Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the 'War on Terror'
176
Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the 'War on Terror'
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Overview
What does this tell us about ideas of gender, sexuality, religious and political identity and the role of the state in the Western powers?
Can we diffuse inter-ethnic conflicts and change the way the West pursues its security agenda by understanding the role of sexualised racism in the war on terror?
In asking such questions, Gargi Bhattacharyya considers how the concepts of imperialism, feminism, terror and security can be applied, in order to build on the influential debates about the sexualised character of colonialism. She examines the way in which western imperial violence has been associated with the rhetoric of rights and democracy - a project of bombing for freedom that has called into question the validity of western conceptions of democracy, rights and feminism.
Such rhetoric has given rise to actions that go beyond simply protecting western interests or securing access to scarce resources and appear to be beyond instrumental reason. The articulations of racism that appear with the war on terror are animated by fears and sexual fantasies inexplicable by rational interest alone. There can be no resolution to this seemingly endless conflict without understanding the highly sexualised racism that animates it. Such an understanding threatens to pierce the heart of imperial relations, revealing their intense contradictions and uncovering attempts to normalise violent expropriation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136373 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/18/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 353 KB |
About the Author
Gargi Bhattacharyya lives and works in Birmingham. She teaches and researches issues of 'race' and racisms, sexuality and globalisation. Her books include Tales of Dark-skinned Women (UCL, 1998); Race and Power with John Gabriel and Stephen Small (Routledge, 2001); Sexuality and Society (Routledge, 2002); Traffick, the illicit movement of people and things, (Pluto, 2005).
Read an Excerpt
Dangerous Brown Men
Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror
By Gargi Bhattacharyya
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Gargi BhattacharyyaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-879-1
CHAPTER 1
The Misuse of Feminism in Foreign Policy
The twenty-first century has seen international and national politics refracted through allegations about culture, belief and antecedence. From 9/11 to the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq to the overall and unfinished debate about the nature, reach and substance of the War on Terror, the suggestion that the world is divided into antagonistic groups who inhabit incompatible cultures or hold diametrically opposed beliefs has entered the serious businesses of war, diplomacy and public rhetoric. Not for the first time, women, bodies and sexuality have taken on a heightened symbolic role and complex narratives have been constructed that link the three themes and in turn link this assemblage to the responsibilities and choices of states. In common with others (Eisenstein, 2007; Shepherd, 2006), my sense is that this utilisation of concepts of women's place, proper bodies and free and unfree sexuality is not unique but that there are distinctive features in their take-up in our time. The exploitation of an appeal to feminism, however insubstantial and uninformed such an appeal might be, is one aspect of this distinctiveness.
This chapter reconsiders the use of a rhetoric of feminism in the pursuit of the War on Terror. I am using the term 'rhetoric' here to indicate the tactical deployment of the language and style of feminism in order to achieve other strategic goals — in other words, in order to shape the response of the other and the outcomes from an interaction through strategies of persuasive language.
The instigators of the War on Terror, famously, have pointed to the rights of women as a justification for military intervention. The early and much-cited invocations of supposedly feminist solidarity from Laura Bush in her radio address to the nation on 17 November 2001 typify one moment in this process:
The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of terrorists. ... Civilised people throughout the world are speaking out in horror — not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us. (Laura Bush, 2001)
George Bush's 2008 BBC interviews, billed explicitly as a review of the 'legacy' of this presidency, also saw Bush respond to the accusation from the Chinese authorities that the US was stuck in Cold War thinking with the assertion that the US was engaged in an ideological struggle with people who were both evil and in thrall to an ideology that targeted the hopeless by refusing rights to women, denying religious freedom and instigating terrorist violence (Bush, 2008). Despite the considerable debate and careful critique mounted by feminists and others, the slogan of women's rights continues to play a talismanic role in Bush's depiction and justification of the War on Terror.
In the War on Terror, the abuse of women and the denial of their public rights has been used as a marker of barbarism and as an indication of societal sickness, a sickness requiring intervention. This could be regarded as another example where insights from development organisations are redeployed as an element of military strategy (Duffield, 2001). While few would deny that the Taliban represented a highly dangerous development for women (and religious minorities and trade unionists and leftists, among others), embedding one version of women's rights in the project of military occupation and western expansion confirms the implication that the West is subduing a type of masculine dysfunction — which, unsurprisingly, invites resistance to western feminism from those wishing to resist such imperial aspirations. Jasmin Zine has described this in terms of the challenges facing Muslim feminists from the simultaneous threats of 'gendered Islamophobia' (Zine, 2004) and 'religious extremism and puritan discourses that authorize equally limiting narratives of Islamic womanhood' (Zine, 2006, 27). One aspect of the War on Terror has been this battle over the meaning and ownership of the idea of women's rights. This chapter examines some feminist responses to the War on Terror and considers what is at stake when well-known opponents of women's rights utilise feminist rhetoric for other ends.
