Gendered Logic(s) of Orientalism: Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in the ‘War on Terror’
Maryam Khalid
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Social Sciences Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
2013
Supervised by Dr Penny Griffin and Prof Marc Williams
Eighty eight thousand three hundred and eighty (88, 380) words
THE UNiVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Surname or Family name: Khalid
First name: Maryam Other name/s:
Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD
School: Social Sciences Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
Title: Gendered Logic(s) of Orientalism: Representation, Discourse and Intervention in the 'War on Terror'
Abstract:
This thesis examines the ways in which representations of orientalised and gendered 'others' are manipulated and deployed in the Bush Administration's 'War on Terror' discourse, enabling military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. International politics is characterised by practices of representation that, through their production of dominant regimes of 'truth' and 'knowledge', work to allow certain possibilities and actions whilst excluding or limiting others. Drawing on poststructural, postcolonial and feminist IR, this thesis identifies and challenges assumptions concerning the apparent naturalness of identities of race, gender and sex and their deployment in official 'War on Terror' discourse. This discourse utilises a range of binaries that situate the 'West' in opposition to the 'East'- for example, good vs. evil, civilised vs. barbaric, rational vs. irrational, progressive vs. backward- and involve the (re)production of mainstream understandings of 'race' and 'gender'.
Using a discourse analytic approach, this thesis interrogates such representations using a critical lens based on Edward Said's concept of orientalism. In particular, it is concerned with the ways in which orientalist discourses configure gender and sexual differences, and as such the thesis begins by developing 'gendered orientalism' as the critical lens through which the discursive construction of the 'War on Terror' is unravelled. Tracing the development of US self-identity and its impact on foreign policy, the thesis then demonstrates the US' long-standing engagement with gendered orientalist discourses that shape the discursive construction of the military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. Analysing texts produced by the Bush Administration during the 'War on Terror' demonstrates that official representations work to legitimise intervention through the deployment of identity categories that are based on perceived differences in gender, gender roles, and sexuality and a belief that these differences are also rooted in 'race'. The hierarchical organisation of these categories, underpinned by orientalist dichotomies, lend themselves to the construction of narratives in which the US can position itself as the bringer of civilisation, democracy, equality, and security through the violence of the 'War on Terror'. Ultimately, the deployment of these gendered orientalist representations allows the 'War on Terror' and its military interventions to be constructed as unavoidable.
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Date ...... 2oth June 2013 ...... COPVRJ!GHT S1'ATEMEN1r
'I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the dj,gital copy_of my thesis or dissertation.' . r .(//f/. 8 7 Signed "'z;:;· ...... ,, ...... ·····~~-tth ...... Date ...... 20 June 2013 ......
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Contents
Abstract ...... i
Published Work...... ii
Acknowledgements ...... iii
Chapter 1 – Introduction ...... 1 Background, aims, and objectives ...... 1 Research approach ...... 9 Contribution to knowledge ...... 14 Scope and limitations ...... 16 Structure ...... 18
Chapter 2 – Orientalism: Theory and Contemporary Application ...... 26 Early orientalism ...... 28 Said’s orientalism ...... 32 Critiques, limitations, and application of Said’s work to this thesis ...... 36 ‘American orientalism’ ...... 41 Race and gender in International Relations and the ‘War on Terror’ ...... 48 Conclusion ...... 63
Chapter 3 – Gender and Analytical Strategy ...... 64 Research strategy and selection of sources ...... 66 ‘Official’ texts ...... 67 Locating sources ...... 68 Gendering discourse ...... 72 Discourse as analytical strategy ...... 75 Discourse: language, identity, power, and representation ...... 77 Developing specific discourse analytic strategies ...... 84 1) Presupposition, predication, and pre/proscription ...... 86 2) (Re)production ...... 91 3) Deconstruction and juxtaposition ...... 94 Conclusion ...... 97
Chapter 4 – Gender, Race, ‘Self’, ‘Other’ in Histories of International Intervention ...... 98 Imperialism, liberalism and the US ...... 101 Liberal internationalism and the pre-1945 international system ...... 106 Gendered and racialised constructions of the ‘underdeveloped’ south ...... 108 The Cold War, hypermasculine ‘Self’, and the threat of the ‘Other’ ...... 114 Post-Cold War: democratisation, humanitarianism, and the responsibility to protect ...... 118 Gender, race, and intervention in contemporary US foreign policy: the Gulf War, reasserting ‘White’ masculinity ...... 123 Conclusion ...... 129
Chapter 5 – Constructing the US ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ Discourse ...... 131 ‘Self’/’Other’ and discourse in the ‘War on Terror’ ...... 133 ‘Self’, nation, race, and gender ...... 136 The ‘American family’ ...... 138 Constructing the masculinity of the US ‘Self’ ...... 146 The ‘hypermasculine leader’ ...... 146 The ‘(extra)ordinary American’ ...... 154 Reading femininity(ies) in the US ‘Self’ ...... 159 The ‘nurturing maternal figure’ and ‘militarised mothers’ ...... 161 ‘Symbols of ‘liberation’ ’ and ‘ ‘deviant’ women’ ...... 165 Conclusion ...... 168
Chapter 6 – Gendered Orientalist Narratives: Afghanistan ...... 170 ‘Saving’ Afghanistan ...... 173 September 11 2001: establishing an orientalist and gendered framework .. 175 Constructions of the ‘Other’ ...... 183 Constructing the ‘Other inside’ ...... 184 Constructing the ‘enemy Other’: ‘mad mullahs and terrorists’ ...... 188 Developing the narrative: Operation Enduring Freedom ...... 192 Barbarism, masculinity, and female protection ...... 194 Conclusion ...... 204
Chapter 7 – Gendered Orientalist Narratives: Iraq ...... 206 Consolidating gendered orientalist narratives ...... 208 ‘Liberating’ Iraq ...... 220 Constructions of the ‘Other’: ‘oriental despotism’ ...... 222 ‘Other’ women, femininities, and gendered orientalism ...... 228 The Sexuality of the ‘Other’ ...... 232 ‘Saving’ Jessica Lynch ...... 233 ‘Deviant’ sexualities at Abu Ghraib ...... 236 Conclusion ...... 241
Chapter 8 – Conclusions ...... 243
Bibliography ...... 249
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Abstract
This thesis examines the ways in which representations of orientalised and gendered ‘others’ are manipulated and deployed in the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’ discourse, enabling military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. International politics is characterised by practices of representation that, through their production of dominant regimes of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, work to allow certain possibilities and actions whilst excluding or limiting others. Drawing on poststructural, postcolonial and feminist IR, this thesis identifies and challenges assumptions concerning the apparent naturalness of identities of race, gender and sex and their deployment in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. This discourse utilises a range of binaries that situate the ‘West’ in opposition to the ‘East’ – for example, good/evil, civilised/barbaric, rational/irrational, progressive/backward – and involve the (re)production of mainstream understandings of ‘race’ and ‘gender’.
Using a discourse analytic approach, this thesis interrogates such representations using a critical lens based on Edward Said’s concept of orientalism. In particular, it is concerned with the ways in which orientalist discourses configure gender and sexual differences, and as such the thesis begins by developing ‘gendered orientalism’ as the critical lens through which the discursive construction of the ‘War on Terror’ is unravelled. Tracing the development of US self-identity and its impact on foreign policy, the thesis then demonstrates the US’ long-standing engagement with gendered orientalist discourses that shape the discursive construction of the military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. Analysing texts produced by the Bush Administration during the ‘War on Terror’ demonstrates that official representations work to legitimise intervention through the deployment of identity categories that are based on perceived differences in gender, gender roles, and sexuality and a belief that these differences are also rooted in ‘race’. The hierarchical organisation of these categories, underpinned by orientalist dichotomies, lend themselves to the construction of narratives in which the US can position itself as the bringer of civilisation, democracy, equality, and security through the violence of the ‘War on Terror’. Ultimately, the deployment of these gendered orientalist representations allows the ‘War on Terror’ and its military interventions to be constructed as unavoidable.
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Published Work
Two of the publications I have completed during my candidature are cited in this thesis:
Khalid, Maryam ‘Feminist Perspectives on Militarism and War: Critiques, Contradictions and Collusions’, in Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt (eds.), Oxford Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013).
Khalid, Maryam, ‘Gender, Orientalism, and Representations of the ‘Other’ in the War on Terror’, Global Change, Peace and Security, 23:1 (2011), pp. 15-29.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my supervisors for their support and guidance throughout my candidature. My primary supervisor, Dr Penny Griffin, has been enthusiastic about my research from the very beginning, and I am thankful to her for her encouragement and advice. Penny’s intellectual engagement with this project has not only enriched the thesis itself but has also inspired me to rethink many of my own assumptions about the world, beyond this research. My secondary supervisor Professor Marc Williams has also been generous with his time, for which I am very thankful. Penny and Marc’s willingness to read and re-read many drafts, their invaluable comments and suggestions, and their helpful advice has been essential for the completion of this thesis. I also thank the University of New South Wales for funding my research in the form of a Research Excellence scholarship, departmental research support, and travel grants. I am grateful for the support of my friends who seem to have an uncanny ability to send motivational messages at just the right moments (and who have been so understanding about my very limited free time). In particular, I have been very lucky to have the friendship of a fellow PhD candidate who, having recently completed her own thesis, insisted on reading over my final draft and acting as a sounding board, and generally provided much moral support. My greatest debt of gratitude lies with my family, who have been invaluable over the last few years. This thesis would not be possible without their help, understanding, and encouragement.
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Chapter One Introduction
Background, aims, and objectives
This thesis examines the ways in which representations of orientalised and gendered ‘Others’ have been constructed, manipulated, and deployed in the George W. Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ discourse, specifically in terms of enabling military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration presented the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 as constructive of ‘a war to save civilization, itself’ which ‘[w]e did not seek … but we must fight’.1 Much ‘mainstream’ scholarship the ‘War on Terror’ that was waged after these attacks has revealed an uncritical acceptance of the assumptions of the ‘War on Terror’ (including its very necessity), focusing on strategic issues such as the most effective way to proceed with the taken-for-granted conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, civilisation and barbarity, that the Bush administration put forward.2 But these approaches take as given a particular set of (highly contested and complex) ‘values’ upon which the ‘War on Terror’ rests. My interest in undertaking research on the ‘War on Terror’ arose out of the failure of mainstream research to problematise the ‘War on Terror’, and the binary underpinnings of the rhetoric, representations, and actions of the US administration (and its ‘Coalition of the Willing’) in the aftermath of the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001. It was Miriam Cooke’s analysis of the US-led 2001 war in Afghanistan (the first large-scale military activity under the ‘War on Terror’ banner) that, for me, illuminated the centrality of gender and race in understanding the ‘War on Terror’. Cooke’s interrogation of dominant images in this war interrogated the ‘naturalness’ of binary
1 George W. Bush, ‘President Discusses War on Terrorism in Address to the Nation’, 8 November 2001, available at
Edward Said’s 2003 commentary on the Iraq war identifies and interrogates the orientalism of similar racialised logics in the contemporary context, and in particular the ‘clash of civilisations’ logic at the heart of the ‘War on Terror’.6 Reading Said’s work, I became interested in modifying Cooke’s ‘gendered logics’ into a broader conceptualisation of ‘gendered orientalist’ logics through which to illuminate the construction and function of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I understand ‘official’ (in my research, Bush administration-produced) US ‘War on Terror’ rhetoric as drawing on notions of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarity’ from the outset. For example, soon after the attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush not had only declared a ‘War on Terror’ but also characterised this war as being waged not only against specific terrorist groups but more broadly ‘against barbaric behavior, people that hate freedom and hate what we stand for’.7 Edward W. Said writes that ‘[w]ithout a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values — the very core of traditional orientalist dogma — there would have been no war’.8 Indeed, in 2009, in his farewell address
3 Miriam Cooke, ‘Islamic Feminism Before and After September 11th’, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, 9:2 (2003), pp. 227-228. 4 Ibid. 5 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 6 Edward W. Said, ‘The Appalling Consequences of the Iraq War are Now Clear’, Counterpunch, 22 April 2003, available online at
Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States.9
In this conception, military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq were necessary in a world that could be divided into an essential battle between ‘good’, ‘evil’. The types of people who might properly fall into identity categories such as ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘terrorist’, ‘barbaric’, those who ‘hate what we stand for’, and those to be ‘saved’ or ‘liberated’ are by no means ‘natural’ or pre-given. Rather, I see such categorisations, as well as the very creation of these (and other) identity categories themselves, as discursive whereby understandings of the world (and the people in it) are ‘(re)constructed through…an ordering of terms, meanings, practices that forms the background presuppositions and taken-for-granted understandings that enable people’s actions and interpretations.’10 Instrumental to this is the construction and representation of ‘the world’, prescriptions of ‘proper’ or ‘acceptable’ behaviour for the ‘types’ of people in it, and of the actions and events that take place in it. As such this thesis is concerned with the ways in which gendered and orientalist understandings of the world allow particular representations to become dominant or authoritative. This is important because, as Jutta Weldes explains, ‘[d]ifferent representations of the world entail different identities, which in turn carry with them different ways of functioning in the world, are located within different power relations and make possible different interests.’11 As such, I see ‘War on Terror’ representations (of people, places, ideas, ‘truth’ and so on) as intrinsically tied to what Jennifer Milliken explains as the character of ‘knowledge’ as ‘(re)constructed through discourse, an ordering of terms, meanings, practices that forms the background presuppositions and taken- for-granted understandings that enable people’s actions and interpretations.’12 This entails, for my project, asking how ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘civilised’, ‘barbaric’ and so on are constructed in the discursive representations of the ‘War on Terror’,
9 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Delivers Farewell Address to the Nation’, 15 January 2009, available at
‘good’/‘evil’, are made intelligible because of (historical and contemporary) gendered and racialised discourses, that are, at key moments ‘orientalist’. Said’s analysis of the power relations that underwrite ‘Western’ representations of ‘the East’ is particularly relevant for its theorising of the power of representations (to define, naturalise, legitimate, and deploy knowledge about and for others) in ‘Western’ constructs of ‘the East’ and relatedly, of ‘the West’s’ efforts to assert and define itself. I must note here that by ‘West’ or ‘Western’ I mean primarily the US, UK, Canada, Australia and those European countries that, as Meghan Nayak and Eric Selbin explain, ‘represent themselves as ‘universal’, developed and civilized’.13 I use scare quotes to indicate that ‘Western’ or ‘the’ ‘West’, like ‘the’ ‘East’ (or ‘Eastern’), are discursively constructed concepts, changing, historically contingent, and complex rather than the unity and homogeneity that speaking of the Western (or Eastern) subject would imply. Focused primarily on the British and French colonial experiences, Orientalism14 cannot be taken ‘as-is’ to read the US-led ‘War on Terror’. As such, I find value in adapting Said’s work to reflect both my interest in gender as central to understanding and shaping the ‘War on Terror’, and the contemporary context of this war. The nature of orientalism as a discourse deeply related to Foucauldian theories of power and knowledge means that Orientalism can be applied beyond the historical context in which the book was immediately focused. The repository of representations which orientalist discourse draws upon is not limited to one nation or area, one gender, or any particular political leaning. It is constantly being added to by the changing dominant (but multifaceted) discourses of ‘the West’. Because of the nature of its construction, orientalist knowledge and discourse is fluid and shifting, is readily adapted to the changing circumstances to which it relates, and must be read as historically specific as well as situated in a broader long-standing ‘tradition’.15
I intend to unpack the construction and deployment of ‘War on Terror’ discourse in enabling military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan by reading gender as well as orientalism into official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I argue that official representations in the ‘War on Terror’ work to legitimise military intervention
13 Meghana Nayak and Eric Selbin, Decentring International Relations (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010), p. 2. 14 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Hammondsworth: Penguin, [1978] 2003). 15 Yasmin Jiwani, ‘ ‘Orientalizing ‘War Talk’: Representations of the Gendered Muslim Body Post-9/11 in the Montreal Gazette,’ in Jo-Anne Lee and John Lutz (eds.) "Race" And Racisms in Space, Time and Theory (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), p. 181; Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1999), Dag Tuastad, ‘Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s)’, Third World Quarterly, 24:4 (2003). 5 through the operation of gendered discourses that construct and deploy ideas of ‘acceptable’ masculinities and femininities, and relate them to race in ways that draw on the repository of orientalist knowledge. In doing so, I draw on poststructural, postcolonial and feminist work in IR which seeks to undermine dominant assumptions concerning the apparent naturalness of identities of race, gender and sex and their deployment in global politics.16 As noted above, depictions of ‘Other’ women and men in US ‘War on Terror’ discourse have been central to constructions of military interventions, Afghanistan being the most obvious example. In official and un-official US ‘War on Terror’ discourses, the Afghan war has been projected as having ‘liberated’ Afghan women, for example in the 2002 State of the Union Address and on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines.17 The representation of Afghan men as dangerous to Afghan women and the security of the US and the ‘civilised world’ is one way in which this has taken place. Men too have been essentialised (often depicted in ways that barbarise, dehumanise, emasculate, and feminise them), and have been targets of ‘discursive violence’ and masculinist practices in the ‘War on Terror’ (such as the abuses at Abu-Ghraib prison).18 To gain insight into the operations of international politics in this context thus requires a gendering of orientalism, developing a lens that illustrates the ways in which international politics is predicated on representations of the racialised and gendered ‘Other’. Gender is important here, as ideas about, and understandings of, what constitute ‘appropriate’ (and ‘inappropriate’) behaviours of ‘gender’ function to
16 See for example, Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations : Reading Race, Gender, and Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Roxanne Lynn Doty, ‘The Bounds of 'Race' in International Relations’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies 22:3 (1993); Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); L. H. M. Ling, ‘Global Passions within Global Interests: Race, Gender, and Culture in Our Postcolonial Order’, in Ronen Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories (New York: Routledge, 2000); Nayak and Selbin, Decentring International Relations; Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Situating Race in International Relations: The Dialectics of Civilizational Security in American Immigration’’, in Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations; Robert Vitalis, ‘The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 29:2 (2000); Robert Vitalis, ‘Birth of a Discipline’, in David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (eds.), Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Laura J. Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge, 2010); Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart (eds.), The ‘Man’ Question in International Relations (Westview: Oxford University Press, 1998); Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart (eds.), Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008). 17 George W. Bush, ‘2002 State of the Union Address’, 29 January 2002, available at
19 Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Sex or gender? Bodies in World Politics and Why Gender Matters’, in Shepherd, Gender Matters in Global Politics, p. 5. 20 Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in Britain,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9:2 (2007), p. 186. 21 Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91:5 (1986), p. 1057. 7
‘women’, ‘men’, ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’ are identity categories created and reproduced according to a binary logic of orientalism that creates dichotomies between the benevolent, civilised and moral masculinity of the US-led ‘West’ and the backward, barbaric, oppressive, deviant masculinity of the ‘brown man’; the ‘free’ Western woman and the oppressed subjugated Muslim woman in need of ‘rescue’. Orientalist discourses are gendered in this way since they harness perceived differences in gender, gender roles, and sexuality to create categories of people; to define within these a series of hierarchical categories that define what marks out ‘men’ or ‘women’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘Arab/Muslim’22 and ‘Western’; and pre/proscribe the thoughts, ideas, behaviours, and so on that are ‘appropriate’ and ‘natural’ to peoples identified as being in any of these categories. By constructing a barbaric and oppressive ‘East’, the US-led West can position itself as bringing civilisation, democracy, and equality through the violence of the ‘War on Terror’. Ultimately, I argue, the deployment of such ‘gendered orientalist’ representations allows the ‘War on Terror’ to be constructed as not only legitimate, but unavoidable. It is also important to note that the representations outlined above are themselves created by gendered differences, as much as they create such differences. For example, representations are not being created only by men in the Bush administration, but by a range of actors in the media, popular culture, and politics and so on. As such, it is not only men but women and some feminisms that are also implicated. Thus approach the complexities of gendered orientalist logics in the ‘War on Terror’ by analysing, at specific moments, non-official production of orientalist knowledge as well. My analysis contributes distinctively to the knowledge produced by poststructural, postcolonial and feminist approaches, by undertaking the first monograph-length discourse analysis of the function of gender and orientalism in official US representations of the ‘War on Terror’. Representations of peoples, ideas, and places in the context of the US-led ‘War on Terror’ require that orientalism as an analytical lens is reconfigured to incorporate both the specificity of the US experience and the central importance of gender. The them/us dichotomy at play in contemporary Western representations (for example, civilised vs. barbaric, good vs. evil, as outlined earlier) serves the purpose of both ‘Othering’ the represented and constructing the creator of the representations in opposition to those who are
22 Following Meghana Nayak, I use ‘Arab/Muslim’ purposefully, to signify that ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims’ are conflated in ‘War on Terror’ (and other orientalist) discourse, despite the differences between these groups as well as the differences amongst them. See Meghana Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8:1 (2006), p. 58 note 1. 8
‘Othered’. In terms of ‘War on Terror’ discourse, this can be seen in (but is not limited to) the dichotomy between the benevolent, civilised and moral West and the backward, barbaric, oppressive ‘brown man’; the free Western woman and the oppressed subjugated Muslim woman. Representations created and sustained by and in mainstream (Western) policy, media, and public discourses are gendered as well as orientalist, ascribing stereotypes to men and women that allow certain relations of power to be masked, and hierarchies to be presented as ‘natural’. These include perpetually oppressed ‘Other’ women and threatening and irrational ‘Other’ men positioned in contrast to ‘our’ enlightened, liberated and rational men and women.
Research approach My research approach is qualitative in that I will be selecting a range of representational texts produced by the Bush administration (detailed in chapter 3). By ‘official’ I am referring to those texts (spoken, visual and written) created and distributed by the Bush administration and that have reached a public audience. My concern is not with the decision-making processes behind the creation and implementation of specific policies, but rather with identifying gendered orientalist discourse intended for public consumption, as it is this that is deployed in constructing intervention as ‘necessary’. In terms of selecting official texts, I have made the choice to focus primarily on the most visible officials in the Bush administration: President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz. In locating my primary sources I focus particularly on the archives of ‘War on Terror’ texts (speeches, press releases, interviews, online documents and repositories of information collated by the Administration’s staff) collected in the Bush administration’s White House, State Department, and Department of Defense online document archives. However, I also use, at key moments, ‘unofficial’ texts and discourses to illustrate the currency of (and overlap between) the official discourses I examine. My study aims to address how US ‘War on Terror’ discourse manipulates and deploys representations of ‘brown’ men and women to justify military involvement in the non-West, specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan. As such, I draw on IR scholarship that is concerned with analysing representational practices that ‘elevate
9 one truth over another’.23 In particular, my use of Said’s concept of orientalism (shaped by a Foucauldian understanding of ‘discourse’) means that a poststructural research approach is a logical choice for my research aims. I choose to use a form of DA that is poststructural as it provides the tools for identifying how identities are created, organised, and deployed, and how the discourses in which they are located become authoritative or ‘falsely obvious’.24 This means understanding ‘discourse’ as a ‘structured, relational totality’ that ‘delineates the terms of intelligibility whereby a particular 'reality' can be known and acted upon’.25 Applying this type of DA to my research means looking for ‘how meanings are produced and attached to various social subjects and objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions that create certain possibilities and exclude others.’26 A key assumption of this approach arises from a poststructural understanding of language, meaning, and ‘reality’ as not imbued with ‘natural’ or ‘pre-given’ ‘meaning’ but as incomprehensible to us without discourse as an interpretive tool. As such, this means that ‘reality’, ‘knowledge’, and the discursive practices that ‘create’ them must be analysed ‘not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured’ (as mastery of knowledge is impossible given no one has perfect information), but rather to uncover how certain representations influence the production of knowledge and identities, and how these representations and the knowledge they create make possible particular courses of action.27 For my research this means engaging in ways of reading that disturb the ‘essence’ or ‘truth’ of ‘War on Terror’ discourses, and shed light on how the discursive construction of ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘masculinity’, ‘femininity’, and how these are attached to ‘men’ and ‘women’ make military intervention possible. In using a poststructural form of DA to do so, I find it impossible to divorce knowledge from power, and, following from this, to identify an objective ‘truth’. I reject the possibility of a distinction between the discursive realm and a knowable ‘reality’ because this approach does not adequately unpack the power relations at play in constructing any particular ‘reality’. Although ‘[t]he world exists independently of language’28 and ‘objects exist externally to thought’,29 I subscribe to the
23 James Der Derian, Anti-diplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 7. 24 Roland Barthes as cited in Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, in Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson, and Duvall, Cultures of Insecurity, p. 13. 25 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 6. 26 Ibid., p. 4. 27 Ibid., p. 5 28 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 6. 10 poststructuralist understanding that this world ‘is literally inconceivable outside of language and our traditions of interpretation’,30 that is, ‘outside any discursive condition of emergence’.31 This has implications for my feminist research; as Laura Shepherd explains, an approach which assumes the existence of a knowable ‘reality’ outside the discursive realm ‘does not problematise the processes through which ‘reality’ is constructed and the ‘material’ given meaning. Ignoring that (gendered and racialised) ‘systems of meaning-production’ are ‘intimately related to practices of power – the power to define and defend ‘reality’ ’, allows them to be (re)produced.32 However, this does not mean that gendered relations of power, and gender discrimination and inequality are ‘merely’ constructs (created through discourse); they are also material ‘realities’ that (while they cannot be understood outside discourse) give rise to practices, acts, and material effects that can (and need to) be challenged, transformed and changed. In reading constructions of various ‘Others’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, I recognise and make reference to the well-documented brutality and atrocities of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Women (and men) in Afghanistan and Iraq (but also in the broader ‘global south’ and in the US and Europe) have lived experiences of discrimination, violence, and oppressive practices that are inherently gendered and, at times, racialised. In the Afghan and Iraqi contexts, these have impacted particularly on women, both before and after the US-led military interventions.33 While these lived experiences of Afghans and Iraqis are drawn upon in official US gendered orientalist ‘War on Terror’ discourse, they also exist beyond this specific discourse. That is, the material practices of the Taliban and Hussein are not simply the products of ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Rather, they themselves are
29 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 108. 30 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 6. 31 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 108. 32 Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan Post-9/11’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:1 (2006), p. 20. 33 See for example, Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist,104:3 (2002);Nadje Al-Ali, ‘Reconstructing Gender: Iraqi Women Between Dictatorship, War, Sanctions and Occupation’, Third World Quarterly, 26:4-5 (2006); Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, ‘Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil’, NWSA Journal, 17:3 (2005); Anne E. Brodsky, With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (New York: Routledge, 2003); Chilla Bulbeck, Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press , 1998); Amy Caiazza, ‘Why Gender Matters in Understanding September 11: Women, Militarism, and Violence’, Institute for Women’s Policy Research Publication #1908, Washington DC, November 2001; R. W. Connell, ‘Change among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculinities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena’, Signs, 30:3 (2005); Elaheh Rostami Povey, Women in Afghanistan: Passive Victims of the Borga or Active Social Participants?’, Development in Practice, 13:2-3 (2003). 11 the outcomes of broader gendered (and at times racialised) relations of power which, although they cannot be understood outside of ‘discourse’, give rise to material actions. That is, discursive meanings must be understood as enacted through and constructed by material practices such that ‘[d]iscourses and material practices are…mutually constitutive’.34 The material effects of gendered (and racialised) power relations have been (and continue to be) challenged by transnational, regional, and national feminist movements (my discussion of RAWA in chapter 6, for example reflects on this).35 As Shahnaz Khan argues, this feminist approach involves identifying and interrogating ‘the material and political forces that continue to construct the world’ and in particular, understanding these ‘as part of a continuous process of history’ in which local, regional, and international politics are gendered as well as racialised.36 This interrogation is absent in the official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse I examine in this thesis. The discrimination and inequality faced by women (and men) in Afghanistan and Iraq (or anywhere else in the world), as a feminist concern demands, in the ‘War on Terror’ context in particular, the interrogation of foreign policy discourses that co-opt this oppression. This must be done in order to ‘avoid accepting (and possibly contributing to) hegemonic discourses, and the gendered, racialised and sexualised violence they rationalise.’37 As Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain have theorised with regards to the Afghan context, ‘material oppression of women in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to an array of floating signifiers; equally clear, however, is the danger of reducing representations of material conditions to the purported essence of Afghan women’ or indeed any women.38 This, along with my commitment to all knowledge as discursive, has implications for what I focus on in my research in this thesis. The scope of this thesis means I cannot assess in detail the lived experience of people under the Taliban and Hussein regimes, beyond what they tell us about the contingency of official US ‘War on Terror’
34 Charlotte Epstein, The Power of Words in International Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), p. 5. 35 On the role of institutions and regional and national feminist movements more broadly, see Rawwida Baksh, Linda Etchart, Elsie Onubogu, and Tina Johnson, Gender Mainstreaming in Conflict Transformation: Building Sustainable Peace (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2005). The authors theorise that war, conflict, and violence are ‘profoundly gendered’ (p.14) in that they shape and are shaped by dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity; recognise that men, women, girls, and boys do not experience these in the same way; point out that gender equality is inextricably linked to democracy and peace; and highlight the work done by women in terms of peace-building processes which seek to address these impediments to gender equality. 36 Shahnaz Khan, ‘Between Here and There: Feminist Solidarity and Afghan Women’, Genders, 22 (2001), par [47]. 37 Maryam Khalid, ‘Gender, Orientalism and Representations of the ‘Other’ in the War on Terror’, Global Change, Peace & Security, 23:1 (2011), p. 29. 38 Ayotte and Husain, ‘Securing Afghan Women’, p. 113. 12 discourses. Moreover, I am interested in the power relations that underwrite the construction and deployment of the actions of the Taliban and Hussein as gendered, sexualised, racialised, and orientalist, their use in constructing gendered orientalist narratives which in turn enable actions (such as military intervention) in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. In this sense, ‘[a] conception of power that can account for the asymmetry’39 of gendered and racialised (at time orientalist) power relations is vital for any feminist research; and it is this conception of power that a poststructural approach allows me to take. To this end, I apply a poststructural DA approach to reading ‘texts’ (as words, images, sounds, anything through which we aim to communicate meaning) through identifying discursive that attempt to ‘fix’ as legitimate certain knowledges and ‘realities’. The key analytical techniques I use are presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production.40 Specifically, I look at how what is presupposed and predicated about people, places, things, ideas, functions to present as true particular knowledge and ‘identities’ through particular verbs, adverbs and adjectives. In delimiting ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, I see discourses as pre/proscriptive because they function to exclude or demand particular actions based on the ‘knowledge’ they assert.41 For example, particular identities constructed through predication, such as backward Afghans, oppressed women, dangerous Muslim/Arab men, pre/proscribe ‘logical’ actions (or inactions) such as oppressed (without agency) Afghan women, irrational and uncontrolled barbaric Afghan men, and a benevolent, civilised US. From these ‘truths’ it can be concluded in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse that ‘oppressed Afghan women’ need to be ‘saved’ by the ‘benevolent and superior US’ (through military intervention). These processes also need to be understood in terms of the productive power of discourses, that is, productive of power, of the knowledge(s), ‘facts’, narrative, realities, meanings, and identities that discourses speak of, construct, and order. Through continually employing discursive processes (of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription), they are (re)productive of the ‘meanings, subject identities, their interrelationships, and a range of imaginable conduct’42 defined by the discourse.43
39 Margaret A. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 2. 40 Much of my understanding of these processes draws on Jennifer Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research Methods’, European Journal of International Relations 5:2 (1999). 41 Penny Griffin, Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 43-44. 42 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 4. 43 Lene Hansen, Security As Practice: Discourse Analysis And The Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 17. 13
(Re)production is particularly important for my analysis in chapters 6 and 7, as the ways in which ‘War on Terror’ discourse expanded since its beginning in September 2001 to function both consistently (in terms of its broadest logics) and adapt to changing events (in terms of specific narratives) through the 2001-2003 ‘War on Terror’ period, resulting in two military interventions (in Afghanistan and Iraq) that were highly connected to each other in this discourse.
Contribution to knowledge My research looks at how, in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, women, men, masculinities and femininities are created and categorised (for example some ‘types’ of ‘women’ are in need of rescue, some categories of ‘men’ are a threat) and how these categories are deployed to make military interventions in the ‘War on Terror’ legitimate. This places my work outside ‘mainstream’ IR, which Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes explain is largely concerned (substantively) with relations between nation-states, with theoretical perspectives (such as neorealism, neoliberalism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism) that are based on rationalist assumptions, and ‘rigorously police[s]’ these boundaries.44 A range of scholars have pointed out that mainstream IR, if it does not overlook them entirely, fails to problematise and ‘silences’ the politics and power inherent in constructing and deploying the categories and operation of race and gender, taking racialised and gendered identities for granted by largely ignoring how they affect the ways in which international politics play out.45 I thus draw on the poststructural,
44 Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal’, p. 188. 45 See for example, Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1999), chapter 3; Anna M. Agathangelou and Heather M. Turcotte ‘Postcolonial Theories and Challenges to ‘First World-ism’ ’, Shepherd, Gender Matters in Global Politics, pp. 44-45; Doty, ‘The Bounds of ‘Race’ in International Relations’, p. 444; Branwen G. Jones, ‘Introduction: International Relations, Eurocentrism, and Imperialism’, in Branwen G. Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), p. 10; Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, in Jones, Decolonizing International Relations; L. H. M. Ling, ‘Hypermasculinity on the Rise, Again: A Response to Fukuyama on Women and World Politics’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2:1 (1999); Persaud, ‘Situating Race in International Relations’, in Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations, pp. 56-57; V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues: Dilemmas in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Nicola Short and Helen Kambouri, ‘Ambiguous Universalism: Theorising Race/Nation/Class in International Relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 13:3 (2010); Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal’; Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 1, 4-9; J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 3-6; J. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 21-27; J. Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg (eds.), Feminism and International Relations: Conversations About the Past, Present, and Future (Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 6-7; Vitalis, ‘The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture’, pp. 332-333; Gillian Youngs, ‘Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender Are Essential to Understanding the World ‘We’ Live In’, International Affairs, 80:1 (2004). Some examples of mainstream IR works that overlook the operation of race and gender, or which (re)produce dominant (and hierarchical) understandings of race and gender (for example, immutable divisions between ‘us’, 14 postcolonial, and feminist IR scholarship that seeks to undermine the naturalness of identities underwritten by race, gender and sex, and their deployment in global politics. I understand international politics to be ‘characterised by practices that have been implicated in the production of meanings and identities’.46 I argue that practices of representation by ‘the West’ of ‘the East’ have discursively constructed ‘the East’ in ways that produce dominant regimes of legitimate ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’.47 Such dominant regimes work to create meanings and attach them to certain subjects and objects, which in turn creates and justifies certain possibilities and actions, and excludes or limits others. Taking the concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘orientalism’ as lenses through which to read representations of events in the ‘War on Terror’, I make two key contributions to existing knowledge. Firstly, this thesis will constitute the first in-depth (monograph length) analysis of the origins and deployment of ‘gendered orientalism’ in the ‘War on Terror’ context. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have, as I will examine in chapter 2, addressed the racialised and gendered underpinnings of ‘War on Terror’ representations. My research will add to these understandings by providing discursive analysis of two key military interventions as case studies of actions enabled by the discursive processes that are predicated on gendered orientalist ‘War on Terror’ logics. By taking this approach, I aim to demonstrate how the discourse of gendered orientalism not only functions at key moments but is sustained over an extended period of time, and how it develops to accommodate changing circumstances. For example, the development of the construction of identities of the ‘Other’ (both ‘men’ and ‘women’) in the discourses on the Afghan and Iraq wars are not identical expressions of gendered orientalism, but rather in drawing on gendered and orientalist understandings of the world, result in narratives that are specific to each of these ‘War on Terror’ contexts. This also leads the thesis to make an empirical contribution, by canvassing a larger body of primary source material than previous analyses of gender, orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’. My aim in this thesis, to identify an official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse (and its key features) that enables intervention as ‘necessary’, requires the analysis of a large body of primary documents created as part of official US representations of the ‘War on Terror’. The majority of my primary sources cover
‘them’, ‘first world’, ‘third world’, ‘male’, ‘female’ (most often attached to ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ respectively) include the work of Francis Fukuyama, David Held, Samuel Huntington, Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye. 46 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 2. 47 Ibid. 15 the period 11 September 2001 to the end of 2003. I looked at well over 500 primary documents (although, due to restraints of space, I am not able to refer to all of these in this thesis and thus cite approximately 150 of these primary documents). Within this time frame, I focus not only on texts created by George W. Bush but also incorporate other key figures in the administration. As such, my research draws on a larger body of primary material than previous analyses. Secondly, by utilising orientalism and gender together as a lens through which to read events that have taken place under the banner of the ‘War on Terror’, I am developing a conceptual and theoretical perspective which might be applicable to other case studies of (and perhaps beyond) the ‘War on Terror’. While this thesis is concerned with the interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq specifically, the points made about the function of gendered and orientalist constructions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ could be used to illuminate, for example, the post-September 11 2001 relationship between the US and ‘Eastern’ states (such as Pakistan) that did not experience military intervention in the same way as Afghanistan and Iraq perhaps, but are part of ‘War on Terror’ discourse and practice. In particular, my use of DA here may be useful in providing a specific methodological approach for understanding how certain actions can be enabled or made ‘necessary’ through the deployment of gendered orientalist representations in contemporary international relations.
Scope and limitations The main concern of this thesis, the operation of gender and orientalism in constructing discursive reality (and in particular, identities for various groups of people) in the ‘War on Terror’, relates to a potentially very large area of research, spanning the fields of IR, feminist studies, orientalism and foreign policy. In terms of the ‘War on Terror’ as a case study, the primary texts available are vast, and identifying and analysing them all would be an impossible task in terms of my project, as both the time and the word count are limited. For this reason, I have chosen to limit my analysis to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to illustrate how ‘gendered orientalism’ plays out in specific moments. I am, in this thesis, aiming to uncover the logics (and the presuppositions or assumptions on which these are based) upon which dominant representations of people, places, ideas, and events in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse are predicated. I do so with a view to understanding how these representations are deployed to (re)produce a gendered orientalist discourse in which distinct identity categories (of 16
‘us’, ‘them’, ‘civilised’, ‘barbaric’, ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ for example) are configured in ways that enable (or require) military intervention in to Afghanistan and Iraq. Focusing on the Afghan and Iraq wars specifically presents an opportunity not only to see how gendered orientalist discourse(s) make significant actions possible, but also limits the scope of the thesis to two specific moments around which broader ‘War on Terror’ discourse is organised, and can be analysed. This limits the scope of my thesis, most obviously in terms of the timeframe of my analysis. As explained earlier, I am concerned primarily with establishing ‘War on Terror’ discourse immediately after 11 September 2001, examining the development of this in the lead-up to the Afghan war, and how it was extended in service of the military intervention into Iraq. As such, I am not undertaking a detailed examination of the discourse beyond this point; to go beyond the Abu Ghraib abuses would be beyond the remit of this thesis methodologically. My methodological choices (in terms of applying a DA approach that looks for processes of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production, and utilises juxtaposition and deconstruction in doing so) also require me to limit my case studies as the application of these techniques requires a fairly detailed analysis of my primary source material. For example, an analysis of ‘War on Terror’ discourse that does not use a DA approach in the way that I do could possibly incorporate more ‘events’ in the ‘War on Terror’, or even incorporate a broader range of sources including policy-making documents. I do not analyse policy- making documents because my aim in this thesis is not causal, that is, I do not intend to demonstrate that gendered orientalism shapes the construction of foreign policy (although there is some evidence that orientalism does impact on the creation of foreign policy).48 Rather, my interest in the ‘War on Terror’ lies in the discursive constructions that allow certain actions to become ‘necessary’ to the exclusion of others, for example military intervention instead of non-violent processes of international law. This also means that, while it would be appropriate for some analyses of gendered orientalism in the ‘War on Terror’ to extend beyond ‘Western’ discourses and look at ‘Eastern’ discourses in detail as well, I limit my analysis to ‘the West’ (in the ‘War on Terror’ context, the US specifically). While I acknowledge that this, to some extent, privileges ‘Western’ discourses, I believe that it is precisely because these discourses (and their representations) are so powerful that they require detailed examination; it is these discourses that enable
48 For example see Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and The Middle East Since 1945, 3rd ed (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 17 material effects (such as military interventions) that have a devastating impact on people in both ‘the East’ and ‘the West’.
