrate that Israel’s gender equality agenda doesn’t truly include Palestinian women. In Israel’s bombing of Gaza in May 2021, hundreds of Palestinians were killed, many of them women and children. And this is only the latest military operation that has killed civilians; there have been many incidents and operations in recent decades when Palestinian women were unjustly killed by the IDF.

Unfortunately, IDF soldiers and Israeli intelligence frequently perpetrate sexual violence against Palestinian women. In 1948, IDF soldiers raped and sexually tortured Palestinian women (and possibly men), which has been corroborated by eyewitness accounts and the diaries of Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders. Many Palestinian women prisoners are subjected to sexual harassment and abuse at the hand of Israeli intelligence officers while they’re imprisoned. For all the IDF’s women’s empowerment propaganda, it is clear that women’s empowerment is just a smoke screen when you examine the war crimes and sexual violence that Palestinian women experience at the hands of the IDF.

Femonationalism and Purplewashing

Coined by Sara Farris, femonationalism is “the use of feminism to defend xenophobic and racist measures or policies with the excuse that they are necessary for the liberation of women.” Similar to this is colonial or imperial feminism, where feminist arguments are used to justify colonialism or acts of imperialism. There is also securofeminism, coined by Lila Abu-Lughod, which describes “the particular installation of women in leadership positions of initiatives to counter violent extremism.”

Israel frequently asserts that Israeli women are empowered and equal to Israeli men whereas Palestinian women are oppressed and need to be saved from Palestinian men. However, Palestinian women are frequently seen as a ‘demographic threat,’ and one Israeli lawmaker even publicly advocated for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to and raise “little snakes.” And there many more public, well-documented examples of prominent Israeli figures either cautioning against the threat of Palestinian women (for giving birth to other Palestinians) or advocating for the straight-up genocide of all Palestinians. Not very feminist if you ask me.

As documented by Keskin, women became a tool to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan: “the portrayal of Afghan women as victims helped establish and further promote and commercialize the view that the war was indirectly necessary, especially for the good of Afghan women and girls.” The movie Zero Dark Thirty, based on the true story of a CIA agent, is a reflection of colonial feminism and securofeminism. According to Rafia Zakaria, it depicts a “new flavour of feminism that has evolved in the white and Western world since 9/11 and the War on Terror.” While some may argue that Afghan women were liberated by the US military, the Taliban is in control once again, and the US is not preparing to invade again on behalf of Afghan women, despite recent reports of restrictions placed on girls and women and forced disappearances. (This is sarcasm; I don’t advocate for the invasion of other countries.)

During Mona Eltahawy’s #MosqueMeToo movement, she noted that one group who discourages Muslim women from speaking out about sexual assault is a “collective of racists and Islamophobes who are eager to demonize all Muslim men and are all too glad to use Muslim women’s testimony of misogyny to that end.” So, while some (Western) feminists will use femonationalism and colonial feminism to achieve political objectives, they end up silencing other women, which seems counterintuitive to core feminist values.

Burqas, burkinis, and sometimes even hijabs are seen as ‘unpatriotic’ or abnormal in Western societies, despite the long history of Islam and natural-born Muslim citizens in many of them. In spite of feminist rhetoric that women can and should wear whatever they want, Muslim women in some Western countries, like France, are subject to burqa and burkini bans. This is purplewashing and femonationalism at their most basic. Many people who espouse feminist values and proclaim Muslim women are oppressed and need to be liberated are the very same people who will support Islamophobic policies, like the burqa ban, that target Muslim women and dictate what they can and can’t wear.

Final Thoughts

The majority of translators and interpreters are women, at least in the US, which is probably why I’ve been able to attend several sessions on how we as translators can help mitigate misogynist messaging. While battling misogyny is hard enough, I think we should also carefully analyze (if possible) the feminist messaging we come across in our work. After examining purplewashing and all its facets, I believe it’s important to examine our work from an intersectional feminist perspective because as my research has shown, feminism and women’s empowerment can be used for purposes that don’t actually help women. We may be bound by client requirements/ preferences sometimes, but we should always be mindful of purplewashing and strive to ensure all women are empowered, not exploited, in client communications.

Resources

Jennifer Case
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