Rhetorics of feminism and the War on Terror
The attacks of 11 September 2001 were met with many varieties of horror, surprise and outrage. However, among these understandable reactions, there was a less familiar appeal to popular feminist sensibilities in some highly publicised and early responses (for a discussion of this see Shepherd, 2006; Steans, 2008; Croft, 2006). Such statements were all the more surprising given that key speakers, most obviously those affiliated to the Bush administration, had been openly and strongly opposed to any extension of the rights of women at home or abroad. There was certainly little indication that the public embracing of liberal feminist demands and ideals could serve any populist or electoral purpose. If anything, the Bush administration in particular had been elected through the mobilisation of a coalition of forces that included elements who remained highly antagonistic to feminist demands in any form. The Bush administration has been heavily reliant on the support of evangelical Christian groups and other representatives of the Christian right. One price of this alliance has been the insertion of actively anti-feminist initiatives into the business of mainstream government (Kaplan, 2005). In this context, the public rhetoric of the War on Terror as a battle for women's rights has been regarded with suspicion, if not outright ridicule, by feminist activists and scholars.
The irony of George W. Bush presenting himself as a champion of women's rights was not lost on feminist commentators and activists in the United States and elsewhere who pointed out that neo-conservatives — often in alliance with conservative and fundamentalist Islamic states — had actively sought to roll back key planks of the international women's rights agenda over the past decade in the interest of rescuing the traditional — read patriarchal — American family. (Steans, 2008, 164)
Certainly, feminists in the US and elsewhere were under no illusions about the attitude of the Bush administration to policy issues impacting on women. Internationally, the United States continues to refuse to sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), effectively blocking its implementation, and under Bush there has been a withdrawal of US aid to sexual health and family planning programmes that provide information about abortion (Kaplan, 2005). Within the US, the Bush administration has closed the Women's Bureau in the Labor Department — thus dismantling the apparatus to track gender and pay (Eisenstein, 2006, 195) and closed the White House Women's Office. Audiences with some knowledge of these matters have regarded the use of feminist claims in the War on Terror as no more than a cynical cover for a business-as-usual imperialist foray to safeguard both access to resources and geopolitical leverage.
However, despite this, the intensive media circulation of the claim that this war was to protect women has shaped public debate on these issues. Media audiences in the US and beyond are unlikely to be well-informed about the detail of US government policy. Issues such as the blocking of obscure international treaties or changes in the detail of aid distribution do not translate easily to headlines, in either domestic or international media.
The story about women's human rights has been reproduced by US media which have largely, until recently, rallied to the cause as spun by the White House. The evocation of liberated Western women and oppressed Muslim women has been useful in the project of casting the United States as a beacon of civilisation and in constructing, reinforcing and reproducing an 'us versus them' polarity between the West and the Islamic world. (Steans, 2008, 160)
There has been considerable criticism of this rhetoric and framework, with a growing feminist literature challenging the expedient use of feminist rhetoric and the pretended defence of women. However, in popular discourse, the claims of Muslim repression and western liberation of women continue to circulate. In particular, the stance of the US group, the Feminist Majority Foundation, in supporting the attacks on Afghanistan as necessary for the liberation of Afghani women, served to confirm to an unschooled international audience that this was a war informed by (US) feminism.
There has been no shortage of feminist challenges to this disreputable misuse of feminist claims by non-feminist forces. Gillian Youngs summarises some of these critiques when she writes, 'when western women hear their governments engage in such warrior speak about eastern women, embedded within it are gendered assumptions about western women's inferior social status' (Youngs, 2006, 11).
However seductive the narrative of rescue can be, especially when structured around representations of veiled, voiceless and utterly othered women in poor parts of the world, feminists in the West have learned that cultural projects that assume that foreign women need to be saved have consequences for women at home. The story of rescued women anywhere relies on the idea that women everywhere are less than men, helpless victims waiting to be saved. In connection to this, Stabile and Kumar have argued that the Bush administration represented women's equality in the West as a natural part of 'western humanist values', in the process erasing the struggles of generations of feminists to achieve such rights (Stabile and Kumar, 2005).
This has been the defence of feminists in many places. The War on Terror may reference feminism and ventriloquise feminist concerns and goals, but this is an instrumental appropriation by those who have no interest in or commitment to feminism. Feminism is a veil, or in Zillah Eisenstein's phrase, a decoy to avert attention from the actual activity and focus of this war (Eisenstein, 2007).
