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Transnational Feminism and Women Who Torture: Re- Imag(In)Ing Abu Ghraib Prison Photography

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Transnational Feminism and Women Who Torture: Re- Imag(In)Ing Abu Ghraib Prison Photography Postcolonial Text, Vol 7, No 1 (2012) Transnational Feminism and Women Who Torture: Re- imag(in)ing Abu Ghraib Prison Photography Basuli Deb University of Nebraska-Lincoln 1. Introduction Despite the passage in 1960 of the U.N. Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which aimed to protect native populations from subjugation, domination, and exploitation by foreign powers, the United States has continued to expand its power across the globe in the footsteps of European colonial powers. In a post 9/11 world, as the United States waged high tech warfare on defenseless civilians of other nations, and as entire populations were coded as terrorists in US politico-military parlance, little did the empire realize that technology, its blue-eyed boy, would come back to jolt the empire’s own foundations. In 2004 an innocuous camera would not only capture the terror, violence, and pain inside Abu Ghraib—the US military prison in Iraq, but would also bring it home to millions across the world. Unprecedented in the history of the empire, images of imperial torture at Abu Ghraib would be splashed across the Internet and print media of all sorts.1 With this, a kind of naïve feminist assumption that perpetrating state violence is gender exclusive to men would give way to feminisms that had to explore the dynamics of female on male violence. Out of eleven soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company charged with detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, three were women—Private First Class Lynndie England, Specialist Sabrina Harman, and Specialist Megan Ambuhl. Some of the most circulated images from the archive of Abu Ghraib torture photography include England and Harman posing as dominatrix and torturing naked Arab men. US-centric feminisms at once leapt to the rescue of these women and portrayed them merely as tools manipulated by the military establishment to disenfranchise women in the US military. However, a transnational feminist critique arrives at a different understanding of the torture of bodies criminalized as “enemies” in these photographs. Such an examination of torture asks crucial questions: Where does transnational feminism stand with respect to enemies of the nation? How do we carry out a responsible transnational feminist inquiry into figures of female torturers of male bodies that are differently raced, cultured, and nationed in war photography? In an attempt to respond to such questions, this essay both draws on and extends Laura Sjoberg’s argument about the “relational autonomy” or agency of white women soldiers at Abu Ghraib in performing violence on Arab bodies. In Sjoberg this agency is derived from the imperial connections of US women soldiers despite functioning within the rank and file of the military. My argument re-imag(in)es Abu Ghraib torture photography and its graphic testimonies about the empire’s women, largely interpreted by US-centric feminisms as the inevitable captivity of US women soldiers within the iron-grip of the military’s stern patriarchy. Instead, this essay argues for a transnational feminist point of view that privileges an understanding of the personal and collective stakes for white imperial women in the torture of brown male bodies of the “enemy other.” II. Situating a Transnational Feminist Inquiry: Dialogue with Other Critical Voices In 2007 American journalist Tara McKelvey edited an anthology on Abu Ghraib detainee torture entitled One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers. It included contributions from thinkers ranging from Eve Ensler to Angela Davis. Barbara Ehrenreich’s foreword argues for the vital need to question a “feminist naiveté” which assumes that justice is achieved when women become equal to men (2). Developing a concrete rationale to lay bare this naiveté, I maintain that in liberal feminist thought, premised on equality, the male remains normative, and patriarchy is undisturbed as the onus lies on women to enter structures of privilege. According to this theory, women who control male detainees have successfully reversed the power inequalities, at least for themselves. Exercising power violently consolidates their status within patriarchal structures into which they have assimilated. Conversely, a transnational feminist perspective examines the interplay of the gender locations of detainees and tormentors together with other social locations such as race, ethnicity, culture, nationality, religion, and class. Cynthia Enloe’s Afterword to the collection One of the Guys poses a crucial question about studying women who torture: [V]irtually all of the immediate wielders of militarized violence here—in Sudan, Congo, Columbia, Chechnya/Russia, Palestine, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Afghanistan—are male. So, why create—and, as a reader, join in—a feminist conversation now about women’s relationships to the wielding of violence? (230) Enloe argues that it is by exploring minorities like women perpetrators of