(En)Gendering the War on Terror

War Stories and Camouflaged Politics

Kim Rygiel, Krista Hunt, Krista Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317189213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The war on terror has been raging for many years now, and subsequently there is a growing body of literature examining the development, motivation and effects of this US-led aggression. Virtually absent from these accounts is an examination of the central role that gender, race, class and sexuality play in the war on terror. This lack of attention reflects a continued resistance by analysts to acknowledge and engage identity-related social issues as central elements within global politics. As this conflict spreads and deepens, it is more important than ever to examine how diverse international actors are using the war on terror as an opportunity to reinforce existing gendered, raced, classed and sexualized inter/national relations. This book examines the official war stories being told to the international community about why and against whom the war on terror is being waged. The book will benefit students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of international relations, women's studies and cultural studies.

Chapter 1
(En)Gendered War Stories and Camouflaged Politics

Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel

(En)Gendering the War on Terror

In October 2001, US President George W. Bush launched his so-called ‘war on terror’ in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC on September 11, 2001 (‘9/11’). There is now a rapidly growing body of literature examining the development, motivation, and effects of this US-led aggression (e.g. Ali, 2003; Chomsky, 2002; Clarke, 2004; Harvey, 2003; Lyon, 2003; Mann, 2003 and Wood, 2003). However, what is virtually absent from these accounts is an examination of the central role that gender, as it intersects with other identities such as race, class, sexuality, nationality and religion, plays in the war on terror. In part, this reflects the conventional way of thinking about international relations, in general, and wars, in particular. That is, states, state leaders, militaries, international organizations, global capitalists and, in this particular case, transnational terrorist organizations, are assumed to be the most important actors in international conflicts. Women, when and if they appear, are typically represented as being acted upon rather than as actors themselves. In terms of the war on terror, we can see this in portrayals of women as casualties of the 9/11 attacks, mothers of fallen soldiers, victims of repressive dictators, and widows rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of war. When women are portrayed as (more) conventional international actors, such as female soldiers in the US military, their gender is often subverted by their political role or used to discredit them as capable international players. To whatever extent women are visible in this war on terror, the dynamics of gendered power remain problematically under-theorized.

In challenging this lack of attention to women and gender, we draw on an extensive body of feminist literature about the relationship between gender and war (Cohn, 1993; Cooke and Woolacott, 1993; Cooke, 1996; Enloe, 1989, 1994, 2000; Giles and Hyndman, 2004; Giles et al, 2003; Lorentzen and Taupin, 1998; Vickers, 1993; Whitworth, 2004). This literature studies such issues as militarized masculinities and femininities, gendered nationalism, the state’s role in mobilizing different groups of women during wartime, and the differential effects of war on these groups of women. Most importantly, it makes visible the complex gender dynamics that are otherwise absent from mainstream analyses of war. As Cynthia Enloe states,

Women thinking and acting as feminists have been responsible for revealing how dependent any militarization process is on certain ideas about femininity and on the labor and emotions of women. Most conventional commentators discussing the causes of war treat femininity and women as sideshows. The main event, presumably, is the performance of masculinity and the public choices made by elite men. In narrowing their analytical stage, these observers underestimate the number and quality of calculations made by leaders both of governments and of political movements. That is, by largely ignoring the decisions that maneuver women into those positions where they can smooth the processes of militarization, these conventional (nonfeminist) political commentators underestimate the workings of political power (Enloe, 2000, p. 293).

In waging a war on terror, the Bush administration’s own claim that ‘the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women’ seriously challenges those analysts who continue to operate as though gender and women do not play a significant role in war-making (Laura Bush, 2001). Without critical feminist scholarship, non-feminist commentators and analyses of the war on terror miss the way this war has been constructed, waged and legitimized on gendered terrain and ignore the detrimental effects that the Bush administration’s manipulation of women’s issues has had on millions of women both in the United States and around the world.

Our volume also builds on the feminist writings that were produced immediately following the 9/11 attacks. Hawthorne and Winter’s After Shock (2002), Agosin and Craige’s To Mend the World (2002), and Joseph and Sharma’s Terror, Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out (2003) provide collections of feminist responses to 9/11 and the events that immediately unfolded in its wake. These volumes present personalized accounts of 9/11 including short essays, poetry and diary entries. We contribute to this feminist work on the ‘post-9/11 era’ by providing analytical essays addressing the longer-term impact of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror. In contributing to these important political reflections, our collection provides an intensive and sustained feminist analysis that variously explores the intersection of gender with race, class, sexuality, religion, and nationality in relation to the war on terror.