However, despite this concern to delegitimise the feminist claims of the War on Terror, the place of feminism and the implications for the status of women are far from decided. Defenders of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq continue to suggest that regime change by force has been in the interests of women (Bush, 2008). Commentators continue to evaluate the position of women as an indicator of successful nation-building or post-war reconstruction (Oates, 2006). Whatever the actuality of feminist participation or influence, the War on Terror remains an endeavour that is shaped in dialogue with at least an idea of feminism. My argument here is not that feminism or feminists have been complicit with the activities of the War on Terror — for most, the opposite is the case and feminist activists have taken high-profile and vocal roles in anti-war and civil liberties campaigns in many parts of the world. However, despite this, the use of stolen feminist rhetoric has continued to form an important aspect of the claims of the War on Terror and this claim has continued to gain some acceptance in popular media. For example, in early 2008, at a time of intensive domestic debate about the continuing presence of British troops in Afghanistan, the UK media was filled with concerns about the case of a young man sentenced to death allegedly for downloading and distributing a report about women's rights (Sengupta, 2008). The central message of this coverage was horror that such things continue to happen when we went there to defend women's rights. Although such media coverage brings a necessary corrective to the US-led coalition claim that Afghani women have been liberated by military intervention, it reveals a continuing belief that the original military offensive was intended to 'save' the women of Afghanistan and a disappointment that this rescue project has not been achieved. Although many parties doubt the intentions and ability of Bush, there appears to be a widespread acceptance that military intervention in pursuit of women's rights is necessary and desirable, if carried out effectively.
The War on Terror as yet another ethnic war
In addition to this discussion of the desirability and effectivity of war for women's rights, the amalgamated activities of the War on Terror are characterised by a range of gender work familiar from analyses of earlier nationalist wars. Feminist scholars have insisted in the debates of recent decades that the business of states, nationalisms and war are all highly gendered and shaped by and shaping of gender identities. In a famous collection, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias introduced this idea with the words:
We claim that central dimensions of the roles of women are constituted around the relationships of collectivities to the state. We also claim that central dimensions of the relationships between collectivities and the state are constituted around the roles of women. (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989, 2)
Importantly for further debate in the area, the authors go on to identify five areas in which women have tended to participate in ethnic and national processes. These are listed as:
(a) biological reproducers of ethnic collectivities;
(b) reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups;
(c) participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture;
(d) signifiers of ethnic/national differences — as a focus and symbol in ideological discourses used in the construction, reproduction and transformation of ethnic/national categories;
(e) participants in national, economic, political and military struggles. (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989, 7)
The War on Terror assumes a slightly different form from the conflict situations imagined in this typology. However, the checklist serves as an important reminder of the multiple and well-known roles assigned to women in the varied processes of nation building. Despite the disavowal of both ethnic exclusivity and national interest, the deployment of ideas of femininity and its place in a cultural community pervade the rhetoric of the War on Terror. Although in this narrative there is an active refusal to allot the role of breeder to women in the West, because this reduction to reproductive function is portrayed as part of the barbarism of the enemy, the other four points identified by Yuval-Davis and Anthias can be transferred to the project of the War on Terror with little adaptation. However much it is denied that this war operates around boundaries of ethnicity, the repeated claim that it is a feminist war requires women in/of the West to embody a significant boundary between us and them. The presentation of a particular culture of westernisation and consumerism as central to feminism collapses the conduct and aspirations of women in/of the West into the supposed ideological reproduction of the collectivity and into a signifier of ethnic/cultural difference. Women's ongoing struggles for everyday freedoms are appropriated into the racialised war project and presented as, if not quite an ethnic culture, at least an explicit demonstration of our values, the very values that are under attack and that must be defended. In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that women also play a variety of roles in the conflict situations that arise from the War on Terror, with plenty of examples of women performing military, administrative and propaganda roles for coalition forces as well as of women organising in the peace movement, with other women transnationally playing roles in the various resistance, insurgent, nationalist and religious movements that oppose US and allied forces.
There may be no agreement about the ethnic character of the War on Terror, but the deployment of ideas about the role of women echoes more familiar projects of ethnic boundary-marking. Others have remarked on the manner in which women have come to be used as a symbolic marker in the struggle between 'us' and 'them' (Al-Ali, 2005, and on the depiction of western culture as being typified by multicultural tolerance, consumer citizenship and sexual freedoms that allow pleasurable heterosexuality and inclusion in the national narrative for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (Puar, 2006). In these claims, there is the implication of a shared culture among 'us', and although this shared space admits diverse identities, it also disciplines members of the group into conformity and reproduction of group myths. The vision of western culture as being identified by unique characteristics of tolerance for ethnic and sexual diversity and freedom for women becomes a version of a nationalist project, and women are deployed to project and further this vision, occupying roles not dissimilar to those described by the account of processes of nationalist and ethnic projects. The fact that this assertion of superior group identity presents itself as above the backward claims of ethnicity does not prevent an active racialisation of the enemy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dangerous Brown Men by Gargi Bhattacharyya. Copyright © 2008 Gargi Bhattacharyya. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Dangerous Brown Men?1. The Misuse of Feminism in Foreign Policy
2. Bodies, Fears and Rights
3. State Racism and Muslim men as a Racialised Threat
4. Sexuality in Torture
Conclusion: The Spectacle of Violence