Hatreds

In "HATREDS, " Zillah Eisenstein charts the plural politics of the twenty-first century, which she defines as having begun with the fall of communism and the gulf war. Exploring the politics of hate on both global and local levels, Eisenstein tracks developments such as racialized ethnic and gender conflict, the new male democracies of eastern Europe and the new Democrats of the Clinton era, the sexual exploitation of the west and the sexual violence of nationalisms, and the importance of western feminisms' promissory standpoint of freedom to women in the third world.
Traveling between theory and the sites of everyday life politics, Eisenstein discusses how hatred is written on the bodies of women and is magnified, for instance, in the war-rape of women and girls in Bosnia and Rwanda. She looks in between the cold-war rhetoric of colonialism and liberal democracy to see and find women's actions across the globe. At the same time, through examples like the Los Angeles riots, the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City, the politics of hate in congress and anti-immigration policies, she demonstrates that hatred also flourishes in the west, while the west is looking at and trying to "fix" the east.
Eisenstein's passionate look at hatred in all its forms and all its locations starts with the body and ends with the globe: the same women's bodies that are used to write hatred also begin to imagine beyond hatred and nation to a transnational sisterhood.