As this conflict grows, spreads and deepens, it is more important than ever to examine how diverse international actors are using the war on terror as an opportunity to reinforce existing, and create new, gendered inter/national relations. We contend that it is impossible to understand this war and the shape of global politics in the twenty-first century without continued attention to the centrality of gender, as it intersects with multiple identities and oppressions. Thus, our volume examines the war on terror and post-9/11 inter/national relations from an intersectional feminist approach based on the argument that gender oppression must not be treated separately from oppression based on race, class, sexuality, and so on. Using Kimberley Crenshaw’s analogy of a traffic intersection to describe the flow of power and oppression, Susanna George maps the concept of intersectionality in the following way:

…race, ethnicity, gender or class are the avenues of power that define the social, economic and political map. These are the routes through which ‘disempowering dynamics’ travel. These avenues, or axes of power are sometimes considered distinct from each other. But in reality, they overlap and cross each other, and operate in relation to each other, resulting in complex intersections at which two or more of these axes meet. Given the strong manifestations of patriarchy in most societies, women’s experience of racism, xenophobia and other forms of discrimination are compounded by gender-based oppression. To take the analogy further, women are most vulnerable to the heavy traffic at the intersections of these axes of power (George, 2001).

Echoing this, Avatar Brah and Ann Phoenix state that the concept of intersectionality recognizes that women’s multiple and intersecting identities disrupt ‘notions of a homogeneous category “woman” with its attendant assumptions of universality that [serve] to maintain the status quo in relation to “race”, social class and sexuality, while challenging gendered assumptions’ (Brah and Phoenix, 2004, p. 82). As such, intersectionality stems from the critique that focusing only on patriarchy, or gender-based oppression, marginalizes and silences the diversity of women that feminism purports to represent, since women are neither privileged nor oppressed solely as women. Thus, an intersectional feminist approach provides the framework for understanding how this war has reinforced divisions between different groups of women and has, in some cases, privileged some women while oppressing others. In fact, Brah and Phoenix see this concept as particularly useful in analyzing the war on terror as it provides ‘powerful tools for challenging the power games currently played out on the world stage’ (p. 84).

In this volume, we seek to confront these international power games by exposing and challenging the way this conflict has been engendered. When we talk about ‘(en)gendering the war on terror’, we use this concept to signify the ways that this war is produced, constructed, and waged on highly gendered terrain. Feminist analyses of this (en)gendered war disrupt and make visible the masculinized, militarized, racialized, sexualized, and classed dynamics through which the war operates and which often go unnoticed, ignored or hidden by official representations of war. As feminists committed to anti-racist, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist politics, we as editors challenge the co-optation of women’s rights to frame this conflict and join the growing number of women (and men) who vocally oppose a war being fought in the name of women’s rights. We reject this engendering of the war on terror and abhor the violence, oppression, and disciplinary measures that it continues to justify. Through this project, we want to create a space to grapple with the following questions: How have different feminists in ‘the west’ and elsewhere responded to the war on terror? How can feminists raise questions about women’s rights without aligning themselves with ‘right wing’ powers or having their concerns co-opted as part of the campaign of waging war? How do different feminists in coalition countries oppose this war, which is being fought in their names, while remaining in solidarity with targeted women both at home and abroad? How do various feminists negotiate issues of representation, privilege, and difference in assessing the war on terror? And, most importantly, how do they unite to resist a war that serves to intensify the oppression of women and men around the world?

War Stories and Camouflaged Politics

In order to expose how the war on terror has been (en)gendered, the chapters that follow examine official war stories being told by Coalition leaders, governing and business elites, and the mass media about why and against whom this war is being waged. They reveal the central role that gender plays in these official stories, as well as the camouflaged politics that they enable. Specifically, we argue that the political purpose of official war stories is to camouflage the interests, agendas, policies, and politics that underpin the war in order to legitimize and gain consent for the war on terror. The chapters raise questions about how the roles and representations of women and men are used, and racial, class, sexualized, religious, and national differences manipulated, to justify war. They also examine how the war on terror is used to create and maintain these divisions between women, as well as between different groups of women and men. In so doing, this volume serves to challenge officially sanctioned war stories and the politics they camouflage by providing feminist counter-narratives about the war on terror.