Structure The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse employs logics of gendered orientalism in its construction and representation of identities, events, ‘facts’, and knowledge, in order to create a reality in which military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq become discursively possible. ‘War on Terror’ discourse, I argue, is predicated on, pre/proscribes actions through, and (re)produces binaries such as ‘us/’them’, ‘East’/’West’, ‘man’/’woman’, ‘masculine’/’feminine’. These binaries arise out of processes of orientalist and gendered ‘Othering’, in which a ‘Western’ (US) ‘Self’ (aligned with ‘positive’ attributes of hypermasculinity, civilisation, progress, democracy, and rationality) is pitted against an ‘Eastern Other’ (identified as irrational, backward, barbaric, and stagnant). In understanding ‘War on Terror’ discourse in this way, I am drawing directly on the concept of orientalism developed by Said but also arguing that it must be read as gendered (and indeed that gendered understandings of the ‘War on Terror’ must also be read as orientalist). My understanding of gendered orientalism is necessarily developed over two chapters (chapters 2 and 3). I do not mean to imply by this division that either gender or orientalism is more useful than the other as an analytical category, and my discussion in these chapters makes reference to both concepts and how they inform each other, at key moments. While the first half of chapter 2 explains the development of orientalism as a concept (to provide background and a rationale for my specific use of the concept), I do not treat it as separate from gender, developing it both in terms of both applicability to the US context and as fundamentally shaped by logics of gender. My understanding of orientalism as a ‘discourse’ in chapter 2, is developed in chapter 3 which is concerned with explaining discourse as an analytical strategy (in place of a traditional methodology) for my research. In doing so, it also looks at gender-as-discourse and brings together the ways in which gender and orientalism in terms of explaining how specific discursive processes (of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, (re)production) can be identified in ‘War on Terror’ examples. Chapter 2 begins by defining and explaining orientalism for my research, drawing on Said’s Orientalism. As this text focused on British and French colonialism, I find it necessary to ‘update’ this for the ‘War on Terror’ context. As 18 such I explore the development of orientalism as a critical lens, from early critiques of Orientalist scholarship, to Said’s thesis and its key components. I focus on explaining the ways in which, according to key critical scholars of orientalism, something can ‘be’ orientalist and how it then becomes possible to read orientalism into practices, texts, representations, and actions. In doing so, I also address criticisms of Said’s work and explain how I understand and intend to use orientalism as a critical lens, in particular in terms of developing more complex and historically specific notions of ‘orientalisms’ specific to the US experience and relating orientalism to gender. Although Said did not explicitly consider gender as integral to the way orientalism functioned, I draw on feminist (IR) scholarship to define ‘gender’ and explore how orientalism might be configured by dominant (and binary) understandings of gender and sexuality. In tracing the usefulness of orientalism as a critical tool, the chapter also highlights the role of the ‘Orient’ as a key component of Western civilisation and culture, how this is still discernible in the contemporary expressions of orientalism in US culture, media, and politics. By drawing on the works of scholars who trace this orientalism through the contemporary US experience, and research on gendered understandings of the ‘War on Terror’, I argue that US ‘War on Terror’ discourse must be read as being predicated on gendered orientalist visions of ‘the East’. Said’s conception of orientalism as a discourse is particularly important for my research which, in aiming to undermine assumed ‘truths’, benefits from a poststructuralist conception of knowledge as discursively constructed and partial. The apparent obviousness of what is meant by terms like ‘terrorist’, ‘us’, and ‘them’ for example, is precisely why orientalism and gender, as critical tools that seek to lay bare the power relations that shape our understandings of the world, are useful. Understanding orientalism as a gendered discourse in which representations become ‘fact’ uncovers a system of representations that produces and renders intelligible specific categories such as ‘East’, ‘Arab’, ‘Muslim’, ‘West’, ‘civilised’, ‘barbaric’, and organises them according to binary logics, and in hierarchical ways. The nature of orientalism as deeply related to Foucauldian theories of power and knowledge is especially important for my research not only because it means that orientalism can be applied beyond the historical context which Said focused on, but also because it aligns with my understanding of gender, truth, knowledge, and power as influenced by poststructural feminist IR. In chapter 3 I develop this by setting out the key assumptions and analytical concerns of my thesis, the theoretical framework and concepts that guide my research, and an appropriate 19 strategy for analysing examples of gendered orientalism in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Having introduced gender as a concept in chapter 2, I relate it to my understanding of discourse in chapter 3. I then explain how the ways in which ‘War on Terror’ representations (re)produce legitimate knowledge or ‘truth’ can be identified by focusing on the discursive practices that are at work in creating these representations. A poststructuralist conception of the constructedness of reality, knowledge, and language informs my understanding of discourse, identity and representation. Discourses, as I understand them, are ways of constructing knowledge; they are groups of ideas, images and practices that are relational (they all refer to another in some way) and which provide us with ways of talking about, knowledge about, and conduct associated with, particular topics, events, activities, or institutions. In other words, they are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’49 and rather than conveying meaning, they create meaning. Ultimately, as I will explain in chapter 3, I find that a DA approach allows me to uncover gendered and orientalist presuppositions that ‘War on Terror’ representations (of people, their identities and characteristics, of actions, events, ideas) are predicated on, and the knowledges, ‘truths’, and actions that they pre/proscribe and (re)produce. Based on this understanding of discourse, I detail what a discourse-based analytical strategy entails, including outlining specific techniques of discourse analysis for the rest of the thesis. In doing this, I examine how the creation of identities is linked to representational practices in texts, in order to understand how and where it is possible to discursively ‘elevate one truth over another’50 I understand this as achieved through discursive practices and processes of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production, explain how these are identified and ‘read’ in my research, and how the techniques of juxtaposition and deconstruction can be used to show the contingency of ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Chapters 4 and 5 share a concern with understanding how the US state has constructed its ‘outward Self’ by using a lens that looks at the function of gender, race, and orientalism in these constructions. Chapter 4 provides the first substantive discussion of the US’ (re)production of gendered, racialised, and orientalist discourses, specifically in terms of international intervention and the construction of US ‘Self’ and a range of ‘Others’. Specifically, I do this by
49 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 54. 50 Der Derian, Anti-diplomacy, p. 7. 20 considering the relevance of ‘imperialism’, which has been closely connected with both orientalism and gender, and tracing the development of a ‘liberal international system’, the ways in which international intervention has been constructed and legitimised here, and the US state’s identity of ‘Self’ in the international arena terms of gendered, racialised (at times orientalist) discourses. Given it is not possible to cover all that is relevant to the development of a ‘liberal international system’ and the US’ relationship to it over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I select examples from the post-WWI, WWII, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods to examine constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ using my DA approach. In doing so, chapter 4 develops the earlier theoretical overview in chapters 2 and 3 to further explore gender and orientalism as analytical tools in IR by applying them to concrete examples post-World War I. This discussion is important as the examples I use serve as points at which to read the discursive construction of a particular US ‘Self’, the basic character of which is ‘White’, ‘Western’, and ‘masculine’, and the basic binary gendered/racialised logics of which I argue are (re)produced in gendered orientalist discourse in the ‘War on Terror’. I then bring together gender, race, orientalism, and imperialism in terms of the first Gulf War as a short case study to illustrate contemporary expressions of US intervention, concluding that gendered and orientalist conceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ have been deployed in previous interventions in ways that make their use in the ‘War on Terror’ intelligible. As a whole, chapter 4 is concerned with, in terms of a DA approach, gendered and racialised (at times orientalist) presuppositions, the predication and (pre)proscription of identities, questioning their naturalness, and demonstrating not only that there is power and inequality in ascribing particular gender traits to racialised or orientalised people(s), groups, and states, but also how this power is deployed in undertaking particular actions (such as intervention). In the next three chapters, I apply my understanding of gender, orientalism, and (US) intervention (established in chapters 2, 3 and 4) to identify and demonstrate the operation of those discursive practices through which the US administration, through its official representations of the ‘War on Terror’, predicates, pre/proscribes and (re)produces gendered orientalist narratives that enable military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. Together, chapters 5, 6, and 7 explore the ways in which official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse is shaped by logics of ‘Othering’ inherent in ‘gender’ and ‘orientalism’. These logics shape the construction and organisation of categories of identity such as self/other, combatant/victim, liberator/oppressor, barbaric/civilised predicated on 21 orientalist/racialised/gendered understandings of the world (creating, for example, ‘Other men’ by reference to ‘deviant’ attitudes toward ‘Western’ values). Here, ‘Othering’, and specifically gendered orientalist ‘Othering’, serves the dual purpose of both constructing the ‘Other’ and reflecting the gaze back onto the ‘Self’. As ‘Othering’ is a mutually constitutive process I look not only at the ‘Other’ but also the ‘Self’ that is constructed in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. As the focus of this thesis is on (official) US discourse specifically, it is important to consider in some detail the identity of the ‘Self’ that is both being constructed in this discourse, and that is instrumental in shaping constructions of the ‘Other’. To this end, chapter 5 mirrors my chapter 4 concern with identifying projections of a particular US ‘Self’; in chapter 5 I develop the idea of the US ‘Self’ explored in chapter 4 in terms of the ‘War on Terror’. I argue that the US ‘Self’, in and beyond ‘War on Terror’ discourse, is informed by traditional notions of family, gender, sexuality, and race. The role of gender, sexuality and race in the construction of national identity, specifically in terms of the formation and projection of a hypermasculine and white US ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse is central here. The ‘naturalness’ of this is asserted discursively, through processes of presupposition and predication; metaphors of family are utilised here, by the Bush administration, to establish the authority to create identities for the subjects that are represented in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. ‘Family’ also helps to illuminate the particular identity categories that are constructed as part of this ‘Self’, and the gendered and orientalist logics upon which the ‘Self’ is predicated. Specifically, I look at how gender shapes various identities that make up the US ‘Self’, for example, the ‘hypermasculine leader’, the (masculine) ‘(extra)ordinary American’, ‘nurturing maternal figure’, ‘militarised mothers’, and (feminine) ‘symbols of liberation’. In doing so, I argue that the construction of the US ‘Self’ is organised by a discourse that is gendered, heteronormative in that it assumes the naturalness of heterosexuality, and racialised, as it becomes structured around and naturalised through the ideology of the heterosexual male-headed family unit. This is important to consider in some detail as this perception of ‘Self’ organises and makes intelligible official US constructions of ‘Other’ identity categories examined in chapters 6 and 7, and the placement of people in these categories. For example, examining the gendering of the US ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse reveals that masculinity is conceived of as inextricably linked to maleness, and comprised of certain traits such as rationality, strength, which are then deployed ‘against’ the ‘Other’ in the discursive construction of reality around the Afghan and Iraq wars. 22
As I will explain in chapter 5, I see gendered orientalism operating in terms of ‘layers’, for example the function of race and gender in constructing ‘Self’ that I look at in chapters 4 and 5 become part of gendered orientalist logics that ‘War on Terror’ narratives are predicated on. These narratives are the focus of chapters 6 and 7, which are concerned with identifying specific historically contingent moments of gendered, orientalised, racialised discourses that together can be understood as ‘gendered orientalism’. Thus in chapters 6 and 7 I operationalise my understanding of discursive processes and logics of gendered orientalism in reading official US ‘War on Terror’ narratives surrounding the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In these chapters I bring together the elements of identity-making and gendered orientalist discourse examined in the preceding chapters, and look specifically at how these logics and identity categories have been deployed to make possible US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. I argue that the official rhetoric projecting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as ones that were undertaken to (and succeeded in) ‘liberating’ Afghans and Iraqis from despotic leaders who oppressed not only their own people but aimed to inflict terror and impose their world view on ‘the entire civilized world’ was based on gendered and orientalist understandings of who ‘us’ and ‘them’ are. I relate the understanding of the US ‘Self’ established in chapter 5 to the construction of a range of ‘Others’ in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The construction of the ‘Self’ is important here as it is through predicating the ‘Self’ as progressive, rational, civilised and so on, that certain peoples, places, ideas can be identified and comprehended as ‘Other’. In chapter 6 I explore this construction of the ‘Other’ in terms of the 2001 Afghan war. The al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, as the event that precipitated the ‘War on Terror’, provide the starting point for this chapter. The initial response to these attacks constituted the beginning of ‘War on Terror’ discourse, and saw the emergence of gendered and orientalist logics. The Bush administration’s responses to these attacks centered around the presupposition of a binary world of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and through predication assigned values such as ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’, ‘democracy’, ‘strength’, ‘humanity’ to ‘us’, and ‘barbarity’, ‘backwardness’, ‘violence’, ‘terror’, ‘tyranny’ and ‘repression’ to ‘them’. The world, in the initial ‘War on Terror’ discourse, was under threat from the ‘Other’ who, in being predicated as possessing uncontrolled masculinity, sought to assert an irrational hypermasculinity, constructing a broad-based and imminent threat in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. It is in this context that the narratives of gendered orientalism in which the US (and its allies) sought to ‘save’ the world from the ‘Other’ must be 23 understood. The particularly emotive narrative of ‘saving Afghan women’ demonstrates the juxtaposition of deviant and ideal masculinities in official discourse, by reference to notions of ‘Other’ femininity as passive. Although there are significant differences between the Afghan and Iraq wars in terms of planning, level of support, international legitimacy, the involvement of the UN, I argue that the basic assumptions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ I discuss in chapter 6 were not only relevant in the Iraq context but instrumental in discursively enabling this intervention. ‘War on Terror’ discourse as constructed immediately after 11 September 2001 and through the first months of the Afghan war (explored in chapter 6) constructed, naturalised, and (re)produced gendered orientalist ‘knowledge’ (for example, presuppositions, predications of identity for ‘us’ and ‘them’ the nature of the ‘threat’) without which constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the lead up to Iraq would not have been intelligible to the same effect as pre-Iraq war ‘War on Terror’ discourse allowed them to be. Although the military intervention in Iraq did not proceed for two and a half years after the September 2001 attacks, ‘War on Terror’ discourse in the lead-up to the Iraq war drew directly on early ‘War on Terror’ (including the Afghan war) discursive constructions of threat, (in)security, and masculine competition against an orientalised ‘Other’ that required military action. By constructing Hussein as another embodiment of the ubiquitous barbaric/irrational/evil ‘Other’ constructed from September 2001, a discursive link was created between the attacks of 11 September 2001, al Qaeda, and Hussein’s regime. Situating the Iraqi ‘threat’ in the context of a world divided into two fundamentally opposed ‘world’s, official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse enabled the (re)deployment of gendered orientalist logics to predicated a specific narrative of intervention. Here, the motifs of ‘oriental despotism’ and the ‘sexualised Other’ were particularly dominant. ‘Oriental despotism’ served the dual purpose of constructing the ‘Other’ as a threat to the world, but also provided an image of widespread oppression and passivity (of ordinary Iraqis not affiliated with the Ba’ath party) that ‘required’ military intervention. Those under Hussein’s rule were feminised, being positioned as victims of a powerful and ruthless authoritarian despot. Once again, the narrative of the discourse of intervention centred on competing expressions of masculinity (the hypermasculine civilised ‘Self’ against the irrational masculinity of the ‘Other’). I use the Abu Ghraib scandal to illustrate the ways in which gendered orientalist logics cannot always achieve an immutable division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and how those who contribute to ‘War on Terror’
24 discourse attempt to (re)assert the contingent, constructed, and unfixed discourses that have been instrumental in enabling two devastating wars.
25
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Chapter Two Orientalism: Theory and Contemporary Application
Chapter 2 is the first of two chapters (along with chapter 3) that establish the theoretical underpinnings that shape my research and analysis in this thesis. I am concerned in this chapter with establishing gendered orientalism as the critical lens applied to my later analysis of the ‘War on Terror’ and its interventions. ‘Gender’ and ‘orientalism’ are thus key concepts for my research, and my understanding of these as discursive impacts on my methodological choices, as chapter 3 will detail. As I explained in chapter 1, I take gender and orientalism as intertwined at the ‘top layer’ of gendered orientalist discourse, evident in the broadest logic of ‘War on Terror’ narratives that construct conflict in the world in terms of competing masculinities attached to ‘Eastern Others’ and a US ‘Self’. However, I also see gender and orientalism as logics that are not refracted through each other at every specific moment of my analysis (for example, pre-‘War on Terror’ racialised discourses in the US, discussed in chapters 4 and 5, are not specifically orientalist at all moments). To an extent, this shapes the way I approach gender and orientalism in chapters 2 and 3. As orientalism and gender studies as fields of critical enquiry have distinct lineages, I find it necessary to initially introduce these separately before considering how orientalism and gender relate to each other as discursive points. I start by exploring the concept of ‘orientalism’, explaining why it is applicable to the US ‘War on Terror’ context and considering its relevance to International Relations (IR). I then look at IR scholarship and practice as gendered, drawing on feminist (particularly poststructural) IR literature. This allows me to show how gender and orientalism function both separately and together, which reflects my ‘layered’ approach to analysis of ‘War on Terror’ discourse. The central concern of my thesis, how official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse manipulates and deploys representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ to enable military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, requires a consideration of orientalism-as- gendered. This is because it is orientalism specifically (as a critical lens) that
26 illuminates the relationship between depictions of non-‘Western’ subjects which lie at the heart of ‘War on Terror’ discourse and the actions that these discursively enable. Analysis that centralises orientalism as a way of giving meaning to the world is useful for uncovering the ways in which non-‘Western’ cultures, traditions and peoples are and have been perceived in those ‘Western’ discourses (such as ‘War on Terror’ discourse) which represent ‘East’/‘West’ through binary oppositions depicting the ‘East’ as irrational, backwards, exotic, despotic and lazy, and the ‘West’ as rational, moral and the pinnacle of civilisation. I find this to be particularly relevant to the ‘War on Terror’ given the ‘us’/‘them’ binary at the centre of this discourse. My key aim in this chapter is to develop a critical lens which can be used to reveal the centrality of racial, cultural, gender, and sexual difference to official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse and the processes of ‘Othering’ that shape it. This chapter has three main aims. Firstly, it aims to explore how orientalism has been used as a critical concept, and the chapter begins with an overview of Orientalism as a school of thought and the development of ‘orientalism’ as a critical tool.1 In doing so, the chapter reviews relevant literature on orientalism and situates my own work in the context of literature on orientalism that draws on Said’s thesis, specifying how I understand the dynamics of orientalist power as explained in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism as the discourse by which the ‘West’ constructs the ‘East’. Through providing an overview of orientalism as a concept and its development as a critical lens, the chapter aims to delineate a specific understanding of orientalism that is relevant to the contemporary US ‘War on Terror’ context. Although Said’s thesis did not constitute a detailed analysis of orientalism in the contemporary US context, I find his concept of orientalism (as a discourse by which the ‘East’ is constructed) to be useful in understanding the ways in which the non-‘Western’ ‘Other’ is constructed in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I argue that by tracing the development of orientalism as a critical tool, and examining the usefulness and shortcomings of this theoretical critique, a historically specific notion of ‘orientalism’ specific to the US experience can be developed. Secondly, I identify the aspects of the concept that are relevant to analysing official US discourse in the ‘War on Terror’, specifically the discourses constructed around the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. I then consider the relationship between gender and orientalism, and in doing so look at the insights provided by feminist work on gender in IR. This illustrates that gender
1 I use Orientalism to denote the Western school of thought that identified, researched and wrote about the ‘Orient’. The lower case ‘orientalism’ denotes the discourses and style of ‘Othering’ that Said examined, and the critical lens that uncovers this. 27 is, like orientalism, central to understanding power relations in international politics, and intrinsically linked to militarism and intervention in particular. Finally, I situate my research project in terms of existing feminist IR literature on the ‘War on Terror’.
Early orientalism Orientalism, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, referred to a field of inquiry or an academic discipline. An Orientalist was a scholar who learned the languages of and studied the literatures of Turkey, the Arab world, India and later China, Japan and other parts of Asia, and Orientalism referred to an artistic style or characteristic that was associated with the geographical East.2 The ‘Orient’ or the ‘East’ denoted the geographical places situated east of the ‘West’ and the civilisations located here (for example Islam, China, India and Japan).3 Critics of Orientalists and Orientalism argued that the Orientalists’ approaches and scholarship were shaped by a long history of interaction with the ‘East’, and in particular that the literatures produced had an intricate relationship with eighteenth and nineteenth century imperialism. Indeed, the labelling of the ‘East’ is a construction in itself – it is only when the ‘West’ is the ‘centre’ that the ‘East’ can become thus located. Similarly, the idea of the ‘West’ as a political entity is a construct that can be traced back to the interactions of European Christendom with Islam. Thus, while neither the ‘West’ nor the ‘East’ are homogenous monolithic entities, they are discursively created identities that are at the heart of orientalist discourse (and in my work I refer to the ‘West’ or the ‘East’ rather than the West and the East to reflect this constructedness). The output of this scholarly tradition was, for the large part, focused on Islam. Orientalist scholars, of Islamic studies and other civilisations, produced a body of work that often found non-‘Western’ cultures and civilisations to be inherently backward and inferior.4 These studies took a Eurocentric approach, using specific notions of societal development, cultural history, religions and their development, political philosophies, and the reading of ‘Oriental’ texts. This scholarship, in pitting the ‘East’ against the ‘West’, positioned the ‘West’ at the highest point of ‘the’ civilisational ladder. For example, Islamic
2 Alexander Lyon Macfie, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2000), p. 1. 3 Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1999), p. 2. 4 See for example studies of Orientalist scholarship such as Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of the Orient (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); Macfie, Orientalism; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Hammondsworth: Penguin, [1978] 2003); Sardar, Orientalism, chapter 2. 28
(along with Chinese and Indian) science and law did not, in Orientalist scholarship, reflect the reason and rationality that were found in ‘Western’ knowledge.5 As Gayan Prakash has pointed out, critiques of colonialism and the cultural domination that was part of colonial practice predated the mid-twentieth century debates on Orientalism.6 However, it was in the social and intellectual context of decolonisation that critiques on these topics had more impact. The political upheaval of the Iranian Revolution of 1906, the Young Turk revolution 1908, the defeat of empires during the First World War, the rise of Egyptian nationalism and Turkish Kemalists in 1919, all very powerfully demonstrated that European dominance could be challenged. The success of decolonisation movements that followed, in the late 1940s to 1960s, further contributed to a growing intellectual climate in which the first debates about Orientalist scholarship arose.7 The late 1960s saw the publication of works that offered sophisticated analysis of Orientalists and their studies. The main contributors to the debate (A. L Tibawi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Syed Hussein Alatas, and Bryan S. Turner) approached the topic from various disciplines and perspectives. Tibawi (an Islamic historian) undertook a review of contemporary Orientalist historians in which he questioned the historical accuracy and objectivity of their works, looking at their representations of, and assumptions and judgements about, Islam. Tibawi’s main contention was that many Orientalists did not, despite their claims, have an ‘objective’ approach to their objects of study, and demonstrated that Orientalist histories of Islam often contained ‘an alarming degree of speculation, guesswork, and passing of judgement for which little or no concrete evidence is produced.’8 For example, Tibawi explained that Orientalist scholars assumed that the Quran was written by Mohammed and alluded to and quoted from the Bible, and from this asserted that Islam originated from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Tibawi pointed out that these scholars failed to prove that a man who could not read or write could locate and quote from an ‘Arabic Bible’ when such a Bible did not exist. Drawing on a range of similar examples, Tibawi concluded that Orientalist writing on Islam often stated opinions as fact and then drew inferences from these ‘facts’.9 Abdel-Malek and Turner also asserted that Orientalism as a field of inquiry was highly problematic and far from ‘objective’. Like Tibawi, Turner and Abdel-
5 Sardar, Orientalism, pp. 4-5. 6 Gayan Prakash, ‘Orientalism Now’, History and Theory, 34:3 (1995), p. 200. 7 Macfie, Orientalism, p. 5. 8 A. L. Tibawi, ‘English-Speaking Orientalists: a Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism’, The Muslim World, 53:3 (1963), pp. 189, 190. 9 Ibid., pp. 191-193 (see also pp. 194-200 for more examples). 29
Malek identified that modern Orientalist thought relied heavily on often-inaccurate representations (contemporary as well as historical), and that these all ‘essentialised’ the ‘Other’; they also suggested that Orientalist assumptions were cumulative over time, displaying a level of coherence, and played a role in colonialism. Moving beyond Tibawi’s contention that Orientalism did not respect Islam, both Abdel-Malek and Turner detailed the concepts and methods that marked out Orientalism as a tool of imperialism and colonialism. Conceptually, Turner argued, Orientalism was predicated on a belief in social development and historical progress as linear, and peoples are reducible to a basic ‘essence’. Orientalists conceived of ‘Western’ ‘essence’ as reflecting the ideal type of society (democratic, industrialised) and juxtaposed this with ‘stagnant’ Arab-Islamic society.10 Turner argued that Middle Eastern societies became defined by what was ‘missing’ (for example, democratic institutions and capitalist economic systems), and Orientalists essentialised their objects of study according to these attributes.11 The Orientalist emphasis on finding the ‘essence’ of their ‘Eastern’ subjects, Abdel- Malek argued, necessitated the development of racist typologies ‘based on a real specificity, but detached from history, and, consequently, conceived of as being intangible, essential’.12 At the same time, the European (male) studied was the ‘normal man’, and resulted in an essentialised character of ‘Easterners’ being ‘stamped with an otherness’ that marked it as inherently different to ‘the West’.13 Abdel-Malek also faulted the methodology of Orientalists, arguing that their tendency to write histories of the Orient ‘completely cut off from their contemporary heirs...detached from social evolution’ meant that even the most flattering depiction of the ‘Oriental past’ painted it as ‘grandiose but extinct’.14 While some scholars might have characterised the ‘the Orient’ as once great, which might be a ‘positive’ judgment of sorts, this characterisation of ‘the East’ portrayed it as stagnant now, with ‘greatness’ located in history. For Abdel-Malek, this rendered Orientalist studies complicit in colonialism: the vast Orientalist literature was utilised by (and thus ‘profoundly tainted’) colonial administrators and missionaries in the service of empire.15 It was precisely because of these concepts and methodologies that Orientalist studies could be deployed in the service of colonialism, as the disconnect between past and present allowed Orientalists to
10 Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), Marx and the End of Orientalism, pp. 81-82. 11 Ibid., p. 82. 12 Anouar Abdel-Malek, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Diogenes, 11:44 (1963), pp. 107-108. 13 Ibid, p. 107. 14 Ibid, p. 110 (emphasis mine). 15 Ibid., p. 111. (See also analysis in Macfie, Orientalism, p. 77.), 30 ignore ‘Oriental’ contributions to knowledge, and the ‘backwardness’ of the region was seen as characteristic, something that could only be remedied by ‘Western’ intervention.16 The correlation between the rise of Orientalist studies (particularly the creation of Orientalist societies and congresses) and European imperialism supported this.17 In a similar vein, Alatas argued that Orientalism’s aim of ‘knowing’ the orient was shaped by assumptions of an inherent backwardness of the ‘Oriental subject’ that ultimately served colonialism, with orientalist representations justifying ‘civilising’ missions. Alatas’ sociological analysis of Orientalist writings by colonial administrators and travellers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines and between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries showed that ‘Orientals’ were mostly depicted as ‘lazy natives’ averse to hard work. Alatas explained, however, that this ‘knowledge’ was predicated on European colonialist assumptions. Alatas’ research illustrated that whereas some ‘Orientals’ (such as Chinese and Indian immigrants to Malaysia) found it necessary to find work in urban centres in service- roles (serving Europeans generally), the Malays mostly refused to do this. They often remained in rural areas where they provided for themselves; they did not integrate into the ‘private capitalist sector’ that the Europeans regarded as ‘real work’. The Malays’ independence in refusing to do this rendered ‘invisible’ to Orientalists and colonialists the very real work they undertook and which Alatas documented in detail. Thus, Alatas demonstrated, the normalisation of European locations and conceptions of work constructed the ‘Otherness’ of the ‘Oriental’ and blinded Orientalists and colonialists to the reality of the hardworking ‘native’.18 These first attempts to expose the Orientalist tradition concluded, despite their varied approaches, that Orientalism was not the innocuous and objective field of study it projected itself as. According to Alexander Macfie, this was the ‘product of a common sense of resentment felt by [these] critics of Orientalism regarding the extraordinary power exercised in the period of their youth by the combined forces of imperialism and capitalism.’19 Indeed, one response to critics of Orientalism characterised their work as driven by resentment at the ‘fact’ that ‘modern concepts of history, science, evolution, and all of what makes up the spiritual heritage of man, have been elaborated in the West...the East contributed nothing in any way to this labor.’20 From this perspective, Orientalism, although it was ‘at times accompanied with...Europe[ean] subjection and exploitation’, it was
16 Abdel-Malek, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, pp. 122-123, 17 Ibid., p. 104. 18 Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass, 1977), chapter 5 (esp pp. 72-75). 19 Macfie, Orientalism, p. 96. 20 Franceso Gabrieli, ‘Apology for Orientalism’, Diogenes, 13:50 (1965), pp. 133-134. 31 for the most part a ‘disinterested and impassioned search for the truth.’21 Such objections to the critique of Orientalism, however, failed to engage with Abdel- Malek and Turner’s arguments, asserting that Orientalist scholars were simply being honest and rational (in contrast to ‘Eastern’ ‘suspicion’, ‘ill-feeling’, and irrational ‘passion’).22 As this reflected the very type of thinking that the critics of Orientalism had undermined.
Said’s orientalism Together, these critiques were a sustained indictment of the problems with Orientalist scholarship, and illustrated the centrality of the production of this kind of knowledge to imperialism and colonialism. In particular, the relatively consistent reproduction of stereotypical images of an unchanging, backward, and unified ‘East’ throughout this scholarship was revealed. It was in this intellectual context Said’s well-known thesis on Orientalism was produced. Writing in the late 1970s, Said explained that his inspiration for Orientalism arose from his politicisation following the 1967 Six Day War, and the ‘rediscovery’ of his Palestinian identity. The depictions of the events of 1967 prompted Said to question the ‘unpolitical years of my education’,23 and to conclude that ‘what happened in the Arab World concerned me personally and could no longer be accepted with a passive political disengagement.’24 In particular, he pointed to the support of Israel at the expense of Palestine as enabled by Orientalist knowledge, by Palestine being ‘imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom [through Israeli or ‘Western’ labour], its [Palestinian] inhabitants inconsequential nomads.’25 Said also surveyed dominant (Western) media representations of Arabs, arguing that their depiction as primarily terrorists and sheiks, backwards and irrational, with this essentialised Arab being put forward as ‘a disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence.’26 What underscored his work at this time was the politics of power and knowledge in cultural representations of the ‘East’ by the ‘West’, and he explored this in greater detail in Orientalism. Said’s Orientalism built on ideas raised by Abdel-Malek et al, that Orientalist scholarship had been deployed in the service of imperialism and colonialism, had created stereotypical images of Islam and the ‘East’, and these had a long history.
21 Ibid., pp. 131-132 (emphasis in original). 22 Ibid., pp. 133, 136. 23 Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 293. 24 Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. xiv. 25 Edward W. Said, ‘The Arab Portrayed’, in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 5. 26 Ibid. 32
In Said’s conception, Orientalism had a great reach, not only in terms of geographical space, but also in terms of time, spanning a great many eras. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Said argued that Orientalism became not just a way of thinking that affected the scholarly production of works, but all areas of European (later ‘Western’) life – social, religious, intellectual, economic and political arenas were shaped by ‘orientalism’. Writing Orientalism as a critique of French and British colonial projects in Arab states, Said examined scholarly, fiction, and travel writings and their representations of this ‘Orient’. Ultimately, Said argued, ‘Orientalism’ established binary oppositions (such as irrational/rational, primitive/developed) that constructed the ‘East’ as irrational, backwards, exotic, despotic and lazy, while the ‘West’ was civilised, rational, moral and Christian. These representations served to not only ‘other’ the Orient, but also represented the ‘West’ self-referentially – the ‘West’ was everything the ‘East’ was not. Said argued that over time, this type of ‘knowledge’ about the ‘East’ and the construction of an ‘Eastern reality’ produced a tradition, which then consistently influenced all further learning and knowledge about the Orient.27 This tradition is then ‘orientalist’. For Said, orientalism had three main, and inter-related, definitional component parts. The most basic definition of orientalism refers to anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient. Secondly, and related to the first meaning, orientalism refers to a way of thinking that is based on an ‘ontological and epistemological distinction’28 between ‘East’ and ‘West’. That is, in the orientalists’ epistemological and ontological view, the geographical space located to the east (and the peoples and cultures located in it) is assumed by the orientalist to be inherently distinct or different from the ‘West’. This orientalist epistemology entails a ‘way of knowing’ that, because it is constantly reinforced, is assumed to be ‘true’ rather than constructed. Thus, Said asserts that the separation of ‘East’ and ‘West’ is ‘less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human production’.29 For Said, this distinction formed the basis of a range of theorising about, social descriptions of, and political accounts on ‘the Orient’ (its peoples’ customs, cultures, history, future – its ‘collective mind’). This way of thinking – placing the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ in opposition to each other – also served the purpose of creating and strengthening a ‘Western’ identity that was superior to that of the ‘East’, by representing itself
27 Said, Orientalism, pp. 2-3, and Chapter 1:‘The Scope of Orientalism’ (these points are made throughout the chapter, particularly pp. 40-46, 63-73, 92, 95). 28 Ibid., p. 2. 29 Edward W. Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Cultural Critique, 1 (1985), p. 90. 33 against the Orient, by imagining the Orient as an alternative ‘Self’. Thirdly, the term has a more historical meaning – orientalism is a Western institution that interacts with the Orient. This institution (which Said argues existed from the at least the late eighteenth century) managed the ‘East’ – by ‘making statements about it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.’30 These omnipresent and all- embracing interactions with the ‘East’ formed a ‘style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.’31 This, for Said, was crucial to understanding the ways in which colonialism functioned – that colonialism was not only justified by orientalism, but enabled it to occur. Colonialism’s power, for Said, was not just located in its economic, political, and administrative institutions but in orientalism’s power as an apparatus of knowledge. Central to this is Said’s notion of orientalism as a cultural and ideological concept bound to a structure of political domination. Orientalism was a mode of discourse that utilised ‘supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.’32 It was Said’s conceptualisation of orientalism as a ‘discourse’ drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of this marked his work from previous critiques of Orientalism.33 A more detailed explanation of my own understanding of (Foucauldian) discourse will be undertaken in chapter 3, but it is worth outlining some key points about ‘discourse’ here, in terms of Said’s orientalism. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse, Said saw knowledge, in the context of orientalism, as a series of representations which did not reflect the ‘intrinsic’ meaning of the ‘thing’ represented, but which were shaped by the person who created the representation. These representations are never ‘objective’, in that they are not representative of a knowable ‘truth’, but are the outcome of particular, historically-specific power relations. ‘Western’ knowledge of the ‘East’ was thus the outcome of its unequal power relationship with the ‘East’. Here, Said draws upon Foucault’s understanding of power as productive, and of power and knowledge as intrinsically linked to (and productive of) one another.34 In this conception, power is not independent of ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ but rather validates certain knowledge as truth. In this sense, discourses are ‘practices that systemically form the objects of
30 Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 2. 33 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 177-178; Sardar, Orientalism, p. 67. 34 Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 34 which we speak’, and it is in this practice that power lies.35 The importance of imperialism to orientalism is based largely on Said’s deployment of Foucault’s power/knowledge nexus in Orientalism. Said focused on fusing critiques from different academic fields to create a ‘multidisciplinary cultural analysis’ through which he argued that the ‘West’ employs a discursive construction along Foucault’s power/knowledge axis that renders orientalism a form of control.36 In this sense, Said argued that the ‘West’ had a particularly potent discourse about the ‘East’, a discourse in which certain powerful ideas about the ‘East’ could be sustained as ‘fact’. For Said, then, knowledge and power are inextricable from each other. That is, it is ‘knowing’ that gives people, groups, and institutions power over others; an individual or group has power when it can establish its version of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ over others’.37 The power to represent and write authoritatively about the ‘East’ inherent in this discursive control was central to orientalist representations. Said concluded that, as knowledge represents power (for example over the ability to create, categorise, and select information), the ability of the ‘West’ to create and recreate the ‘East’ through binaries that implied the superiority of the ‘West’ and the inferiority of the ‘East’ led to the conditions necessary for imperialism. As a ‘fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West’, orientalism’s authority lay in its very ability to construct the ‘Other’ by ‘interacting’ with it (therefore being able to ‘know’ it).38 This was actually undermined by the texts produced, which were built upon earlier writings that, as Said and the earlier critics of orientalism argued, were themselves based on suspect concepts and methodologies. The connection between the knowledge that orientalism ‘assumes’ (or presupposes) and its material output (the texts created) is illustrated through the idea of ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ orientalism. Latent orientalism refers to the assumptions of the Orient as separate from the ‘West’ and inferior in its backwardness, passivity, despotism, judged according to the terms of and in comparison to the ‘West’. Latent orientalism is almost ‘unconscious’ and finds expression in manifest orientalism, which refers to orientalist knowledge produced in various literatures and art. Whilst the form orientalism (the particular tropes, stereotypes for example) differs over time, and different authors represent the Orient in differing ways, the influence of latent orientalism’s assumption of a
35 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 54. 36 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 67. 37 Pal Ahluwalia and Bill Ashcroft, Edward Said (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 56, 58, 62-63. 38 Ibid., p.204. 35 division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ for example will influence all these works.39 Said’s later examination of imperialism in Culture and Imperialism noted the vital role of culture in imperial control, building on Orientalism. Imperialism (for Said, a set of assumptions justifying and supporting control and domination over peoples) was shaped and fuelled by cultural artefacts (novels, operas) that could be used in support of colonialism, as a specific way of dominating the ‘Other’ through settlements in its geographical space.40 As Said explained, the authority of imperial ideology had in this way become embedded in cultural production and culture thus is ‘the vital, informing and invigorating counterpart to the economic and political machinery that…stands at the centre of imperialism.’41
Critiques, limitations, and application of Said’s work to this thesis Said’s work was heavily criticised by those whose work constituted the ‘contemporary Orientalism’ he was so scathing of. For example, early reviews of Said’s work, in particular those written by Bernard Lewis and Ernest Gellner, focused on his politicisation of Orientalist scholarship, and they defended the ‘objective’ nature of this work.42 Lewis characterised Orientalism as a neutral discipline producing impartial scholarship, and accused Said of ‘poisoning’ Orientalism’s true nature and aims.43 Gellner, too, held a strong belief in the possibility of ‘disinterested scholarship’ that the critics of Abdel-Malek et al (outlined above) had raised in response to those earlier critiques of the Orientalist tradition.44 However, as Richard Fox notes, this is representative of an epistemological stance that is ‘unreflective’ in its refusal ‘to budge from the idea of a value-free scholarship’.45 These critiques are fundamentally opposed to Said’s explicit rejection of the possibility of a neutral scholarship, reflecting an epistemology that is fundamentally inconsistent with the poststructuralist approach I adopt. As such they hold little value in terms of developing Said’s thesis for my own research. As I explained in chapter 1 (and explore in more detail in chapter 3), I subscribe to the perspective that it is impossible to divorce knowledge from power, and following
39 Ibid., pp. 205-209. 40 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 5-14. 41 Edward W. Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’ in Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson and Edward W. Said (eds.), Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 72. 42 Prakash, ‘Orientalism Now’, p. 201. 43 Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Bernard Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’, New York Review of Books, June 24 1982, pp. 49-50. 44 Ernest Gellner, ‘The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1993. 45 Richard G. Fox, ‘East of Said’ in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), p. 145. 36 from this, impossible to identify an objective ‘truth’ or ‘facts’ to which meaning is intrinsic and pre-given and which can simply be ‘uncovered’. As such I follow Said and those postcolonial (and poststructural) scholars who consider there to be no value-free representation of the ‘East’ (or anywhere else), be it in popular culture, media, or academic scholarship, and reject ‘ “universal” standards of truth and objectivity’.46 More relevant for my research is criticism of the (at times) ahistorical nature of Said’s work, and relatedly, the scope of Orientalism and its applicability to contemporary contexts. On the one hand, Orientalism provides an innovative way to consider the manner in which ‘the East’ is represented, that is, the discursive construction of the ‘East’ by the ‘West’ along a Foucauldian power/knowledge axis. However, as Ziauddin Sardar points out, Orientalism is at once ‘too limited and too general...it transcends time and history’, thus limiting its explanatory power.47 Aijaz Ahmad attributes this to Said’s conception of orientalism as spanning antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity. David Kopf agrees the problem lies partly in the broad scope of Said’s work, but also argues that it arises from his conception of orientalism as an idea or construct, rather than a ‘concrete historical reality.’48 Kopf notes that by, at times, avoiding grounding theory in a historical context gives Orientalism a certain provocativeness that ‘may be the only effective way’ to demonstrate the power of ‘Western’ representations of the ‘East’.49 Still, the issue of abstraction must be addressed in order to successfully apply ‘orientalism’ as a concept to my research. Talal Asad, whilst supportive of the observations Said made regarding imperialism, colonialism, and knowledge, suggests that Said’s analysis should have been more strongly rooted ‘in the particular conditions within which this authoritative discourse was historically produced’.50 As Homi Bhabha argues, orientalist knowledge and discourse is constantly changing and shifting according to the contexts in which it operates, making orientalist knowledge ambivalently constituted. As each historical, cultural, and geographical location affects its deployment, readings of ‘orientalism’ must be grounded in specific historical frameworks.51 The historicisation of orientalism has been examined most often in terms of British colonialism and India. A brief overview of this body of work illustrates that
46 Prakash, ‘Orientalism Now’, p. 203. 47 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 70. 48 David Kopf, ‘Hermeneutics Versus History’, Journal of Asian Studies, 39:3 (1980), pp. 496-499. 49 Ibid., p. 498. 50 Talal Asad, ‘Review of Orientalism’, English Historical Review, 95:376 (1980), p. 649. 51 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 71. 37
Said’s thesis can be successfully historicised. Although Said dealt to an extent with British texts, writers, and travellers to India, B. J. Moore-Gilbert criticised what he saw as Said’s assumption that orientalism ‘varied little between the regions upon which it operated’.52 In his own work, Moore-Gilbert modified Said’s conception of orientalism to account for ambivalent as well as derogatory representations, and the shifts he identified in Anglo-Indian (orientalist) discourses (for example between ‘Othering’ Muslims and ‘Othering’ Hindus).53 Richard Fox and Partha Chatterjee examine the role of orientalism in the formation of the ideology of British colonialism, concluding that this is based on the binary oppositions of ‘East’/’West’, civilised/barbaric, and ahistorical constructions of the ‘Other’ as backward that were central to Said’s Orientalism.54 Such colonial and imperialist constructions of Indians, Ronald Inden points out in a re-evaluation of his own work, have been possible because of the power/knowledge axis at the heart of Orientalism. For Inden, ‘Indological discourse’, like Said’s orientalism, reflected assumed essential differences between Indian civilisation and the Hindu religion and the progressive and rational ‘essence’ of ‘Western’ civilisation. But, in a similar vein to Moore- Gilbert, Inden illustrated that this was also shaped by historical events specific to the British/Indian experience of colonialism.55 These scholars, in drawing on Said’s analysis of representations in orientalist thought to inform their own historicised analyses of British colonialism, demonstrate that Said’s work can be useful in understanding how ‘Western’ representations of certain groups at certain times can be considered orientalist. But Ahmad argues that the scope of Orientalism, intended to illustrate the span of orientalist discourse, also undermines Said’s projection of orientalism as a highly cohesive discourse. For Ahmad and Macfie this broad scope implies that orientalism is a homogenous discourse existing in a unified ‘Western mind’.56 Historical nuance and specificity are to an extent lost in Orientalism, which tends to overlook the range of attitudes revealed in ‘Western’ texts on the ‘East’. Reina Lewis explains that cultural production in colonial France and Britain involved both those for and against imperialism contributing to the construction of orientalist discourse.57 Ahmad and John Mackenzie agree that constructions of the ‘East’ by
52 B. J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ (London: Croom-Helme, 1986), p. 1. 53 Ibid, pp. 2-8. 54 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Their Own Words? An Essay for Edward Said’, in Sprinker, Edward Said, pp. 194- 195; Fox, ‘East of Said’, p. 144-145. 55 Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies, 20:3 (1986). 56 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’, Studies in History, 7:1 (1991), p. 141. 57 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 3-5. 38 the ‘West’ have been both negative and positive, and themselves differentiated along class and gender lines. This complicates Said’s assertion of a ‘unified interest’ in orientalist discourse,58 illustrating what Lisa Lowe calls ‘an uneven matrix’ located ‘across different cultural and historical sites.’59 However, this does not render Said’s thesis unusable. The Foucauldian understanding of power that inspires Said’s understanding of orientalism, conceives of discourses as changing and unstable by their very nature. Inclusive of fractured and differing representations, this does not make them any less powerful. Indeed, the very nature of orientalism as a discourse means that there is power over the ‘East’ in the very act of ‘knowing’ it. Said’s concepts of latent and manifest orientalism are helpful in resolving the issue implied homogeneity in Orientalism. Whereas manifest orientalism is expressed in varied and different ways (mirroring the complexity and contradictions of ‘Western subjects’), the ‘unity’ of orientalism lies in the latent structure which gives it ‘stability and durability’; rather than making manifest orientalism homogenous, the latent structure (outlined earlier) informs manifest expressions that are repetitious and consistent in terms of their ‘will-to-power over the Orient.’60 As Meyda Yeğenoğlu explains, it is precisely the ‘variations, differences, deviations, multivalences, and paradoxes’ articulated in different historical periods that allow orientalism to permeate so much of ‘Western’ knowledge about the ‘East’.61 And, as Sardar asserts, while positive representations do add to the richness and complexity of orientalist discourses, they do not preclude the existence of a relatively consistent discourse. This is particularly so in terms of the binary conception of ‘East’ and ‘West’, reflected in and built upon through continuous interaction of ideas in ‘Western’ thought and scholarship, that allow many of the assumptions of orientalism to be transmitted across geographies and time periods.62 In this sense it is helpful to conceive of a range of orientalist discourses, multiple ‘orientalisms’ each of which are ‘internally complex and unstable’ because of the diversity of participants in the construction of the discourse.63 An understanding of orientalism that reflects this can show the ways in which the power relations of orientalist discourse impact on and function in different historical contexts.
