Reductive Evidence

I proposed reductive evidence as a decolonial feminist and queer concept to describe how colonizing entities (states, institutions, etc.) and social actors allied with them selectively construct an element of a colonized society or culture as “evidence” of the whole, essentialize it, and deploy it for anti-other aims (Bacchetta 2020). Very often, the substance of what is made into reductive evidence is a gender and sexuality practice by a limited sector in the colonized society and not the whole. Some examples of sectorial practices made into reductive evidence are: sati in India (Mani 1998), Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in “Africa” (Barkat 2019), the veil in the “Middle East,” or the Palestinian use of violence in resistance to Israel’s murderous occupation, apartheid, and genocide. I place “Africa” and “Middle East” in quotes to signal that they are made into homogenized entities in colonial and orientalist discourse. Inside a colonizing entity and for its allies, reductive evidence operates as “common sense” in the sense of Antonio Gramsci (1934; 1991) The general representational status assigned to reductive evidence enables murderous colonial, capitalist, imperialist, racialized, sexist, lesbophobic, queerphobic, and transphobic practices. Reductive evidence incites broad normative adherence inside the colonial-imperialist society. It gets reproduced in colonial-and race-amnesiac feminist and queer theories, discourses, and practices.

To illustrate the colonial-racial construction and mobilization of reductive evidence let us consider sati in India. Sati is defined as the procedure whereby a wife throws herself on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband to be reincarnated with him. The British interpreted, spectacularized, and deployed sati to justify colonialism in India as a civilizing mission. However, prior to colonialism, sati was practiced by only a tiny, privileged sector of Hindu society. It was historically not about gender. It concerned state power and the upper caste Hindu theological tenet of reincarnation. When a powerful and/or beloved person died it was believed that those who died performing sati would be re-incarnated with that person. The site where sati is performed becomes sacred space. Sati was enacted by (male and female) ministers upon the death of their king or queen. Indian reformers had long critiqued sati (Mani 1998). Yet, under colonialism, British denunciations of sati actually incited an increase in it as a nationalist oppositional response. Since political Independence from Britain in 1947, there have been few sati cases among a population now numbering over 1.2 billion. The last sati occurred in 1984. Yet the world continues to “know” India through British discourses on sati. This “knowing” does not end with colonialism. It has metamorphosed in the present age of “MeToo” to construct India as inherently and exceptionally a land of male rapists and women victims. Reductive evidence enables the perpetuation of the colonial-racial based relationship ad infinitum. 

Similarly, the colonial-racial idea of “honor-killings” serves powerful global northern states as reductive-evidence. “Honor killings” has no translation in some of the languages where it supposedly takes place (Towghi 2007).1 “Honor killings” is one of the terms that, when used by colonial entities, operate to essentialize all Muslim societies as deadly to women. Yet, empirically, gendered murders have no nation-state. They are planetary. Though there are proportionally many more gendered domestic murders in the U.S. where guns are easily available and all forms of violence are frequent, Pakistan’s domestic murders are particularized, made into reductive evidence (Lambert 2019). Ironically, in Pakistan familial murders around questions of honor are often not about gender and men can be killed for soiling a family name (Anees 2022). Moreover, there is no catchy term to designate gendered murder in the U.S. or other global northern site (no death-by-sexist-white-dominated-culture, for example) because only colonized-racialized countries are particularized. From a decolonial feminist perspective, the notion of “honor killing” needs to be abolished. It is integral to colonial strategy. It serves the very misogyny it proposes to flag. As a red herring “honor killing” hides how women and other subalternly gendered subjects are murdered in other gendered ways in Pakistan, the U.S., and elsewhere, and it inhibits transnational decolonial feminist alliances.

Reductive-evidence discourses are not just a means to damage a society’s reputation. They serve powerful political agendas. This is clear in the colonial feminist claim by George Bush following 9-11, 2001, that the U.S. had to occupy Afghanistan to save Afghan women from Afghan men (Bacchetta et al. 2002). That assertion’s operability hinged upon accumulations of colonial-orientalist discourses about more-oppressed-than–thou Muslim women and more-sexist-than-thou Muslim men. It necessitated forgetting that the U.S. developed the Taliban from an innocuous student movement into an armed religious-political movement against the Soviet Union. The term Taliban means simply student. Bush projected himself as more-feminist-friendly-than-thou while working to overturn a major U.S. feminist gain: legalized abortion. Bush’s self-claim achieved “truth” status because of its genealogy in colonial representations of colonized women as eternally victimized by their society’s men, and whose freedom depends upon heroic male colonizers. Bush’s narrative required forgetting that U.S. military occupation and bombardments left masses of women, children, men, and others dead and injured, created countless refugees, and decimated the Afghan economy, state, infrastructure, and environment.

At this time (2024), the Israeli state and its allied colonial feminists and queers are making genocidal use of pre-constructed colonial-orientalist reductive evidence about Arabs and Muslims as (homogeneously) terrorists, Arab and Muslim men as (always already) more-sexist-than-thou, and Arab and Muslim societies as (eternally) more-queerphobic-than-thou. These elements of reductive evidence are now mobilized by Zionist forces as colonial common sense in a variety of ways. The colonial-occupying Israeli state is deploying the construction of homogenized terrorism to represent all Palestinians as threats to “civilization” and to (global northern) life itself to justify their total elimination. It has mobilized the more-sexist-than-thou assignment to construct Hamas activists as systemic rapists to drum up emotions for the genocidal effort, while ignoring Zionist rapes and sexual torture of Palestinian women, men, and people of other genders, along with its own sexist-genocidal denial of healthcare, food, water, and proper shelter to Palestinians. Finally, the colonial-occupying Israeli state uses the idea that Palestinians are eternally more-queerphobic-than-thou in pinkwashing campaigns, and in an array of practices of divide and rule practices (i.e. to divide Palestinian queers and straight people, and in attempts to blackmail queers). In response, Palestinian queer groups systematically refuse to be considered separate from the rest of the Palestinian people and they demand that queers outside of Palestine who desire to be in solidarity with Palestinian queers first condemn the Zionist occupation.

In sum, the identification and deconstruction of reductive evidence is important to decolonial feminist and queer analytics, practices, and solidarities.

• 1. Fouzieyha Towghi (2007) points out that the literature on “honor killing” in Pakistan often invokes karo-kari (Sindhi: ڪارو ڪاري, Urdu: کاروکاری) literally meaning “Black man” (karo) – “Black woman” (kari) without mention of honor or killing. Karo-kari signals ethically tarnished subjects, mainly by adultery. Once thus labeled a man and a woman can both be killed, not the woman alone.