violence that patriarchal practices of “masculinized exclusion” (231), as well as the “complexity in the politics of femininities” (232), are likely to be seen and analyzed. My argument acknowledges Enloe’s observations about structures and ideologies that mark perpetrators. Nonetheless, it also pushes for a transnational feminist response to torture that recognizes an 2 Postcolonial Text Vol 7 No 1 (2012) ethics of personal response-ability in one’s encounter with the “enemy”— the radical other of the nationalist imaginary. The response-ability to the “enemy other” thus becomes the response-ability to the trans(national). This is not the same as seeing the torturer as the agent of free will—the atomistic individual of liberal humanism, who is not unfettered by unequal power structures. Such reasoning would lead us to the argument that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the act of a few bad apples. In fact, Anne McClintock has succinctly described the systemic relationship among the “torture culture” at Abu Ghraib, the direct agents of such brutalities, and the state: External conditions for torture at Abu Ghraib were governed and choreographed by a long chain of military command that authorized the violence from the highest quarters. The MPs may have carried out the atrocities but they did not originally initiate them. It cannot be stressed enough that if Abu Ghraib was anarchic and chaotic, the abuses were neither isolated nor exceptional, but part of a systematic attempt by the US government to circumvent the Geneva Conventions in order to terrorize the Iraqi population and quell the uncontrollable resistance. (70) McClintock goes on to show the historical linkage between the structures of torture at Abu Ghraib and at other sites where the United States has exercised its military might, such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Central America. She states: “Hooding, making people stand on boxes, hanging them in ‘stress positions,’ sleep deprivation, and rape and sexual humiliation were widespread and systematic, migrating from Afghanistan and Guantanamo to Iraq” (70). Thus, McClintock situates the perpetrators at Abu Ghraib in the culture of imperial torture in which the United States has historically engaged. Though I recognize that Abu Ghraib torturers are implicated in a governmentality that requires them to torture, my interest lies in a feminist ethics at the limits of imagination—in moments of encounter between the torturer and the tortured. To elaborate on this, I draw on “Terror: A Speech After 9-11” where Gayatri Spivak elaborates on a feminist politics of “how [to ethically] respond in the face of the impossibility of response” in moments of encounter with the enemy (81). Spivak argues that such responses are about the possibility of “moving away from [our own] identity as reference” to the enemy “other” as the point of reference—“the most succinct lesson in the imagination” (111), and against the tide of conformist thinking. If it were at all possible to imagine such a feminist politics, what would it look like? In such a world of feminist ethics, women like Lynndie England would, at their own risk, resist patriarchal manipulation of military women by defying the chain of command that requires military women to engage in torture. In this epistemological and ethical paradigm shift preserving the “self” will no longer be the point of reference. Such a feminist politics asks: How can we negotiate with governmentality in the face of the impossible—in the face of a coercive system that rewards violence against the radical other and punishes non- compliance with an ideology of torture? Moreover, why is such an 3 Postcolonial Text Vol 7 No 1 (2012) analysis a political necessity for feminism? I contend that framing ethical transnational feminist responses to women who torture enemy men is an act of responsibility to the politics of feminism. It is an attempt to deter torture in the name of women’s emancipation, an attempt to stop imperialism from marching under the banner of women’s rights, and an attempt to intervene in a liberal feminist politics that advocates for the unconditional empowerment of individual women. It is an act of critical feminist self-reflection that engages in difficult dialogues around violent locations of women’s empowerment like race, class, ethnicity, and nationality vis-à-vis the othered male. Bargaining for the possibility of ethics in the face of near impossibility—at the limits—also holds accountable US-centric feminist responses that clears torturers of personal response-ability by arguing that women soldiers are captives in the hyper- masculine military establishment that compels them to participate in torture. III. Torture as Imperial Governance: Exorcizing Africans and Arabs One of the central arguments that this essay attempts to make is that being a woman in itself does not constitute disempowerment since women are variously located in their relationship to other forms of power like race, nationality, and culture. This essay will bring figures of women in a lynching image from the pre-civil-rights era together with women’s participation in torture as depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs.
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