58 Ahmad, ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’, pp. 141, 150; John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 9, 208-210. 59 Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 5. 60 Said, Orientalism, pp. 202-203, 206-207, 222. 61 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 70. 62 Sardar, Orientalism, pp. 71-72, 77. 63 Lowe, Critical Terrains, p. 5. 39
As such, I consider Said’s work to offer a useful starting point for developing a critical lens through which to read official US ‘War on Terror’ representations as discourse. I take orientalism to be a system of representations that produces, renders intelligible, and makes ‘fact’ of specific (categories such as ‘East’, ‘Arab’, ‘Muslim’, ‘West’, ‘civilised’, ‘barbaric’, organising them according to binary logics and in hierarchical ways. Particularly important here is the power/knowledge nexus at the heart of orientalism, that constructs the ‘Other’ as an object, as something to be ‘known’ rather than capable of self-definition. This aspect of orientalism is crucial to my understanding of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse; the glaring lack of ‘Other’ voices in this discourse (particularly ones that are contradictory to dominant representations and narratives) points to the imbalance of power to represent and create ‘knowledge’ that is at the heart of Said’s work. I do not take orientalism as discourse that has a unified intent producing homogenous texts over varying eras and geographical locations, as this would be to essentialise the ‘West’ as much as orientalism essentalises the ‘East’. Rather, I find value in understanding orientalism as a discourse, in constructing the ‘East’, exercises power in representing ‘Eastern Others’ and often displays a level of coherence in presenting ‘East’ as oppositional (and often inferior) to the ‘West’ (for example in terms of culture, development, politics). In reading orientalism into a very specific set of historical moments in the ‘War on Terror’, I take Said’s orientalism as a model for demonstrating how to read discourses that claim to ‘know’ the ‘East’, and their use of racialised and gendered assumptions along an ‘East’/ ‘West’ binary (which have at times been complicit in creating the conditions for (imperial) interventions). I do this because the use of the ‘us’/’them’ binary in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse and the division of the world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (some notable examples being the 11 September 2001 Address to the Nation, the 2002 National Security Strategy, and the ‘Axis of Evil’ speech), must be read using a critical lens that problematises these categories (‘us’ ‘them’ ‘good’ ‘evil’) and recognises how they might be made intelligible (through a repository of images and assumed ‘knowledge’ about the ‘East’). I do not assume that the contemporary US discourse that I examine in chapters 5, 6, and 7 simply ‘inherited’ the orientalist discourse of, for example, the British colonial era. Said, in a 1995 afterword to Orientalism, clarified that the discourse was ever-changing, that the identity of ‘self’/’West’ and ‘other’/’East’ was not static but rather an ‘historical, social, intellectual and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.’64 That orientalism is not static
64 Said, Orientalism, p. 332. 40 is what gives it value as a concept which can be anchored to specific historical contexts. My own use of orientalism recognises this, and my reading of orientalism in the ‘War on Terror’ then requires the demonstration of the applicability of orientalism to the US context, to which I now turn.
‘American orientalism’ As outlined earlier in this chapter, Said’s thesis has been applied to geographical and historical settings that were not the focus of Orientalism (or not dealt with in great detail), by taking the centrality of the power/knowledge nexus that underlies orientalism and historicising it for specific contexts. Scholarship on the US and orientalism has been scarce, however, and can be largely attributed to its perceived inapplicability to the US.65 My research, with its focus on the official US discourse of the ‘War on Terror’, in demonstrating that orientalism can be applied to the US, requires some elaboration on what ‘American orientalism’ might look like, and how it has developed. In Orientalism Said briefly examined US involvement in the Middle East after 1945, arguing that because US imperialism ‘displaced’ the French and British empires, the US inherited the orientalist system which constructed Arabs/Muslims as violent, irrational, and devious.66 In Culture and Imperialism, Said argued that the ‘imperial experience’ of France, Britain and the US ‘has a unique coherence and special cultural centrality.’67 Andrew Rotter rightly points out that there is a uniquely American experience of the Middle East that cannot be reduced to ‘little more than an inheritance from Europeans’.68 Others such as Richard Bulliet take issue with the concept of ‘American orientalism’ arguing that the US’ ‘Others’ are not found in the Middle East, but rather domestically, in terms of the US experience with slavery.69 However, the ‘Othering’ of African Americans does not preclude orientalism, which may co-exist with a range of mechanisms of ‘Othering’. Reading of orientalism in narratives and representations can still be a powerful explanatory tool for specific moments in the US context. In order to demonstrate the relevance of orientalism to US engagements in international politics, especially in the greater Middle East, it is necessary to consider the body of work exploring the manifestations of orientalist
65 Andrew J. Rotter, ‘Saidism Without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History’, American Historical Review 105:4 (2000), pp. 1205-1206. 66 Said, Orientalism, p. 285; Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 55. 67 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxii. 68 Rotter, ‘Saidism without Said’, pp. 1207-1208. 69 Richard Bulliet, quoted in Christian Henderson, ‘Academic Reflects on US Foreign Policy; Explains Development of American Thinking Since Second World War’, Daily Star (Lebanon), 19 March 2004, available at
70 Sardar, Orientalism; Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and The Middle East Since 1945, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000, (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2001); Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (eds.), The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Fuad Sha'ban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought (Durham, N.C: Acorn Press, 1991); Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2009); Dag Tuastad, ‘Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s)’, Third World Quarterly, 24:4 (2003); Mohammed Samiei, ‘Neo-Orientalism? The Relationship Between the West and Islam in Our Globalised World’, Third World Quarterly, 31:7 (2010). 71 Sardar, Orientalism, pp. 54-55, 77-106. 72 Ibid., p. 55. 73 Edward W. Said, Covering Islam (New York: Vintage, 1997). 42 thesis. The immutable binary logics underscoring Huntington’s work have also been reflected in the works of other ‘popular experts’ such as Daniel Pipes.74 These texts have a broad impact: as Geeta Chowdhry argues, the issues raised in them ‘reflect popular and often official US government sentiments about security policies, broadly understood’, reproducing orientalist binaries.75 Orientalist representations have become particularly important in providing ‘knowledge’ of Islam/Arabs because, as Mohammed Samiei writes, Islam has ‘moved ever closer to the centre of world politics’, becoming an explanatory tool for events in the Muslim and Arab world.76 For example, the formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) composed largely of Arab states was read as a challenge to ‘Western’ domination, and linked to the ‘resurgence’ of ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘militant’ Islam by both mainstream media and political authors.77 In popular discourse, ‘Islam’ and by extension, Arabs, are seen as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-‘Western’, and dishonest. These are elements of what Dag Tuastad calls ‘new barbarism’, a contemporary expression of orientalism that, in glossing over historically, politically, and economically specific explanations for events (especially violent events) in the Middle East, imply that violence, corruption, and irrationality are embedded in ‘Other’ cultures. Similarly, the homogenisation of an ‘Islamist terrorist enemy’ in mainstream political and media discourses ignores the specificities of movements such as al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, and paints them as ‘enemies of the civilised world’ driven by irrational hatred rather than motivated by (at least some measure of) logic linked to challenging unsatisfactory social or political conditions.78 Such representations and narratives, conflating ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, display the hallmarks of orientalism in the reproduction of a fundamental division between ‘East’ and ‘West’.79 They legitimate presuppositions which, Samiei argues, are built on the knowledge/power nexus of orientalism, as the ‘production of enemy imaginaries contributes to legitimising continuous colonial economic or political projects.’80 The power (as discursive authority) of US ‘War on Terror’ discourse depends, materially and culturally, on certain ‘knowledge’ (such as representations and
74 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 82-85; Tuastad, ‘Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis’, pp. 594- 595. 75 Geeta Chowdhry, ‘Edward Said and Contrapuntal Reading: Implications for Critical Interventions in International Relations’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 36:1 (2007), p. 108. 76 Samiei, ‘Neo-Orientalism?’, p. 1148. 77 Sardar, Orientalism, pp. 81-82. 78 Christina Hellmich, ‘Creating the Ideology of Al Qaeda: From Hypocrites to Salafi–Jihadists’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 31:2 (2008), pp. 111–24; Samiei, ‘Neo-Orientalism?’, p. 1149. 79 Tuastad, ‘Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis’. 80 Samiei, ‘Neo-Orientalism?’, p. 1149. 43 narratives) of the ‘East’. It is the continuity of orientalist representations, narratives, and images and the binary division that underwrites them that allows George W. Bush to speak of a ‘them’ located ‘over there’, and for this to be intelligible. As Zachary Selden explains, while it is true that political leaders play a role in shaping public opinion, ‘it seems extremely unlikely in an age of instant access to information from a variety of sources that the American public could be so held in sway by its leaders if the message those leaders delivered was not in line with their basic sentiments and opinions.’81 In this sense, it is not just that US discourse manipulates and deploys (and has mastery over) orientalist representation, but that the racist, gendered, and sexist representational practices that are deeply embedded in mainstream US discourse enables the currency of orientalist knowledge about the ‘East’ (specifically, the Arab/Islamic ‘Other) in the US context. That orientalist knowledge, images, and representations are discernible in US engagements with the ‘East’ has been established in works by Michel Feher, Douglas Little, Melani McAlister, Fuad Sha’ban, and Tuastad.82 Fuad Sha’ban, for example, examines the US’ engagements with the ‘East’, finding mostly ‘negative’ representations of ‘Eastern Others’ in his research on the development of ‘American orientalism’ through the political and cultural texts of the first settlers, to the more active investigation of the ‘Other’ that followed the establishment of the American Oriental Society in 1842.83 More recent representations, Little argues, illustrate that the racist practices of orientalist ‘Othering’ are deeply embedded in contemporary US political and cultural discourses. Little’s review of US-Middle East relations shows that mainstream books, films and news reports, generally portray the Arab/Islamic world as a malevolent, anti-‘Western’, ‘Other’.84 Jack Shaheen’s seminal study on the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in American popular films as violent, irrational, and dangerous lends weight to this assessment.85 The (re)production of the ‘Othered Muslim/Arab’ that occurs in and through the creation of knowledge in academic scholarship, media reports, ‘expert’ advice, popular culture, and political commentary is both dependent on and validates assumptions that then become part of everyday language. For example, ‘Islam’ is not presented as changing, complex or diffuse, but rather is understood as unified and homogenous, ‘from which it is a small step to allude to ‘the darkness and
81 Zachary Selden, ‘Neoconservatives and the American Mainstream’, Policy Review, 124 (2004), p. 38. 82 Michel Feher, ‘Robert Fisk’s Newspapers’ Theory and Event, 5:4 (2001); Little, American Orientalism; McAlister, Epic Encounters; Sha'ban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought; Tuastad, ‘Neo- Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis’. 83 Sha'ban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought, pp. 59, 195. 84 Little, American Orientalism, p. 314. 85 Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs. 44 strangeness of Muslims, Arabs, their culture, religion etc.’ ’86 Michel Feher points out the tendency to deny Middle Easterners agency by defining them almost entirely in terms of dominant ‘Western’ assumptions of the Middle Eastern and Muslim ‘Other’ as backward and unable to progress. He divides ‘American orientalism’ into two manifestations, both based on such constructions. The first expression of this contemporary orientalism ‘Others’ Muslim Middle Easterners and perceives them as either moderates who long to emulate America, or fanatics who envy America and express this in acts of violence and hate. The second type of neo-orientalism regards all anti-Americanism as an articulation of the effects of US imperialism on Middle Easterners. Common to both interpretations is the distinct lack of political agency of the Middle Eastern subjects and their precise historical localisation.87 Moreover, as Feher points out, it appears that they ‘have no agenda, no strategy of their own, only emotions inspired by America.’88 For Little, the expression of orientalism in elite politics in the US is found in ‘a tendency to underestimate the peoples of the region’, and to ‘overestimate America’s ability to make a bad situation better [in Muslim countries and the Middle East]’ by virtue of the superiority of American civilisation.89 In practical terms, he argues, this has translated into US administrations (at times) attempting to remake the Middle East in the image of the US, viewing Arab and Iranian nationalism as ‘manifestations of oil-inspired economic arrogance, anti-Semitic rabble-rousing, or oriental affinity for revolutionary despotism of the sort made infamous by the Kremlin.’90 The ethnocentric character of US orientalism, Little argues, means that US security thinking has been shaped by false assumptions about the Middle East, its culture, and politics. For Little, ‘American orientalism’ appears to be the result of naive misunderstandings that taint a genuine desire to ‘help’ the peoples of the Middle East. A more critical approach reveals that there is more to ‘American orientalism’ than this. Little’s belief that US orientalism bears a significant difference from that of European imperialists’ in terms of a ‘greater appreciation of the complexities of the Muslim world’91 is misguided in that it mistakenly takes the power of orientalist representations to be assessable in the degree of overt racism they bear. Tuastad’s analysis of US encounters in the Middle East builds more directly on Said’s conception of orientalism as discourse than Little’s. Tuastad
86 Ahluwalia and Ashcroft, Edward Said, p. 9, quoting Edward W. Said. 87 Feher, ‘Robert Fisk’s Newspapers’, par [42]. 88 Ibid. 89 Little, American Orientalism, p. 314. 90 Ibid., p. 309. 91 Ibid., p. 314. 45 argues that dominant images of the Arab or Muslim ‘Other’ focus on violence and present this as a result of traits embedded in local cultures. The production of such images constructs the ‘Other’ as an ‘enemy’, and contributes towards legitimising the need to control or police the region. Tuastad, like earlier critics of eighteenth and nineteenth century orientalism, identifies these images as drawing on contradictory notions of the ‘Other’ as both too weak to progress politically (for example citing the lack of democracy in the region) and yet strong enough to pose a threat. In this sense, the power of the colonial practice of employing binaries of ‘civilised West’/’barbaric East’ has been harnessed in the service of contemporary imperialist practices.92 The power of these binaries is drawn from their dispersal through mainstream US culture. It is the ubiquitous nature of representations and images that gives orientalism its power, as Melani McAlister illustrates in her study of the relationship between contemporary American culture and foreign policy in the Middle East. McAlister demonstrates the links between policy, popular culture, and academia, in terms of constructions of the Middle East. She shows that the complexity of foreign policy making, and the role that culture plays in it, means that the ‘national interest’ is constructed not just by State Department officials but also through public opinion, media, and varied lobby groups, resulting in multilayered political interests in the Middle East. The significance of cultural production in making these interests is emphasised by McAlister, who illustrates that popular cultural representations of the Middle East (such as news reports, films and popular novels) have had bearing on the perceptions that Americans have of their own national interests. The politics/culture nexus is especially important in the US context because of the considerable role that cultural representation has played in making the Middle East comprehensible to Americans in the period after 1945 when American political, economic and military power expanded in the Middle East. Policy makers themselves are products of culture, and are not immune to it.93 Orientalism has continued relevance to the US context in terms of the significant impact academia and think tanks have had on US foreign policy making. A range of scholarship and research impacts on how foreign policy is formulated, providing theoretical and academic justifications that function to legitimate knowledge that naturalises orientalist presuppositions about the ‘East’. Academics such as Fouad Ajami, Samuel Huntington, and Bernard Lewis, who influence key
92 Tuastad, ‘Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis’, pp. 591-594. 93 McAlister, Epic Encounters. 46 political figures such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, draw on orientalist constructions of Muslims and Arabs.94 Ajami has argued that the US ought to ‘liberate’ people in ‘those Arab lands’ by force95 and, disturbingly, regards corrupt regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as being accurate expressions of an ‘Arab/Muslim mind’.96 Lewis, a key contemporary orientalist,97 called for the removal of Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and the influence his work has had on key members of the Bush administration in particular should not be underestimated given he participated in meetings on the Middle East with the Bush administration in the aftermath of September 11,98 and Wolfowitz and Cheney have publicly praised his work.99 Wolfowitz for example has stated that Lewis’ work ought to be used to ‘guide us where we will go next [in the Middle East] to build a better world for generations to come’.100 Such influential academics, and the think thanks that many of them join, have a significant impact on foreign policy making.101 My understanding of orientalism, based on the discussion thus far, is that although manifest orientalism is complex, changing, and fractured, its latent ‘structure’ both shapes ‘the West’ and enables ‘the West’ to construct and know ‘the East’ (simultaneously constructing a superior ‘West’ in opposition to this ‘East’). This repository of knowledge, then, influences the way that we understand descriptors such as ‘Islam’ and ‘Arab’, by providing a long-established set of assumptions, descriptions, and representations that come to be seen as authoritative knowledge about the ‘East’. I now develop my understanding of the discursive connection between gender and orientalism, tracing scholarship that problematises gender and race in IR and global politics.
94 Benjamin Isakhan, ‘ “Oriental Despotism” and the Democratisation of Iraq in The Australian’, Transformations, 16 (2008); Iyanatul Islam, ‘The Political Economy of Islamophobia and the Global Discourse on Islam’, Regional Outlook Paper No. 3 (Brisbane: Griffith Australia Institute, 2005), p. 5; Said, ‘Orientalism Once More’, p. 872; Adam Shatz, ‘The Native Informant’, The Nation, 28 April 2003, available at
Race and gender in International Relations and the ‘War on Terror’ Feminist and postcolonial IR scholars have pointed out that mainstream IR fails to problematise (and in doing so ‘silences’) the politics and power inherent in constructing and deploying racialised and gendered categories, instead taking these for granted by largely ignoring how shape and are deployed in global politics.102 Shampa Biswas, Priya Chacko, Chowdhry, Branwen G. Jones, Sankaran Krishna, Sheila Nair, L. H. M. Ling, Meghana Nayak, Prakash, Julian Saurin, Eric Selbin, and Robert Vitalis, amongst others, have explored the ways in which international relations (as a discipline and as practice) has been constructed along racial lines, illustrating that the practice of global politics is often predicated on racialised assumptions and related power relations that are often overlooked or obscured in much scholarly research.103 ‘Race’ does at times feature in IR in terms of, for example, issues around the ‘third world’ in global politics and contemporary
102 See for example, Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1999), chapter 3; Anna M. Agathangelou and Heather M. Turcotte ‘Postcolonial Theories and Challenges to ‘First World-ism’ ’, in Laura J. Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 44-45; Roxanne Lynn Doty, ‘The Bounds of 'Race' in International Relations’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies 22:3 (1993), p. 444; Branwen G. Jones, ‘Introduction: International Relations, Eurocentrism, and Imperialism’, in Branwen G. Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), p. 10; Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, in Jones, Decolonizing International Relations; L. H. M. Ling, ‘Hypermasculinity on the Rise, Again: A Response to Fukuyama on Women and World Politics’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2:1 (1999); Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Situating Race in International Relations: The Dialectics of Civilizational Security in American Immigration’, in Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 56-57; V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues: Dilemmas in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (St Leonards, NSW: 1996); Nicola Short and Helen Kambouri, ‘Ambiguous Universalism: Theorising Race/Nation/Class in International Relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 13:3 (2010); Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1, 4-9; J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 3-6; J. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 21-27; J. Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg (eds.), Feminism and International Relations: Conversations About the Past, Present, and Future (Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 6-7; Robert Vitalis, ‘The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 29:2 (2000), pp. 332- 333; Gillian Youngs, ‘Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender Are Essential to Understanding the World ‘We’ Live In’, International Affairs, 80:1 (2004). 103 Shampa Biswas, ‘The New “Cold War”: Secularism, Orientalism, and Postcoloniality’, in Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations; Priya Chacko, ‘Modernity, Orientalism and the Construction of International Relations’, in Proceedings of the Oceanic Conference on International Studies (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia: 2004); Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations; Doty, ‘The Bounds of ‘Race’ in International Relations’; Jones, ‘Introduction’; Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’; L. H. M. Ling, ‘The Monster Within: What Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter Can Tell Us About Terror and Desire in a Post-9/11 World’, positions, 12:2 (2004); L. H. M. Ling, ‘Global Passions within Global Interests: Race, Gender, and Culture in Our Postcolonial Order’, in Ronen Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories (New York: Routledge, 2000); Meghana Nayak and Eric Selbin, Decentring International Relations (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010); Julian Saurin, ‘International Relations as the Imperial Illusion; or, the Need to Decolonize IR’, in Jones, Decolonizing International Relations; Vitalis, ‘The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture’; Robert Vitalis, ‘Birth of a Discipline’, in David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (eds.), Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 48 debates on democratisation and humanitarian intervention.104 But, Doty argues, the positivist underpinnings of mainstream IR obscure the ‘politics, exclusion and power’ inherent in the very concept of ‘race’, which remains unproblematised and ‘neutral category’.105 As Krishna explains, the problem is ‘not that race disappears from IR’ altogether, but that it ‘serves as the crucial epistemic silence around which the discipline is written and coheres.’106 IR’s traditional focus on ‘theory building’, ‘rational’ scholarship, state actors, sovereignty, and order107 becomes a ‘screen’ that ‘rationalizes and elides’108 what Chowdhry and Nair call the ‘status quo’ of IR in which racialised (as well as gendered and classed) hierarchies are naturalised and reproduced.109 Chacko, through examining the intellectual heritage of the discipline that has shaped it as a discourse that ‘justifies and perpetuates the hegemony of the West’, seeks to illustrate the orientalist logics at play here.110 Understanding of the specifically orientalist nature of international relations is necessary in analysing the ‘War on Terror’ as a discourse that constructs and deploys representations of and knowledge about the peoples of the ‘East’ (understood here as the Middle East/Arabs/Islam). IR, as a discipline and discourse, is inextricably linked to its birth in and continued growth alongside the idea of ‘Western modernity’, which in turn is constituted by its encounters with colonialism.111 As Saurin points out, (Western) IR has privileged a particular ‘definition of progress’,112 which Jones explains is expressed in the assertion of this discipline that ‘ “the rest of the world” has benefited and continues to benefit from the spread of the West’s civilizing values and institutions.’113 These assumptions can be traced back to what Chacko understands as the disciplines ‘Western’ Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment intellectual heritage, which were themselves constituted through representations of the ‘East’ as backward and barbaric. Aside from the more obvious racialised hierarchies of the
104 Doty, ‘The Bounds of 'Race' in International Relations’, p. 446. 105 Ibid., p. 449. See also Nayak and Selbin, Decentring International Relations, p. 14. 106 Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, p. 93. 107 See for example, Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations, pp. 3-6; Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, p. 89; Nayak and Selbin, Decentring International Relations, p. 7. 108 Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, p. 89. 109 Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations, pp. 1-3. 110 Chacko, ‘Modernity, Orientalism and the Construction of International Relations’, p. 1. 111 Ibid. 112 Saurin, ‘International Relations as the Imperial Illusion’, p. 87. 113 Jones, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 49
‘Great chain of being’114, the key concept of ‘Western’ modernity central to these traditions is constructed as such only through a simultaneous construction of an irrational, ‘non-Western Other’. This heritage can be traced to the canonical texts that underpin the ‘supposedly transhistorical and transcultural’ theories of IR, and these imbue the discipline with orientalist understandings of, for example, progress, civilisation, ‘East’, and ‘West’, ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’.115 Chacko argues (‘Western’) constructions of a rational, civilised and progressive ‘Self’ in relation to a barbaric stagnant and irrational ‘non-West’ came to signify the ‘state of nature’ in the racial hierarchy of Enlightenment thought, and which IR as a discipline drew on. For example, international relations scholars such as Hedley Bull, Stanley Hoffman, and Kenneth Waltz have conceptualised the international system and state behaviour by drawing on theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Kant) whose works were dependent on orientalist knowledge and ethnographic writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On this reading, orientalism has manifested itself in IR by permeating the foundational concepts of the discipline.116 Thus, as Sheila Nair writes, the practice of global politics and IR as a discipline are ‘engaged with and shaped by the very concerns about global power relations that are at the centre of Said’s writings and rhetoric’.117 Given this, it is not surprising that little attention has been paid to Said’s work in mainstream IR, as it (re)produces ‘the very injustices and plays of power against which he was clearly positioned’, and unsettles ‘Western’-centric stance on readings of, for example, US engagement in the Middle East.118 Said’s work then holds value for my research by providing a critical approach to ‘understanding the contradictions, complicities, and hierarchies embedded’ in IR and global politics as its object of inquiry.119 For example, Said’s work has been used to demonstrate the intersection between culture, representation and identity, and the masking of race in IR scholarship.120 Feminist IR scholars too are concerned with examining ‘how power works’, particularly in terms of uncovering gendered bases of I/international R/relations (as
114 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), p. 4; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1-3. 115 Chacko, ‘Modernity, Orientalism and the Construction of International Relations’, pp. 7-8. 116 Ibid. 117 Sheila Nair, ‘Edward W. Said and International Relations’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 36:1 (2007), p. 82. 118 Ibid., p. 81. 119 Ibid, p. 82. 120 Chowdhry, ‘Edward Said and Contrapuntal Reading’; Shampa Biswas, ‘Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 36:1 (2007); L. H. M. Ling, ‘Said’s Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists’ Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 36:1 (2007). See also Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations; Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 50 both practice and a field of study).121 In examining the gendered underpinnings of IR, feminist scholarship seeks to interrogate the ‘masculinist framing’ and assumptions of both mainstream IR perspectives and understandings of the world, and of global politics as practice.122 J. Ann Tickner has demonstrated that I/international R/relations reflects the experiences of (particular kinds of) men. For example, Tickner points out that mainstream theorising about international politics (centered on interactions between nation-states) is underpinned by the assumed ‘naturalness’ of rational, competitive, militarised ‘rational economic man’, but debunks the universality of this model as it does not reflect the lives of many (men or women).123 (Re)producing notions of masculinity that value characteristics such as rationality, autonomy, and aggression, Tickner posits that these assumptions shape notions of ‘progress’ and appropriate behaviour in global politics, normalise (certain) masculinities, and in doing so devalue ‘feminine’ traits and erasing women from global politics.124 Cynthia Enloe has challenged the assumptions of ‘appropriate’ areas (and subjects) of study in mainstream IR by (re)examining key IR issues such as war, security, and militarism with a view to uncovering the complex roles that women play in these. Reconceptualising what counts as ‘relevant’ to I/international R/relations, Enloe demonstrates that a range of women’s experiences are central to analyses of global politics. She shows that the roles (symbolic and practical) women play in arenas such as military bases, sex tourism, agriculture, diplomacy, and domestic service are intrinsically related to maintaining the political and economic international system. For example, ‘patriotic wives’, girlfriends, and prostitutes fulfil particular (gendered) roles in supporting (generally male) military personnel.125 In this reading, while global politics (dominated by men)126 shape women’s lives, this is not a ‘unidirectional’ process, and Enloe’s work undermines the division between public and private in mainstream IR by illustrating the centrality of the ‘private’ and ‘domestic’ to international politics.127 Although they may be underrepresented in elite politics, women are in
121 I borrow ‘I/international R/relations’ as a way of referring to both scholarship and practice from Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in Britain,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9:2 (2007). 122 Youngs, ‘Feminist International Relations’, p. 76. 123 Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 72 and chapter 2. 124 Ibid., pp. 5-7. 125 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), chapter 4. 126 Tickner also points to the continued dominance of men in elite (military and foreign) policymaking; see Gendering World Politics, pp. 1-2. 127 Cynthia Enloe, ‘Margins, Silences and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996), p. 190; 51 fact ‘playing [their] part in creating the current international system’ in complex and often overlooked ways.128 A key point that arises out of this feminist research is that international politics, at all levels, is predicated on ‘gender’, and as, Pettman writes, is ‘gendered male, in its theory and practice.’129 Charlotte Hooper explains that this gendering shapes IR in ‘the range of subjects studied, the boundaries of the discipline, its central concerns and motifs’ along with its (empirical) research models and theoretical assumptions.130 More broadly, V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan explain, ‘how we care about, perceive, understand, analyze, and critique the world we live in is profoundly shaped by gender’.131 This then requires some elaboration on what ‘gender’ means in feminist scholarship.132 While feminist IR scholars do look at women in writing about gender, and these are related, feminist concern with gender in IR is not ‘reducible’ to a concern with women.133 That is, as Gillian Youngs explains, while the absence of women in mainstream IR scholarship warrants substantive research on women, using ‘gender’ in this (and other) feminist research entails not taking ‘relational categorizations of male and female’ as ‘given or necessarily natural’.134 This approach can be distinguished from approaches that take as ‘given’ social differences between ‘men’ and ‘women’, or the ‘natural’ (biological) sex they are predicated on. Rather, a poststructural understanding of gender, which I subscribe to, is instead concerned with ‘inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given.’135 As Christine Sylvester explains, this means understanding ‘men and women’ as not pre-discursive but as ‘the stories that have been told about “men” and “women” ’.136 Gender in this sense refers to ‘what counts as ‘woman’ and as ‘man’ ’137, and ‘an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex nor directly determining of
see also Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 128 Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, p. 1. 129 Pettman, Worlding Women, p. vii. 130 Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 1. 131 Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 10. 132 I develop my understanding of gender in more detail in terms of discourse/strategy in chapter 3, but provide some introductory comments to clarify my use of ‘gender’ here. 133 V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010), p. 1; see also Terrell Carver, Gender is Not a Synonym for Women (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996); Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91:5 (1986), p. 1056. 134 Youngs, ‘Feminist International Relations’, p. 77. 135 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 7. 136 Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, p. 4. 137 Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal’, p.186. 52 sexuality.’138 Rather than seeing ‘gender as a universal binary’, poststructural feminist IR seeks to uncover its ‘instability’ across contexts.139 This is significant for my research as it entails understanding differences among ‘women’ (and indeed ‘men’), understood as having varied interests, experiences, and perspectives (for example, shaped by race).140 Gendering IR also entails examining ‘men and masculinities’ as ‘central to international politics’141 not because studies about men are more relevant than those about women, but rather that analysing international politics requires interrogating ‘the accepted naturalness’ of this.142 Central to this is understanding gender as imbued with power: not simply in the sense of ‘power-over’143, but rather, much like Said’s conception of orientalist power, in terms of creating, legitimising, and naturalising knowledge (for example, knowledge about and for people, places, ideas). Gendered power not only orders ‘reality’, but, and particularly relevant for my research, ‘power’ itself is gendered as a concept. Peterson and Runyan point out that mainstream understandings of ‘power’ and relatedly of ‘security’ are gendered in terms of privileging aggressive masculinities. For example, ‘security’ might be understood, outside militarised masculine politics, as ‘celebrating and sustaining life’ but in dominant discourses is presupposed as ‘the capacity to be indifferent to ‘others’ and, if necessary, to harm them’.144 The normalisation of masculinity then functions to privilege ‘who and what is masculinized’ and is ‘inextricable from devaluing who and what is feminized’.145 This insight particularly important for my research in revealing the power of gendering in global politics in terms of the ways in which certain entities, states, and peoples (within, between, and beyond states) are masculinised and feminised.146 It is also relevant to understanding militarism, war and intervention as predicated on masculinist logics that (re)produce ‘appropriate’ roles for ‘men’ and ‘women’; gender then is a ‘powerful legitimator of war and national security’ (understood as
138 Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, p. 1057. 139 Elisabeth Prügl, ‘Gender and War: Causes, Constructions, and Critique’, Perspectives on Politics, 1:2 (2003), p. 337. 140 Jill Steans, Gender and International Relations: Issues, Debates, and Future Directions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), pp. 16-17. 141 J. Ann Tickner, ‘The Growth and Future of Feminist Theories International Relations’, Brown Journal of World Affairs, 10: 2 (2004), p. 51. 142 Marysia Zalewski, ‘Introduction: From the ‘Woman’ Question to the ‘Man’ Question in International Relations’, in Marysia Zalewski and Jane Papart (eds.), The Man Question in International Relations (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), p. 8. 143 Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 33. 144 Ibid. 145 Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, p. 76; see also Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations, pp. 15, 18. 146 Ibid. 53 military security).147 That is, as Jill Steans explains, there are ‘deep and profound connections between the construction of masculinities, femininities, and state- sanctioned violence’.148 This can be seen in the protector/protected ‘myth’ (or ‘Man as Warrior’ and ‘Beautiful Souls’), where women (assumed to be weak, vulnerable) are constructed as in need of the (military) protection that is offered by the (masculine) state; (militarised) femininities are thus constructed and operate relationally, against (militarised) masculinities.149 This is predicated on, and requires, the control of ‘femininity as an idea and of women themselves’ (as gendered logics conflate the two as naturally linked).150 Understanding ‘how militarism is (re)produced and deployed in enacting military operations’, understanding it as a discourse configured by gendered logics, also means taking ‘gender and race as mutually constructed and thus contingent on each other’.151 That is, militarised masculinities also require ‘Other’ masculinities to be constructed against, and like femininities, they represent ‘subordinate’ identities that are often sexualised to signify this. Carol Cohn and Joshua S. Goldstein illustrate by reference to the Gulf War, where US masculinity was asserted by feminising (and sexualising) the ‘enemy Other’ (Iraqi men) through derogatory language usually associated with women (for example ‘bitch’) and symbolic anal rape (missiles with ‘Bend Over, Saddam’ written on them).152 My analysis of ‘War on Terror’ discourse draws on the above insights and literatures to read intervention as predicated on logics of ‘gendered orientalism’ that themselves are enabled by broader logics of gender and race. Readings of the ‘War on Terror’ as orientalist have been few but insightful. For example, McAlister and Little have both updated their monographs on US constructions of the Middle East; McAlister with a concluding chapter on orientalism in the US context after the 11 September 2001 attacks, and Little with an updated preface and chapter focusing largely on Bush’s 2002 security doctrine and the Iraq war. Both
147 J. Ann Tickner, ‘Feminist Perspectives on 9/11’, International Studies Perspectives 3:4 (2002), p. 336. 148 Steans, Gender and International Relations, p. 61. 149 Tickner, ‘Feminist Perspectives on 9/11’; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 3-4. 150 Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 173-174. 151 Maryam Khalid, ‘Feminist Perspectives on Militarism and War: Critiques, Contradictions and Collusions’, in Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt (eds.) Transnational Feminist Movements: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013). 152 Carol Cohn ‘Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War’, in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 236; Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 356, 359. 54 characterise dominant responses as predicated on the ‘East’/‘West’ binaries.153 Said himself revisited the function of orientalism in the ‘War on Terror’ context, explaining the power of orientalist knowledge in informing ‘authoritative’ political statements about the al Qaeda attacks, and of the nature of a ‘them’ pitted against an ‘us’.154 However, very little IR scholarship reads ‘War on Terror’ discourse through a gendered and orientalist lens, although, as I will explain now, gender and orientalism as discourses do intersect and are refracted through each other at certain moments, particularly in the ‘War on Terror’.155 Orientalism, although it contained critiques of representations of women by orientalist writers such as Flaubert, did not deal with gender relations in depth.156 Yeğenoğlu points out that depictions of ‘Eastern’ women were simply a subfield of colonial discourse in Said’s analysis.157 Reina Lewis argues that Said ignores the ways in which the colonial subject was gendered – in Orientalism Said’s colonial subject is ‘unified…irredeemably and paradigmatically’ male.158 Sondra Hale and Lila Abu-Lughod, argue, however, that despite this Said’s work can be utilised by feminists. Although Said did not conceptualise orientalism as gendered (in the way poststructural-feminist IR scholars have understood it, explained above),159 his work is important precisely because ‘knowledge’ produced in any location (‘West’, ‘East’ or elsewhere) is the product of (and (re)productive of) gendered discourses. ‘Western’ knowledge about the ‘East’ is thus the product of a system that not only ‘orientalises’ the ‘East’ but in doing so genders it. Hale points out that it is possible to reconceptualise orientalism as gendered, much in the way feminists have read gender and sexuality into works of (amongst others) Marx, Freud, and Foucault.160 The uncovering of the relationship between power and representation in Said’s orientalism can be (and has been) harnessed by feminists.161 Melika Mehdid’s study on representations of colonial Muslim women,
153 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 2nd ed (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2008), chapter 11; Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and The Middle East Since 1945, 3rd ed (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), preface and chapter 9. 154 Said, ‘Orientalism Once More’. 155 McAlister does, however, note that the US was constructed in terms of masculinity, albeit very briefly (see pp. 266, 276). The main exception to the lack of detailed analysis of gender and orientalism in the ‘War on Terror’ (and one which I will discuss in more detail shortly in this chapter) is Meghana Nayak’s ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8:1 (2006). 156 Sondra Hale, ‘Edward Said – Accidental Feminist: Orientalism and Middle East Women’s Studies’, Amerasia Journal, 31:1 (2005), p. 2. 157 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 25. 158 Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, p. 17. 159 Although, Said does acknowledge the contribution of feminist works on depictions of the ‘East’ in his later work Culture and Imperialism (p. xxiv). 160 Hale, ‘Edward Said - Accidental Feminist’. 161 Ibid.; Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies’, Feminist Studies, 27:1 (2001). 55 defined through male projections that became central to ‘Western’ narratives of the Middle East, brings together orientalism, imperialism and gender and demonstrates that feminist readings of Orientalism can be applied to a Middle Eastern context.162 In a similar vein, Mohja Kahf has shown that orientalist representations of women were instrumental in constructing the French and British empires which, ‘in subjugating whole Muslim societies, had a direct interest in viewing the Muslim woman as oppressed—even as their policies had oppressive effects on flesh-and- blood Muslim women.’163 The importance of Said’s work for feminists and gender scholars then lies in its uncovering of ‘East-West’ power relations, specifically the relationship between the desire to represent the ‘Orient’ and to wield power over it. Understanding orientalism as shaped by and productive of gender and sexuality broadens Said’s original thesis and allows us to understand the multiplicity of roles played by men and women in contributing to orientalist discourses, but also how these are constituted along gendered lines.164 Feminist analysis of ‘Western’ scholarship on the ‘third world’ illustrates how particular relationships of power are inscribed as gendered. A particularly relevant example (in terms of ‘War on Terror’ discourse) is the construction of ‘the Muslim woman’. Chandra Talpade Mohanty explains that the ‘global hegemony of western scholarship…the production, publication, distribution and consumption of information and ideas’ is complicit in the homogenisation of Muslim women as victims of male violence, oppressed by religious or cultural tradition.165 As dominant ‘Western’ writings of Arab/Muslim women fixate on this image, these women become a monolithic entity, and are rendered ‘objects’ (to be defined, rather than defining themselves).166 Mohanty further argues:
Not only are all Arab and Muslim women seen to constitute a homogenous oppressed group, but there is no discussion of the specific practices within the family, which constitute women as mothers, wives, sisters etc. Arabs and Muslims, it appears, don’t change at all. Their patriarchal family is carried over from the times of the Prophet Muhammad. They exist, as it were, outside history.167
162 Malika Mehdid, ‘A Western Invention of Arab Womanhood: The ‘Oriental’ Female’ in Haleh Afshar (ed.), Women in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities, and Struggles for Liberation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 19, 25. 163 Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 6. 164 Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, p. 20; Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), p. xii; Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, pp. 14-15. 165 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review 30 (1998), p. 64. 166 Sara Suleri, ‘Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition’, Critical Inquiry, 18:4 (2002), p. 760. 167 Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’, p. 70. 56
It is this existence outside of an historical context that both renders the ‘East’ as inherently backward and barbaric, and deprives women of agency (often by ignoring their current and historical involvement in feminist and broader political struggles). As a result of this, ‘since no connections are made between first- and third-world power shifts, it reinforces the assumption that people in the third world just have not evolved to the extent that the west has.’168 These women then ‘never rise above the debilitating generality of their ‘object status.’169 Mohanty and Sara Suleri argue that the ahistorical representation of Muslim women as wholly oppressed defines the parameters within which the oppression of third world women is discussed, and constructs them as a homogenous ‘other’ to be defined against.170 At the same time, such representations render the third world inherently backward and barbaric, and as, Miriam Cooke, Jasmine Zine, Carole Stabile, and Deepika Kumar inter alia argue, these images play a role in the legitimation of intervention in, most recently, the ‘War on Terror’.171 The veil in particular has become a central icon in orientalist discourses that define the experiences of Arab/Muslim women. A visible symbol of their continuing ‘oppression’, it has been referred to in defence of (imperial) ‘liberating missions’, both past and present. Matthew Bowles and Fatima Ayub argue that the longstanding ‘Western obsession with unveiling Muslim women’ has its roots in masculinist colonial discourses that have been ‘repackaged’ in contemporary times.172 They, along with Yasmin Jiwani, demonstrate that many colonial and current representations of the Muslim woman draw on a ‘dual narrative’ that is typical of orientalist discourse, that of the oppressed Muslim and the parallel construct of the misogynist Muslim man who threatens not only ‘his’ women but also the ‘West’.173 The ways in which such stereotypes have been (re)produced in the ‘West’ has been examined in terms of media and official narratives on women’s
168 Ibid,, p. 80. 169 Ibid., p. 79. 170 Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’, p. 70; Sara Suleri, ‘Women Skin Deep’, p. 760. 171 Miriam Cooke, ‘Saving Brown Women’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:1 (2002); Jasmin Zine, ‘Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Engagement’, in Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (eds.), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Carole A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar, ‘Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender and the War on Afghanistan’, Media Culture & Society, 27:5 (2005). 172 Matthew Bowles and Fatima Ayub ‘Liberating Muslim Women as Colonial Discourse’, (paper presented at ‘Islam’ Regular Session, American Sociological Society, San Francisco, California, August 14-17, 2004) p. 3. 173 Bowles and Ayub, ‘Liberating Muslim Women as Colonial Discourse’; Yasmin Jiwani, ‘Gendering Terror: Representations of the Orientalized Body in Quebec's Post-September 11 English-Language Press’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 13:3 (2004). 57 rights in the ‘War on Terror’, representations of the veil and female liberation/oppression, and a ‘clash of civilisations’ mentality.174 Much of this feminist scholarship has focused on the 2001 ‘intervention’ into Afghanistan to illustrate the ways in which gender operated in official and media constructions of the ‘War on Terror’ to justify war. For example, the ways in which masculinities and femininities are represented in ‘War on Terror’ discourses is a key concern in two feminist edited collections that have unpacked ‘War on Terror’ narratives in order to unsettle the ostensible ‘naturalness’ of identities (such as us/them, self/other, men/women, masculine/feminine) in media, popular, and official discourses.175 A gendered analysis of the ‘War on Terror’ means interrogating these categories and the relationship between them, with a view to exploring how this is predicated on a dynamic of gendered power. As Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel point out, the narratives about war that are deployed by governments, political elites, and the mass media (re)produce traditional ideas about the behaviours, actions, desires of (particular types of) ‘men’ and ‘women’, and in doing so they manipulate perceived differences to justify war.176 For example, racialised differences, based on orientalism and Islamophobia, are deployed in ‘War on Terror’ discourses to justify intervention into Afghanistan based on the need to ‘liberate’ women oppressed by uncivilised and backward men.177 The deployment of such narratives also allows what Hunt calls the ‘embedding’ of feminism into the ‘War on Terror’, allowing proponents of war (including the Bush administration) to align themselves with feminist language and concerns (such as a
174 Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, ‘Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil’, NWSA Journal, 17:3 (2005); Elgin M. Brunner, ‘Consoling Display of Strength or Emotional Overstrain? The Gendered Framing of the Early “War on Terrorism” in Transatlantic Comparison’, Global Society, 22:2 (2008); Dana Cloud, ‘ “To Veil the Threat of Terror”: Afghan Women and the
178 Hunt, ‘‘Embedded Feminism’ and the War on Terror’, in Hunt and Rygiel, (En)Gendering the War on Terror. 179 Melissa Brittain, ‘Benevolent Invaders, Heroic Victims and Depraved Villains: White Femininity in Media Coverage of the Invasion in Iraq’, in Hunt and Rygiel, (En)Gendering the War on Terror; Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, ‘Introduction’ in Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, (eds.), Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008). 180 Usha Zacharias, ‘Legitimizing Empire: Racial and Gender Politics of the War on Terrorism’, Social Justice, 30:2 (2003), p. 128. 181 Agathangelou and Ling, Transforming World Politics. 182 Ling, ‘The Monster Within’. 183 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’. 59 in the detail that Nayak does, nor does she examine official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse as orientalist in detail.184 Melanie Richter-Montpetit too utilises orientalism alongside gender in terms of the Abu Ghraib scandal185, marking out her work from other feminist scholarship on this particularly visible moment in ‘War on Terror’ discourse.186 My aim in this thesis is to illustrate an under-examined nexus in ‘War on Terror’ scholarship: that the intersection between orientalism and gender is essential to understanding official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, particularly in terms of how gender and orientalism have operated to discursively ‘create’ the need for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.187 As outlined earlier, I utilise a broad conception of gender, including ideas about sexuality as constitutive of gender (and gender of sexuality), and heteronormative. In particular, I question the ‘naturalness’ of the binary man/woman distinction, and its relationship with masculinity and femininity. Thus, I focus my research on both masculinities and femininities and how these correspond with the categories ‘men’ and ‘women’. In doing so, I intend to read gender orientalism, illustrating that orientalism as an analytical tool must not only be ‘aware’ of gender differences in specific contexts, but that orientalism itself as a way of knowing that is informed by and reproduces the ‘naturalness’ of dominant understandings of gender. As Yeğenoğlu has demonstrated in her reading of orientalist discourses around the veil, race and gender are inextricably intertwined in orientalism. The process of knowing, constructing, and representing both the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ is dependent on (in that it is shaped by and reflective of) the construction of sexual difference, and the privileging of certain masculinities and femininities over others.188 Nayak applies a
184 For example, Tacks looks at a handful of statements by Bush (and one by Laura Bush) in her overview of official discourse, as her focus is on documentaries produced on Lynch. Stacy Takacs, ‘Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-9/11’, Feminist Media Studies, 5:3 (2005), pp. 300-301. 185 Melanie Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner “Abuse” in Abu Ghraib and the Question of “Gender Equality”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 9:1 (2007). 186 For example, the collection of articles in Tara McKelvey (ed.), One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007) offer a detailed analysis of masculinity and femininity in official and unofficial ‘War on Terror’ discourses, with some examining the intersection of race and gender but do not explicitly engage in a sustained analysis using orientalism as a lens. Indeed, as Jennifer Kelly explains, to some extent orientalism is (re)produced in this volume as critiques of ‘Western’ constructions of ‘the Arab mind’ to still fall back on the ‘knowledge’ that sexual abuse breaks ‘every gender and sexual taboo’ in Arab society (p. 81). Jennifer Kelly, ‘One Of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers: A Feminist Analysis?’, Anamesa, 6:1 (2008), p. 120. 187 Few have analysed this intersection (a notable exception is Meghana Nayak whose work I discuss shortly); however, orientalism has been mentioned (though not theorised and analysed in depth) in some feminist IR scholarship on the ‘War on Terror’, see for example Ann Russo, ‘The Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid: The Intersections of Feminism and Imperialism in the United States’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:4 (2006); Tickner, ‘Feminist Perspectives on 9/11’. 188 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, pp. 25-26. 60 similar understanding of orientalism to the ‘War on Terror’ context, specifically in terms of ‘saving US state identity’.189 Nayak theorises orientalism in terms of its dependence on gendered and racialised violence, which are ‘institutionalised’ in both foreign and domestic US policies.190 Nayak identifies a hierarchical organisation of peoples in ‘War on Terror’ rhetoric along gendered and racialised lines, specifically in terms of orientalism. This, she argues, privileges the specifically ‘Western’ hypermasculinity the US state seeks to reassert after its loss of ‘Self’ on 11 September 2001.191 Laura Shepherd’s article on the gendering of the Afghan war also conceptualises the ‘War on Terror’ as based on a range of masculinities and femininities (although her analysis does not explicitly draw on orientalism, she does identify that race is central to this analysis but is outside that ‘within the parameters of this article I am unable to pay them the critical attention they deserve’).192 Using a discourse-theoretical approach, she demonstrates that, in enacting war in Afghanistan, masculinities ascribed to authority figures and US citizens were positioned above both ‘our’ feminised women and the feminised ‘barbaric enemy’. Shepherd's analysis is particularly insightful in its explicit use of poststructural discourse analysis, which, as I have touched on earlier and will explain in more detail in chapter 3, is best placed to uncover both the contingency of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truths’ projected in representations, and the power at play in creating as well as deploying them. These analyses then provide a starting point for my own research in terms of identifying the centrality of gender and orientalism in constructing and analysing the ‘War on Terror’. My research builds on this in that I too identify multiple expressions of masculinity and femininity in the construction of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and the hierarchical organising of these, specifically in terms of a wide range of ‘official’ (Bush administration-produced) texts. I extend these analyses by exploring in more detail how gender (including sexuality) and orientalism (predicated on pre- existing understandings of ‘race’) are deployed across the ‘War on Terror’ over a longer time-frame, in terms of two key moments (Afghanistan and Iraq) that illustrate the ongoing discursive processes at work in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Also useful here is feminist IR scholarship that has considered the operation of masculinity and sexuality in two key moments during the Iraq war, the
189 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’. 190 Ibid., p. 43. 191 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’, p. 47. 192 Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan Post-9/11’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:1 (2006), p. 35 note 2. 61
Jessica Lynch story and the Abu Ghraib abuses. Robin Riley explains that both episodes are highly gendered and racialised, and function to ‘construct, recuperate, and reinscribe ideas about femininity, the military, and war.’193 Cristina Masters, Laura Sjoberg, Véronique Pin-Fat and Maria Stern, in examining the role of women in the military, argue that the Jessica Lynch story demonstrates that ‘War on Terror’ representations of women deploy the ‘feminine’ to privilege hypermasculinity, for example through the manufactured ‘rescue’ of Lynch from the Iraqi ‘Other’.194 The centrality of gender is apparent in the scapegoating of Lynndie England during the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the feminisation of the prisoners there.195 As Richter-Montpetit explains, the positioning of prisoners as feminised and dominated by hypermasculinity is reflective of an imperialist desire to ‘enact whiteness’ that is based on orientalism.196 Gargi Bhattacharyya’s analysis of public representations in the ‘War on Terror’ also demonstrates that violence and brutality in and beyond official discourse is legitimated by sexualised and racialised representations in of ‘brown men’.197 The intersection of gender, sexuality, and race highlighted by this body of work is important for my own research, in that it unsettles the ‘naturalness’ of assumptions about ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘us’, ‘them’ and recognises that dominant understandings of these are gendered and orientalist. My own research takes a different path from Bhattacharyya’s in that I look at how military intervention is discursively prescribed as a result of gendered and orientalist logics in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Drawing on this body of work, I apply an understanding of gender and orientalism as (not always but often) overlapping discourses to key moments in the US’ official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Building on the insights of previous feminist scholarship, and work on orientalism, I offer the first monograph-length discussion of the gendered orientalist discursive creation of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in official US ‘War on Terror’, and demonstrate how this has enabled military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq.