Our approach builds on Miriam Cooke’s important work, Women and the War Story, which ‘interrogates more deeply the conditions that enable the production of particular kinds of war texts’ (1996, p. 4). Specifically, Cooke examines what she calls the ‘War Story’, that is the official, state authorized story about why we go to war and how wars are won. ‘The War Story’, Cooke explains, ‘gives order to wars that are generally experienced as confusion’ (p. 15). It does so by evoking certain familiar dichotomies (‘beginning and ending; foe and friend; aggression and defense; war and peace; front and home; combatant and civilian’) as the natural order of things (p. 15). This ‘natural’ order of things, however, is a deeply gendered one, where men fight on the frontlines while women are relegated to the home front. In fact, to work, the War Story depends on traditional gendered tropes and notions of masculinity and femininity such as ‘women’s need for protection as the reason men must fight’ or ‘outworn essentialist clichés of men’s aggressivity and women’s pacifism’, as well as gender roles of men as citizen-warriors and women as mothers, whether as ‘the Mater Dolorosa (the weeping madonna), the Patriotic Mother (the ever-ready womb for war), [or] the Spartan Mother (the jingoistic mother who prefers her sons dead to defeated)’ (p. 15). As such, these gendered representations give order to the otherwise confused and controversial realities of war. Cooke challenges the War Story by providing women’s accounts of war, which reveal the messiness of war and ‘refuse the polarization of space that conceals the fact that the violence of war is not so different from the violence of peace’ (p. 43). Women’s own war stories thus serve as counter-narratives to the official War Story. As Cooke writes:

Women’s prominence as guerrilla fighters, as military targets of bombs and rapes, and as subjects of debate about the gendering of the military and of combat has complicated the telling of the War Story. These women are telling their own counternarratives, revealing that what we had thought to be self-evidently true is true only for some, for those for whom this particular truth is useful (p. 39).

Further, Cooke argues, ‘[i]t is by putting women into the war stories that we can begin to recognize the strangeness of the unchanging metanarrative that the War Story has always been’ (p. 43). In other words, asking questions about how war is (en)gendered reveals how the official War Story is made possible precisely because it depends on these gender tropes going unnoticed or becoming naturalized.

Methodologically, many of the chapters employ discourse analysis in our examination of war (on terror) stories. According to Michel Foucault, power is ‘exercised within discourses’, which constitute and govern individuals, societies, and institutions (Weedon, 1987, p. 113). In other words, texts do political work, namely the production of knowledge imbued with particular political goals. Foucault is particularly concerned with how certain (dominant) discourses, rather than others, come to have greater legitimacy, power, and authority. As such, he argues that it is necessary to examine the discursive field in question ‘in order to uncover the particular regimes of power and knowledge at work in a society and their part in the overall production and maintenance of existing power relations’ (Foucault, 1995, pp. 107–108). For instance, international relations scholar David Campbell argues that foreign policy texts do not ‘simply offer strategic analyses of the ‘reality’ they [confront]’ but actively script both ‘reality’ and identity, such as who or what gets to be identified as the new enemy or latest security threat (Campbell, 1992, p. 33). The goal of discourse analysis is to understand how dominant discourses produce and maintain power through various disciplinary measures. In order to challenge the Bush administration’s war stories, one must ‘understand the intricate network of discourses, the sites where they are articulated and the institutionally legitimized forms of knowledge to which they look for their justification’ (Weedon, 1987, p. 126). Yet discourse analysis also provides the ground upon which to challenge and destabilize dominant discourses. By revealing how dominant discourses pose as regimes of truth, we aim to open up space in which alternative discourses can be produced along with the alternative politics that they enable. As such, this approach should not be regarded as simply a theoretical exercise, since discourses produce and legitimize the political realities that materialize ‘on the ground’.

Using this methodology, our volume examines the political work that war (on terror) stories do and the interests/agendas ...