193 Robin L. Riley, ‘Valiant, Vicious, or Virtuous? Representation and the Problem of Women Warriors’, in Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah (eds.) Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 183. 194 Cristina Masters, ‘Femina Sacra: The ‘War on/of Terror’, Women and the Feminine’, Security Dialogue, 40:1 (2009); Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence’; Laura Sjoberg, ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations From the War in Iraq’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 9:1 (2007). 195 Masters, ‘Femina Sacra’, pp. 36-37; Sjoberg, ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others’; Véronique Pin-Fat and Maria Stern, ‘The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch: Biopolitics, Gender, and the “Feminization” of the U.S. Military’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 30:1 (2005). 196 Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence’, pp. 42-45. 197 Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on the Terror (London: Zed Books, 2008). 62
Conclusion Said’s Orientalism is valuable for the ways in which it examines ‘Western’ constructs of the ‘East’ and the ways in which a specific (dominant) understanding of ‘West’ is defined and asserted. While a lack of historical sensitivity limits the direct applicability of Orientalism to the US ‘War on Terror’ context, the work of various scholars inspired by Said’s work illustrate that it is possible to utilise its central insight (a knowledge/power axis on which constructions of ‘East’ and ‘West’ rest) for a range of case studies. These scholars have illustrates that the repository of representations on which orientalist discourse(s) draw are constantly being added to by the changing dominant (but multifaceted) discourses of the ‘West’. It is precisely because orientalist discourse(s) are complex, fractured, and fluid that they can be deployed in various historically specific moments, developing and adapting for differing temporal and geographical locations. This conception of discourses constructed by ‘the West’ about ‘the East’ allows us to read representations in specific historical moments, such as official US ‘War on Terror discourse’, as orientalist in its use of racialised and gendered assumptions along an ‘East’/‘West’ binary. The centrality of gender to the construction (and intelligibility) of orientalist discourse, recognised by feminist scholars, allows for orientalism as a concept to be developed to illuminate power relations between ‘East’ and ‘West’ in a more complete way. Thus orientalism can be deployed as a powerful explanatory tool for US discourses towards the ‘third world’ generally, and Afghanistan and Iraq in particular. In using orientalism as a lens through which to read official US constructions of the ‘War on Terror’, I follow Said in conceiving of orientalism as a discourse, and as resting on a Foucauldian understanding of the power/knowledge nexus. As such, my analytical strategy is dependent upon poststructuralist conceptions of discourse, and I outline this along with my research strategy in the next chapter.
63
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Chapter Three Gender and Analytical Strategy
In this chapter I set out the key assumptions and analytical concerns of my thesis, the theoretical framework and concepts that guide my research, and an appropriate strategy for analysing examples of ‘gendered orientalism’ in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. My research looks at how, in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, women, men, masculinities, and femininities are created and categorised (for example some ‘types’ of women are in need of rescue, some categories of ‘men’ are a threat) and how these categories are deployed to render military interventions in the ‘War on Terror’ legitimate. The overview in chapter 2 of International Relations demonstrated that mainstream IR as a discipline and global politics as practice generally overlook the operation of orientalism, race and gender, taking racialised and gendered identities for granted. I follow the poststructural, postcolonial, and feminist approaches I discussed in chapter to in understanding international politics to be ‘characterized by practices that have been implicated in the production of meanings and identities’.1 I argue that practices of representation by the ‘West’ of the ‘East’ have discursively constructed the ‘East’ in ways that produce dominant regimes of legitimate ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’.2 I use this chapter to specifically outline these practices in the context of the ‘War on Terror’, using examples of discourse around military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq to show how such dominant discursive regimes work to create meanings and attach them to certain subjects and objects, which in turn creates and enables certain possibilities and actions, and excludes or limits others. It is this process that I am concerned with in this thesis, and this chapter identifies and explores the techniques and strategies I will use to undertake my analysis of ‘official’ US discourse (specifically the texts, speeches, images, and representational practices of the Bush administration). I use a discourse analytic (DA) approach because it illustrates how ‘textual and social processes are intrinsically connected’ and allows us to explore how, at
1 Roxanne L. Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 2. 2 Ibid., p. 2. 64 specific moments, these connections impact on ‘the way we think and act in the contemporary world’.3 Concerned with ‘considering the manifest political consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another’4 a DA approach is relevant to my project as it provides the tools for identifying how identities are created, organised, and deployed, and how the discourses in which they are located become authoritative or ‘falsely obvious’.5 DA provides a set of tools for explaining this productivity of discourse, that is, how it creates and disperses certain meanings and identities as legitimate or as ‘Other’. For example, relations between the US and the orientalised ‘Other’ occur within a ‘version’ of ‘reality’ that is ‘created’ or ‘defined’ (for the most part) by the representational practices of the US, that frame our thinking by delimiting ‘accepted’ ways of categorising the world and people in it.6 How these create or (re)produce legitimate knowledge or ‘truth’ can be understood by focusing on the discursive practices that are at work in creating them in this way. To this end, a specifically poststructural conception of the constructedness of reality, knowledge, and language informs my understanding of discourse, identity and representation. After setting out my selection of sources, the first half of this chapter will outline what I understand ‘discourse’ to be and elucidate what an analytical strategy based on this entails. Having explored in some detail the function of orientalism as a discourse, I also develop, in an early section of chapter 3, the way in which gender can be understood as discursive (building on the understanding of gender outlined in chapter 2). After this, I focus on the elements of ‘discourse theory’ that are most relevant to my aims, and focus in particular the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe. This understanding of discourse will inform the specific analytic techniques I will explain in last section of the chapter, and which I will use throughout the rest of the thesis. Ultimately, I will adopt and explain a DA approach that shows identities to be contingent, relational, and performatively constituted.7 Understanding how gendered and orientalist categories and identities ‘work’ in international relations also entails exploring the relationship between power, discourses, and representation. Thus I also examine in this chapter
3 Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder CO.: Lynne Rienner, 1994), p. 191. 4 David Campbell, Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 8. 5 Roland Barthes as cited in Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, in Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall (eds.), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 13. 6 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 2. 7 Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson, and Duvall, ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, p. 11. 65 how the creation of identities is linked to representational practices in texts, in order to understand how and where this power operates in terms of representational practices that ‘elevate one truth over another’.8 Following from this, I outline particular discursive processes that can be identified and analysed, that is, how these practices might be identified and ‘read’ in my research. I bring together here my concern with gender and orientalism in illustrating how DA can be applied to ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Finally, I set out the specific techniques (analysis of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, (re)production, and deconstruction/juxtaposition) I apply to particular representations of peoples, actions, events, in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse.
Research strategy and selection of sources Before detailing my understanding of ‘discourse’ and outlining my particular analytic strategies, I set out my research strategy in terms of the identification of the primary sources I will be analysing. As I will elaborate in my subsequent discussion on ‘Discourse as analytical strategy’, I understand power in a discourse as being located at the site at which contested meanings become (temporarily) ‘fixed’. The processes through which a fixity of meaning is attempted (and temporarily achieved) in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse is the focus of my analysis of a range of ‘official texts’ in chapters 5, 6, and 7. As my aim in this thesis is to establish that a gendered orientalist ‘War on Terror’ discourse exists and to show how it is used in order to make possible and justify certain courses of action (such as military intervention into Afghanistan and Iraq), my particular analysis of discourse must be based on a group of texts by people who can be considered to be authorised speakers of official ‘War on Terror’ discourse, for example senior members of the US administration (cabinet members) and the Pentagon.9 Along with drawing on a range of ‘authorised speakers’, I also take a broad view of what constitutes a ‘text’: in terms of my research, this is a site in which discourse is manifested and can be read. A text is not simply written words, but includes ‘utterances of any kind and in any medium, including cultural practices.’10 Understanding discourse as instrumental in creating and shaping meanings and identities, I am interested in any texts in which meanings can be ‘read’. Thus, I
8 James Der Derian, Anti-diplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 7. 9 Jennifer Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5:2 (1999), p. 233. 10 Joan W. Scott, ‘Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism’, in Steven Seidman (ed.), The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 284. 66 consider objects or artefacts such as words, images, representations, to be texts in that they are inscribed with and convey meaning.11 As such, while the texts I examine are largely speech acts and written documents they also include, on occasion, images that are attached to these documents as I find them in the databases of primary sources on which I have focused my research.
‘Official’ texts By ‘official texts’ I mean those texts (spoken, visual and written) created and distributed by the Bush administration (the Department of State, the Pentagon, and those authorised to speak on their behalf). Because my concern is with the public discourse that enabled the Afghan and Iraqi interventions to take place, and not the decision-making process behind the creation and implementation of the ‘War on Terror’, I limit my primary sources to those that have reached a public audience. Key to my understanding of texts (and their relationship to discourse(s) are the concepts of intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Intertextuality refers to the interplay between texts in a discourse, highlighting that texts do not exist in isolation but always refer (explicitly or implicitly) to, are in dialogue with, and gain meaning in relation to, a range of texts.12 Intertextuality has obvious relevance to my research whereby gendered and orientalist logics in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse can be uncovered through the identification of repeated representations of gendered orientalist narratives within my corpus of official texts. While I am focusing largely on official discourse, I also understand official representational texts in the ‘War on Terror’ as connected to texts created in other ‘War on Terror’ discourses (for example media discourses), which they necessarily make (implicit or explicit) reference to. As such the intertexuality of discourses is related to their interdiscursivity, whereby official ‘War on Terror’ discourse exists alongside and overlaps with other dominant discourses on the ‘War on Terror’. Not only do official texts gain meaning in relation to other (official and unofficial) texts, official ‘War on Terror’ discourse also exists alongside other ‘War on Terror’ discourses. In this sense, there is an interaction and overlap between official and unofficial texts, representations, and discourses. Although, due to constraints of time and space, I have not undertaken detailed research into non-official texts, in later chapters I supplement my
11 Terrell Carver, ‘Discourse Analysis and the ‘Linguistic Turn’ ’, European Political Science, 2:1 (2002), p. 50. 12 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, p. 232; Roxanne Lynn Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly, 37:3 (1993), p. 302. 67 discussion of Bush administration texts with relevant examples from other dominant discourses (e.g. news media, NGOs). This is important as the currency of the official discourses I examine depends in part on their acceptance by other audiences, and their (re)production in and of other discourses. I conceive of a political economy of gendered orientalist images in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, drawing on Edward Said’s operationalisation of orientalism as a set of interdependent discourses in which the interplay between discourses, the recycling of and building upon the repository of ‘knowledge’, gave (orientalist) discourse its power. Much like the repository of orientalist knowledge conceived of by Said retains its currency because of the continued use of gendered orientalist representations in a variety of discourses (popular, political, media, scholarly/academic), the overlap between various (official and unofficial) ‘War on Terror’ discourses also involves the continued production, circulation, and consumption of images. This is reflected in the significant interplay between official and mainstream news/media ‘War on Terror’ discourses, for example in the image of the oppressed Afghan woman in need of rescue that has been featured prominently in official and media discourses.13 My understanding of ‘War on Terror’ discourse(s) thus rests on the Foucauldian conception of an ‘economy’ of discourses which become ‘regimes of truth’, as ‘mutually constituted (therefore coexisting and interactive) systemic sites through and across which power operates’.14 As such, I find it worthwhile to cite some examples of interdiscursivity in my case studies to illustrate the effectiveness of official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Therefore, I supplement my analysis of the key motifs (such as oppressed women, oriental despots) of official discourse (in chapters 5, 6, and 7) with examples of corresponding representations in unofficial sources.
Locating sources The constraints of this project preclude identifying and analysing every relevant text in the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ discourse, which spans two presidential terms (2001 to 2008).15 The texts (statements, speeches, radio
13 See for example, Krista Hunt, ‘The Strategic Co-optation of Women’s Rights: Discourse in the ‘War on Terrorism’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4:1 (2002); Ratna Kapur, ‘Unveiling Women’s Rights in the War on Terror,’ Duke Journal of Gender, Law & Policy, 9 (2002); Sonali Kolhatkar, ‘ ‘Saving’ Afghan Women: How Media Creates Enemies’, Women in Action, 1 (2002); Jill Steans, ‘Telling Stories About Women and Gender in the War on Terror’, Global Society, 22:1 (2008); Shannon Walsh, ‘A Blindfold of Compassion? Women as Pawns in the New War’, Feminist Media Studies, 2:1 (2002). 14 Spike V. Peterson, ‘Rewriting (Global) Political Economy as Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual (Foucauldian) Economies’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4:1 (2002), p. 4. 15 I realise that it is debatable that the ‘War on Terror’ did indeed end with the Obama administration, in spite of Obama’s refusal to use the term (e.g. as reported in Oliver Burkeman, ‘Obama Administration 68 addresses, television appearances) published under the ‘Presidential News and Speeches’ section on the White House website alone numbered more than 200 from 11 September to 31 November 2001.16 I therefore limit my sources and do so in two ways, in terms of databases and by the time-frame of production. Firstly, I located my sources in the comprehensive databases of publicly available material located on ‘.gov’ websites, which house official texts relating to policy and official activities that the US administration transmits a wide public audience. These are broad enough for my goals in that they include a wide variety of official texts such as transcripts of speeches, radio addresses, press conferences, and televised statements. Rather than being limited to the voice of the US President and his cabinet, they also include those people who are authorised to speak on the behalf of the administration, such as spokespeople for the cabinet (although because of Bush’s visibility and authority as President, I find it necessary to analyse more texts produced by him more than by other cabinet or administration members). Although these texts are created by a variety of individuals and groups, they can, I argue be read as a single ‘voice’ for the purposes of my research. As these statements, speeches and documents are placed in official archival websites and databases, it is logical to assume that the texts are officially sanctioned and as such can be considered part of a larger ‘voice’ intended by the administration to be transmitted to the public. In particular, I focus my research on the public speeches and comments archived White House website of the administration of President George W. Bush (at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov), the archived State Department Website (at http://2001-2009.state.gov/), and the Department of Defense databases (at http://www.defense.gov/news/). I also browsed the Public Papers of the Presidents (at http://www.gpoaccess. gov/pubpapers/description.html), which contain much of the official text material generated by Presidents, and a compilation of Bush administration statements on the ‘War on Terror’ (at http://merln.ndu.edu/index.cfm?type=section &secid=150&pageid=3). I often found the material here on the White House, State Department, and Department of Defense websites and accordingly reference my material to the latter as they are my primary databases. Together, the White House, Department of Defense and State Department websites serve as a
Says Goodbye to 'War on Terror’, The Guardian 25th March 2009, available at
17 I found there were far fewer statements made by Rice during the period I look at (largely 2001-2003), most likely because she was NS Advisor for this period, and did not take on the more high-profile Secretary of State position until 2005. 18 I also undertook a search for transcripts of interviews by Bush administration members on major networks such as ABC, CNN, FOX, NBC, and PBS. I found most of these documents on the White House, State Department, and Department of Defense websites also and referenced them to the latter as ‘official’ sources. However, a few transcripts were not available on official websites, and as such for these few interviews I cite the transcripts produced by the media websites. 70 time period to retrieve texts that might illustrate the continuation of the gendered orientalist discourse established in response to the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 and the Afghan war by using search terms related to the key themes, identities and narratives I identified in the initial stages of the ‘War on Terror’ (for example I looked for instances of the following: us, them, civilised, barbaric, terrorists, women, freedom, oppression, brutality, fear, democracy). I found this important for establishing a coherent (but changing and complex) ‘War on Terror’ discourse that shaped interventions in both Afghanistan and Iraq; the first section of chapter 7 (‘Consolidating Narratives’) is based on this research and demonstrates the elements of continuity between wars that I found within the discourse. The case study on the Iraq war covers a longer time frame than the examination of the Afghan war in chapter 6. As the Iraq war was less reactionary and more planned than the Afghan war, it was necessary to cover a longer period of time in order to show how official ‘War on Terror’ discourse came to incorporate military action against Iraq. In researching ‘War on Terror’ discourse around the Iraq war I therefore looked at the PR exercise preceding the start of hostilities against Iraq, from the period January 2002 to March 2003. Again, I also draw on texts produced after this period to illustrate the strength of the discourse, and challenges to it (in particular the Abu Ghraib abuses which I explore as one of the ‘key motifs’ in chapter 7). I explained earlier that in my understanding of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, ‘official’ US ‘War on Terror’ discourse can be seen as related to non-official discourses, as such I find it necessary to make some reference to media discourses. Due to constraints of space, I find it most appropriate to illuminate the function of ‘unofficial’ gendered and orientalist discourses and their interplay with official representations by generally limiting my utilisation of unofficial discourses to the key motifs I look at in my chapters on the Afghan and Iraq wars (‘Mad Mullahs’ and ‘Oppressed Women’ in chapter 6, ‘Oriental Despotism’ and ‘Other Sexuality’ in chapter 7). To locate appropriate examples of unofficial discourse on the ‘War on Terror’ I perused research on the ‘War on Terror’ by feminist and poststructuralist scholars, and undertook internet and database searches using keywords related to the motifs, narratives, and identity categories I identify in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. As such, my research approach to locating unofficial sources was fairly ad hoc and relied on my own knowledge of the broader discourses around the Afghan and Iraq wars garnered from feminist and poststructural work on the area, and my own research beyond this dissertation. 71
Gendering discourse Speaking of gendered orientalist representations requires some further elaboration of what ‘gender’ means for my project. In chapter 2, I explained that IR is gendered and that orientalism is configured by gender. Understanding representations as discursive implies inquiring into their constitution more broadly, wherein gender plays a key role by uncovering the ways in which the categories of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are taken to be ‘naturally’ linked (masculinity with male, femininity with female). Gendering representations in ‘War on Terror’ discourse then is vital in order to understand the discursive identities ascribed to people and things, and how they are organised in the dominant discourses of the ‘War on Terror’. Here, I explore in more detail the meaning of ‘gender’ for my analytical approach, and clarify the relationship between gender and discourse. Like their orientalist counterparts, gendered identities are discursively constructed, such that, as an ‘organizing discourse’, gender ‘shapes how we experience and understand ourselves as men and women’.19 In its most simple usage, ‘gender’ has come to designate a research concern with ‘women’20; early feminist politics focused on women/femininity rather than men/masculinity so that gender became a synonym for women.21 However, I use ‘gender’ as a category of analysis in its fullest sense – encompassing the (discursive) construction of ‘women’, but also ‘men’, ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’, and sexuality. In this sense, gender refers to ‘what counts as ‘woman’ and as ‘man’ ’,22 and ‘emphasizes an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex nor directly determining of sexuality.’23 Thus gender is not a thing or a variable, but a system of relations that shape our behavior and the way we see the world.24 It is a ‘way of talking about systems of social or sexual relations’ and as an analytic category, gender includes identity categories such as women, men, femininity, masculinity, and the ways in which they constitute each other.25
19 Carol Cohn, ‘War, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War’, in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 228. 20 Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91:5 (1986), p. 1056. 21 Terrell Carver, Gender is Not a Synonym for Women (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996). 22 Judith Squires, and Jutta Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in Britain’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9:2 (2007), p.186. 23 Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, p. 1057. 24 Judith Butler, ‘Against Proper Objects’, Differences, 6:2-3 (1994), p. 5; V. Spike Peterson, ‘Introduction’ in V. Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder Co: Lynne Rienner, 1992), p. 9. 25 Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, pp. 1066-1069. 72
A gendered approach to my study entails acknowledging that femininity and masculinity do not necessarily have a natural correlation with women and men (although, following Butler, I acknowledge that we are rarely able to think about femininity/masculinity as separate from female/male because of the power of dominant discourses in normalising certain otherwise arbitrary discursive products). I also do not see ‘sex’ itself as a ‘natural’ category upon which (socially constructed) gendered identities are established.26 Following Michel Foucault, who proposes a notion of discourse in which the material and non-material are intertwined, the biological and the social do not exist independently of each other but are ‘bound together’.27 As Judith Butler argues:
[g]ender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex … gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive”, prior to culture.28
In this understanding of sex and gender, gender is not ‘given’ and it does not ‘follow from a sex in any one way’.29 Rather, sex and gender are, in dominant gender norms, assumed to exist in a ‘mimetic’ relationship where ‘masculine’ is the ‘expressive attribute’ of ‘male’ and ‘feminine’ of ‘female’.30 Gender, then, is ‘both a material effect of the way in which power takes hold of the body and an ideological effect of the way power ‘conditions’ the mind’, and sex is no more ‘natural’ than gender is.31 What counts as ‘woman’ and as ‘man’ is socially constructed as is ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ and who/what these are applied to. Thus, gender includes discussion of women, men, femininity and masculinity, and the ways in which certain culturally produced categories of identity constitute each other. Gender as an analytical category allows us to look at how gender ‘gives meaning to the organization and perception of ... knowledge’.32 Gendered (orientalist) identities then are identities that are socially constructed and understood to denote and prescribe ‘proper’ or ‘acceptable’ traits to ‘men’ and ‘women’. As such they ‘produce’ people (Afghan men, Western men, Muslim
26 Mary Hawkesworth, ‘Confounding Gender’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 22:3 (1997), pp. 662-663. 27 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), pp. 151-152. 28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 7. 29 Ibid, p. 6. 30 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 10; Penny Griffin, ‘Sexing the Economy in a Neo-liberal World Order: Neo- liberal Discourse and the (Re)Production of Heteronormative Heterosexuality’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9:2 (2007), pp. 223-224, 233. 31 Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal’, p. 187. 32 Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, p. 1055. 73 women,) so that men and women become ‘the stories that have been told about ‘men’ and ‘women’.’33 My analytic approach takes notions that are considered to be ‘natural’ or ‘concrete’ in dominant discourses (such as notions of masculine, feminine, civilised, barbaric, benevolent, oppressed, free) and examines them as unstable and discursively constructed. Gender then can be seen as a way of structuring regulatory practices; gender delineates meanings, identities and behaviour through processes/practices of predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production which normalise and make ‘natural’ the ideological formation of gender categories. Although I have spoken of looking at ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, I must clarify here that I do not consider gendered identities in terms of a simple masculine/feminine binary but rather, I view them as fluid, multiple, and contradictory.34 For example, I do not conceive of one articulation of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ in terms of constructions of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. As I will show in my examination of the construction of the US ‘Self’, there are multiple expressions of ‘masculinity’ which reflect the role various categories of ‘men’ play in constructing the identity of the ‘Self’. In terms of the ‘Other’, there are multiple and contradictory masculinities at play, for example the threatening masculinity of Saddam Hussein (constructed as powerful in his ability to inflict violence on the US and his own people) juxtaposed with the feminisation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib (as examined in chapter 7). As Charlotte Hooper explains, there is an ‘interplay between different masculinities’ which is ‘as much a part of the gender order as the interplay between masculinities and femininities.’35 As such, I understand gendered identities and representations as existing in hierarchical relations with one another. And, as I intend to demonstrate in my work, gender does not exist independent to other factors such as race, class and sexuality; gendered identities must be viewed as intertwined with, for example, race or ethnicity in order to understand fully the hierarchical organisation of identities. For example, when George W. Bush speaks of a male enemy, of ‘a few evil men’, and then of a ‘barbaric uncivilised enemy’, placed in contrast to ‘our civilised values’ he is characterising the ‘Other’ as not only possessing an ‘inappropriate’ masculinity, but one that is underscored by notions of cultural superiority that are linked to
33 Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 4. 34 Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 36-38. 35 Ibid., p. 56. 74 race/ethnicity.36 As I will explain in the following discussions on discourse, identity and representation, my work takes gender and orientalism as analytical approaches that explain how logics of gendered and orientalist identities, meanings, and images constructs and organises the way we give meaning to and interpret our world, its people and events, and the possibilities for action that they prescribe. For example, using gender as a category of analysis acknowledges the power and inequality that comes from ascribing one gender or set of gender traits to people(s) (or states).37 This is crucial for my thesis as the representations I explore rely on juxtaposing the normalised ‘Self’ with the ‘Other’, and I wish to destabilise the ‘normal’ Western masculinity (and femininity) that constructs the Afghan/Iraqi as ‘dangerous man’ or ‘woman to be saved’. Gender-discourse analysis as a research agenda identifies and challenges the gendered foundations of discursive structures and hierarchies. The rest of this chapter discusses the approach to ‘discourse’ that I take, my understanding of identity and representation in terms of gender and orientalism, and outlines particular DA strategies that I will be using throughout the remainder of the thesis.
Discourse as analytical strategy This chapter is less a traditional ‘methodology’ than an outline of a poststructural-informed ‘analytical strategy’ that guides my research and analysis in the following chapters. As I have outlined in chapters 1 and 2, I position my work outside of mainstream International Relations, rejecting the idea that ‘reality’ is something that is knowable. Rather, my research is concerned with how gendered and orientalist categories are utilised in ways that necessitate military intervention through the construction of an enemy (and thus creating a ‘Self’ in reference to this enemy). I argue that this is done by exploiting long-held assumptions about race/ethnicity and gender, such as the naturalness of ascribing ‘feminine’ traits like sensitivity, weakness, and emotionality to ‘women’, and ‘Othered’ traits such as
36 For instances of George W. Bush speaking of a ‘male’ enemy, see for example George W. Bush, ‘President Salutes Troops of the 10th Mountain Division’, 19 July 2002, available at
38 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 4. 39 Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucualt,Koskelleck, Laclau, Luhmann (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003), p. xiii. 40 Ibid., p. vi. 76 existence of a knowable truth, taking what is seen for granted, and reducing it to ‘a certain form of reality that is unquestionable’ such an approach fails to question how ‘reality’ is presented and the power at play in this.41 By contrast, asking epistemological questions before ontological ones allows for the exploration of the forms of and conditions under which certain systems of meaning (for example a discourse such as official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse) come into being. This kind of epistemologically-based research approach uses an ‘analytical strategy’ that addresses how the researcher will construct the observations of others and how we might obtain knowledge critically and differently from an established system of meaning.42 Discourse analysis is the analytical strategy I find most appropriate for my research as it ‘does not look for truth but rather at who claims to have truth, and how these claims are justified in terms of expressed and implicit narratives of authority.’43 The following subsection details my understanding of and approach to ‘discourse’ (as it is a contested and complex concept), how it can be used, its core related concepts (language, identity, power, text, and representation), and how I understand it in the context of my own research that has a specific focus on gender-as-discourse (but also drawing on my understanding of orientalist discourse detailed in chapter 2). In the final section of this chapter, I draw on these core concepts to delineate the specific DA-based analytical strategies (presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production) that I use in the rest of the thesis.
Discourse: language, identity, power, and representation Discourses are ways of constructing knowledge, and of referring to knowledge, about particular topics. They are groups of ideas, images and practices that are relational (they all refer to another in some way), providing us with ways of talking about, knowledge about, and conduct associated with, particular topics, events, activities, or institutions.44 As such, they are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.’45 These ‘discursive formations’ enable and limit our knowledge and ways of speaking about something by defining what is appropriate (and inappropriate), useful (or unimportant), and ‘true’ about particular
41 Ibid., pp. xi-xii. 42 Ibid. 43 Carver, ‘Discourse Analysis and the ‘Linguistic Turn’ ’, p. 52 (emphasis in the original). 44 Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), p. 6. 45 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 54. 77 subjects, and ‘what sorts of persons or ‘subjects’ embody its characteristics’.46 By setting out these ‘rules of acceptability’, discourses become ‘regimes of knowledge and truth’ that utilise procedures of inclusion and exclusion to ‘regulate our approach to ourselves, each other and our surroundings’.47 That is, discourses produce insiders and outsiders by excluding/including particular ‘themes, arguments and speech positions’, denouncing some groups of people as ‘abnormal or irrational’ and granting others ‘the right and legitimacy to treat these people.’48 This particular concept of discourse is poststructural in its commitment to the constructedness of knowledge, and ‘discourse’ can be approached from three main perspectives which differ from each other at least partly in their conception of language and its function in society. In the first of these, a linguistics-based approach, discourse is simply a form of communication and ‘language’ is a neutral tool through which to convey meaning. Conceiving of language as merely reflective of social meaning limits the scope of the ‘discourse analysis’ that follows from this, which generally focuses on empirical analyses of speech acts (for example through counting words, speech act theory and conversation analysis) where the aim is to understand the meaning of speech through the context in which it is uttered.49 However, this approach rests on the assumption that language is a neutral medium used to convey ‘facts’ or pre-existing meaning. A second approach, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ (CDA), acknowledges the role social context plays in shaping discourse and accordingly defines discourse as ideologically produced. CDA approaches understand discourses as articulated and contested through social practices, whereby identities (of subjects and objects) are formed.50 This view of social reality as shaped by discourses is valuable as it does not reduce discourse to language alone, but ultimately CDA holds to the idea that society and culture are in some way objectively knowable, to a distinction between the ‘discursive’ and the ‘non-discursive’, which I reject.51 Instead, I subscribe to the poststructuralist view
46 Hall, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 47 Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies, p. 3. 48 Ibid. 49 Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland, ‘Introduction: Perspectives on Discourse Analysis’ in Adam Jaworksi and Nikolas Coupland (eds.), The Discourse Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 14-16. 50 David Howarth and Yannis Stavrakakis, ‘Introducing Discourse Theory and Political Analysis’, in David Howarth, Aletta J. Norcal and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds.), Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 4. 51 Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, Violence & Security: Discourse as Practice (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), p. 18. As examples of this kind of CDA see for example Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Norman Fairclough, ‘Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis Within Discourse Analysis’, in Jaworski and Coupland (eds.), The Discourse Reader; Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, in Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction (London: Sage, 1997); Teun A. van Dijk, ‘The Study of Discourse’, in Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Structure and Process (London: Sage, 1997). 78 of discourse as a ‘structured, relational totality’52 in which language (writing, speech, pictures, any system of signification that represents our ideas in a way that allows others to ‘read’ meaning) is not simply used to ‘communicate information’ (carrying meaning that we intend to project), but is the site of the creation of meaning and implicated in the establishment of the ‘regimes of knowledge and truth’ referred to above.53 Language is not an objective medium through which we interpret the world, conveying predetermined, natural, or neutral ‘meanings’ which exist a priori and are intrinsic to things, events, people or groups. Rather, as Terrell Carver argues, language has ‘meaning only in virtue of our inscribing it there’; it is used to inscribe meanings onto the world, objects, and experiences, and to read ‘those meanings back to ourselves as if they had always resided in the objects or experiences.’54 That is not to say that this poststructuralist understanding of discourse conceives of objects, events, and people as ‘not existing’ outside discourse: rather, it asserts that they have no meaning and are incomprehensible to us without language and discourse as interpretive tools.55 This approach, in contrast to the work of CDA discourse theorists and the early works of Foucault (which conceive of a non-discursive and objectively knowable material reality in which there is knowledge that is not constructed by discourse), posits that knowledge about society cannot be accessed directly or identified neutrally but is embedded in relational and differential systems of signification. This means that our thoughts and speech-acts only gain meaning ‘within a certain pre-established discourse’, negating the idea of a non-discursive objectively knowable ‘reality’.56 This approach most closely reflects my research concerns, in particular for exploring the construction of identity in terms of discourse, and the role of power in discursive identities.57 Of particular importance here is the understanding of ‘discourse’ as a ‘structural totality of differences that is a result of an articulatory practice’ within a ‘field of discoursivity’, in which ‘fixity’ (of meanings, identities) is never fully completed.58 As Laclau and Mouffe explain, discourses ‘work’ or ‘operate’ as a field of relational identities where elements can
52 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 6. 53 James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 1; Michael J. Shapiro, ‘Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences’, Cultural Critique, 2 (1985-1986), pp. 193- 4. 54 Carver, ‘Discourse Analysis and the ‘Linguistic Turn’ ’, p. 50. 55 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 6. 56 Ernest Laclau, ‘Discourse’, in Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas W. Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 431; Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 84. 57 Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, pp. 90-91, 96; Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies, p. 52. 58 Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies, p. vi. 79 be articulated according to logics of ‘difference’ or logics of ‘equivalence’, where language shapes meaning through ‘signs’ and ‘signifiers’ whose meaning is established in relation to all other signs in the system of language.59 This terrain is a ‘field of discursivity’,60 in which the infinite meanings of signs/language are made intelligible through the function of discourses that are deployed to give structure and order to language so that, for example, ‘men’ and ‘women’ convey a specific meaning as relational to each other.61 For example, in the discourse of ‘family’, ‘mother’ exists in relation to ‘father’ and ‘child(ren)’, and this discourse also constitutes the meaning of ‘mother’, ‘wife’, and ‘woman’. Meanings are not given by nature: what counts as being a ‘family’ is historically variable and ‘family’ is a contested concept, as are the identity categories of ‘wife’, ‘mother’, ‘woman’ and what it means to ‘be’ and perform those roles. Similarly, in orientalist discourse(s) the ‘East’ is delineated differently in the various historical contexts in which it defines particular people who ‘belong’ to the ‘East’. In the ‘War on Terror’ context, ‘us’ gains meaning in relation to ‘them’, and, as I will argue in chapters 5, 6, and 7, the identity categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ operate differently within the categories ‘us’ and ‘them’. For example, that the ‘Othered woman’ is passive, without agency, oppressed, and voiceless allows the ‘Othered man’ to be positioned as threatening, dangerous, violent, and aggressive. As the meanings of signs are being established, there is a constant play of signification that makes any permanent fixation of meaning impossible; power, as the ability to give meaning and create authoritative knowledge, is therefore inherent in all discursive formations.62 What is of interest for my research then is how (dominant) discourses structure meanings, and how they create identities, and how we can uncover the implementation of practices that legitimise them. As ‘meaning’ is not inherent in things, objects or events (meaning is not conveyed by the material world) but is constructed through ‘sign systems’ (not necessarily but usually linguistic), relationships (of difference and equivalence) between elements in systems of signification must be seen as establishing relations of power (when one element is privileged over another, as in civilised/barbaric). Since these elements are relational, this cannot be done by reference to any inherent properties (as there is no essential ‘truth’ about signs or things). Here, equivalential logics work as
59 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, (London and New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 109, 137; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 77-78. 60 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 112. 61 Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, p. 87. 62 Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, p. 33. 80
‘empty’ signifiers or ‘nodal points’ (‘empty’ of specific content) that do not stand in differential relation to any of the elements that they organise, but rather draw relational elements together to create a discursive formation, and are themselves given meaning by these elements.63 An empty signifier then works to stabilise the discursive formation, and becomes a ‘nodal point’, a privileged discursive point which ‘fixes’ meaning momentarily, although not entirely or permanently. Thus ‘discourses’ are constituted through attempts to dominate the discursive field, through attempting to fix the centres of meaning64 by arresting the ‘flow of differences’ and constructing a ‘centre’ of ‘partial fixation’ around nodal points.65 The empty signifier or nodal point is thus where we see political struggles taking place as actors attempt to fix dominant meanings, for example in establishing the meaning of the 2001 al Qaeda attacks in ‘War on Terror’ discourse (as I discuss further in chapter 6). The discursive struggle about the construction of nodal points is one of power, and this character of discourse is the driving factor behind politics which can be seen in terms of an attempt to fill the emptiness of a nodal point with content that can ‘suture’ or ‘fix’ (however temporarily) the discourse.66 This is because attempting to attain discursive closure through the construction of a hegemonic or dominant discourse always requires the exclusion of those elements that challenge the relationships between elements in the discourse (for example, a contradictory meaning for an element) as a ‘radical Other’. Contradictory elements become seen as a ‘radical’ Other because they are what ‘we’ are not; identity then is shaped by this antagonistic relationship in which ‘the outside is not merely posing a threat to the inside, but is actually required for the definition of the inside. The inside is marked by a constitutive lack that the outside helps to fill.’67 The constant play of signification (the contestation of particular meanings) means that a hegemonic discourse can never completely and finally fix meaning. It is at the points of contestation that we can read political struggles for the hegemonic construction of meaning. Hegemony, as an ‘articulatory practice’, ‘sutures’ or fixes (however temporarily) elements of a discourse such that the meaning ascribed to them comes to be viewed as intrinsic and the elements as
63 James Martin, ‘The Political Logic of Discourse: a neo-Gramscian View’, History of European Ideas, 28:1-2 (2002), p. 30; Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 38-40; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 126-134. 64 Howarth and Stavrakakis, ‘Introducing Discourse Theory and Political Analysis’, pp. 7-10; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 134-136; Louise Phillips and Marianne W. Jørgensen, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 24-30. 65 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 112. 66 Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 60. 67 Jacob Torfing, ‘Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments and Challenges’, in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds.), Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 11. 81 naturally linked to one another. Dominant discourses successfully marginalise and displace alternative (contesting) arguments, activities and discourses by naturalising certain meanings and hierarchies; they ‘seek to render themselves incontestable’ by defining what is ‘common sense’ knowledge (a notion I will return to in the following section).68 Hegemonic discourses then attempt to create an a priori ‘givenness’ for certain identities, the relevance (and irrelevance) of particular categories, and simultaneously obfuscate the construction of these categories and identities. Identity (gendered, racialised for example) then is not something we possess but is constructed out of discursive practices. It is not pre-given or ‘natural’, but always being constructed and reconstructed, it is established in relation to someone or something else (another group, individual, or state for example), in relation to what it is not.69 These relationships allow discourses to make things intelligible: they provide us with ways of knowing the world, of being in it and acting towards it by ‘operationalizing a particular ‘regime of truth’ whilst excluding other possible modes of identity and action.’70 Hegemonic practices that attempt to fix meaning in discourses are inextricably linked to representational practices, and it is in these practices that we can locate the operation of power in identity-making.71 To say that discourses are imbued with power means that within discourses certain meanings and statements are privileged, objects and subjects are created and ascribed attributes and others are ignored, certain acts are legitimated whilst others are made improbable. I understand power in the Foucauldian sense, as omnipresent, multiple and pervasive as opposed to only repressive, as central to the production of knowledge (such as the creation of identities, categories and classifications of people, things, ideas and so on). 72 That is, relations of power are ‘always inscribed in the relation an … identity bears to the differences it constitutes’.73 There is power in discursive representations that define and limit what is ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ (by allowing one ‘truth’ to be elevated over another) because these representations or ideas about people can be used to subjugate,
68 Martin, ‘The Political Logic of Discourse’, pp. 24-25; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 134-145. 69 William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 64-66; John Street, Politics and Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), p. 141. 70 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, p. 229. 71 Doty, Imperial Encounters, pp. 8-10. 72 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 119; Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, pp. 11-12; Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan 1977 (New York: Vintage Books, [1979] 1995), pp. 26-27. 73 Connolly, Identity/Difference, p. 66. 82 control, and order them discursively. Discourses then reflect, enact, and reify power relations, and certain actors play a privileged role in the discursive production and reproduction of meaning.74 This privileging is manifested through discursive practices, the rules, regulations and logics according to which a ‘field of objects’ is delimited and a legitimate perspective for knowing is defined.75 ‘Representations’, as ways of talking about something or someone, can then be seen as ‘signifying practices that produce meaning’, as instances of power-laden discursive practices that regulate conduct, create and constrain identities and subjectivities, and delimit the ways in which particular things are thought about, undertaken, and practiced.76 There is power in representations as ideas about people can be used to subjugate/control/order them. Representational power defines and limit what is ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ about ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in the ‘War on Terror’. Practices of representing particular peoples or objects (for example through a specific discourse such as official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse in which ‘female Others’ are represented as victims of ‘male Other’ violence) are ways in which identities of and knowledge about these things have been discursively constructed (for example by US administration officials, Western journalists and media) as ‘regimes of truth’.77 The power to do so is established in, and can be ‘read’ in, texts (as forms of representations) that work to ‘fix’ contested meanings (however temporarily or partial this fixity may be) through the deployment of relational distinctions and binary oppositions in which one element is privileged.78 As such texts are ‘the fabric in which discourse is manifested’79; objects or artefacts such as words, images, and sounds, can be read as texts ‘precisely because we use language to inscribe meaning into them, and then to derive meaning from them.’80 Identifying the particular relational (often binary) distinctions of ‘gendered orientalism’ is then a useful way to approach analysis of ‘War on Terror’ discourse(s) as it unsettles the ‘givenness’ of identities ascribed to people, places, things. These distinctions and identities are, as I will demonstrate in chapters 5, 6, and 7, configured by ‘gendered orientalism’ that constructs its discursive
74 Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson, and Duvall, ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, p. 13. 75 Michel Foucault, Language Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 199. 76 Kathryn Woodward, ‘Concepts of Identity and Difference’, in Kathryn Woodward (ed.), Identity and Difference (London: Sage, 1997), p. 15. 77 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 2. 78 Ibid., p. 10. 79 Mary Talbot cited in Lia Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland , ‘Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations’, in Lia Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland (eds.), Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), p. 12. 80 Carver, ‘Discourse Analysis and the ‘Linguistic Turn’ ’, p. 50. 83 foundations along gendered hierarchies, employing racialised classificatory schemes that order various types of people into ‘us’ and ‘them’. To elaborate, the orientalist binary oppositions I identify in US ‘War on Terror’ discourse include civilised/barbaric, first/third world, ‘West’/’East’, free/oppressed, rational/irrational. These are gendered in that they create (and are created by) notions of what appropriate masculinities and femininities are, and who they are applied to, resulting in hierarchies of discursively created orientalist identities whereby certain (racially identified) types of ‘women’ and ‘men’ are supposed to have particular traits that are thought to be ‘appropriate’ for, and natural to, a sex and a racial/ethnic/religious group. As I explained earlier, dominant understandings of sex and gender posit that ‘women’ should have feminine characteristics and ‘men’ should be ‘masculine’. I also see ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ not as homogenous terms but rather as multiple, that there are a range of ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’ that are applied differentially to groups of people according to orientalist ideas. For example, ‘Other women’ are represented as weak and in need of rescue, ‘Other male’ masculinity becomes barbaric and threatening, ‘Western’ (specifically US) femininity is strong but ultimately defers to the benevolent, paternalistic yet strong and militaristic masculinity of the ‘US self’. Identity then is established in relation to difference or otherness which has ‘become socially recognized’ and that difference itself is constructed in relation to identity.81 As identities are contingent and relational in this way, they are ‘performatively constituted’.82
Developing specific discourse analytic strategies Of particular importance in reading representational texts in my research is the identification of processes through which these relational distinctions construct identity and, relatedly, the discursive practices that delineate what is legitimate. To this end my DA research approach, based on the understanding that language is given meaning through discourses, is concerned with how discursive representational practices are used to deploy these meanings at particular times and in particular places.83 Taking gender and race (most often expressed in the US ‘War on Terror’ context as orientalism specifically) as two of the most fundamental and basic systems of identification that allow us to understand the world, this thesis asks in what ways official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse (re)produces orientalist and
81 Connolly, Identity/Difference, p. 64. 82 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 8. 83 Hall, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 84 gendered logics make war (in Afghanistan and Iraq) not only possible but necessary. In doing so I am concerned with establishing that there exists a ‘War on Terror’ discourse in which identities and events are constructed and understood in terms of gender and orientalism, and how these are deployed in discursive narratives (accounts, reports, beliefs) such as ‘saving’ ‘Other women’, and ‘oriental despotism’. To do so I utilise DA strategies that seek to uncover the ways in which discursive representations of the world function to make ‘truth’ of certain understandings of the world, its people, and events that take place in it, and make possible certain actions. In taking discourses to be systems of signification that operate to construct objects and subjects by ascribing to them certain qualities and attributes that are taken for granted, I understand discourses as coming into being through their use in modes of signification such as representational practices. As such, I examine these practices through the analytical techniques of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production to understand how identities, meanings, and behaviours that correspond with gendered orientalist views of the world are expressed in official texts in ‘War on Terror’ discourse (and, at key moments, unofficial representations, as explained earlier). I analyse these processes, outlined in more detail below, at key points in shaping my research (in terms of gathering and reading texts), and utilise them to organise my research in chapters 5, 6, and 7 around the construction of identity categories for the US ‘Self’ and ‘Eastern Others’ to illustrate how the practices of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production are deployed to construct a particular ‘reality’ or understanding of the world in response to the attacks of 11 September 2001. The (successful) production of identity categories and resulting narratives depends upon these discursive practices that ‘seek to create fixedness of meaning.’84 Central to this is the presumption and prescription of a naturalised ‘truth’ that functions as accepted knowledge of how the world works and what various categories of people within it think and do. Thus in applying DA strategies of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription and (re)production, I am looking to uncover not only what kinds of identity categories are constructed in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, but also what they presuppose, how they are made meaningful, what actions are pre/proscribed for particular groups, how (pre-existing) understandings of gender and race, in particular in terms of orientalism, are (re)produced in this discourse, and ultimately, how this enables military
84 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 8. 85 interventions. To do so is to uncover the contingent bases (contingent on gendered and orientalist logics and knowledge) that discursive practices seek to mask and naturalise as ‘truth’.85 The (re)production of this occurs through the use of classificatory schemes that categorise people into identity groups to which they ‘naturally’ belong, and which produce hierarchies of identity that are also based on naturalised ‘truths’ about the world and its people. A logic of difference (‘us’/’them’, ‘East’/’West’) underlies this, which operates to (temporarily) ‘fix’ these differences, and the contingency of this logic is itself masked by discursive practices.86 Although these discursive processes occur simultaneously and continually, it is useful to look at them separately in order to explain how they apply to my research.87 These techniques and the ways in which they shape my analysis of texts is outlined below.
1) Presupposition, predication and pre/proscription Processes of presupposition and predication are those that, in a discourse, attempt to present certain knowledge as background knowledge and as ‘true’. For example, official texts representing the ‘meaning’ of the violence perpetrated against the US by al Qaeda on 11 September 2001 have presented as true a ‘reality’ of war, and I will show how they do this in chapter 6 by analysing the masculine and orientalist logics (of seeing the world in terms of gendered and racialised binaries) that underscore these. As Doty explains, all statements ‘bring with them all sorts of presuppositions or background knowledge that is taken to be true’.88 Statements make implications about the existence and characteristics of subjects, objects, and their relationship with one another. For example, the process of presupposition is identifiable in the question ‘why do they hate us?’ that was posed (and answered) by President George W. Bush in the days after the September 2001 attacks.89 Here, Bush is creating background knowledge by presupposing that there is an identifiable ‘they’, a category of people that is not only delineated from but also positioned in a binary opposition to a group of people who form an ‘us’, and that group labelled ‘they’ do in fact hate ‘us’. Statements then only make sense because of presuppositions about the world, and because of the ‘background knowledge’ that is required to understand them. I argue, in chapters 5, 6, and 7, that ‘War on Terror’ discourse presuppositions are made
85 Martin, ‘The Political Logic of Discourse’, p. 25. 86 Doty, Imperial Encounters, pp.8-11; 87 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction’, p. 307. 88 Ibid., p. 306 (emphasis in the original). 89 George W. Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War with Fear” ’, 20 September 2001, available at
90 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction’, p. 306; Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, p. 232. 91 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction’, p. 306. 92 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, p. 232. 87 create a pattern of oppression that reproduces Afghan women’s agency along these lines. Repetition (of images, predicates, motifs, metaphors for example) is significant to my understanding of ‘War on Terror’ discourse not only in terms of predication, but also more broadly in terms of the ways in which images, motifs, and actions function in discourse. Here, the notion of intertextuality explained earlier is important to my understanding of the function of repetition in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Repetition of representations across a discourse can function to make certain ideas, thoughts, and understandings familiar and potent, giving them authority as ‘legitimate knowledge’.93 This is not only limited to repetition of particular words and phrases (such as ‘barbaric Taliban’, ‘oppressed Afghan women’), although these too are important in terms of making certain identities, ideas, and images of the world familiar and ‘natural’ to an audience. It is the broader repetition of logics (of gender, race, orientalism, and ‘gendered orientalism’) that construct the ‘same kinds of objects, subjects, and relations’94 across texts in ‘War on Terror’ discourse that give this discourse a coherence that, for example, enables military intervention in Iraq (a largely secular state with no proven connection to al Qaeda at the time of going to war) to be discursively connected to military intervention in Afghanistan (undertaken against a state complicit with the al Qaeda-led attacks on the US on 11 September 2001) through the use of identity categories such as ‘barbaric Other men’ that operate according to a logic of gendered orientalism. For example, while the phrases ‘evil-doers’ and predications of the Taliban as barbaric, backward, and dangerous were used frequently in ‘War on Terror’ discourse in the lead up to and early stages of the Afghan war, they were not necessarily repeated very often in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse leading up to the Iraq war. However, the logic of gendered orientalism was repeated, a logic in which masculine competition between ‘our’ acceptable hypermasculinity and ‘their’ barbaric uncontrolled masculinity (each supported by femininities, the ‘Self’ in terms of illustrating the egalitarian nature of ‘our’ society and the ‘Other’ in terms of illustrating the cowardice of the ‘Other’ and ‘his’ specifically patriarchal barbarism) underscored understandings of the world leading up to the Iraq war as much as it did the Afghan war. I do not, in this thesis, undertake a comprehensive predicate analysis, that is, I do not collect quantitative data relating to predicates across all texts or analyse
93 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction’, pp. 308-309. 94 Ibid., p. 308. 88 all predicates in all texts I have gathered. Rather, I find the processes of presupposition and predication useful for my research and analysis in a qualitative sense, in that these processes guide my reading and analysis of texts by enabling me to delineate particular categories of people, places, and things deployed in ‘War on Terror’ discourse at particular moments. Reading texts for examples of presupposition and predication is a key aspect of both my research strategy (in identifying and organising identity categories in ‘War on Terror’ discourse and locating texts) and the structuring of my analysis of ‘War on Terror’ discourse in chapters 5, 6, and 7. I do this specifically in terms of constructing a ‘Self’ in chapter 5, constructing ‘the world’, ‘the attacks’, and ‘the enemy Other’ and the ‘oppressed Other’ in chapter 6, and the continuing construction of these in chapter 7. In particular, in these chapters I am interested in using predication as an analytical strategy to read my corpus of texts to ascertain how ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ have been delineated for ‘us’ and an orientalised ‘them’. I look for such instances of attaching particular behaviours, qualities, actions, thoughts, feelings to particular actors, places, or things in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, and apply this not only to written or verbal texts but also to other discursive practices I look at in chapters 5, 6, and 7, such as producing images and taking particular actions. For example, in chapter 5 I look at images on the White House website in relation to the immediate aftermath of the attacks as presupposing the superiority of masculinity and predicating ‘Self’ as masculine by privileging ‘male’ bodies. Predication and presupposition can also be applied to non-verbal representations, such as actions or activities. An example of this is found in chapter 6, where, in the context of the broader construction of ‘Self’, ‘Other’, and the contradictory function of the ‘Islamic Other’, I analyse the act of President George W. Bush going to a mosque as ascribing the quality of inclusiveness to the US ‘Self’ that he represents. In establishing background knowledge and subject/object qualities, analysing presupposition and predication along with pre/proscription show how a causality that prescribes ‘truth’ is asserted. This process of predication is closely linked with prescription, that is, once a ‘fact’ has been established through predication, the conclusions drawn from these ‘facts’ are also discursively established as ‘truth’. I look for this in my analysis of narratives of intervention in chapters 6 and 7 primarily, but also in chapter 5 in terms of the naturalisation of masculine ‘Self’ through appeal to familial discourses. I understand ‘War on Terror’ discourse as delineating the ‘terms of intelligibility whereby a particular “reality” can be known and acted upon’ by limiting what may/may not be signified through 89 use of pre/proscriptive language.95 This is done through processes of pre/proscription (which follow on from predication) in that they attempt to ‘fix’ (albeit partially) certain ‘truths’ ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge’, and from these, the actions, behaviours, conclusions that logically follow as ‘acceptable’. This partial fixity then allows subjects to ‘understand’ the world through the ‘truths’, ‘knowledge’, identities, and meanings produced in the discourse. In delimiting ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, discourses are pre/proscriptive; they function to exclude or instruct particular actions based on the ‘knowledge’ they assert.96 ‘War on Terror’ discourse, I argue, prescribes certain desirable characteristics (on which the ‘Self’ is predicated) and performances (of masculinity for example) and proscribes others (for example behaviours toward women ascribed to the barbaric ‘Other’) based on logics of gender and orientalism, and draws ‘natural’ or ‘logical’ conclusions from these. For example, after identities have been constructed through predication (backward Afghans, oppressed women, dangerous Muslim men), pre/proscription operates to present these identities as supportive of ‘facts’ derived from them. That is, discursively constructed identities or ‘truths’ then lead to legitimate conclusions derived from these ‘facts’, for example Afghan women are identified as oppressed, Afghan men backward and barbaric, and the US masculine ‘Self’ is presented as benevolent and civilised; from these ‘truths’ it is concluded that oppressed Afghan women need to be ‘saved’ by the benevolent and superior US (through military intervention). In conducting my research, I applied this approach of identifying predication, presupposition, and pre/proscription firstly to the core texts I located (such as speeches listed on the White House website as ‘key’ speeches, and speeches to large audiences that are designed for particularly wide consumption, such as addresses to the UN, Congress, and State of the Union addresses) in order to identify key identity categories in ‘War on Terror discourse’. I did this by looking for what kinds of characteristics and behaviours were attached to particular groups such as ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘terrorists’, ‘Afghan women’, ‘civilised people’ and so on, and what actions were pre/proscribed to these groups. In chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this thesis, I operationalise this approach by showing how these key identity categories are constructed through processes of presupposition, predication, and pre/proscription which become the means by which the Bush administration
95 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 6. 96 Penny Griffin, Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 43-44. 90
‘names, classifies, and explains’97 the world (people, places, actions, ideas and so on) in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Specifically, I explore how the Bush administration’s discursive practices construct the appropriate ‘Self and inappropriate ‘Other’ in terms of logics of gender that privilege particular expressions of masculinity (over femininities and inappropriate masculinities), and logics of orientalism (in some moments, broader racialised logics) that privilege whiteness and ‘Westernness’ over non-white and ‘Eastern Others’. As noted above, a text will usually predicate more than one subject, giving rise to relational distinctions (free/oppressed, civilised/barbaric, benevolent/threat, for example). Thus I also look at relational distinctions related to identity categories in each of these chapters and how these are ordered. That is, I look at the distinctions in the attributes of objects in texts that are given through implicit or explicit contrasts and parallels, at what kinds of predicates are used to represent particular people, things, ideas. For example, the use of an ‘us’/‘them’ binary that I explore in chapters 6 and 7 (and the sub-categories arising from this, such as hypermasculine/deviant-masculine or feminised, civilised/barbaric, totalitarian/ democratic, oppressive/freedom-loving) construct a world where ‘we’ are civilised, egalitarian, and progressive not only through direct parallels (such as positing ‘our’ respect for democracy against ‘their’ hatred of freedom) but also through implicit contrasts that arise from the binary nature of the world set out in the discourse. In another example, a text that constructs ‘US men’ and the ‘Othered men’ might attach predicates in ways that suggest violence and irrationality for ‘Othered men’, and benevolence and reason for ‘US men’. These two oppositions can then be abstracted to a ‘core opposition’ that underlies both (for example barbarity vs. civilisation).98 Thus, in my analysis of presupposition, predication, and pre/proscription in chapters 5, 6, and 7, I also analyse the structuring of these relational distinctions according to hierarchical logics of gender and of race/orientalism (in which masculinity, maleness, whiteness and ‘Westernness’ are privileged), particularly in terms of their deployment in constructing narratives of intervention.
2) (Re)production Practices of signification such as predication and pre/proscription need to be understood along with the productive power of discourses in order to understand
97 Ibid., p. 39. 98 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, p. 234. 91 how certain discourses become dominant (for example, how it is that the significative and representational practices of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse that create identities such as ‘barbaric Other male’ and ‘civilised benevolent masculine self’ become ‘authoritative’ and justify policy aims like military intervention into Afghanistan and Iraq). Discursive practices of (re)production work to naturalise particular knowledge(s) as ‘truth’ by ascribing authority to speak and predicate, and creating common sense out of (groups of) predicates used. Discourses are then productive of power, of the knowledge(s), ‘facts’, narrative, realities, meanings, and identities that discourses speak of, construct, and order. To speak of the productive power of discourses means that the ‘things’ discourses produce do not ‘exist’ without the acts which constitute them and which result from them. That is, discourses then construct and produce the very subjects/objects of which they speak. Through continually employing discursive processes (of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription), they are (re)productive of the ‘meanings, subject identities, their interrelationships, and a range of imaginable conduct’99 defined by the discourse.100 As certain identity categories, actions, behaviours, hierarchies, narratives, ‘facts’, are (re)produced within discourse(s), this is performative in that the language produced in discourses creates the identities, knowledge, and realities to which individuals must conform, and which allow specific outcomes. For example, gender as a ‘discursive mechanism’ functions to (re)produce and naturalise certain understandings of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ to the exclusion of others.101 I understand (re)production to function as a process of ‘naturalisation’ (creating background knowledge that is taken to be true) through statements of fact (descriptions of what ‘is’ and merging of binary oppositions such as nature/culture Arab/Muslim ‘Other’/’Self’ to become irrational/instinctual Arab/Muslim ‘Other’ and civilised ‘Self’), and ‘classification’ (a rhetorical strategy that is linked to naturalisation in that people are placed into categories in which they ‘naturally’ belong, often then expressed as hierarchies based on an ‘essential’ character of things or people). I understand these identities as being ‘written’ on to the ‘Other’ through ‘negation’, whereby the ‘East’, its people, and histories are constructed as blank spaces on which to write characteristics like barbaric or civilised.102 For example, the agency of Afghan women is ignored in order for to be able to ‘write’ total oppression and helplessness onto their bodies. The writing of
99 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 4. 100 Lene Hansen, Security As Practice: Discourse Analysis And The Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 17. 101 Griffin, ‘Sexing the Economy in a Neo-liberal World Order’, p. 223. 102 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 11. 92 identity onto bodies-as-blank-spaces is closely linked to the final set of techniques I use, deconstruction and juxtaposition (which I describe shortly, in the final subheading in this section). Also key to discursive ‘production’ of the world is the function of discourse in defining who is authorised to speak and act in certain ways, having narrative authority to render certain actions and policies logical and proper (foreign policy officials, defence intellectuals, administration spokespeople).103 By defining the knowledgeable practices used by these authoritative subjects as logical and proper interventions, allowing those with authority or expertise to articulate ‘knowledge’ to the public and present it as legitimate, ‘authorised actors’ such as the US administration can define what is ‘common sense’ about objects, peoples, and groups for a discursively created audience.104 For example, official ‘War on Terror’ discourse attempts to project a certain common sense about the role of the US administration (to provide ‘security’ by identifying and containing threats), dispersing this beyond ‘authorised’ speakers to become common sense for the ‘ordinary’ public. Jutta Weldes’ use of the concepts of ‘articulation’ and ‘interpellation’ is helpful for explaining the process of (re)production and how it gives certain people or groups the authority to predicate sequences of words for or about subjects of objects. ‘Articulation’ in this context refers to the construction of discursive objects and relationships out of ‘cultural raw materials’ and ‘linguistic resources’.105 Weldes argues that cultural raw materials are combined and recombined, and the repetition of certain combinations as representations of the world ‘come to seem as though they are inherently or necessarily connected, and the meanings they produce come to seem natural, come to seem an accurate description of reality’.106 These representations become accepted by individuals as ‘natural’ through ‘interpellation’, that is, when authorised speakers create identities for people to identify with, which the authorised speakers also speak ‘from’.107 I look for this firstly in chapter 5, in order to establish how ‘authority’ (to speak about and for, create identities for, and identify ‘true’ knowledge about, various peoples) is ascribed to the Bush administration in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. This entails analysis of presupposition and predication as well as pre/proscription to analyse how, for example, the prescription of leadership to the administration is
103 Campbell, Politics Without Principle, p. 7. 104 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, p. 229. 105 Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 98. 106 Ibid., p. 99. 107 Ibid, pp. 103-107. 93 achieved through its predication as ‘strong’. I argue that this is made ‘acceptable’ for the audience of this discourse (here, primarily the US public) through the metaphor of ‘family’; this authority is then (re)produced in subsequent ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Although discourses continually (re)produce (as well as predicate and pre/proscribe) ‘realities’, and while I do refer to instances of (re)production throughout the case study chapters, I also isolate the function of (re)production at key moments in chapters 6 and 7. (Re)production is particularly important to my analysis in these chapters for understanding the ways in which early ‘War on Terror’ discourse (established in the weeks after 11 September 2001 and the Afghan war) remained important in the lead-up to the Iraq war. I will demonstrate, in the latter stages of chapter 6 and the early sections of chapter 7, that the (re)production of the gendered and orientalist binaries underscoring early ‘War on Terror’ discourse was instrumental in narratives around the Iraq war. Here, I look at how the consolidation period between the Afghan and Iraq wars is particularly important for understanding how (re)production in ‘War on Terror’ discourse has functioned to create and perpetuate the conditions necessary to make intervention in Iraq necessary. In chapter 7, I argue that discursive representations of the intervention in Afghanistan functioned to (re)produce constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ according to logics of gender and orientalism. That is, the discourse I discuss in chapters 5 and 6, in which a rational, civilised, democratic, progressive, masculine US ‘Self’ is posited against an irrational, barbaric, totalitarian, backward ‘Other’, is highly performative. This is because it is (re)productive of meaning not only through the language and vocabulary of the immediate responses to the 11 September 2011 attacks, but also through the actions and responses that have been prescribed in this discourse. These can be discerned in the lead-up to the Afghan war, conduct during the war, and in the period after consolidation of military control in Afghanistan. To this end, the latter part of chapter 6 and the first substantive section of chapter 7 will focus on demonstrating the (re)production of key identities and concepts (of ‘the war’, various categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and so on) in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse.
3) Deconstruction and juxtaposition Discourses, as noted earlier, depend upon a play of practice, where signification is always in flux, and meanings are never fully fixed. In demonstrating that official representations of the ‘War on Terror’ constitute discursive attempts to 94 order the societies which are represented (US, ‘Western’, ‘Eastern’) according to gendered and orientalist constructions, it is important to understand that these constructions and discourses are inherently contingent. Not only does official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse functions to make ‘natural’ certain identities and structures them according to gendered and orientalist assumptions, but the way it does this is contingent on the successful ‘silencing’ of other possibilities and representations. Official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse is contingent on marginalising those representations and narratives that challenge the ‘truth’ of the assumptions and understandings that shape this discourse. Although my analysis primarily focuses on identifying how, discursively, some representations are made ‘natural’ (through processes of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, articulation, interpellation, and (re)production outlined above), I also demonstrate (although necessarily in less detail due to constraints of space) how identities and categorisation in ‘War on Terror’ discourse is contingent and never fully ‘fixed’ in order to further demonstrate that the assumptions of, and knowledge offered in, this discourse is in fact not ‘natural’ but constructed. A number of methods can be used to demonstrate and challenge this contingency: the ‘genealogical approach’, the ‘subjugated knowledges’ method, deconstruction, and juxtaposition. Jennifer Milliken explains that the genealogical and subjugated knowledges methods constitute in-depth studies of alternative discourses which are useful for highlighting the contingency of discourses by illustrating that identities and events are being and have been interpreted and constructed in various ways. The genealogical method can be used to demonstrate the contingency of a discourse by undertaking historical studies of ‘past discursive practices’ that seek to document the singularity of events.108 A subjugated knowledges approach would also explore alternative accounts of ‘War on Terror’ discourse in some depth, for example by demonstrating the existence of a competing discursive construction of the events of the ‘War on Terror’ in which representations, identity categories and narratives are not shaped by gendered orientalist assumptions. However, using only the approaches of subjugated knowledges and genealology, whilst perhaps more comprehensive (as they entail a more thorough uncovering of alternative ‘truths’), is simply not possible here given the length or scope of my thesis. The depth of research required by the subjugated knowledges approach, for example, would require in depth research into alternative discourses to the point that it would constitute another research project. Instead, I
108 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, p. 243. 95 limit my techniques to two other methods that demonstrate the contingency of ‘War on Terror’ discourse, deconstruction and juxtaposition. Deconstruction and juxtaposition can be used to demonstrate that the world can be interpreted differently from the world as it is discursively constructed in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. The deconstructive method can reveal the contingent nature of a discourse by using textual analysis to interrogate the basic assumptions of texts. Another method, the juxtaposition method, is also useful in that it allows for the direct referencing of alternative representations of events, issues, or identities that are not acknowledged in a discourse. That is, juxtaposition requires the identification of alternative knowledges to challenge the assumptions of a discourse. One such example would be the failure of the Bush administration to acknowledge the complicity of the US in the creation and support of the Taliban, which complicates the strictness of an ‘us’/’them’ division given the collaboration between the two. Another way the method can be used is to juxtapose representations of the dominant discourse with contemporaneous ones that utilise different assumptions and definitions, and which ‘articulate subjects and their relationships in different ways.’109 For example, it is possible to directly contest official US discourse that constructs Afghan women as helpless and mute by discussing material that challenges this construction, for example as I do in chapter 6 by highlighting Afghan women’s activism before and during the US military intervention into Afghanistan. I also find juxtaposition useful in that it can unsettle the privileged knowledge that informs ‘War on Terror’ discourse, through the use of research that is produced by those who are spoken about but not given the ability to speak for themselves in this discourse. That is, it can challenge dominant ‘War on Terror’ discourse through the use of research that challenges the assumptions about those who have been represented as ‘Other’; my aim is to use primary and secondary sources to do this at key moments, for example, in challenging the ‘saving Afghan women’ narrative. However there may be instances where I am unable to locate such material and will need to rely on a deconstructive approach to show that an event or identity could, in principle, be interpreted or seen differently.110
109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., pp. 242-244. 96
Conclusion In this chapter I have set out the framework and concepts that guide my research and assumptions, and which will inform subsequent chapters of this thesis. In order to move beyond the ontological and epistemological positions of mainstream IR that serve to obscure the operation of ethnicity and gender in world politics, to read ‘War on Terror’ discourse to expose the role of ethnicity and gender in the construction of identities that legitimise military intervention, I have set out a framework that is positioned against approaches that presuppose the existence of a knowable ‘truth’. Thus I have outlined a research approach that understands identities and meanings as being discursively created, and the outcome of the play of power. As I have argued, the sites (in texts) at which meanings are contested and created are the location of this power, which enables (or precludes) particular possibilities and actions for states, groups, and individuals. Using the lens of three key themes of presupposition/predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production allows this power and its effects to be unmasked. I look at these processes in terms of how various concepts and identities are organised within official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse: the presuppositions (assumptions) that underscore them, the pre/proscriptions (of behaviours and actions) that follow from this, and the (re)production of these. In analysing ‘War on Terror’ discourse in this way, I am exploring identity creation and categorisation: how ‘us’ is differentiated from ‘them’, how ‘Western masculinity’ and ‘Western femininity’ are understood and constructed as being different from ‘passive Other femininity’ and ‘barbaric Other masculinity’, and how the former are privileged over the latter. Applying this analytical approach to my analysis of (imperial) interventions and the development of a liberal international system in chapter 4, and official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse in chapters 5, 6, and 7, I look at how the world has been divided into (ostensibly) distinct categories of ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’, ‘barbaric’, ‘civilised’, what kinds of characteristics are ascribed to people in these groups, what actions they can undertake in this discourse, and how these are deployed in narratives around intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Chapter Four Gender, Race, ‘Self’, ‘Other’ in Histories of International Intervention
Chapter 4 provides the first substantive discussion of the US’ (re)production of gendered and racialised/orientalist discourses in its construction of a ‘Self’, and how this has impacted on the US’ conceptualisation of, and approaches to, international intervention. To this end, I utilise my understanding of gender, orientalism, and discourse developed in earlier chapters by applying them to concrete contemporary examples (after World War I) that illustrate how gendered, racialised (and at times, orientalist) understandings of (and discourses about) the world can lead to intervention at specific moments. This is important because my analysis of ‘War on Terror’ discourse requires an understanding of the international system in which official US representations are constructed and operate, and in which the US has approached intervention previously. ‘War on Terror’ discourse is not ‘detached’ from previous discourses around intervention. Rather, pre-existing discourses of intervention (which are shaped by particular expressions of liberalism which at specific moments give rise to imperialism) are drawn upon to make ‘War on Terror’ discourse intelligible both by those constructing the discourse and those it is aimed to shape ‘War on Terror’ knowledge for (the ‘audience’), about ‘us’, ‘them’, and ‘the world’. This is not to say that official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse always draws on these discourses explicitly, but rather that the construction of this discourse hinges on the historical development of the US state’s self-identity in terms of particular strands of US (international) liberalism(s), imperial policies, and attitudes toward intervention. That is, the contemporary state of US international intervention, under the ‘War on Terror’ banner in Afghanistan and Iraq, is the result of the changes in US international discourses since at least World War I. To this end, chapter 4 examines how dominant understandings of a (gendered and racialised) US ‘Self’ has been constructed in examples of international intervention and dominant US foreign policy in twentieth century international politics. I find it important to look at pre-‘War on Terror’ examples because of the discursive antecedents that function to make ‘War on Terror’ discourse itself intelligible. That the ‘War on Terror’ has roots in pre-September 11 2001 events and policies is not a 98 novel assertion. A range of scholars demonstrate, for example that interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq represent an extension of ideas and policies that predated 2001 attacks (for example of a long-standing imperial impulse, or the ascendancy of a neo-conservative approach to the world (and the US’ place in it) dating to the end of the Cold War).1 My own analysis, drawing on the premise that the development of the ‘War on Terror’ and its military interventions has links to pre- existing policies and discourses, situates the ‘War on Terror’ in terms of the gendered and racialised (at times orientalist) discourses shaping the US’ foreign policies and international engagements before 2001. In doing so, this chapter applies the theoretical perspective that guides my research and assumptions (which I developed in chapters 2 and 3). Rejecting the notion of intrinsic meanings and ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ knowledge, I understand all knowledge as constructed and the world as made intelligible through discourses. In seeing the world as ‘discursive’, my analysis in chapter 4 is based on the understanding that the construction of identities shaped by gender and race result in the naturalisation of presuppositions and predications that enable or proscribe intervention at certain moments. I use the DA approach explained in chapter 3 to interrogate the presuppositions underlying the predication, pre/proscription and (re)production of identities here. Thus this chapter addresses how identities of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ have been constructed in dominant US discourses of global politics, in particular in terms of ‘interventionist’ impulses in US foreign policy at particular moments. Central to my analysis is the role of gender and race (at times orientalism) in the construction of ‘the’ discursive ‘world’ (and the people, places and so on in it). I draw on the concepts of gender and orientalism developed in Chapters 2 and 3, to illustrate that this world is shaped by dominant understandings of gender and race as binary. I illustrate the power and inequality that comes from ascribing gender and race to particular people(s), groups, and states, and how this power is deployed in undertaking particular actions (such as intervention). For example, I use gender and race/orientalism as critical tools to unpick the binaries of developed/undeveloped, sovereign/dependent,
1 For example, Michael Cox, ‘Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine’, Review of International Studies 30:4 (2004); John Dumbrell, ‘The Neoconservative Roots of the War in Iraq’, in James P. Pfiffner and Mark Phytian (eds.), Intelligence and National Security Policymaking on Iraq: British and American Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Michael C. Hudson, ‘Imperial Headaches: Managing Unruly Regions in an Age of Globalization’, Middle East Policy 9:4 (2002); Michael C. Hudson, ‘Pax Americana in the Middle East: Promises and Pitfalls’, (paper presented at ‘Europe, the Middle East and the Iraq Crisis’, Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, March 31-April 1, 2003), p. 1; Ian S. Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Jonathan Monten, ‘The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy’, International Security, 29:4 (2005); Zachary Selden, ‘Neoconservatives and the American Mainstream’, Policy Review, 124 (2004). 99 democratic/repressive and strong/weak states. This analysis then provides important backgrounding for chapters 5, 6, and 7 in that it illustrates the US’ long- standing engagement with racialised and gendered discourses in global politics. This is important because I understand discourses to be overlapping and as such, the discursive construction of the ‘War on Terror’ ‘world’ is shaped and made intelligible by pre-existing discourses. It is therefore important to consider historical constructions of interventions in dominant US discourse and dominant discourses of intervention in the international system, in order to understand how the military interventions of the ‘War on Terror’ were able to be pursued. The first section of this chapter examines the concept of liberalism and its intersection with imperialism, with a specific focus on the US. I do this because, as I will explain, various strands of liberalism have been implicated in (imperial) intervention, and liberalisms have been central to US conceptions of ‘Self’ dating back to the US’ independence. The chapter will then proceed to examine the configuration of the international system before the Cold War, with a focus on the development of (and changes to) liberal internationalism, sovereignty, and intervention in international relations. My concern here is specifically with how, despite a dominant anti-intervention stance, interventions have taken place and how these might have been made discursively possible. Beginning with US President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘democratic interventionism’, I explore the paternalistic and racist understandings of the international system as gendered and racialised. ‘Wilsonianism’ is important here as it represents an explicit call to intervention in the ‘Third World’ based on gendered and racialised assumptions of progress and development, of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. Wilson’s centralisation of democracy in discourse on sovereignty and intervention is an important example of the way in which military intervention in US foreign policy can be read as imperial (albeit in a different way to colonial powers). Tracing the foundations of the ‘liberal internationalism’ that developed during and after this period (embodied in the League of Nations, the UN, the Truman doctrine, and the construction of the ‘underdeveloped’ global south) I deconstruct various US approaches to intervention as (re)productive of gendered and racist presuppositions and identity predications, which discursively pre/proscribe of certain possibilities and actions (such as intervention). Following this, I look at the changing nature of intervention (particularly US interventions) during and after the Cold War in terms of the construction of identity and threat underpinned by a logic of hypermasculine competition and the superiority of ‘Western’ (specifically US) ‘liberal values’. The 100 chapter ends with an analysis of recent discourses of intervention based on development, humanitarianism, and democratisation. Drawing on the first Gulf War as a short case study to illustrate pre-‘War on Terror’ interventions in the Middle East, I conclude that gendered and racialised (and in some contexts orientalist) conceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ have been deployed to construct ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and to enable US interventions at certain moments. This is central to my discussion in chapter 5, where I continue an examination of a gendered and racialised US ‘Self’, and also to chapters 6 and 7 on the Afghan and Iraq wars, as chapter 4 sets out a history of gendered and racialised discourses that make official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse intelligible.
Imperialism, liberalism and the US This thesis is concerned with how interventions have come to be discursively enabled at particular moments, and through deploying certain understandings of the world, its people, places, ideas, and so on. I understand ‘imperialism’ to key to this, particularly in terms of the intersection between ‘imperialism’ and ‘intervention’. Indeed, many scholars from a range of theoretical perspectives have argued that the US’ ‘War on Terror’ is the expression of an imperial impulse.2 Imperialism, both as a set of ideas and the practice of those ideas, is important not only because it underwrites the actions of (some) states at specific historical moments, but also because there is an imperial dimension to world politics, both past and present, in terms of the configuration of ‘the international system’.3 I explore the characteristics and development of this system in in terms of the post- WWI liberal international order, and the development of ‘the international system’ post-World War II and post-Cold War. As David Long and Brian C. Schmidt argue, ‘imperialism denotes a hierarchical, often coercive, relationship’ in regards to states in an international system4; this also relates to my understanding of discourse as produced through (and productive of) discursive hierarchies as I explained in chapter 3. In particular, given the centrality of orientalism to colonial imperialism
2 See for example, Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities & Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on the Terror (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008); Cox, ‘Empire, Imperialism and The Bush Doctrine’; Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (Toronto: Penguin Press, 2003); Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah (eds.), Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Race, Gender, and War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 3 Julian Saurin, ‘International Relations as the Imperial Delusion; or, the Need to Decolonize IR’, in Branwen Gruffydd-Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 4 David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, ‘Introduction’, in David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (eds.) Imperialism And Internationalism In The Discipline Of International Relations (Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 2005), p. 10. 101
(and how this imperialism was gendered as well as racialised)5 any discussion of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse as gendered and orientalist entails at least a consideration of whether contemporary US international engagements can be read as imperial, and whether discursive constructions of identity (for ‘us’ and ‘them’) in dominant US discourses function to prescribe ‘imperial intervention’. A ‘War on Terror’ example of this is the construction of (in but also beyond Bush administration discourse) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as undertaken to ensure not only security, but as wars of liberation in which (a specific understanding of) liberal democracy would be delivered to Afghans and Iraqis. Zachary Selden and Roxanna Sjöstedt explain that the ‘roots’ of George W. Bush- era US foreign policy that posits military intervention as key to ‘liberating Others’ is based in a long-standing set of ideals that ‘resonate deeply in public opinion’ and can be traced back as far as eighteenth century American political thought.6 The first of these is that the US embodies a particular type of democratic liberal system (that emphasises individual freedom and reduction of domestic state power for example)7 that is an ‘ideal’ and universal model. That is, dominant understandings of ‘the’ US ‘nation’ (or ‘Self’) are based on the construction of the US as ‘unique’ in its embodiment of liberalism.8 Meghana Nayak and Christopher Malone explain that this gives rise to a specific type of ‘Othering’ (positing the US against both ‘Europe’ and non-‘White’ peoples) that produces ‘America’ as ‘unique’, expressed in the notion of ‘American Exceptionalism’ as a ‘founding narrative’.9 The second ideal Selden points to is that of the US federal government’s primary duty, which has been conceived of in dominant understandings as the protection of ‘its citizens from external threats’; generally this has led to international interventions being seen as ‘necessary’ if they relate to ‘national security’.10 As such, impulses to ‘export’ US liberal democratic values and institutions are intimately linked to domestic politics too and have at times been constrained by these.11 George W. Bush himself, Selden argues, embodies these contradictions in that his election campaign promised a
5 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Hammondsworth: Penguin, [1978] 2003); Melanie Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner “Abuse” in Abu Ghraib and the Question of “Gender Equality”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 9:1 (2007), p. 46; Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6 Selden, ‘Neoconservatives and the American Mainstream’, p. 30; Roxanna Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine: Norms, Identity, and Securitization Under Harry S. Truman and George W. Bush’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 3:3 (2007), p. 249. 7 Stanley Hoffman, ‘The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism’, Foreign Policy, 98 (1995), p. 160. 8 Selden, ‘Neoconservatives and the American Mainstream’, p. 30 9 Meghana V. Nayak and Christopher Malone, ‘American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony’, International Studies Review, 11:2 (2009), p. 254. 10 Selden, ‘Neoconservatives and the American Mainstream’, pp. 30, 32. 11 Melvyn P. Leffler, ‘9/11 and the Past and Future of American Policy’, International Affairs, 79:5 (2003), p. 1050. 102 turn-around from the unpopular policies of nation-building under Clinton, but he engaged the US in two military conflicts within three years which was possible because of the discursive construction of ‘the nation’ as under ‘threat’.12 As Neil Smith explains, there is a discernible duality underlying the liberal roots of US political make-up. That is, expressions of imperialism in US foreign policy can be understood as based on the notion that it is the US that best embodies ‘liberal democracy’ (‘American Exceptionalism’), yet this system is ‘universalised’13 (and that given the freedom to choose, any rational person would choose the US liberal model).14 There have of course been ‘contradictory attitudes’ to the US’ ‘proper’ role in international affairs, generally in terms of a dichotomy between isolationism and expansion.15 This points to two expressions of a (liberal) commitment to ‘American’ liberal democracy and economic institutions. For example, although US neoconservatives during the 1990s were not ‘liberal internationalists’, their conception of how to achieve their goals (of ‘containing’ Iraq for example) were predicated on the assumption that the US model of liberal democracy was the only legitimate one (thus pushing for the removal of Hussein through the 1990s and the installation of this specific model of democracy in Iraq).16 And, John Dumbrell argues, neoconservatives (some of who were part of the George W. Bush administration) might be ‘conservative’ in terms of domestic issues, but adhere to a liberal understanding of the centrality of free trade and democracy (for example the democratic peace theory) in their formulations of the US’ role and interests in the international arena.17 While there have been substantial differences in foreign policy choices and methods of implementation at moments in US history, it can be argued that at very basic level, the privileging of US liberal democracy is intrinsically tied to the centrality of in US nationalism and domestic as well as international political identity.18 Thus, what I am interested in in this chapter is identifying how, at particular moments, the construction of a US ‘Self’ is not only racialised and gendered but how these racial and gendered logics also enable or prescribe international intervention in certain moments. For example Roxanne Doty has illustrated that particular constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in terms of race and ethnicity have
12 Selden, ‘Neoconservatives and the American Mainstream’, p. 34. 13 Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 15. 14 Edward Rhodes, ‘The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Liberal Agenda’, Survival, 45:1 (2003), p. 144. 15 Monten, ‘The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy’, p. 113. 16 Maria Ryan, ‘Bush’s “Useful Idiots”: 9/11, the Liberal Hawks, and the Cooption of the “War on Terror” ’, Journal of American Studies, 45:4 (2011), p. 679. 17 Dumbrell, ‘The Neoconservative Roots of the War in Iraq’, p. 34. 18 Monten, ‘The Roots of the Bush Doctrine’, pp. 113-114. 103 been instrumental in shaping and enabling an imperial US foreign policy.19 As such, this chapter is concerned with the ways in which particular manifestations of liberalism give rise to imperialism; that is, how certain constructions of US ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ have converged to construct (US) intervention as necessary at particular moments since WWI. Although liberalism is marked by a commitment to freedom, peace and democracy, it is not fundamentally opposed to imperialism.20 The connection between imperialism and liberalism is not an inevitable one: liberalism has been anti-imperial in some of its expressions, but also the Western- centric underpinnings of liberalisms have given rise to imperial impulses in some of their manifestations (for example, in contemporary international relations, in terms of liberal internationalism and the democratic peace theory).21 Whether, in the post-colonial era, imperialism is a valid label for state actions is a highly contested issue in IR. The case for reading US foreign policy and global influence as a form of imperialism rests on an understanding of imperialism as fluid, changing, and historically specific. That is, imperialism is not necessarily tied to formal colonial rule. Although George W. Bush denied during his presidency that the US had imperial ambitions (stating in 2002 that ‘we have no territorial ambitions, we don't seek an empire’),22 the power relationships that underscore imperialism have shaped the US’ role within the international system at various points since at least the end of World War I. Julian Saurin makes the point that colonialism and empire should not be conflated; colonialism was simply ‘one form of imperialism’ and ‘modern’ imperialism has ‘metamorphosed in such a way as to retain the fundamental powers of imperialism while shedding the outward forms of colonialism’.23 That is, Edward Said explains, imperialism did not ‘suddenly become “past” once decolonization had set in motion the dismantling of the classical empires’.24 As Aijaz Ahmad point outs, imperialism as a power relation has ‘been with us for a very long time, in great many forms’, precisely because it has been able to ‘reinvent’ itself alongside the changing nature and structure of the international (economic and
19 Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 20 David Long, ‘Liberalism, Imperialism, and Empire’, Studies in Political Economy 78 (2006), p. 201. 21 Martin Hall and John M. Hobson, ‘Liberal International Theory: Eurocentric But Not Always Imperialist?’, International Theory 2: 2 (2010), pp. 218-219, 241. 22 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Salutes Veterans at White House Ceremony’, 11 November 2002, available online at
25 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Imperialism of Our Time’, Socialist Register, 40 (2004), p. 43. 26 Alison J. Ayers, ‘Imperial Liberties: Democratisation and Governance in the ‘New’ Imperial Order’, Political Studies, 57:3 (2009), p. 3. 27 Ibid., pp. 3-4. 28 Ahmad, ‘The Imperialism of Our Time’, pp. 44–5, emphasis mine. 29 Bacevich, American Empire, p. 25. 30 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xii. 31 Anna M. Agathangelou, ‘Bodies of Desire, Terror and the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the 'New' Imperium’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 38:3 (2010), p. 696. 105 has been ‘a complex process, moving through stops and starts, interrupted, contested, and sometimes reversed.’32 Rather, I am acknowledging that the US’ economic and military power33 has assisted in its ‘disproportionate role in shaping certain processes and situations’34 according to the US’ conception of liberal (political and economic) values, particularly in terms of (re)producing racialised and gendered identities and logics that have at various moments enabled intervention.
Liberal internationalism and the pre-1945 international system A key moment at which the intersection between imperialism and ‘American liberal values’ can be read as racialised as well as gendered is the emergence of ‘liberal internationalism’. The political though of US President Woodrow Wilson is intricately linked to the development of liberal internationalism which has continued to be relevant beyond Wilson’s era, having been developed and in various ways since then.35 In its most basic sense, liberal internationalism refers to those theories and practices which posit that open markets, international institutions, a cooperative approach security, democracy, collective problem solving, and the rule of law are key to international security and global progress. Differing modalities of this type of liberalism can be discerned in the structure of the international order since early twentieth century. The post-WWI ‘Wilsonian era’ marks the first attempts to construct an international order based on liberal principles. Unpicking Wilson’s liberal internationalism as gendered and racialised is important in that the basic assumptions of this world view can be discerned in later expressions of liberalism in the international system. For example, the George W. Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive strikes has also been identified as resembling the liberal internationalism espoused by Wilson, expressed as ‘Wilsonianism with teeth.’36 As such, it is worth exploring how ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, relationships between various types of people and relatedly, (imperial) international intervention, have been discursively constructed here. Proponents of liberalism as an organising principle of the international system (such as G. John Ikenberry) put forward liberal internationalism (as institutionalised in for example the UN, IMF, World Bank) as a way of ordering
32 Alex Callinicos, ‘The Actuality of Imperialism’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 31:2 (2002), p. 323. 33 Cox, ‘Empire, Imperialism and The Bush Doctrine’, p. 586. 34 Meghana Nayak and Eric Selbin, Decentring International Relations (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010), p. 2; see also Chris Brown, ‘History Ends, Worlds Collide’, Review of International Studies, 25: 5 (1999), pp. 47–49. 35 Selden, ‘Neoconservatives and the American Mainstream’, p. 32. 36 John J. Mearsheimer as cited in Agathangelou, ‘Bodies of Desire, Terror and the War in Eurasia’, p. 710. 106 international relations that is essentially ‘positive’ in that it is purported to be egalitarian and help all peoples achieve political and economic ‘progress’. For example, Ikenberry writes that ‘[a]t its most basic, liberal internationalism offers a vision of an open, rule-based system in which states trade and cooperate to achieve mutual gains.’37 However, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, this understanding of liberal internationalism is dependent on, and obscures, gendered and racialised knowledge about the world that enables imperialism to be naturalised through the ‘universalising’ of particular political and economic systems that privilege some over others. In the twentieth century, liberal democratic states became some of the most prosperous and powerful in the world, ‘propelling the West and the liberal capitalist system of economics and politics to world preeminence.’38 Liberal internationalism as a global political order emerged out of the ideas presented by some of these states (the US led by President Wilson alongside European liberals) in the aftermath of WWI. The proponents of liberal internationalism sought the establishment of long-term world-wide peace through global institutions that would promote mutual cooperation between states. It was in this context that the League of Nations was established at the Paris Peace Conference, in the aftermath of WWI. The League formed part of Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points for Peace’, which were based on the liberal assumption that the ‘new world’ born out of the end of WWI could solve the problems of the old through diffusing liberal principles of free trade and open markets, self-determination, and collective security.39 ‘Wilsonianism’ came to refer to a specific type of liberal internationalism in which an international order organised around a global security institution would encourage sovereign states to embody and promote those values, working toward cooperation and peaceful resolution of disputes. This liberal order ‘was defined in terms of state independence and the building of an international legal order that reinforced norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention.’40 This vision for a global institution took shape in the form of the League of Nations, which was to have universal membership.41 However this was tempered by the belief that some powers (read: ‘Western’) were ‘better suited’ to assist the ‘underdeveloped’; thus while all states (liberal democratic or not) were able to join
37 G. John Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilemmas of Liberal World Order’ Perspectives on Politics 7:1 (2009), p. 72. 38 Ibid., p. 71. 39 Marjo Koivisto and Tim Dunne, ‘Crisis, What Crisis? Liberal Order Building and World Order Conventions’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 38:3 (2010), p. 613. 40 Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0’, pp. 71, 73-74. 41 Ibid, p. 74. 107 the League, Wilson was ‘reluctant’ to recognise non-European ‘new’ states.42 The Wilsonian conception of this international order (and his rhetoric that the victors of WWI, leading the ‘new world’, would lead all peoples of the world to a better way of life and global peace) was underpinned by a world-view that was predicated on (openly) racist views based on social Darwinism, such as that non-‘White’ peoples were not fit to rule themselves.43 Thus Wilson’s vision for the world also centred around the issue of ‘subjugated peoples’ who were constructed by reference to lack of Western liberal democratic institutions and governance, race, and gendered attributes that marked ‘them’ as different to ‘us’. Although President Wilson was the key architect of the League, the US did not ratify the agreement due to opposition from Republican senators to Article X in particular, which would compel the US to become involved in international conflicts if a member nation was attacked. The failure of the US Senate to ratify the League reflected a reluctance to give up sovereignty and an isolationist element in US foreign policy that exists in concert with imperialist impulses.44 However, the importance of ‘Wilsoniansm’ extends beyond the League and has had a lasting impact on US foreign policy and political theory as the original expression of racist imperialism,45 and as the first US Presidential acceptance of Thomas Paine’s ‘idea of ‘America’ as the project of mankind’.46 I now explore the gendered and racialised underpinnings of Wilsonian liberal internationalism in terms of broader constructions of the ‘underdeveloped south’ below.
Gendered and racialised constructions of the ‘underdeveloped’ south The early twentieth century conception of (US) liberal internationalism posited intervention as necessary based on presuppositions about the world and predications of the people in it, which were both gendered and racialised. Heavily influenced by Wilson’s vision of the ‘necessary’ world order and the US’ place in it, this expression of liberalism was racist, paternalist and Western-centric. These elements were enshrined in the League of Nations, which, as John M. Hobson explains, can be read as a type of imperial civilising mission. Although the League
42 Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0’, pp. 74-75; David Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 88-89. 43 Constance G. Anthony, ‘American Democratic Interventionism: Romancing the Iconic Woodrow Wilson’ International Studies Perspectives 9:3 (2008), p. 241; Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, p.88. 44 Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, p.88; Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and The Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 95-96. 45 John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory 1760- 2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 167. 46 Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, p. 84. 108 was purported to be an alternative to the system of ‘national imperialism’ that that Great Powers had pursued, the League System
explicitly reconvened the very racist or Eurocentric assumptions that underpinned the old nineteenth-century conception of the civilizing mission. Indeed the Mandate System harked back directly to the ‘trusteeship’ conception of imperialism that was enunciated at the 1884 Berlin Conference and which was responsible for the imperial carve-up of Africa. Moreover, this conception also underpinned the idea of the British Empire.47
Although not coercive in the same way as the imperialism of European colonialism, the mandate of the League failed to reject imperialism in that the League’s ‘central’ principle of national self-determination was not intended to be applied to all states equally.48 Rather, it was underwritten by an ‘international imperialism’ (which has underwritten the various expressions the liberal international system that the US has been closely involved in shaping), which was to be ‘regulated and ‘civilized’ by the Mandate System’ in order to realise the ‘interests’ of ‘underdeveloped’ non- ‘White’ peoples; these peoples and their interests were constructed ‘according to the Western standard of civilization’.49 The presupposition of racial difference and hierarchy that underscored the paternal ‘civilising mission’ of the League was evident in Wilson’s refusal to include Japan’s racial equality clause in the League’s covenant. This also reflected the racialised and gendered conception of ‘Self’/‘Other’ in US domestic politics (centring on the paternalist notion that non-‘Whites’ must be ‘trained’ by developed ‘Whites’ before being full members of US society), to which Wilson subscribed.50 A demarcation between a civilised ‘Self’ and underdeveloped ‘Other’ proscribed ‘their’ full participation in the liberal international world order, but also prescribed the necessity of ‘us’ bringing ‘progress’ to ‘them’. In the Wilsonian conception, this meant delivering ‘rational’ political and economic institutions to supposedly ‘backward’ societies. Doing so would also function as a security strategy as integration into the political and economic systems of the ‘West’ would ‘lift’ non- Western peoples into the realm of the civilised or ‘developed’.51 The logic that underpinned this drew on gendered language and characteristics by which the ‘undeveloped’ were infantilised in the League’s Covenant. For example, Article 22, which was concerned with the status of colonies, spoke of ‘advanced nations’ offering ‘tutelage’ to ‘peoples not yet able to stand by
47 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, p. 166. 48 Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 130. 49 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, p. 166. 50 Anthony, ‘American Democratic Interventionism’, pp. 247-249; Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics , p. 168; Robert Vitalis, ‘Birth of a Discipline’, in Long and Schmidt, Imperialism And Internationalism In The Discipline Of International Relations, p. 169. 51 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, pp. 167-169; Tony Smith, ‘Making the World Safe for Democracy in the American Century’, Diplomatic History, 23:2 (1999), p. 177-178. 109 themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’, as part of a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’ much like the colonial ‘white man’s burden’.52 The proscription of ‘full’ sovereignty to non-‘Western’ ‘Others’ was predicated on the construction of the ‘underdeveloped’ as backward; this construction was naturalised in being constructed as rooted in, according to Article 22, lack of ‘resources, their experience or their geographical position’.53 The gendered representation of non- ‘White’ ‘underdeveloped’ peoples was central to President Wilson’s rhetoric on US international interventions, for example in the Philippines. Here the ‘Other’ was infantilised and feminised against the ‘Western’ (and US specifically) ‘Self’ which possessed ‘masculine’ traits of ‘self-control and discipline’ that were ‘necessary for democracy’. ‘Others’ were painted as ‘children [while] we are men’ who needed to develop ‘a love for order’, positing rationality and structure against irrationality and political and economic disorganisation.54 The development of the ‘Wilsonian’ approach to intervention is significant not only because President Wilson undertook more interventions than any other US president,55 but also because Wilsonian liberal internationalism was the first attempt (in US foreign policy) to institutionalise a connection between liberal democracy, economic liberalism, and ‘national security’.56 This has since underscored many international engagements undertaken by the US. For example, Constance G. Anthony explains that involvement Mexico under Wilson’s administration reflected ‘an American foreign policy tradition’ around interventions into the so-called ‘Third World’ which centres on exporting ‘democratic ideals’ to ‘underdeveloped’ nations, a tradition which has its roots in Wilsonian political ideals and rhetoric. In this particular expression of US liberalism in international politics, a specific model of democracy is envisaged as a ‘universal’ system beneficial for all peoples. However the ostensibly egalitarian character of this obscures the racialised and (masculinised) paternalistic belief that those nations in which Western liberal democracy had not yet developed formed a class of ‘immature peoples’ in need of US guidance from the US, whose guiding role was prescribed out of the predication
52 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, pp. 172-173; League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations, 28 April 1919, available at
57 Anthony, ‘American Democratic Interventionism’, pp. 239, 247; Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, p. 173. 58 Anthony, ‘American Democratic Interventionism’, pp. 241. 59 Ibid., p. 242. 60 Woodrow Wilson as quoted in Mark Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution: US Mexican Relations Under Wilson and Carranza (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), p. 22. 61 Kamil Shah, ‘The Failure of State Building and the Promise of State Failure: Reinterpreting the Security-Development Nexus in Haiti’, Third World Quarterly, 30:1 (2009), pp. 26-27. 62 Woodrow Wilson as quoted in Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875-1910, p. 175. 111 democratization’: if the ‘Other’ did not embrace the US model of democracy, ‘the United States must make them’.63 After WWII, the US was central in exporting the economic and political values it claimed to embody, playing a significant role in the establishment of key international institutions such as the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank.64 Changes in the international economic system as a result of WWII saw the emergence of a new configuration of liberal internationalism, a liberal democratic order with a focus on economic interdependence and openness, international institutions, and democracy.65 In 1942 the US, under President Franklin Roosevelt helped to establish the United Nations, an international body composed of those who had agreed to the Atlantic Charter which was drafted by Britain and the US. Global cooperation, the Allies purported, would ensure not only peace but also economic security. This vision for the world was underwritten by the assumption that through establishing global economic and political integration and interdependence, there would be less incentive for states to go to war.66 The position of non-‘Western’ states in this configuration of the international order differed somewhat from Wilsonian liberal internationalism, in that the US now pushed for independence of European colonies (albeit under the trusteeship of the UN, and also because of the US’ fear of a closed economic system that arose out of the US depression, and a desire to displace European power).67 However, imperial power, based on racialised and gendered constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, remained central to both US discourse and the reconfigured international system. For example, the institutions that were established through the Atlantic Charter and Bretton Woods system post- WWII (the GATT, IMF, World Bank, UN) institutionalised ‘liberalism’s implicit subjectivity of “I lead, you follow” ’.68 Constructed as based on ‘universal’ principles and interests, these institutions were designed to ‘civilize international politics’ and to ‘develop’ the ‘underdeveloped’.69 The relatively strong position of the US allowed it to position itself at the helm of these post-WWII changes: the US controlled
63 Anthony, ‘American Democratic Interventionism’, p. 242. 64 Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 135; David Skidmore, ‘Understanding the Unilateralist Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 1:2 (2005), p. 209. 65 Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0’, p. 76. 66 Ibid.; Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, p. 98. 67 Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, pp. 99, 104. 68 L. H. M. Ling ‘Cultural Chauvinism and the Liberal International Order: ‘West versus Rest' in Asia's Financial Crisis’, in Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.) Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, Class (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 134. 69 Siba N. Grovogui, ‘Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Enquiry’, in Chowdhry and Nair (eds.) Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations, p. 51; Nayak and Malone, ‘American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism’, pp. 268-269. 112 almost half of the world’s wealth at this time and in providing the financial resources for the IMF and World Bank, the US was able to exert more influence over these institutions than most other states. The US was instrumental in drafting not only the UN Charter, but also the central organising principles of the new economic system that remained tied to Anglo-American liberal experiences and interests.70 The imperial underpinnings of Wilsonian liberal internationalism were thus reconfigured in this post-WWII neoliberal political and economic system. Neoliberal discourse, as created in and by hegemonic international institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, GATT, is predicated upon a division of the world into oppositional identities that draw on constructions of a capitalist ‘Western Self’ as progressive and developed, and the ‘Other’ as the backward, underdeveloped, ‘Third World’ or global south. In this configuration the ‘Self’ comprises of a white/Christian/capitalist ‘West’ that is marked out by its adherence to (and propagation of) a specifically neoliberal configuration of the world. Simultaneously, gendered logics function to mark out this ‘Self’ through ‘masculine’ traits of rationality, wealth, and power, whereas the ‘Other’ embodies ‘brownness, blackness or yellowness shackled by superstitions or fundamentalisms…and exhibits irrationality, poverty, and powerlessness’.71 In privileging liberalism and capitalism, and seeking to incorporate the ‘Third World’ into the economic structures of the ‘West’, these institutions can be read as having an imperial function. For example, the conditionality of IMF and World Bank loans and the process of structural adjustment have been instrumental in diffusing the principles of free trade and ‘neoliberal civilizational practices’.72 As Robert Keohane and Michael Ignatieff, (notable proponents of liberal internationalism) admit, this reflects the ‘interests and ideologies of the most powerful states in the international system’.73 While Keohane and Ignatieff argue that these are beneficial for all states and peoples, the function of these institutions is imperial in terms in requiring ‘developing’ states to conform to a specific understanding of ‘successful’ political and economic structures, and indeed cultural practices. However, the ‘benefits’ neoliberalism might bring to the global south are debateable. For example, ‘free trade’ denies poorer economies the benefits of protectionism that allowed richer countries to industrialise, and allows richer countries to benefit at the expense of poorer ones by allowing the former to
70 Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, p. 104. 71 L. H. M. Ling, ‘Borderlands: A Postcolonial-Feminist Alternative to Neoliberal Self/Other Relations’, International Affairs Working Papers 2008-03 (New York: The New School, 2008), pp. 1, 3. 72 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, p.199. 73 Ibid., p.219. 113 export their goods.74 By way of another example, accepting financial aid from the IMF is conditional on structural adjustment programs, which means that accepting aid requires the adoption of ‘neoliberal policy architectures’.75 The role of liberal international institutions is imperial, as they function ostensibly in the service of a ‘common good’ (purporting to achieve global prosperity and security) but serve the interests of some rather than all. These institutions are not merely ‘economic’ or divorced from the political and cultural: their impact extends to the ability, through economic relationships, to ‘culturally convert’ the ‘underdeveloped’ to ‘Western liberal-civilizational principles’ which are purported to ‘help or uplift them’.76 The (liberal) international system being constructed here is then predicated on, and in institutionalising (re)produces, gendered and racialised ‘Self’/‘Other’ identities which have continuing relevance for the contemporary context. Indeed, Nayak writes that encouraging ‘Others’ to take on political and economic models that ‘fit’ with the US’ own, that is, ‘[m]aking the world safe for capitalism’, is a ‘necessary condition for the reassertion of US state identity’ in the ‘War on Terror’ context specifically.77 In this sense, liberal international institutionalism means ‘new ways’ of intervening in the global south.78 Although ‘new’ in the rejection of overtly racist or gendered language, this conceptualisation of ‘the world’ is still underpinned by racialised and gendered logics (of feminised backward ‘Others’) that enabled imperialism (in the form of colonialism but also beyond it). The ways in which racialised and gendered identities of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (US ‘Self’ and external ‘Others’) are constructed and function in global politics (especially around intervention) are important because their construction and reconstruction over time serve to function as ‘background’ knowledge which play a part in making ‘intelligible’ the binary identity categories upon which narratives of intervention in ‘War on Terror’ discourse are predicated. I will now discuss the construction and function of gendered and racialised identity categories in the Cold War context, showing that these too built on and reflected pre-existing gendered and racialised logics.
The Cold War, hypermasculine ‘Self’, and the threat of the ‘Other’ The US played a central role in creating a liberal international system post- WWII, but this also saw the US become ‘tightly bound to the other states within
74 Ibid., pp. 219-220; Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, p. 160. 75 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, p. 220. 76 Ibid,, pp. 199, 219-221. 77 Meghana Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8:1 (2006), p. 56. 78 Mark Duffield, Development, Security, and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2007), p. 32. 114 that order’, which continued under President Harry Truman.79 As explained above, this liberal international system was constructed out of a concern with ensuring global security, but (particularly under Truman) was also designed to ‘reconstruct’ the economies of nations after WWII. US foreign aid programs were ‘designed to support friendly regimes, to prevent others from defecting’ to the Soviet bloc, ‘and to serve as a global mechanism to maintain international order while promoting economic growth in developing and the newly-emerging countries.’80 The Cold War- era Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan were ‘precursors’ of contemporary ‘development assistance’ as they incorporated aid into a security strategy against a threatening ‘Other’.81 This is significant for my analysis of the ‘Other’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, as the development of US international discourse and the liberal international system during the Cold War illustrates the (re)constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ along racialised and gendered lines that were instrumental in discursively enabling intervention during this period and beyond. Indeed, Mark Duffield’s work on the link between development and security illustrates that ‘development’ has been ‘securitised’ in terms of being aimed at those states or populations that are perceived to threaten ‘our’ ‘security’.82 This he argues, can be understood as a ‘liberal strategization of international power’ that is predicated on and (re)produces constructions and deployment of categories of ‘civilised’ (democratic, egalitarian, developed) and ‘barbaric’ (backward, despotic, underdeveloped).83 For example, in the ‘War on Terror’ era, ‘failed’ and ‘fragile’ states (the use of feminising terminology reflects the gendered nature of development discourse) are identified as central to ensuring ‘security’,84 and there are
pressures to reprioritise development criteria in relation to supporting intervention, reconstructing crisis states and, in order to stem terrorist recruitment, protecting livelihoods and promoting opportunity within strategically important areas of instability.85
79 Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0’, p. 76. 80 Neclâ Tschirgi, ‘Security and Development Policies: Untangling the Relationship’, in Stephan Klingebiel (ed.), New Interfaces Between Security and Development: Changing Concepts and Approaches (Bonn: German Development Institute, 2006), p. 47. 81 Ibid.; Mark Duffield, ‘Social Reconstruction as the Radicalization of Development: Aid as a Relation of Global Liberal Governance’, Development and Change, 33:5 (2002), pp. 1065-1066. 82 Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London and NY: Zed Books, 2001), p. 15. 83 Mark Duffield, ‘Development, Territories, and People: Consolidating the External Sovereign Frontier’, Alternatives 32:2 (2007), p. 227-228. 84 Mark Duffield, ‘Human Security: Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror’, in Klingebiel, New Interfaces Between Security and Development, p. 27. 85 Ibid., p. 14. 115
Duffield’s reading of Truman’s inaugural speech illustrates the early ‘securitisation of development’,86 and the following excerpt of this speech is particularly relevant:
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat to both them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.87
The relationship between development and security is posited as one that is mutually beneficial; as Duffield writes, the underlying premise of this is that by ‘fostering ‘their’ development, we improve ‘our’ security’.88 This has been repeated in the contemporary context: for example, Tony Blair has argued that if ‘we’ help ‘them’ (those who are ‘less fortunate than ourselves’) ‘not only is it good for them, it is also good for us.’89 Thus the provision of development aid for the developing world by wealthy capitalist economies has been ‘framed in universalist terms of bringing progress and development to the Third World’ but reflected a ‘specific concern with the security of the developed world’.90 Instrumental to this, and to US discourses around the Cold War, are constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ along gendered and racialised lines. The Cold War, David Campbell argues, can be read in terms of the ‘production and reproduction of identity’ as the war was an ‘ensemble of practices in which an interpretation of danger crystallized around objectifications of communism and the Soviet Union’ that focused on the ‘threat’ the USSR posed to ‘our’ freedom and the US ‘democratic system’.91 Instrumental to this was the deployment of strongly bounded binary identity categories of ‘the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbaric,’ the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological.’92 In this context, the construction of the key US foreign policy doctrine at this time, the Truman doctrine, is worth examining for its constructions of threat, identity, and intervention. Gendered identities in terms of competing masculinities are discernible in the construction of the Truman Doctrine, which is important to examine as it ‘set a framework that directed the security policies of all subsequent presidential administrations until the end of the Cold War’, which shared the aim of ‘containing’
86 Duffield, Development, Security, and Unending War, pp. 23, 39. 87 President Harry Truman, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1949, as cited in Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 3. 88 Duffield, ‘Development, Territories, and People’, p. 225. 89 Ibid. 90 Tara McCormack, ‘Human Security and the Separation of Security and Development’, Conflict, Security & Development, 11:02 (2011), p. 246, emphasis in original. 91 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 25-26, 195. 92 Ibid, p. 195 116
Communism.93 The Truman Doctrine (and subsequent containment policies) was predicated on the construction of, and division of the world into, ‘freedom’ and ‘totalitarianism’ embodied in, respectively, (‘Western’) capitalism and communism.94 The construction of the conflict in this way was gendered in terms of the discursive construction of the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, because, as Robert Dean explains, US ‘hegemony over the ‘free world’ required the cultivation of imperial masculinity.’95 Specifically, this was an ‘elite masculinity’ performed by US leaders during the early Cold War which equated manliness and heroism with physical strength, military service, and uncritical loyalty to the state and its (anti- communist) values.96 Charlotte Hooper explains that gender and ‘threat’ were intertwined in dominant US Cold War discourse, and particularly in the construction of identities (of ‘Self’ and various ‘Others’, external as well as internal). Drawing on Campbell’s work, she argues that Cold War logics, in feminising communists and homosexuals (for example through the use of the term ‘pinko’ to describe those accused of being sympathetic to communists) demonstrated a fear of ‘latent homosexuality’.97 Cold War constructions of US ‘Self’, then, were organised around a desire to project a hypermasculine ‘Self’, against the threatening masculinity posed by an ‘aggressive’ and ‘totalitarian’ ‘Other’, and the ‘homosexual threat’ inside.98 The Truman Doctrine posited the USSR as a threat to ‘Western’ democratic states, and positioned the US as the leader in what was perceived to be a ‘global struggle against Communism.’99 Roxanna Sjöstedt’s analysis of the doctrine illustrates that, discursively, the identification of a ‘major threat’ (gendered, as explained above) both ‘obligates and enables’ the pursuit of a ‘solution’ which in the Truman Doctrine included intervention into states perceived to be ‘victims’ (which Sjöstedt’s research shows are all states except the US and USSR).100 The Truman Doctrine reveals much about the gendered underpinnings of the construction of the US ‘Self’ as protector of the liberal international system post-WWII. The US ‘Self’
93 Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine’, p. 236. 94 Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, pp. 93-94. 95 Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), p. 12. 96 Ibid., p. 18, and chapter 3. 97 Charlotte Hooper, Manly State: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 86-87; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, pp. 65, 166. 98 Hooper, Manly States, p. 66; Jutta Weldes, ‘The Cultural Production of Crises’, Crises: US Identity and Missiles in Cuba’, in Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall (eds.), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 46. 99 Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine’, p. 240. 100 Ibid., pp. 238, 242. 117 was personified, in the official and unofficial texts Sjöstedt examines, as capitalist, ‘White’, and male.101 Sjöstedt further shows that
“aggressive” is the most frequent predication to the Soviet Union, partly because of its power and capabilities, but mainly because of its political ideology…Communism is…seen as representing cruelty, war, and lack of freedom, as well as constituting a major threat to liberty.102
This predication ascribes a negative masculinity to the USSR, one that is irrational, deviant, backward, and unpredictably aggressive. While, as Sjöstedt’s selection of official texts show, the US has not ‘asked’ to be put in this position, the duty to secure the world from the Communist threat has been ‘placed upon us, whether we like it or not, [and entails] great international responsibilities’.103 ‘Other’ masculinity is then in competition with the masculinity ascribed to and performed by the US ‘Self’. The valiant nature of US masculinity is expressed in President Truman’s claim that the US has ‘a higher duty and a greater responsibility than the attainment of our own national security. Our goal is collective security of all mankind’.104 The Secretary of State elaborated that the US has ‘a sense of responsibility for world order and security’, and this predication consolidates the US position as a rational masculine protector for the safety of not only its own people, but the world.105 The UN and states other than the US and USSR were feminised through their construction as ‘weak’ (being in need of economic assistance and physical protection from the USSR’s totalitarian ambitions) and unable to compete with the USSR’s masculinity, leaving the US to counter the threatening masculinity of the ‘Other’.106 The gendered predication of identities then reflects the historical construction of the US ‘Self’ as embodying values of freedom, democracy, equality, and so on, as the Truman Doctrine positioned the US as ‘the ‘‘leader’’ of ‘‘the West’’ or the ‘‘free world’’ ’.107
Post-Cold War: democratisation, humanitarianism, and the responsibility to protect The end of WWII saw the emergence of an ‘interstate system of capitalist world politics based on an ideology of individualism, competition, private property, and limits on state power.’108 Due to the collapse of the USSR, the US’ main
101 Ibid., p. 241. 102 Ibid., p. 242. 103 Assistant Secretary John Hilding, as quoted in Ibid., p. 241. 104 President Harry Truman as quoted in Ibid., p. 248. 105 Secretary of State James Byrnes as quoted in Ibid., p. 248. 106 Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine’, p. 242. 107 Weldes, ‘The Cultural Production of Crises’, Crises’, pp. 42-44. 108 Ling ‘Cultural Chauvinism and the Liberal International Order’, pp. 137-138. 118
‘enemy’, Ikenberry characterises the US as a ‘superpower’ in a new unipolar world.109 Tim Dunne cites Ikenberry as arguing that ‘the leading states of the world system are travelling along a common pathway to modernity’ in the post-Cold War system.110 In Ikenberry’s assessment, this US-led liberal international order is still intact, functioning with a blend of ‘reciprocity, coercion, and consent’.111 Dunne however, points out that this is a ‘singular’ reading of the world, predicated on the belief that ‘the locomotive of modernity is the shared interests of leading international actors in the reproduction of a liberal order that delivers benefits to all and excludes none (at least in principle)’.112 Although the US has been, at many points in history, a key instigator of change in the international system, this system exists outside the US as much as it is influenced by it and does not always reflect the US’ interests (whatever they might be at any given time). For example, while financial markets post WWII had been closely tied to the US as the US dollar had been linked to the gold standard, this became less so when the dollar-gold standard ended in the 1970s.113 While the US remains a particularly strong and powerful state in this system, it has often found itself in disagreement with it. This is particularly evident in the US’ approach to international interventions in this period, which I contextualise now. After the end of the Cold War, US and ‘Western’-based discourses of international intervention have increasingly revolved around concepts of development, democratisation, human rights, and the responsibility to protect. These concepts are predicated on the construction of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ along racialised and gendered lines, and find their antecedents in the imperial discourses of post-WWI liberal internationalism.114 The division of the world into civilised/barbaric as discussed in chapters 1 and 2 has evolved in the contemporary era. Now, Noam Chomsky writes, there is still a ‘vast gulf’ constructed between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in dominant ‘Western’ discourses, expressed in terms of a divide between ‘the civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the barbaric brutality of those who for some reason…fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment’.115 Previous
109 Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0’, p. 79. 110 G. John Ikenberry cited in Tim Dunne, ‘The Liberal Order and the Modern Project’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 28 :3 (2010), p. 535. 111 G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 3; Dunne, ‘The Liberal Order and the Modern Project’, p. 535. 112 Dunne, ‘The Liberal Order and the Modern Project’, p. 535. 113 Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0’, p. 78. 114 Ahmad, ‘The Imperialism of Our Time’, p. 46. 115 Noam Chomsky as quoted in Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 284. 119 constructs of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ based on the basic binary of civilised/barbaric are now reinterpreted in mainstream discourse, in the construction of the world as comprised of developed/underdeveloped and effective/failed states. These function to ‘promote neo-trusteeship or benign imperialism’ and ‘legitimize these prescriptions as non-racist, technical fixes to failures of governance.’116 But this depends on the ability to assign ‘freedom and representation to ‘us’ ’ which itself has been predicated on a ‘culturally coded racism’ in which binaries such as ‘civilized/barbarian, advanced/backward, active/passive, industrious/sensuous’ are applied to peoples who do not ‘measure up’ to ‘our’ standards of civilisation.117 The conceptualisation and practice of ‘development’ then functions as a ‘liberal relation of governance’ in that speaking of ‘development’ allows for power to be exercised in the act of ‘speaking on behalf of people and their rights, freedoms, and well- being’.118 Development then has a relationship to security discourse, whereby helping those ‘less fortunate than us’ is not only altruistic, but also reaps rewards as it is expected that helping ‘them’ will ‘improve ‘our’ security’ reaching back to President Truman’s call for ‘us’ to assist the ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘primitive’.119 Thus, as Duffield explains, ‘[T]he nineteenth-century liberal urge to protect and better has been supplemented by a contemporary developmental need to secure unfamiliar and incomplete life.’120 Central to this is the construction of some ‘lives’ as lacking ‘the prerequisites of a proper or complete existence.’121 Within discourses of ‘development’ and ‘responsibility to protect’, the predication of ‘humanitarian’ differences between so-called ‘effective and ineffective states’ function to (re)create a hierarchy of states in the international system which (generally) privileges the global north.122 This hierarchy is evident in the construction of ‘the international community’ of states, for which international bodies such as the UN claim to speak and represent. The hierarchical configuration concentrates power in the hands of some states, allows them to construct intervention against others as legitimate, and to undertake intervention selectively.123 This can be traced to the formation of the United Nations, which was ostensibly based around a desire to bring together states in an egalitarian
116 Robert Shilliam, ‘What the Haitian Revolution Might Tell Us about Development, Security, and the Politics of Race’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50:3 (2008), p. 778-779. 117 Duffield, ‘Development, Territories, and People’, p. 230. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., pp. 225-226. 120 Ibid., p. 234. 121 Ibid., p. 237. 122 Ibid., p. 236. 123 Ramesh Thakur, ‘Global Norms and International Humanitarian Law: an Asian Perspective’, International Review of the Red Cross, 83:841 (2001). 120 international community in which all member states were afforded formal equality. However, the practice of humanitarian intervention reflects the highly stratified nature of the international system, with the power to determine which states meet the ‘new’ standard of civilisation (as defined by human rights), and what is to be done about those who do not, is concentrated in the hands of the UN Security Council which is dominated by (mostly ‘Western’) states that have a vested interest in perpetuating the neoliberal world order, and which ultimately have the final decision regarding approving interventions.124 The development of, and debates about, the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine (R2P) in international relations also illustrate racialised and gendered logics of ‘civilisation’ (racialised) and ‘dependency’ (gendered) in the international system. The complexity of the US’ stance in regards to contemporary humanitarian intervention and the contemporary international system is useful to examine here. While a key actor in shaping the (imperialist) liberal international system that developed after WWI, the US is also constrained by and at loggerheads with this system. Exploring the imperial possibilities in the R2P doctrine, I posit that the US’ reluctant to support R2P as a doctrine (and its obstruction of international interventions undertaken by the UN under this doctrine) are less the result of an objection to any imperial function of R2P, but rather reflect the reluctance the US has often displayed to having its own sovereignty impinged on by collective decision making that it does not lead and that might lead it to become involved in conflicts that do not suit US ‘national interests’. The R2P doctrine was developed during the late 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report on ‘The Responsibility to Protect’. Sovereignty, in the R2P doctrine, is not absolute: rather, it is tempered by ‘the international community’ of sovereign states’ (in dominant international discourse at least) ‘legitimate interest’ in the (domestic and international) policies and practices of states125 insofar as they offend standards of ‘civilisation’ which now relate to ‘universal’ principles of human rights.126 Far from being an ‘objective’ exercise, the conceptualisation of R2P depends very much on the power to determine what ‘human rights’ are.127 The US position in relation to R2P illustrates the contradictions and complexities of intervention in US foreign policy, which has been underwritten by
124 Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Humanitarian Intervention and International Society’, Global Insights 7:3 (2001), pp. 225-226. 125 Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0’, p. 79. 126 Ayoob, ‘Humanitarian Intervention and International Society’, p. 226. 127 Ibid., p. 226. 121 both imperial and isolationist tendencies. Harking back to the US’ refusal to join the League of Nations out of reluctance to defer to the League’s authority on participating in military engagements, R2P was not looked upon favourably by US Congress; Congress made it clear that the UNSC could not overrule domestic war- making powers in the US.128 However, the doctrine was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2005,129 indicating the extent to which liberal internationalism (which the US had a key role in developing, as I have explained) now exists beyond the US. Indeed, humanitarian intervention, as a model of liberal internationalism, has proved extremely challenging for the US, which has been at loggerheads both with the international system and other states throughout the post-Cold War period. Competing ‘imperatives to unilateralism and multilateralism in US foreign policy’ have impacted on US relations with the UN in the context of international interventions since the 1990s, and in this sense the US’ unilateral actions in Iraq in 2003 reflect a tension between a conception of US ‘Self’ that jars with acquiescing to the UN when there is a perceived conflict with US ‘interests’.130 In particular, the US experience in Somalia marked the start of a period of particularly strong hostility toward various UN efforts at humanitarian intervention. While events in Somalia were unfolding there were calls in the international community for the US to become involved with UN efforts, but domestically, there was disagreement about the US’ proper role (especially between the State Department and Defense, with the latter far more reluctant for the US to become involved). The failure of the peacekeeping mission in Somalia opened the Clinton administration to charges of becoming entangled with UN-led actions to the detriment of the US’ own ‘national interests’, particularly in mainstream US news media and in Congress.131 In the US press, Congress, and public, Somalia was seen as a failure in terms of the ability of the UN to keep the peace and because of the price paid by the death of US soldiers for what appeared to have no connection to the US national interest. After the domestic backlash in terms of the US’ role in Somalia, the US (state’s) position on international interventions was underwritten by a distrust of the UN’s ability to successfully manage (humanitarian) intervention, and a belief that US national interests were not served by this.132 The US has asserted its sovereignty since by displaying open hostility to UN efforts at intervening post-Somalia, in particular as
128 Ramesh Thakur, The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 49. 129 Alex J. Bellamy, ‘The Responsibility to Protect and the Problem of Military Intervention’, International Affairs 84:4 (2008), p. 615. 130 Thakur, The United Nations, Peace and Security, p. 48. 131 Ibid., pp. 54-57. 132 Ibid., p. 58. 122 evidenced by the inaction over the Rwandan genocide despite knowledge of the events unfolding there, as well as in East Timor.
Gender, race, and intervention in contemporary US foreign policy: the Gulf War, reasserting ‘White’ masculinity Gendered and racialised logics, I have illustrated thus far, have been underlying the development of US constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ that have been instrumental in enabling intervention. These became particularly salient in a pre- ‘War on Terror’ example of intervention in the Middle East, the first Gulf War, which I look at here in the context of contemporary racialised and gendered logics of US intervention. As I explained in chapter 2, feminist research has uncovered the central role that traditional constructions of gender in shaping dominant discourses on security, peace, and war. US foreign policy, Cynthia Enloe argues, is militarised: it conflates national security with military security. In addition, there is culture of ‘toughness’ that arises out of the close relationship between military and political leadership in elite US politics; thus masculinity (or dominant performances of it) is privileged.133 It is worth elaborating in particular on the work of Carol Cohn here, which illustrates the (re)production of dominant gendered hierarchies within the world of defence officials in the US. Cohn’s research on defence officials found that traits such as rationality, power, competition, aggression, and activeness were valued. In contrast, ‘femininity’ and the ‘feminine’ were linked to impulsiveness, lack of control, emotion, constructed as negative traits that hinder the ‘proper’ concerns of leaders of a powerful nation. Understandings of war here were predicated on and represented through gendered binaries and sexual imagery. War was a thoroughly masculine activity. It was, for example, a ‘pissing contest’, and critics of war or those who suggested more collaborative ways of engaging internationally were labelled using negative sexual imagery that was linked to women and homosexuality (for example being labelled ‘pussies’ ‘fags’ and ‘women’).134 Claire Sjolander and Kathryn Trevenen explain that the discourse of US elite (foreign and defence) politics is configured by gendered logics in which performing masculinity is vital in order to avoid being revealed as ‘faking’ being ‘a man’, and as such, not only the language and concepts of US foreign policy but also the very actions undertaken reflect this fear and desire to assert masculinity. This
133 Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in The New Age of Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 122, 125. 134 Carol Cohn, ‘War, Wimps and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War’ in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds.) Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp.229, 231, 235- 236. 123 insecurity about acceptable performances of masculinity, about whether the US is ‘a man, a mouse or a woman’, finds expression not only in the discourses of, and the language, concepts and metaphors used to express, US foreign policy, but also in its policies and actions.135 Gender shapes responses to (and constructions of) ‘national security threats’ as the world comes to be seen in terms of performances of masculinity and femininity. Military intervention becomes a way to not only shape the world (according to particular political and economic configurations for example), but also to reaffirm a masculine self-image. Cynthia Peters explains that the intersection between political and economic discourses is also key here: championing a ‘free-market’ system that ‘values making profit over meeting human needs’ and centring the economy around militarism (for example, spending more on the military than social welfare programs) war is constantly being legitimised and prepared for.136 The 1990 Gulf War provides a useful example of the ways in which the appropriateness of war has been mediated through gendered and racialised representations of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in US discourses of intervention. David Campbell argues that a discourse of ‘danger’ was constructed around the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, although Iraq did not attack the US itself. Indeed when Iraq had invaded Iran ten years earlier, the US reaction to the event was markedly different.137 In official US discourse on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, however, danger was linked specifically to the US, and to US national identity in particular. President George H. W. Bush pronounced, in his announcement of the deployment of US troops to the Gulf, that ‘[i]n the life of a nation, we're called upon to define who we are and what we believe.’138 The construction of ‘we’, the values in which ‘we’ believe, and the rationale for intervention, were gendered and racialised, and this racialisation was specifically orientalist. Peters explains that ‘racism…is a powerful tool in the realization of both domestic and foreign policy.’139 In terms of Gulf War discourse, the prior racialisation of the US population was instrumental in constructing and positioning ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in US Gulf War discourse. That is, those domestic discourses (social, political, economic, and so on) which ‘consistently devalue non-white communities’, provided the ‘groundwork for the
135 Claire Sjolander and Kathryn Trevenen, ‘One of the Boys? Gender Disorder in Times of Crisis’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12:2 (2010), pp. 162-163. 136 Cynthia Peters, ‘Introduction’, in Cynthia Peters (ed.), Collateral Damage: The ‘New World Order’ at Home & Abroad (Boston, MA.; South End Press, 1992), p. ix. 137 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 1. 138 Ibid., p. 3. 139 Peters, ‘Introduction’, p. viii. 124 sudden demonization of Saddam Hussein’, who had until recently been an ally of the US.140 In addition, gendered and orientalist logics of feminisation, penetrating the east, and uncontrolled ‘Other’ masculinity underscored the construction of the intervention itself.141 An example is the use of masculine pronouns (‘he’ and ‘him’) to refer to, for example, Hussein and keeping him ‘off guard’. This, Cohn argues, is a ‘linguistic move’ that that conflates Hussein/Iraq/its military, in line with the military practice of speaking of the ‘other guy’ (enemy) as ‘male’; rather than being simply ‘shorthand’, this entails conceptualising conflict as about how ‘men’ act, that is, as a conflict between masculinities.142 Another example of gendered discourse here is the metaphor of rape that was prominent in official and popular (particularly media) discourses on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the resulting Gulf War. Susan Jeffords explains that ‘ “the rape of Kuwait” has stood as a shorthand referent for a summary of alleged Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait’, with multiple newspaper articles on Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait linking the ‘rape’ of Kuwait specifically to Hussein himself, thus drawing together both racialised and gendered logics (it is ‘Other’ men who rape).143 In the month before the deadline to withdraw from Kuwait issued by President George H. W. Bush and the UN, US discourse on the situation saw a significant increase in references to sexual violence (both actual and potential) carried out by Iraqis against individuals.144 The use of the ‘rhetoric of rape’ here can be read as a type of gendered orientalist ‘rescue scenario’. In this scenario, George Lakoff explains, ‘Iraq is villain, the US is hero, Kuwait is victim’;145 indeed, George H. W. Bush used the same terminology to describe the war at its end in 1991, stating that ‘the recent challenge could not have been clearer…Saddam Hussein was the villain; Kuwait the victim.’146 The use of the rape metaphor here constructs and configures ‘Self’/‘Other’/‘victim’ as protector/violator/victim. It is intelligible in this way because of the currency of orientalist tropes of ‘sexually deviant men’ and ‘the white man’s burden’, but, importantly, also because of significance of the rape metaphor and captivity/rescue
140 Ibid. 141 Jasmine Zine, ‘Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Engagement’, in Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (eds.), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2006), p. 32. 142 Cohn, ‘War, Wimps and Women’, pp. 239-240. 143 Susan Jeffords, ‘Rape and the New World Order’, Cultural Critique 19 (1991), p. 203. 144 Abouali Farmanfarmaian, ‘Did You Measure Up? The Role of Race and Sexuality in the Gulf War’, in Peters, Collateral Damage, pp. 113-116. 145 George Lakoff, ‘Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify the War in Iraq’, Vietnam Generation Newsletter, 3:2 (1991), available at
147 Jeffords, ‘Rape and the New World Order’, p. 206. 148 Ibid, pp. 210-212. 149 Farmanfarmaian, ‘Did You Measure Up?’, p. 127. 150 Ibid., pp. 126-127. 151 Cohn, ‘War Wimps and Women’, p. 228 152 Stacy Takacs, ‘Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-9/11’, Feminist Media Studies, 5:3 (2005), p. 299. 126 neocons during his presidency (selecting prominent neocons such as Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld for his cabinet) warrants analysing their own foreign policy discourse. For the Wolfowitz (the third-ranking civilian defence official in the George H. W. Bush administration), the end of the Cold War had left the US in an unrivalled position; the US’ best course from here was to ensure no challenges to its primacy emerged. International security was dependent on military strength, and the spread of US influence and ‘values’ by military means if necessary, and the need to remove Hussein as leader of Iraq (some of these ideas, it has been suggested, informed the 2002 George W. Bush national security strategy).153 In particular, democratisation became important in the foreign policy prescription of a group called the Project for the New American Century, some of who were key figures in the George W. Bush administration (Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz). The PNAC saw the removal of Hussein in Iraq as key to ‘remaking’ the Middle East, characterising this as ‘trying to remove the shackles on democracy’.154 This can be contextualised as part of a broader aim to ‘remake’ the Middle East into a ‘friendlier region’ that required democratisation,155 with democratisation functioning as a ‘new’ civilising mission.156 PNAC members also constructed a discourse that reflected highly gendered understandings of the world, whereby the very need to preserve US dominance (and ‘deal with’ Iraq) was predicated on a fear of the US becoming vulnerable (feminised) if militarist policies were eschewed. There was a fixation on power and weakness.157 For example, PNAC members warned that Clinton’s strategy of multilateral containment of Iraq had left the US ‘ “weak” “helpless” and “dependent” ’ on its European allies.158 This thoroughly unmasculine policy had left the US ‘cowering’ and as such, ‘only violence’ would ‘recoup the damage … done to America’s standing’ (read: its masculinity).159 In light of long-standing conceptions of a masculinised and racialised US ‘Self’ (from Wilson to the ‘Vulcans’), it is unsurprising that the attacks of 11 September 2001 rendered the (re)masculinisation of the US ‘Self’, in Stacy Takacs’ words, ‘a public necessity’.160 I explore the immediate effects of the attacks as
153 Bacevich, American Empire, pp. 44; Hudson, ‘Pax Americana in the Middle East’, p. 4. 154 Dumbrell, ‘The Neoconservative Roots of the War in Iraq’, pp. 27-28 (citing Paul Wolfowitz on p.30). 155 Dina Badie, ‘Groupthink, Iraq, and the War on Terror: Explaining US Foreign Policy Shift Toward Iraq’ Foreign Policy Analysis 6:4 (2010), pp. 282-284. 156 Ayers, ‘Imperial Liberties: Democratisation and Governance in the ‘New’ Imperial Order’, pp. 3-4. 157 Luiza Bialasiewicz, David Campbell, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey, Alison J. Williams, ‘Performing Security: The Imaginative Geographies of Current US Strategy’, Political Geography, 26:4 (2007) p. 412. 158 Takacs, ‘Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-9/11’, p. 298 (quoting Robert Kagan and PNAC). 159 Ibid (quoting PNAC director Reuel Marc Gerecht). 160 Ibid., p. 299 127
‘feminising’ the US and the logics underpinning the ‘War on Terror’ in more detail through various texts in chapters 5, 6, and 7, but here will briefly discuss the links between the 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) and the prior racialisation and gendering of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in US discourses on global politics. The NSS details the George W. Bush administration’s assumptions (presuppositions) about the world, its predication of ‘us’ (the US and its allies) as civilised, moral, and progressive, in contrast to a (primarily ‘Eastern’) ‘Other’ predicated as backward, barbaric, stagnant. It prescribes intervention as a legitimate action by positioning the ‘East’ as being in need of guidance from a ‘superior’ US ‘Self’ marked out by its exemplary embodiment of liberalism. Democracy promotion is central to securing peace in this strategy, and reflects the belief that US interests are best advanced through the promotion of (‘Western’) liberal political values and institutions in ‘strategic’ areas.161 Bush’s foreword to the strategy proclaims that it is ‘only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom’ that can ‘unleash’ their potential for success. The US, it is assumed embodies these traits, and in doing so the very aggressive and powerful action of ‘unleashing’ the US’ success serves to project a masculine ‘Self’. Not only this, but the US also ‘enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence’, which will be used to ‘defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants’, and to ‘encourag[e] free and open societies on every continent’ against the plans of ‘shadowy networks of individuals’ who seek to ‘penetrate open societies’. This security strategy is predicated on the presupposition that ‘freedom’ entails ‘hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade’ to the exclusion of any other economic and political configuration. Ultimately, the desire to project a masculine ‘Self’ against a feminised ‘Other’ is apparent in the classification of ‘weak states, like Afghanistan’ who can both threaten but be contained by ‘strong states’ like the US if latter is assertive in ‘uplifting’ the weak through ‘our’ liberal values.162 Security, once again, was linked with democracy in US foreign policy discourse, as is illustrated in Bush’s assessment of the importance of the 2003 war in Iraq, ‘freedom’, and the Middle East:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the
161 Monten, ‘The Roots of the Bush Doctrine’, p. 112; Rhodes, ‘The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Liberal Agenda’. 162 George W. Bush,National Security Strategy of the United States of America 2002, September 2002, available at
spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.163
Conclusion The construction of the US ‘Self’ and its ‘Others’ in the NSS has clear antecedents in US foreign policy discourses from at least as early the ‘Wilsonian’ liberal internationalism that arose in the aftermath of WWI. Constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ along gendered and racialised (at times orientalist) lines have underscored US discourses of intervention and global politics since WWI, justifying intervention at various moments. Wilson’s highly qualified understanding of ‘democracy’ and those who were ‘fit’ to have it illustrated the (re)production of earlier (colonial) gendered orientalist narratives in which notions of barbarism and civilisation were key markers of identity for ‘Others’ and a US ‘Self’. Beginning with Wilsonian ‘liberal internationalism’, the international system and the US’ actions within it have been marked by gendered and racialised understandings of the world, constructing hierarchical categories based on racialised (if no longer outwardly racist) and gendered assumptions, and placing people within these. In particular, this chapter has shown the ways in which racialised and gendered identities, whose naturalness is often taken for granted, are (re)produced in international politics within discourses of ‘liberal internationalism’, ‘(under)development’, ‘humanitarianism’, and ‘democratisation’. The inception of organisations of international governance such as the UN, IMF and World Bank grew out of, and now function within, a system that, although it has developed over time and is certainly not static, is underwritten by assumptions about gender and race. In particular, the construction of identity and threat has been underpinned by logics of hypermasculine competition, intersecting with race-based (at times specifically orientalist) assumptions (for example in the Gulf War). Chapter 4, in showing that gender and race function to shape US perspectives of and actions toward the world, contextualises the function of (and intelligibility of) gendered orientalist logics, representations, and narratives in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse (which I look at in detail in chapters 5, 6, and 7). This is not to say, however, that constructions of ‘Self’ in US ‘War on Terror’ discourse (re)produce exactly the ‘Selves’ I have examined in chapter 4. Rather, my discussion in chapter 4 illustrates how racialised and gendered logics have functioned in dominant US
163 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East’, 6 November 2003, available at
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Chapter Five Constructing the US ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ Discourse
This chapter is the first of three chapters that will examine the construction and operation of gendered orientalist identities in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 take the conceptual and historical background provided in chapters 2, 3, and 4 and apply the understanding of ‘gendered orientalist discourse’ developed in previous chapters to the ‘War on Terror’ as a case study. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are concerned with exploring the ways in which official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse is shaped by gendered and orientalist logics that create and organise identity categories such as self/other, combatant/victim, liberator/oppressor, barbaric/civilised, and the ‘proper’ placement of groups of people within these categories. Chapters 6 and 7 examine this process specifically through the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much in the way I explored racialised and gendered constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in historical discourses in chapter 4, in chapter 5 I apply my analysis to official US ‘War on Terror’ discursive constructions of ‘Self’ specifically. Thus chapter 5 is concerned with the construction of a US ‘Self’ or national identity in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. While I refer to a singular ‘Self’ in this and subsequent chapters, I stress here that I am using this (and ‘national identity’) to denote the (fabricated) monolith that the Bush administration aims to construct in its discourse. Whilst I conceptualise (gendered and orientalist) ‘Othering’ as a mutually constitutive process (where ‘Othering’ serves the dual purpose of constructing the ‘Self’ through the ‘Other’), for analytical purposes I delineate the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in this thesis. That is, I find it important to detail the construction of a US ‘Self’ in this discourse before considering how this discourse enables intervention through specific narratives that draw on constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ (chapters 6 and 7). While this thesis is also concerned with demonstrating how ‘gendered orientalism’ functions in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, it is important to reiterate here the ‘tripod’ or layered relationship between gender, orientalism, and ‘gendered orientalism’ outlined in chapter 1. That is, I understand ‘gender’ and ‘orientalism’ as operating together (as ‘gendered orientalism’) and separately within ‘War on Terror’ 131 discourse, and related to broader discourses such as racialised discourses that are not necessarily specifically orientalist. In this sense, I see pre-existing discourses of race and gender as intersecting with (to make intelligible and reinforce) gendered and orientalist presuppositions and predicates to allow a ‘gendered orientalist’ ‘War on Terror’ discourse to be constructed. In chapter 5, this is important for examining the articulation of authority (to speak about, create identities for, and categorise people, groups, and states) and interpellation as enabled through pre-existing (pre- ‘War on Terror’) discourses of ‘US national identity’ that are themselves gendered and racialised (but not necessarily always orientalist). The ‘tripod’ of ‘gendered orientalism’ is configured such that the construction of the Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern ‘Other’ in opposition to a US ‘Self’ is possible because of previous gendered/racialised discourses of ‘national identity’ that privilege a Western, white, and masculine ‘Self’. Orientalism remains important in the context of establishing a specific ‘War on Terror’ discourse and the narratives around its interventions. Thus, the discussion of ‘Self’ in this chapter is informed by the idea that notions of gender, sexuality, and race are interlinked in asserting the legitimacy of imperial interventions.1 Unpacking the role of these in constructing a US ‘Self’ in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, Chapter 5 backgrounds chapters 6 and 7 by providing insight into the particular identity categories at play here, and the gendered, racialised, and at times orientalist discursive processes that are employed to create and secure this ‘Self’ in the ‘War on Terror’. This chapter address the construction of ‘Self’ in three main sections. Firstly, I revisit the concept of ‘discourse’ explored in chapter 3, elaborating on how the operation of race (and orientalism) and gender in discursive constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ apply to the ‘War on Terror’ context. The next section, on ‘Self’, Nation, Race and Gender, develops this framework in terms of the ‘American family’ metaphor. In this chapter I operationalise my DA strategy to show that the construction of the US ‘Self’ in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse is established upon racialised and gendered presuppositions which make intelligible the predication of a US ‘Self’ as ‘white’ and hypermasculine. Central to this is the metaphor of ‘family’ which is deployed to articulate the administration’s authority, simultaneously interpellating US citizenry into a gendered and racialised ‘national family’ naturalised through the ideology of a ‘Western’ male-headed family unit. Here, I examine how official US ‘War on Terror’ constructions of the ‘Self’ are predicated
1 Abouali Farmanfarmaian, ‘Did You Measure Up? The Role of Race and Sexuality in the Gulf War’, in Cynthia Peters (ed.), Collateral Damage: The ‘New World Order’ at Home & Abroad (Boston, MA; South End Press, 1992), p. 112. 132 on, and naturalised through, hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality that have roots beyond ‘War on Terror’ discourse. The next section is concerned with delineating specific gendered categories within the US ‘Self’ and the placement of people in these categories. I identify gendered and racialised constructions of ‘Self’ in terms of the ascription of variants of ‘traditional’ familial roles to citizens in the construction of a ‘national family’ around which a US ‘Self’ is ordered (for example male authority figures, female nurturers). The gendered and racialised dominant discourses of national identity in domestic politics that I discuss in earlier in the chapter then provide the ‘base’ or foundation upon which the specific moments I look at in ‘War on Terror’ discourse can be understood as gendered and orientalist.
‘Self’/’Other’ and discourse in the ‘War on Terror’ As I explained in chapter 4, the events of 11 September 2001 (attacks on the symbols of US strength and by extension, masculinity) can be read as disrupting dominant discourses of US ‘Self’ that have (both historically and more contemporary) centred on a specifically masculine and racialised understanding of US ‘national identity’. The 2001 al Qaeda attacks threatened this masculine character, triggering a need to ‘recreate’ identity. Thus it is important to examine how, in official US discourse, this was dealt with specifically in terms of (re)creating a strong, powerful masculine ‘Self’ (which was deployed in subsequent ‘War on Terror’ narratives, particularly the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq). In order to examine how the ‘Self’ becomes discursively constructed in response to the al Qaeda attacks, it is necessary to first clarify the relationship between ‘Self’, ‘Other’ and ‘discourse’ in the ‘War on Terror’ context. As explained in chapter 3, I view language as relational, whereby meaning is not intrinsic or ‘natural’ or pre-given but created discursively as the ‘signs’ or ‘signifiers’ of language are ordered and structured. I view identity formation as working according to the process of relational structuring, established in relation to a difference or otherness.2 Thus, following Said, I conceive of the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ as mutually reinforcing, delineated through binary oppositions that construct ‘us’ as well as ‘them’. Identity formation is ‘a process of desire for the power of the other, that produces an image of the self’3: far from being disconnected processes, constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ inform each other as they are created through and sustained by each other.
2 William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 64. 3 Iver B. Neumann, ‘Self and Other in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 2:2 (1996), p. 145. 133
For example, the construction of the ‘Self’ as civilised requires the identification of a barbaric ‘Other’ through which the civilised ‘Self’ can be delineated. My examination of the creation of the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in this thesis, however, necessarily takes places over three chapters due to the complexity of the categories (and creation) of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in the ‘War on Terror’ context, and the large amount of primary material to be covered. However, the discussion in these chapters reflects the relational nature of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ as mutually informing, constitutive and reinforcing. For example, the discussion of the projection of US identity in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, explored primarily through an examination of official statements that explicitly focus on asserting attributes for a US ‘Self’, will necessarily be drawn on and developed further in chapters 6 and 7 as I look at the construction of narratives of intervention. Similarly, characterisations of the ‘Other’ (for example, barbaric, uncivilised, oppressed) are touched on in chapter 5 in so far as they provide context for understanding the construction of the US ‘Self’ in official discourse. ‘War on Terror’ representations of the ‘Other’ are of course much more complex than the brief comments in chapter 5, and are explored in more detail in chapters 6 and 7. In looking at constructions of a US ‘Self’, I am focusing on what is presented as the US ‘Self’ through the dominance of official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Here the notion of the productive power of discourses is helpful in understanding how certain discourses become dominant. This can be identified by looking at how significative practices deployed in Bush administration ‘War on Terror’ discourse, which work to create identities such as ‘barbaric Other’ and ‘civilised Self’, become authoritative and naturalised. As noted in chapter 3, discourses ‘produce’ the world by constituting some speakers as having narrative authority to render certain actions and policies logical and proper and ‘common sense’ for an ‘ordinary’ public audience.4 To do this, a discourse must define who is authorised to speak and act in certain ways, for example ascribing authority to cabinet members, foreign policy officials, defence intellectuals, and administration spokespeople. In official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, this is achieved through constructing the role of the US government (specifically the Bush administration) as one that provides ‘security’ to the ‘audience’ (the US public) by identifying and containing ‘threats’. Discursive practices of articulation and interpellation function here to allow the administration
4 David Campbell, Politics Without Principles: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 7; Jennifer Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5:2 (1999), p. 236. 134 to define a range of people, groups, identities and identifiers, objects, and concepts in the ‘War on Terror’ context. As I will show, through this, the administration becomes the authoritative subject with the ‘authority’ or ‘expertise’ to define what is ‘common sense’ about objects, peoples, and groups, and articulate that ‘knowledge’ to the public and present it as legitimate. As I explained in chapter 3 (pp. 91-92), representations come to be accepted by individuals as ‘natural’ through ‘interpellation’ and ‘articulation’ which, in constructing discursive objects, people, groups, and relationships, require ‘cultural raw materials’ and ‘linguistic resources’ to make discursive constructions appear natural or ‘truth’.5 The gendered, racialised and orientalist discourses around historical interventions carried out by the US provide some of these cultural raw materials in terms of a repository of gendered, racialised, and orientalist knowledge, and particular combinations of representations of groups of people and the world. As Jutta Weldes argues, these ‘come to seem as though they are inherently or necessarily connected and the meanings they produce come to seem natural, to be an accurate description of reality’.6 Moreover, the construction of the ‘Self’, the delineation of appropriate identities and traits for ‘the state’ and particular groups of people within the US, is just as vital to the discursive narratives that enable military interventions as speaking for and about the ‘Other’. This is because the successful construction of identity categories for the US ‘Self’ (and as I will show, there are many identity categories at play here) is a vital part of the process of interpellation. Interpellation functions to provide legitimacy to discourse through creating authorised speakers (here, the Bush administration) and relies on the successful creation of identities for people (the intended audience) to identify with, which the authorised speakers also speak ‘from’. For example, I look at interpellation in terms of official representations that ask individuals to see themselves as part of ‘us’ (sharing the US government’s values and aims), a ‘national family’ committed to ‘American values’ of freedom and democracy, supporting the administration in containing the threat to these values posed by ‘Other’ men.7 I outline this function of discourse in the next section, demonstrating that the Bush administration is given ‘discursive authority’ through the construction of identities that draw heavily on familial language and metaphors (and their
5 Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 98-99, 103-107. 6 Ibid., p. 99. 7 The point that interpellation is achieved through the metaphor of ‘family’, both here and in later sections of chapter 5, draws on Jutta Weldes’ conceptualisation of interpellation in Constructing National Interests, pp. 104-106. 135 related hierarchies of race and gender), and that official constructions of the US ‘nation’ and ‘Self’ are naturalised, and thus legitimised through a ‘traditional’ heterosexed familial structure.
‘Self’, nation, race, and gender National identities require constant (re)producing in order to remain meaningful and relatable, and as such nations are never ‘completed’ but are ‘continually in the making’.8 The attacks of 11 September 2001 (as explained above) unveiled the contingency of dominant understandings of US ‘Self’ and as such required the reassertion of particular constructs this ‘Self’. As Meghana Nayak explains, in the ‘War on Terror’ context this has resulted in the need to (re)assert a ‘stronger, more defiant United States’.9 Binary logics (not just orientalist but also gendered) of creating ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ are deeply implicated in the (re)creation of ‘the nation’ which is, as Benedict Anderson argues, an ‘imagined community’.10 This ‘imagined community’ is reaffirmed constantly through national celebrations and repetition of symbols of the ‘nation’ (not only national anthems but also ‘everyday’ activities such as national sporting events) such that the constructedness of ‘national identity’ becomes hidden, and this identity is instead seen as ‘natural’ and pre-given.11 That nations are ‘imagined’ means, as Anne McClintock explains, they are ‘systems of cultural representations whereby people...imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community’; nations therefore are ‘historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed.’12 The construction of national identity, of a unified national ‘Self’, is always problematic and exclusionary as no society is homogenous. So, in constructing ‘national identity’, ‘we’ can only be delineated through the identification of ‘them’ as that which ‘we’ are not. As such, defining the ‘nation’ or the ‘national Self’ necessarily occurs through the binary logic outlined in the previous section, that is, through the construction of ‘Others’. The (re)production of ‘national identity’ rests on ‘the inscription of boundaries’ between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’
8 Ghassan Hage, cited in Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, Culture and Power at the Edges of the State (London: Transaction, 2005), p. 194. 9 Meghana Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:1 (2006), p. 44. 10 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 224. 11 Tim Edensor. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002), pp. 72-73. 12 Anne McClintock, ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism, and the Family’, Feminist Review, 44 (1993), p. 61. 136
(and inside/outside, domestic/foreign); I look at this as achieved through domestic as well as international processes.13 Gender and race (at times expresses as orientalism) play a central role in (re)creating ‘national identity’ (a US ‘Self’), both in ‘War on Terror’ discourse and beyond it, in terms of external and internal ‘Othering’. I look at the function of the ‘external Other’ in terms of shaping narratives that make intervention into Afghanistan and Iraq ‘necessary’ in chapters 6 and 7. In this section of chapter 5, I focus on the pre-existing racialised and gendered discourses of domestic ‘Othering’ that make intelligible the ‘gendered orientalist’ representations and narratives of ‘War on Terror’ discourse I look at in chapters 6 and 7. I am concerned here with looking (briefly) at a background (more recent than the examples I discussed in chapter 4) of gendered and racialised discourses of ‘Self’ (‘national identity’) pre- dating the ‘War on Terror’ and how these enable and are (re)produced in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. For example, Gillian Youngs points out that the assertion of US masculinity over the ‘oppressed’ femininity of Afghan women is ‘based on an established and given gender hierarchy within the USA’.14 Similarly, I argue that pre-existing gendered and radicalised discourses make intelligible, in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, representations of ‘our’ superiority and ‘their’ barbarity, linked to notions of gender and of race as expressed through orientalism. The process of ‘Othering’ I look at in this section is not always specifically orientalist in that it does not only posit an Arab/Islamic/Middle Eastern ‘Other’ against which to construct the ‘Self’. The construction of a US ‘Self’, as noted above, is a continually occurring process and has been constructed through reference to a range of ‘Others’ who are not ‘orientalised’ as such (for example, the US ‘national identity’ has, at various times, been constructed against European, Native American, and African American ‘Others’). In this sense, gender in the construction of the ‘Self’ is not refracted through orientalism at all moments of identity creation. Rather, it becomes important when considering ‘War on Terror’ discourse specifically, which is gendered, racialised, orientalised at various moments, with gender and orientalism intersecting at the broadest level of ‘War on Terror’ discourse, and in the narratives around the Afghan and Iraq wars. In this next section, I identify a ‘family’ metaphor as a starting point for understanding the construction of ‘Self’ in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. This metaphor functions to naturalise as ‘common sense’ the
13 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1992), p. 8. 14 Gillian Youngs, ‘Feminist International Relations in the Age of the War on Terror: Ideologies, Religions and Conflict’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:1 (2006), p. 11. 137 logics of race and gender (in and beyond the ‘War on Terror’) that make intelligible gendered orientalist ‘War on Terror’ logics of, for example, positioning a masculine and ‘Western’ (read as ‘White’) US ‘Self’ against an ‘Eastern Other'.
The ‘American family’ The framing of US identity in terms of a ‘family’ began just two days after the 11 September 2001 attacks, with President George W. Bush referring explicitly to ‘family values’ in his conceptualisation of ‘nation’. Bush urged parents taking time to hug their children and linking ‘every American family’, to the ‘family of America’.15 A month after the ‘War on Terror’ was declared, Bush reinforced the notion of the ‘American family’ at length:
Terrorists hoped our nation would come apart. That's what they hoped for. But, instead, we've come together. Our country is more resolved, more united and guided by a greater sense of purpose than any time during our lifetimes. (Applause.) And some important things about our culture seem to be shifting. After the attacks, moms and dads held their children closer. And maybe for a moment longer. Millions have gone to synagogues and churches and mosques to renew their faith, to find perspective, to be reminded of the true values of life. … In America, it seems like we're putting first things first. In my Inaugural Address, I said that some Americans feel like they share a continent, but not a country. Today, that feeling is gone. We know we are a single nation, each a part of one another. The terrorists did not intend this unity and resolve, but they're powerless to stop them. (Applause.) 16
Here Bush is interpellating ‘Americans’ to think of themselves as part of a ‘national family’ by speaking of a singular nation and connecting individuals into a ‘family’ through the predication of ‘us’ and ‘we’ as unified, compassionate, caring, and loving toward ‘one another’. The use of the family metaphor in these texts is significant, given that they were among the first carefully drafted public communications by the President (as opposed to, for example, the short ‘on-the-go’ statements from Bush in the first few days after 11 September). The metaphor was reasserted in the two months after this. Speaking in the context of the attacks, Bush addressed the centrality of the concept of ‘family’ to ‘America’, claiming families to be the ‘bedrock of our society’, and proclaiming ‘family values’ to be
15 George W. Bush, ‘National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims Of the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001’, 13 September 2001 available at < http://georgewbush- whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010913-7.html>, accessed 10 May 2010. 16 George W. Bush, ‘President Asks American Children to Help Afghan Children: Remarks by the President During March of Dimes Volunteer Leadership Conference’, 12 October 2001, available at
‘great values’.17 ‘Family values’ were also referenced in texts on the ‘War on Terror’ closer to the Iraq war.18 The above quotes reveal, explicitly or implicitly, key elements of the US ‘Self’ which I will examine in this chapter as part of an ‘American family’. These centre on the family as gendered, headed by masculinised figures and supported by a range of femininities, and the make-up of the ‘national family’ as ostensibly racially and culturally inclusive. The referencing of various religious traditions in the above speech indicates a desire to project inclusiveness, however, as I will show both here and in chapter 6,19 this discourse of ‘family’ does exclude some despite Bush’s claims that ‘we are a single nation’. This family, as I will show throughout the rest of the chapter, is heteropatriarchal and racialised in that it is impliedly predicated on (and structured according to) gendered (heterosexist) and racialised assumptions of familial roles and duties, which then prescribe corresponding ideals of acceptable behaviour for ‘men’ and ‘women’. Returning to the discursive operation of gender (detailed in chapter 3), feminist International Relations scholars have identified that the creation of ‘national identity’ (and broader functions of power) in modern nation-states relies on gendered relations of power which privilege masculinity.20 Similarly, feminist readings of orientalism identify the construction of a ‘Western Self’ in terms of stereotypical traits of masculinity (for example rationality, logic, and autonomy).21 In terms US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, I look at the construction of the US ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse as an instance of (re)masculinisation of ‘national identity’ (although, as chapters 6 and 7, and the section on ‘deviant women’ in this chapter will demonstrate, this is unstable and challenged). In speaking of a gendered ‘Self’, I draw on V. Spike Peterson’s work on sexuality, gender and national identity.
17 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush and President Putin Talk to Crawford Students: Remarks by President Bush And President Putin to Russian Exchange Students And Students of Crawford High School’, 12 November 2001, available at
Peterson’s research demonstrates that gendered identity creation is not only about masculinities and femininities, but also about heterosexism and heteronormativity. Heterosexism here refers to the institutionalised assumption that heterosexuality is the only ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ ‘mode of sexual identity, sexual practice and social relations’.22 This is naturalised by presuppositions of binary and hierarchical identity categories of male/masculine and female/feminine, and whereby only heterosexual couplings are legitimate. As Peterson points out, heterosexism is naturalised through ‘multiple discourses’ (such as political theory and religious dogma), and most significantly through the ‘reification’ of the patriarchal nuclear family. The ordering of masculine over feminine in heterosexed masculine-feminine binaries in the patriarchal nuclear family is, Peterson argues, inextricable from the state’s interest in regulating bodies through controlling sexuality, reproduction, sexual activities, women’s bodies, and normalising a heteropatriarchal family as the only legitimate socio-economic unit.23 Heteropatriarchy here refers to the ‘sex/gender systems that naturalize masculinist domination and institutionalize/normalize heterosexual family forms and corollary heterosexist identities and practices.’24 The centrality and institutionalisation of heteropatriarchy in the modern state is fundamental to the construction and analysis of a US ‘national self’ in ‘War on Terror’. George Lakoff’s study on the ‘nation-as-family’ metaphor shows that its use in American political life is inextricable from (dominant) gendered understandings of family, for example in the prescription of government as ‘father’ which is itself predicated as masculine by ascribing traits of protection, security, authority to it.25 Rhetoric that draws on (and uses metaphors of) ‘the traditional family’ or ‘family values’ then functions as an interpretative framework for national identity.26 Although a great deal of US families do not correlate with the rhetorical ‘ideal family’, the concept still remains salient in mainstream political and social discourses, functioning as a metaphor through which to understand the world.27 While the ‘traditional family’ structure (a nuclear family based on heterosexual marriage, headed by a male breadwinner father, a caretaker wife, and obedient children) is not ‘natural’ or biologically inevitable, it is sanctioned by naturalised in
22 Peterson, ‘Sexing Political Identities / Nationalism as Heterosexism’, p.39. 23 Ibid., pp. 39-40. 24 Ibid., p. 57 (note 7) 25 George Lakoff, Moral Politics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 15-16. 26 Patricia Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation’, Hypatia, 13:3 (1998), p. 62. 27 Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako ‘Is There a Family?: New Anthropological Views’ in Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (eds.) Rethinking the Family (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Judith Stacey, ‘Backward Toward the Postmodern Family: Reflections on Gender, Kinship and Class in the Silicon Valley’ in Thorne and Yalom, Rethinking the Family. 140
US state discourse.28 The ideals of a ‘traditional family’ are reflected in the constantly cited notion of ‘family values’, which in turn serves to ‘lay the foundation for many social hierarchies...within U.S. society’, in particular gendered and racialised ones.29 For example, ‘family’ metaphors have been used to explain racial inequality in US domestic politics, though notions of non-white Americans as ‘as intellectually underdeveloped, uncivilized children’ and the corollary construct of ‘Whites as intellectually mature, civilized adults’.30 In a gendered example, the militarisation of ‘nation’ constructs states as ‘protectors’ of their citizenry and necessarily position masculinity (most often attached to ‘men’) over the feminised role of ‘women’ as reproducers of the nation.31 ‘The nation’ (in and beyond US experiences) is reflective and constructive of gendered and racialised discourses that have had long-standing currency in the US. These are intimately linked to broader historical discourses on ‘family’, for example those that privilege masculinity over femininity, and ‘whiteness’ over non-white ‘otherness’.32 Abouali Farmanfarmaian points out that the historical development of constructs of race, sexuality, family and ‘national identity’ in the US are ‘reflected and reproduced in the larger construct of the Nation’,33 and are tied to the literal and discursive reproduction of (heterosexual) ‘white’ families in the historical US experience. For example, reflective of anxieties around drawing and preserving racial boundaries based in concerns about ‘Other’ sexuality, interracial relationships (particularly between ‘white’ women and non-‘white’ men) were historically objected to if not banned outright.34 Racial and heteronormative boundaries have been explicitly, and more recently implicitly, (re)produced in dominant US political, legal, and cultural discourses. The ‘deep structure of racialized consciousness’35 can be traced through many moments in US history, for example: anti-miscegenation laws; slavery and especially rape/lynching complex that called for the ‘protection’ of
28 Lakoff, Moral Politics; see also Jutta Weldes’ analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the metaphor of the ‘American family’, in Weldes, Constructing National Interests, pp. 156-162. 29 Margaret L. Andersen, ‘Feminism and the American Family Ideal’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 22:2 (1991); Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family’, p. 64. 30 Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family’, p. 65. 31 See for example Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Joane Nagel, ‘Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21:2 (1998); Iris Marion Young, ‘The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29:1 (2003); ‘Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997). 32 Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family’, pp. 64-65. 33 Farmanfarmaian, ‘Did You Measure Up?’, p. 112. 34 Ibid., p. 112, 116-120. 35 Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Situating Race in International Relations: The Dialectics of Civilizational Security in American Immigration’, in Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations : Reading Race, Gender, and Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 74. 141 white women by white men against black men; segregation; and the control of borders through immigration policies that (re)produce notions of cultural (and racial) superiority (and often linked to anxiety around sexual ‘threats’ posed by non-white ‘Others’ to ‘white’ women).36 For example, as Zillah Eisenstein points out, contemporary discourses of dependency and welfare have been racialised, sexualised and feminised, and that ‘[c]rime, unemployment, welfare abuse, illegitimacy are labeled foreign, and imaged on immigrant bodies of color, or african americans’, privileging and naturalising the normative whiteness of ‘the nation’.37 Race, sexuality, and gender also intersected in the deployment of ‘the nation-as- family’ in US discourses around the Gulf War, where a ‘national family’ constructed upon traditional gender roles and assumptions of ‘white’ (and ‘Western’) masculine superiority was positioned against a racialised ‘Eastern Other’.38 Racialised and gendered hierarchies remain central to the US which, while it has undergone significant changes over time (such as establishing formal racial although not sexual equality), has ‘manage[d] to replicate a seemingly permanent’ racial and gendered hierarchy that privileges ‘whiteness’ and masculinity.39 Against this background the singularity of the nation in Bush’s family metaphor becomes problematic, and I read it as having dual functions in that it ‘both constructs and masks power relations.’40 That is, although family-based rhetoric is inclusive in that Bush’s use of ‘we’ and ‘you’ ostensibly includes all American citizens, the dynamics of gender and race that have organised ‘whites’, ‘non-whites’, ‘men’, and ‘women’ along hierarchical lines in the historical development of ‘the nation’ (and which still exist now) are masked by the ostensible inclusiveness that ‘family’ suggests. Discourses of nation-as-family seek to mask racial, gender, class differences41; they ‘figure hierarchy within unity’, legitimating exclusion and control.42 Bush’s first address on the al Qaeda attacks explicitly referenced unity in asserting that ‘all Americans from every walk of life
36 Eileen Boris, ‘The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States’, Social Politics, 2:2 (1995), p. 169; Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Like One of the Family: Race, Ethnicity and the Paradox of US National Identity’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24:1 (2001), pp. 7-9; Farmanfarmaian, ‘Did You Measure Up?’, pp. 117-121. 37 Zillah Eisenstein, ‘Writing Bodies on the Nation for the Globe’, in Sita Ranchod-Nilsson and Mary Ann Tétreault (eds.), Women, States, and Nationalism: At home in the Nation? (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 50. 38 Eisenstein, ‘Writing Bodies on the Nation for the Globe’; Farmanfarmaian, ‘Did You Measure Up?’, pp. 112. 39 Hill Collins, ‘Like One of the Family’, p. 9; Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family’. 40 Hill Collins, ‘Like One of the Family’, p. 5. 41 Stuart Hall, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (eds.), Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 616. 42 Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 45. 142 unite’, reiterating this in the following days.43 However, in the binary logic of ‘us’ and ‘them’ underscoring ‘War on Terror’ discourse, ‘we’ can only be ‘united’ as long as there are shared values, loyalties, and aims in the war against an ‘Eastern Other’. As I will explain in detail in chapter 6, this has also required the delineation of ‘acceptable’ Muslims/Arabs, for example. By its very nature, the ‘Othering’ of certain groups both inside and outside the US is implicit in the notion of a ‘national family’, enabling the normalisation of the masculine, heterosexual, ‘whiteness’ that marks the privileged position the Bush administration embodies. In particular, this reflects long-standing domestic anxieties around masculinity and the ‘ideal family’ in the US. The ‘American family’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse is not explicitly gendered in that exactly what is meant by ‘family’ and ‘family values’ is rarely elaborated on in official texts; however, one exception (Bush’s proclamation on ‘National Family Week’) sheds some light on this. Speaking of his administration’s commitment to ‘strengthening the American family’, Bush asserts a particular kind of family as ‘the bedrock of our society’.44 Although he acknowledges single parent families, ‘success’, he says, lies in ‘a family with a mom and dad who are committed to marriage and devote themselves to their children’.45 At the same time, public (official and media) grieving of September 11 featured no LGBT families (unsurprising given the administration’s stance on legalising gay marriage)46. This reflects boarder dominant discourses of ‘family’ within the US, in particular the ‘crisis of the American family’ and related ‘crisis of masculinity’. These ‘crises’, articulated in mainstream media and the political rhetoric of neoconservatives in particular, centre on the ‘loss of the “traditional American family” ’, often linking this to ‘the “homosexual agenda” ’ (of marriage equality, for example).47 Bush’s November 2001 assertion that the US is a ‘great nation’ because its people have ‘reassessed priorities’ so that ‘parents [spend] more time with their
43 George W. Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’, 11 September 2001, available at
48 George W. Bush, ‘President Discusses War on Terrorism in Address to the Nation’, 8 November 2001, available at
53 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’. 54 In doing so I utilise and build on Laura Shepherd’s insightful analysis of gender in the early days of the ‘War on Terror’ in ‘Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan Post-9/11’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 8:1 (2006). I draw on Shepherd’s identification of performances of masculinity (the Ordinary Decent Citizen and the Figure of Authority), and build on these (using a wider range of primary sources) in light of my concern with orientalism/race. I also identified, in my primary source materials, a range of femininities that are not the focus of Shepherd’s article. 55 George W. Bush, ‘Guard and Reserves “Define Spirit of America”, 17 September 2001, available at
Constructing the masculinity of the US ‘Self’ As outlined in chapter 4, there is a long history of masculinisation of US ‘Selves’, projected at various times as powerful, knowledgeable, a leader, uniquely progressive, and civilised. The importance of these attributes to US identities in global politics is particularly significant in the ‘War on Terror’ context. As discussed in chapter 3, I see gender as a symbolic system of characterisations that shapes how we understand ‘men’ and ‘women’, and as interwoven with other discourses (such as race and orientalism) in the processes of identity creation.57 The (re)production of US ‘national identity’ or ‘Self’ in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse reflects and employs dominant discourses of race, sexuality and gender. For example, identity markers are gendered and orientalist in drawing on stereotypes that associate, for example, power, strength, the public realm, politics, aggressiveness, rationality, autonomy, independence, with ‘masculinity’ (and ‘masculinity’ with ‘men’), and specifically, with ‘white Western’ masculinity. ‘White’ is an important qualifier here as although ‘non-white’ persons form part of the ‘Western’ world, ‘War on Terror’ discourse acts to obscure, as much as possible, the non-white from the construction of the ‘Self’ here, as will be detailed later in this chapter. The gendered nature of orientalist logic in this ‘War on Terror’ discourse is exemplified by the acute need to express the essence of the US ‘Self’ as highly masculinised. There are expressions of masculinity and femininity in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I see the relationship between femininities and masculinities in the ‘War on Terror’ as one of power and subordination. This does not, necessarily, mean power in the oppressive sense. Rather, I see constructions of femininity in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourses as central to the construction of ‘Self’ (for example, performances of ‘liberated’ femininity portray the US as ‘civilised’), but never privileged over hypermasculinity. In gendered orientalist ‘War on Terror’ logic, it is only a hypermasculine US ‘Self’ that can threaten the ‘Other’, and as I shall demonstrate, the ‘watering down’ of this masculinity is prevented through the discursive subordination of femininities.
The ‘hypermasculine leader’ ‘The nation’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, I argue, is predicated on the assumptions of ‘appropriate’ or ‘desirable’ performances of masculinity as
57 Charlotte Hooper, Manly State: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 38. 146 specifically encapsulated in the notion of ‘hypermasculinity’. As a particular expression of masculinity hypermasculinity establishes… of defending its own people and others deemed in need of protection. I draw on the conception of hypermasculinity as outlined by Anish Nandy, and elaborated on by Anna M. Agathangelou, L. H. M. Ling, and Nayak. Hypermasculinity glorifies stereotypical ‘masculine’ traits and acts such as ‘aggression, competition, power, and production’, devaluing feminine (read as womanly) characteristics such as ‘welfare, nurturing, kindness, contemplation.’58 This is expressed in the ‘sensationalistic endorsement of elements of masculinity, such as rigid gender roles, vengeful and militarized reactions and obsession with order, power and control’.59 In the context of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, I argue that this can be seen in the Bush administration’s construction of a national ‘Self’ that is spearheaded by a hypermasculine leader in the form of Bush and his cabinet. The defining image of a masculine figurehead at the helm of the US ‘Self’ emerged in statements made by Bush and members of his cabinet immediately after the attacks of 11 September 2001. In his first full length televised speech after the attacks, Bush asserted the strength and authority of the US government, linking this to notions of (masculine) strength: ‘Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it's prepared.’60 Five days later, he continued to assert the authoritative role of the administration both in terms of guiding appropriate responses to the attacks, and informing ‘us’ what those attacks meant:
My administration has a job to do, and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers. We will call together freedom loving people to fight terrorism. … We've been warned there are evil people in this world. … and we'll be alert. Your government is alert.61
The administration’s authority to do this was reiterated in October as Bush asserted that the Cabinet knew ‘we’ve got a job to do’ and that ‘I've got a job to do, and that's to explain to the American people the truth’ about the threat to ‘freedom’ by ‘evil’.62 On September 20, 2001 Bush made clear the protectionist leadership role he envisaged for the US, again drawing on notions of masculine leadership. The US
58 Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 3. 59 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’, p. 43. 60 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’. 61 George W. Bush, ‘Today We Mourned, Tomorrow We Work: Remarks by the President Upon Arrival’, 16 September 2001, available at
63 George W. Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War with Fear”: Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, 20 September 2001, available at
‘masculine’. Whilst the attacks damaged physical symbols of American progress, Bush asserted that ‘they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.’68 Days after 11 September 2001, Bush characterised himself (and by extension the administration) as thoroughly hypermasculine: ‘I am determined, I'm not going to be distracted, I will keep my focus my administration is determined to find, to get them running and to hunt them down will do what it takes.’69 ‘America’, Bush declared, ‘will define our times, not be defined by them.’70 Bush asserted his authority in aggressive terms with reference to ‘the terrorists’ but also asserted authority over fellow world leaders:
They know my intentions are to find those who did this, find those who encouraged them, find them who house them, find those who comfort them, and bring them to justice. I made that very clear. There is no doubt in anybody's mind with whom I've had a conversation about the intent of the United States. I gave them ample opportunity to say they were uncomfortable with our goal. And the leaders you've asked about have said they were comfortable. They said, we understand, Mr. President, and we're with you.71
Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz further resolved to ‘hunt down’, ‘punish’, and ‘conquer’ and ‘prevail’ over ‘the enemy’, asserting a specifically hypermasculine leadership that aimed to ‘rally the entire civilized world’.72 The administration endeavoured to display ‘our fighting spirit’ and use their ‘will and resources’ to be proactive and ‘go after’ not only those who perpetrated the attacks, but anyone ‘linked’ to them. In a speech to the UN, Bush reiterated the link between ‘civilisation’, the US’ defence of ‘our future’ and the US’ resolve to bring to the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks ‘their hour of justice’.73 While Bush
68 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’. 69 Bush, ‘Today We Mourned, Tomorrow We Work’. 70 Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War With Fear” ’. 71 Bush, ‘Today We Mourned, Tomorrow We Work’. 72 Of many texts using this language in the days after 9/11, the following are quoted in this paragraph: Bush, ‘President Bush Meets with National Security Team’; George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President Upon Arrival at Barksdale Air Force Base’, September 11 2001, available at
74 Bush, ‘Today We Mourned, Tomorrow We Work’; Bush, ‘President Bush Meets with National Security Team’. 75 Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War With Fear” ’; Bush, ‘Remarks by the President at John Cornyn for Senate Reception’. 76 Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, ‘Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11’, International Studies Quarterly, 48:3 (2004), p. 529. 77 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’. 78 George W. Bush, ‘President Speaks to U.S. Troops in Seoul’, 21 February 2001, available at
We're going to meet and deliberate and discuss - but there's no question about it, this act will not stand; we will find those who did it; we will smoke them out of their holes; we will get them running and we'll bring them to justice. … Make no mistake about it: underneath our tears is the strong determination of America to win this war. And we will win it.88
Characteristics of hypermasculinity are repeatedly emphasised here, through the agency of ‘we will’ and predicates signifying control of action, superior strength, and victory. Although reference to tears ascribes humanity to this ‘Self’, any weakness that might be inferred is discursively curtailed: strength and rationality that ensure ‘we will win’ is ultimately valued. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney too, in TV interviews, reiterated the need for an aggressive leadership. Rumsfeld stated ‘the best defense against terrorism in an offence’, while Cheney elaborated on the link between this aggressive masculine stance and victory:
a good offense is the best defense…. [A]t the heart of our success…is to go get the "bad guys" … aggressively take down the al Qaeda network, wrap up Osama bin Laden and punish those states that provide sanctuary to terrorists.89
Explicitly linking ‘an aggressive U.S. posture’90 to security, Cheney and Rumsfeld echoed Bush’s active stance centred around the phrase ‘we will not/must not stop’. The administration was thus ‘resolved to find the terrorists…we won't stop until the
85 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’. 86 Bush, ‘President's Remarks at Victory 2002 Event’. 87 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’. 88 Bush, ‘President Urges Readiness and Patience’. 89 Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Fox News Sunday’ 16 September 2001, available at
91 Bush, ‘President Speaks to U.S. Troops in Seoul’; See also Bush, ‘President Bush and President Putin Talk to Crawford Students’. 92 Zillah Eisenstein, ‘Is ‘W’ for Women?’, in Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (eds.), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2006), p. 194. 93 Shepherd, ‘Veiled References’, p. 24. 94 L. H. M. Ling, ‘The Monster Within: What Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter Can Tell Us about Terror and Desire in a Post-9/11 World’, positions, 12:2 (2004), pp. 398-399, note 45. 95 Michaele L. Ferguson, ‘ “W” Stands for Women: Feminism and Security Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Bush Administration’, Politics and Gender, 1:1 (2005), p. 19. 96 Shepherd, ‘Veiled References’, p. 24. 153 will explain in chapters 6 and 7, this gendered predication intersections with orientalist logic in prescribing a hypermasculine ‘us’ to challenge to a feminised and barbaric ‘them’. Performances of maternal femininity, attributed to female bodies, are relegated to a supporting role (a point I return to later in this chapter) as emotional, nurturing, and vulnerable. The incorporation of female bodies must not detract from or compromise its leadership role, as in gendered discourse this is intrinsically tied to its rationality calmness, knowledge, and strength.
The ‘(extra)ordinary American’ The importance of performances of traditional masculinities extends also to the discursive construction of the ‘American people’, symbolised by ‘the American people’:
The United States will do what it takes to win this war. ... There is no question in my mind we'll have the resolve -- I witnessed it yesterday on the construction site. Behind the sadness and the exhaustion, there is a desire by the American people to not seek only revenge, but to win a war against barbaric behavior, people that hate freedom and hate what we stand for.97
In this 2001 statement Bush links the (masculine) resolve of the administration with ‘the American people’, not only by using the inclusive ‘we’, but also by reference to those working on construction sites in the aftermath of the attacks as the embodiment of ‘resolve’ and strength. By illustrating the resolve of ‘the American people’ through the imagery of a traditionally masculine space, a construction site, Bush reinforces the masculinity of the ‘(extra)ordinary American’ to the US ‘Self’.98 The hypermasculinity of the administration, as outlined above, is thus supplemented by the citizenry: as Bush explains, ‘our real strength is the hearts and souls of the American people.’99 The character of the ‘(extra)ordinary American’ is instrumental in validating the ‘civilised values’ and hypermasculine image of the US ‘Self’ embodied in the Bush administration. The US, according to Bush, is ‘full of the finest people on the face of the Earth’100 and ‘the world will see that the strength of this nation is found in the character and dedication and courage of everyday citizens.’101 It is also implied, in this discursive construction, that whilst there may be heroes in other nations, America is set apart through the heroism of its ordinary population that, according to Wolfowitz, ‘struggled for something
97 Bush, ‘President Urges Readiness and Patience’. 98 Shepherd, ‘Veiled References’, p. 22. 99 Bush, ‘President's Remarks at Victory 2002 Event’. 100 Ibid.; Bush, ‘Remarks by the President at John Cornyn for Senate Reception’. 101 Bush, ‘Guard and Reserves “Define Spirit of America”’. 154 unique and extraordinary’ in creating the US democratic state,102 and, as Bush alleged, in defending that ‘choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding’ through the ‘War on Terror’.103 The heroes of 11 September 2001, Bush states, are the ‘police, firemen, and rescue workers’, who demonstrate ‘our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice’.104 The acts of sacrifice and bravery he cites are often of men.105 For example:
one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end at the side of his quadriplegic friend...a beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. … A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burn victims.106
An active and heroic masculinity, embodied in men, was a key feature of Bush’s main speech to the nation on 11 September 2001. Here, Bush linked ‘the nation’s’ courage to ‘the courage of passengers, who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground’, symbolised by ‘an exceptional man named Todd Beamer.’107 Predicated on heteronormative logics, heroes were presupposed as heterosexual: for example media stories about Mark Bingham, a gay passenger who assisted in diverting the third flight on 11 September, failed to acknowledge his sexuality, and official references to Bingham let alone his sexuality were scarce.108 Through 2002 and 2003 only male heroes were referenced in a speech given by Wolfowitz to military personnel, and in an address to the NYPD President Bush gave two examples of heroism related to 11 September 2001, both of men.109 Although women did engage in rescue missions, the stories of men became prominent in both official and media representations of Americans’ rescue efforts in the aftermath of the attacks.110 The notion of a ‘masculine woman hero’ is illogical in gendered ‘War on Terror’ discourse that is predicated on understandings of gender in which ‘male’ is ‘masculine’, and opposite to ‘female-as feminine’.
102 Paul Wolfowitz, ‘On Iraq: Remarks by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz , Washington, DC’, 16 October 2002, available at
Other statements on the heroism of the ‘(extra)ordinary American’ referred to ‘the daring of our rescue workers’, ‘working past exhaustion’.111 As Shepherd explains, these statements reflect an idealised ‘working class heroism’ and the masculinity of ‘real jobs’.112 Together, the explicit references to men (firemen) and implicit references to masculine acts and roles are highly gendered in their conflation of ‘male’ and ‘masculine’. Shepherd also cites the example of a poem featured on the White House ‘9/11’ webpages titled ‘Inspiring Messages From Americans’. The photo that accompanies the poem is of two white male firefighters, further illustrating the construction of the heroic ‘(extra)ordinary American’ as masculine, but also pointing to the racialisation of this citizen as white.113 Another example in the same section of the White House website features another picture of firefighters, being greeted by Bush, and again the men in this photo are white.114 The ‘Heroes’ and ‘Patriotism’ section of the White House photo-essay series on 11 September and its aftermath featured nine photos, only one of which depicted non- white people.115 All pictures were chosen by the White House and as such reflect the racialised assumptions of those involved in creating official ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I return to the role of the Arab/Muslim ‘Other’ later in the chapter, note here that the predication of the US ‘Self’ on racialised logics enables the orientalist marginalisation of the Arab/Muslim ‘Other’ that I will explore in detail in chapters 6 and 7 by naturalising the ‘extra(ordinary) American’ as ‘white’. The ‘(extra)ordinary American’ was vital to constructions of the US ‘Self’ as action-driven, compassionate, hardworking. Shepherd points out the importance of the ‘national family’ here, which Bush linked to ‘extra(ordinary) Americans’ by encouraging Americans to ‘hug [their] children’ in the aftermath of September 11.116 Presupposed as belonging to nuclear family units, US citizenry had as much an active role to play as the hypermasculine leader: ‘the evil-doers have never seen the American people in action before, either - and they're about to find out.’117 The ‘civilised values’ asserted by the administration as intrinsic to the US ‘Self’ were
111 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation’; George W. Bush, ‘Radio Address of the President to the Nation’, 15 September 2001, available at
118 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’. 119 Bush, ‘President Urges Readiness and Patience’. 120 Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Secretary Rumsfeld Interview for ABC News This Week’, 16 September 2001, available at < http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1886>, accessed 24 August 2011; Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability in Washington’, 16 September 2001, available at < http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1885>, accessed 24 August 2011; Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with ABC Good Morning America’, 17 September 2001, available at
Today, millions of Americans mourned and prayed, and tomorrow we go back to work. Today, people from all walks of life gave thanks for the heroes; they mourn the dead; they ask for God's good graces on the families who mourn, and tomorrow the good people of America go back to their shops, their fields, American factories, and go back to work.123
Four days later, in his first address to Congress since the 11 September attacks, Bush put forward the economy as ‘a symbol of American prosperity’, which, after the attacks, required ‘your continued participation and confidence’ to remain a symbol of the US’ success.124 Powell reiterated that Americans, despite ‘this time of tragedy’, have ‘got to get back to our jobs, we’ve got to get back to work’, ‘[w]e need people to go back out to stores’.125 This sentiment carried through to September 2002 as Bush stated the ‘enemy hurt us when they hit us. They hurt our economy.’126 Cheney explained that being vigilant ‘against dangers to come’ as equally as important as ‘returning to the business of our lives’, in particular focusing on economic growth.127 administration’s economic recovery plans were as important as being As Shepherd, Agathangelou and Ling argue, a capitalist, neo- liberal concept of economic progress is central to the narrative of the ‘War on Terror’.128 The reliance of the Bush administration on neoliberalism is material (in that it is neoliberal infrastructures that allowed the US to pursue a militarised response to the al Qaeda attacks) but also discursive.129 It is particularly central to the conception of the ‘Self’ as a champion of ‘Western’ notions of economic progress (linked to the superiority of its political system) which become orientalist at certain moments, as I will explain in chapter 7 vis-à-vis the construction of a politically and economically backward ‘Oriental despot’. Rather than allowing the attacks to decrease the economic productivity of the US, the Bush administration’s discursive construction of the ‘Self’ put forward a vision of the US and its political/economic structures as highly powerful and resilient. In the above quote from Bush, mourning, as an emotional (and thus ‘feminine’ trait), is allowed only in
123 Bush, ‘Today We Mourned, Tomorrow We Work’. 124 Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War With Fear” ’. 125 Colin L. Powell, ‘Opening Statement by Secretary Powell at Press Briefing’, 12 September 2001, available at
The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity.131
The NSS also purported that ‘the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence’;132 in stating this the administration is also asserting that, despite the threat posed by the terrorist ‘Other’, the inherent strength of the US’ liberal democratic values is undiminished (similarly, Rumsfeld characterised the US military and its men and women as the ‘finest…on the face of the earth’133). The nation’s adherence to these values is also made all the more exemplary in the face of a national tragedy. The US is not then just a strong nation in terms of morale, but is also as Bush claimed ‘an entrepreneurial nation’ that not only ‘need[ed] to go back to work tomorrow’ but ‘will’.134
Reading femininity(ies) in the US ‘Self’ In this section I focus on constructions and performances of femininity, and I wish to clarify at the outset that although there is an emphasis on women in this section, I do not intend to imply that women are necessarily associated with
130 Simon Springer, ‘ Violence Sits in Places? Cultural Practice, Neoliberal Rationalism, and Virulent Imaginative Geographies’, Political Geography, 30:2 (2011), p. 91 131 National Security Strategy of the United States of America 2002, available at < http://georgewbush- whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/>, accessed 10 August 2010. 132 Ibid. 133 Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Address to the Men and Women of Fort Bragg/Pope AFB’, 21 November 2001, available at
135 Agathangelou and Ling, ‘Power, Borders, Security, Wealth’, p. 519; Agathangelou and Ling, Transforming World Politics, pp. 3-4. 136 Agathangelou and Ling, ‘Power, Borders, Security, Wealth’, p. 519. 160
The ‘nurturing maternal figure’ and ‘militarised mothers’ The organisation of gendered orientalist identities in the construction of the US ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse positions femininities (attached to female bodies) as supportive of the masculinised ‘Self’. ‘Male’ and ‘female’ in this logic are conceived of as binary, and as with orientalist binaries, each is constructive of the other. That is, ‘men’ are defined by and define what ‘women’ are and are not. Acceptable roles for ‘women’ in this discourse are then complementary to the masculine ideal types of the ‘hypermasculine leader’ and the ‘(extra)ordinary American’. In this characterisation, certain femininities are ascribed as ‘natural’ to women, (re)producing female ‘ideal’ types that draw on notions of femininity as suggestive of weakness, dependence, emotion, passivity, and the private realm. In terms of the ‘familial’ structure of the ‘Self’ (drawing on dominant understandings of a heterosexed nuclear family), discursively sanctioned female roles are subordinate to masculine ones in that they do not challenge the ‘hypermasculine leader’. The appropriately feminine ‘woman’ does not find fault with the ‘natural’ (it is assumed) dominance of the ‘hypermasculine leader’, but admires and is supportive of the protection offered.137 In official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, the female counterpart to the ‘hypermasculine leader’ was the ‘nurturing maternal figure’, embodied most visibly by Laura Bush who became a very visible model of the maternal and supportive nature of one type of ‘acceptable’ femininity in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. As First Lady, she held a degree of authority in terms of the weight of her opinions and impact of these on a US audience.138 Her support for the Bush administration’s discursive constructions of ‘Self’ was expressed in her statements and messages to the public. One of her first comments, in a letter to children, offered her ‘reassurance’ and let them know ‘how much I care about all of you’.139 Children, in most ‘Western’ cultures, are recognised as vulnerable and in need of special protection and care and are closely associated with women and the maternal.140 President Bush also addressed children in some speeches, but the formal tone of his main address to children after 11 September contrasts with the maternal tone of
137 Young, ‘The Logic of Masculinist Protection’, p. 9. 138 Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, ‘Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil’, NWSA Journal, 17:3 (2005), p. 123. 139 Laura Bush, ‘Mrs. Bush's Letter to Elementary School Children’, 12 September 2001, available at
Mrs Bush’s letter. His speech made references to ‘resolve’, ‘perseverance’, and ‘determination’ (and discursively linked saving Afghan children to asserting US identity), thereby avoiding the feminisation of the ‘hypermasculine leader’.141 The centrality of ‘family’ as based on traditional gender roles in contemporary US (neoconservative) political discourse (discussed earlier at pp. 141-143) is reflected in President Bush’s choice to speak of ‘the children traveling without their mothers when their planes were hijacked’142 in a remembrance speech for 11 September 2001. In the logic of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, mothers clearly play a role that men cannot. Laura Bush, in this context, became a traditionally maternal foil to the ‘hypermasculine leader’, offering a feminised mode of support. Her nurturing role was extended to the entire ‘national family’, for example, in delivering the president’s ‘Weekly Radio Address’.143 In terms of constructions of the US ‘Self’, Laura Bush’s statement echoed President Bush’s claims about, amongst other things, the conception of the US ‘Self’ as civilised, protectionist, and moral, by articulating the nature of the Afghan war as a battle between good and evil, civilisation and barbarity.144 As such, Laura Bush’s statement is intimately linked to the Bush administration’s conception of the ‘Self’. By supporting and echoing her husband’s conception of the role of the US, Laura Bush embodied a female counterpart to the ‘hypermasculine leader’ of ‘War on Terror’ discourse in line with the rhetoric of the two-parent nuclear family. Indeed, all American mothers were urged to play a supportive role. For Bush, ‘we’ were (or ought to be) ‘grateful to every military family for the sacrifice they are making for America’.145 The status of mothers in militarised US state discourse is apparent in the establishment of ‘Gold Star Mothers’ specifically to honour and support mothers (rather than both mothers and fathers) who bore ‘the loss of a son or daughter in service to our Nation.’146 Gold Star Mothers’ ‘contributions to our nation’, Bush explained, are identifiable in their willingness to
141 Bush, ‘President Asks American Children to Help Afghan Children’. 142 George W. Bush, ‘President: The World Will Always Remember September 11’, 11 December 2001, available at
‘serve their country’ through ‘their strength’ in sacrificing their children as a mark of ‘their devotion to the United States of America’.147 Predicated on well-established gendered ‘war stories’, it is mothers, then, who are at the centre of the families who have been lauded (in and beyond ‘War on Terror’ discourse) for their willingness to sacrifice their sons for war. 148 The centrality of this to official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse was such that even when discussing the campaign in 2005, Bush explained that ‘[o]ur nation depends on our [National] Guard families.’149 In a speech on the Iraq war, Bush quoted the mother of the Pruett family, who had four sons serving in Iraq:
I know that if something happens to one of the boys, they would leave this world doing what they believe, what they think is right for our country. And I guess you couldn't ask for a better way of life than giving it for something that you believe in.150
‘America’, Bush explained, ‘lives in freedom because of families like the Pruetts.’151 The role of women in the war effort at home complicates the notion of a singular passive femininity in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse,152 and can be read as what Cynthia Enloe calls ‘militarised motherhood’. Women hold value here through ‘the womb as a recruiting station’, whereby a woman who ‘has more children— sons, preferably— is a woman who is contributing to “national security” ’.153 Theorising the ‘militarised mother’, Enloe suggests that she does not question government appeals to women to have children to ensure national security, and reflects gendered assumptions about the world in nurturing children who later become soldiers for the war effort. This mother also considers her status as a ‘good mother’ to be dependent on, and indicative of, her citizenship and thus willingly performs the role of the ‘patriotic mother’.154 A ‘good American mother’ then plays a supportive role to the hypermasculine ‘Self’ by sending her sons to war, undergoing a ‘sacrifice’ for the ‘good of the nation’. This ‘militarised mother’ is discernible in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse as the woman Bush thanks for giving up her sons for the war effort. While these mothers were, on the one hand,
147 Ibid. 148 Jill Steans ‘Telling Stories About Women and Gender in the War on Terror’, Global Society 22:1 (2008), pp. 168-169. 149 George W. Bush, ‘President Addresses Military Families, Discusses War on Terror’, 24 August 2005, available
155 Steans ‘Telling Stories About Women and Gender in the War on Terror’, pp. 168-169. 156 Ibid. 157 Young, ‘The Logic of Masculinist Protection’. 158 Krista Hunt, ‘The Strategic Co-optation of Women’s Rights: Discourse in the “War on Terrorism” ’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 4 (2002), p.117. 159 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992), p.194. 164 protection (by men).160 As will be detailed in chapters 6 and 7, this also discursively limits ‘our’ options/responses to military intervention to the exclusion of all other approaches.
‘Symbols of ‘liberation’ ’ and ‘ ‘deviant’ women’ Whilst there is a protectionist logic at play in the assertion of a ‘hypermasculine leader’, and in the rescue narratives discussed in chapters 6 and 7, the role of women and their performances of femininities in ‘War on Terror’ discourse must be read as complex than this. Although there are performances of the kind of ‘passive’ femininity Hunt describes, these are better described as femininities that symbolise ‘liberation’ in that some of these are intended to project an active feminine role and that active character is vital to marking the ‘Self’ as ‘civilised’ (although, as I shall demonstrate, the predication of performances of femininity and masculinity upon ‘traditional’ understandings of gender and gender roles proscribes equality between femininities and masculinities, and femininities are ultimately supportive of performances of hypermasculinity that characterise the US ‘Self’ in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse). The role of mothers as active in the war exercise is one way the notion of passive femininity is complicated. Whilst gendered orientalist logic in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse needs ‘our’ women to require (masculine) protection and cannot allow femininities to destabilise the highly masculinised ‘Self’ that is intended to be projected here, constructing an image of completely passive ‘American women’ would ultimately undermine the superiority of the ‘Self’. This is because to predicate US women as completely passive would render the US ‘Self’ much like the ‘Othered’ enemy who oppress ‘his’ women. ‘Our women’ must be constructed against the ‘oppressed Muslim/Arab woman’ lacking agency, who symbolises the barbarity of the ‘enemy Other’. In order for the binary mechanisms of gendered orientalism to be successful, ‘our women’ must be ‘liberated’ and ‘independent’ in contrast to the ‘oppressed Others’ who are to be ‘saved’ through military intervention (an argument developed in chapters 6 and 7). Active performances of ‘liberated’ femininity are then central to projecting the US ‘Self’ as civilised, morally and culturally superior, and thus to gendered orientalist justifications for military interventions in the ‘War on Terror’. The importance of ‘liberated women’ to the US ‘Self’ is reflected in the many references to securing women’s rights abroad in ‘War on Terror’ discourse.
160 Laura Sjoberg, ‘Women Fighters and the ‘Beautiful Soul’ Narrative’, International Review of the Red Cross, 92:877 (2010), pp. 55-57. 165
Women’s rights were referenced throughout both of Bush’s presidencies (particularly in the months after the September 2001 attacks), for example in speeches to Congress, to the American public on the first day of the Afghan war, at a Pentagon press briefing, and a Congressional hearing.161 Feminists who aligned themselves with the Bush administration’s agenda of ‘liberating Afghan women’ were also valued in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse, enabling the projection of the US as ‘the champion of human rights and wellbeing of women…worldwide’, operating in a ‘joint struggle’ with feminists ‘on behalf of women of the world’.162 Speaking in 2004 about global women’s rights, Laura and George Bush mentioned the struggle for women’s rights in the ‘West’ only in relation to the suffrage movement, with the speeches focused almost entirely on women’s rights in the Middle East, often conflated with Islam.163 The status of the US as egalitarian was thus presupposed, and the very damaging attempts by the Bush administration and neoconservatives to curtail and even undo key women’s rights achievements in the US were ignored.164 This displays the hallmarks of orientalist logic in which the ‘Western Self’ must be constructed as ‘the harbinger of…gender equality.’165 In the ‘War on Terror’ context, US women’s ‘liberated’ status in constructing a ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ is thus predicated on the presupposition of US gender equality, leading to the prescription of a concern for ‘their’ women’s rights, but proscribing engagement with what ‘we’ might still need to achieve in this arena. US women in the discursive construction of the US ‘Self’ were indeed ultimately not ‘equal’ to men. This is most saliently illustrated by the example of Jessica Lynch, a female soldier who, it was claimed, was captured by Iraqi forces during a battle. Lynch was referred to as ‘daring’, ‘heroic’, and ‘fighting to the death’ against her Iraqi captors.166 Her presence in the armed forces and her
161 Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War With Fear” ’; Bush, ‘Presidential Address to the Nation’; Department of Defence, ‘Women’s Rights a Priority; Humanitarian Aid Improves’, 19 November 2001, available at
167 Laura Sjoberg ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations From The War In Iraq’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 9:1 (2007), p.86. Sjoberg explains that UK journalist John Kampfner revealed that Lynch was not shot at and not injured by Iraq soldiers and in fact cared for by her captors. 168 Brittain, ‘Benevolent Invaders, Heroic Victims and Depraved Villains’, pp. 82-83; Deepa Kumar, ‘War Propaganda and the (AB)Uses of Women: Media Constructions of the Jessica Lynch Story’, Feminist Media Studies 4 (2004), pp. 302-303; Veronique Pin-Fat and Maria Stern, ‘The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch: Biopolitics, Gender, and the ‘‘Feminization’’ of the U.S. Military’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30 (2005), pp. 25, 27-28, 35-36. 169 Jim Garamone, ‘Lynch to Rescuers: “I’m an American Soldier Too” ’, American Forces Press Service, 5 April 2003, available at
Conclusion The ‘Self’ constructed in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse draws on the masculinisation and racialisation of US identity explored in chapter 4. That is, the constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ examined here in chapter 5 have roots in pre- ‘War on Terror’ discourse(s). Their long-standing importance meant that the attacks of 11 September 2001 required the discursive (re)production of the US as ‘the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity’ in the world.179 Central to this is the projection of US ‘national identity (civilised, progressive, masculine, ‘White’) as natural and pre-given rather than constructed. This ‘naturalness’ is discursively constructed, through processes of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production. Metaphors of family are vital to this in terms of providing authority to creating (through predication and (re)production) identities for the subjects that are spoken about in this discourse, and naturalising the gendered and racialised presuppositions that they are underwritten by. ‘Our’ identity is constructed through many ‘facets’ in which a range of performances of masculinity and femininity serve to a powerful, benevolent, moral, civilised and masculine US ‘Self’. Constructed as strong, rational, dominant, and dynamic, the Bush administration’s leadership in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse is linked to the strength of the military, representing a hypermasculinity that is powerful and capable of protecting not only
174 Timothy Kaufman-Osborne, ‘Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?’, in McKelvey, One of the Guys, p. 147. 175 Brittain, ‘Benevolent Invaders, Heroic Victims and Depraved Villains’, p. 88. 176 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush, Jordanian King Discuss Iraq, Middle East’ 6 May 2004, available at
169
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Chapter Six
Gendered Orientalist Narratives: Afghanistan
The two final substantive chapters of this thesis, chapters 6 and 7, are concerned with uncovering the logics of gender and orientalism (intersecting as gendered orientalist narratives) in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourses around the military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. In these chapters I bring together the elements of identity-making and the logics of gendered, racial, and orientalist discourses examined in the preceding chapters. I look specifically at how these logics and the identity categories they create have functioned to make possible the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Repeated references to binaries (such as ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘civilised’, ‘barbaric’) in official US discourse around the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demand the interrogation of these binary logics.1 President George W. Bush, in a 2004 speech, reflected on the ‘War on Terror’ thus:
In the last two-and-a-half years, we have seen remarkable and hopeful development in world history. Just think about it: More than 50 million men, women and children have been liberated from two of the most brutal tyrannies on earth -- 50 million people are free. All these people are now learning the blessings of freedom.2
The speech reiterates what had been claimed by the George W. Bush administration throughout the ‘War on Terror’: that US military responses to the attacks of 11 September 2001 were not simply retaliatory, but designed to spread ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ to places and peoples subjugated by barbaric leaders who aimed to inflict terror and impose their world view on ‘the entire civilized world’.3 In chapters 6 and 7 I examine key moments in ‘War on Terror’ discourse to illustrate the discursive processes by which gendered orientalism functions to make military
1 For example, George W. Bush, ‘National Security Strategy of The United States of America’, September 2002, available at
172 rule.4 My analysis of the war in Afghanistan focuses on the representations surrounding two key events, the attacks of 11 September 2001 (and what they came to stand for) and the military conflict in Afghanistan until December 2001. Using these two events as the focus of my analysis, I ascertain how a ‘War on Terror’ was constructed in immediate aftermath of the attacks, as a discourse through which an ‘appropriate’ response to the attacks was shaped by a construction of ‘Other’ (and its relationship to ‘Self’) that was predicated on gendered orientalist logics. The chapter will proceed as follows. After briefly contextualising the lead-up to military intervention into Afghanistan and the conflict’s ongoing impact, I discuss texts produced by key members of the Bush administration for public consumption in the first few weeks after 11 September 2001. In the next section I detail the nature of the presuppositions and predicates attached to particular types of people that function to construct them as ‘Other’. Firstly, I develop the notion that the world could be divided according to a logic of ‘us’ and ‘them’, in particular examining an ‘internal Other’ in terms of Arab/Muslim ‘Others’ and their construction in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I then look at the construction of an external ‘enemy Other’ (not limited only to the perpetrators of the attacks), constructed as ‘Mad Mullahs and Terrorists’. Finally, in the third section, I bring together the identities ascribed to the key actors in ‘War on Terror’ discourse and illustrate how the ‘us’ explored in chapter 5 (predicated as masculine, civilised, democratic, egalitarian) is positioned against a ‘them’ (predicated against the ‘Self’) as barbaric and possessing a cowardly yet threatening masculinity, and what kinds of actions and behaviours are pre/proscribed to them on this basis. Specifically, I look at how ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ were pitted against each other in narratives about the Afghan war along gendered and orientalist lines in enabling a military response. The motifs I look at here include the deployment of narratives of ‘saving’ the ‘Other’, female subjugation, and the feminisation of Afghan society. Some of these key themes of gendered orientalism in the Afghan context will also be developed in chapter 7, in the Iraq context.
‘Saving’ Afghanistan On October 7 2001 the US began its military campaign in Afghanistan, in response to the attacks perpetrated against the US on 11 September 2001. Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by al Qaeda. The group had, for some
4 Douglas Kellner, ‘Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying: Presidential Rhetoric in the “War on Terror” ’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 37:4 (2007), p. 631. 173 time, been supported by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. After the attacks, the Taliban refused to cooperate with US demands to surrender al Qaeda leaders, particularly Osama Bin Laden. As a result, the country became a target for US military strikes with a stated aim of removing the group’s terrorist capabilities, destroying terrorist training camps and infrastructure, and capturing key al Qaeda leaders.5 Originally named ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ in its early stages (until September 25 2001), the campaign was soon renamed ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, in response to possible offence it might cause to Muslims.6 The change in name mirrored the shift in official US narratives, from one of antagonism and revenge, to a desire to ‘rid the world of evil’ and create a better world through the spread of ‘civilised’ values as embodied in the American nation (these narratives will be explored in more detail below). The paradox of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, that war brings peace, has been recognised in the assessment of many that the war in Afghanistan has been a failure. A more-than-10 year war has had a devastating impact (mostly on civilians), both in terms of casualties and long terms effects such as destruction of infrastructure, and exacerbation of inter-ethnic conflict.7 Within the first three months alone, the number of Afghan civilians directly killed by US-led forces reached at least 3,000, with an estimated 20,000 dead as an indirect result of the invasion, and abuses by the military were exposed by human rights organisations.8 Yet polls show that Bush’s approval rating was over 80% at this time.9 It was the discursive construction of the conflict along gendered and orientalist lines, I argue, that played an instrumental role in the acceptance of this war despite its obvious
5 George W. Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War with Fear”: Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, 20 September 2001, available at
September 11, 2001: establishing an orientalist and gendered framework In this section, I draw principally on the primary material I gathered for the period from 11 September 2001 to 21 September 2001. I see this as the period in which basic presuppositions, predications, and pre/proscriptions of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse were established; these are the basics features of the discourses that I will argue were (re)produced in the subsequent narratives I look at both in this chapter and in chapter 7. The division of the world along binary lines was established by the Bush administration as early as 12 September 12 2001, when Bush stated that ‘[t]his will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil’.10 In doing so he immediately characterised the attacks as the start of a large-scale conflict, which would later come to be classified as war (which I will demonstrate in detail below). Then-National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice explained in 2002, the President’s characterisation as early as 12 September 2001 (that ‘we’re at war’) was ‘a perfectly natural thing for him to say’;11 I argue that this could be so because of orientalist and masculinist logics that I explore throughout this chapter. Bush elaborated on what these categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ might entail by characterising (through predication) the attackers as ‘evil people who hate freedom and legitimate governments’ and positioning them against ‘freedom-loving people’ who must ‘come together to fight terrorist activity’.12 In doing so, Bush portrayed the world according to an ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary centred around what I will show are orientalist binaries even before his famous ‘either you are with us or against us’13 pronouncement two weeks later which served to reinforce this binary. In the first month after 11 September 2001, key aspects of this binary narrative
10 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Meets with National Security Team’, 12 September 2001, available at
14 George W. Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’, 11 September 2001, available at
Constructions of the instigators of this ‘war’ began soon after the attacks. Bush explained that ‘a group of barbarians have declared war on the American people’.20 The way in which this was done not only by stating explicitly that the attacks constituted a ‘declaration of war’, but also involved a consistent characterisation of the attacks as aimed at ‘American values’, by extension ‘world values’, and ‘civilised values’. In his first post-attack televised address to the nation, Bush asserted that ‘our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.’21 For the next month, Bush reiterated the attacks as directed at ‘our way of life, our very freedom’, ‘legitimate governments’, ‘freedom-loving people’, and ‘democracy’ in a number of speeches and statements.22 This was echoed by Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz in a number of statements, interviews, and speeches given in the days after the al Qaeda attacks in which they too predicated the attacks as ‘an assault on democracy’, ‘our political system, our form of democracy…our successes of society’, ‘our way of life’, ‘the way of life of free people’, ‘people who believe in freedom’, and ‘freedom-loving people everywhere in the world’.23 Bush explicitly linked the attacks on these values to the US’ status as ‘freedom's home and defender’.24 That the US was attacked because it embodied these values then reinforces its predication as ‘free’, ‘freedom-loving’, and ‘democratic’. Official rhetoric in September 2001 also linked the US and ‘American values’ to the broader world:
This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.25
20 Bush, ‘President Urges Readiness and Patience’. 21 Bush, ‘Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation’. 22 See for example George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President While Touring Damage at the Pentagon’, 12 September 2001, available at
In asserting that the attacks were ‘not just on America but on the civilized world’26, the Bush administration was the embodiment of civilisation and ‘Western’ liberal values (much as the US ‘Self’ had been projected historically, as discussed in chapter 4). Thus, Bush could assert that ‘America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.’27 Rumsfeld concurred, stating that those who died in the attack on the Pentagon were killed ‘because they were here, in this place that symbolizes the power of freedom and the strength of American purpose and principle.’28 This type of predication then functioned to prescribe a leadership role for the US in the ‘War on Terror’. Indeed, Powell made this connection explicit in a TV interview on 12 September 2001, stating that this was an ‘assault on America, because it's an assault on civilization, it's an assault on democracy, it's an assault on the world’ and that ‘the world must respond as the United States plans to respond.’29 As the Bush administration made clear, the appropriate response was ‘war’. The construction of ‘war’ as necessary relied on the construction of a broad threat centred on a specifically gendered and orientalist ‘Other’. As Bush and Rumsfeld announced in remarks made during September, ‘a group of barbarians have declared war on the American people’, whose ‘terrorism is a direct attack on our way of life and…a direct attack on the United States of America.’30 Bush expressed this threat as based on irrational hatred of ‘civilised values’:
They hate what we see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. … These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.31
Cheney concurred, that the US and its ‘commitment to free institutions, the dignity of the individual, the spirit of enterprise’ is a ‘threat only to those who…regard human beings as mere instruments in the quest for power.’32 The ‘War on Terror’ was then also ‘a war against evil people who conduct crimes against innocent
26 Colin L. Powell, ‘Interview on Fox Morning News’, 12 September 2001, available at
33 Bush, ‘President Building Worldwide Campaign Against Terrorism’. 34 Ibid. 35 Richard B. Cheney, ‘Interview of Vice President Cheney with Diane Sawyer of ABC’, 29 November 2001, available at
39 George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President After Two Planes Crash Into World Trade Center’, 11 September 2001, available at
(economic, cultural, military), both in and of themselves42 and also in terms of public reactions,43 demanded the hypermasculine statements made by the administration to reassert a ‘lost’ (however temporarily) masculinity. That masculinities have historically been, as I discussed in chapters 4 and 5, central to US national identity/‘Self’ (domestically and in terms of its projection to the rest of the world) makes it all the more necessary to reassert this in light of the challenge to US masculinity posed by the al Qaeda attacks. As gendered and orientalist logics presuppose, are predicated on, and (re)produce binaries (‘us’/‘them’, ‘masculine’/‘feminine’), the successful assertion of masculinity in this context requires the construction of a competing masculinity. Early official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse located this in the ‘Eastern Other’ as an ‘enemy [that] hides in shadows…preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, runs for cover…an enemy that tries to hide.’44 Here the ‘Other’ is feminised through the predication of ‘weak’ (therefore feminine) traits, but this is also interlinked with the image of the dark, devious orientalised ‘Other’. Reading this in light of the ‘Self’ discussed in chapter 5, which predicates its world view on masculinist assumptions, an ‘Other’ that possesses threatening (uncontrolled) masculinity must be feminised in order to be positioned as vulnerable to the hypermasculine power of the US. ‘Self’. By doing so, the Bush administration could discursively position its own masculinity as superior, vowing to get the enemy ‘out of their caves, smoke them out’.45 Powell asserted this masculine dominance in terms of firm leadership when, in response to a question about the cooperation of other states with the US’ ‘War on Terror’, he said ‘I'm not carrying an expectation. The only thing I'm looking for is results. They either do or they don't. It's binary -- yes or no.’46 Bush even drew on the divine in his conceptualisation of ‘the world’ as one of competing masculinities. He stated on September 11 that ‘the resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake: we will show the world that we will pass this test’ and ending his speech with a prayer.47 Reiterating the notion that the attacks were directed at the US because of its perceived status as the beacon of democratic values and freedom, Bush’s statement, along with the use of religious motifs and
42 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and “Saving” US State Identity’; Cynthia Weber, ‘Flying Planes Can Be Dangerous’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 31:1 (2002), p. 145. 43 Drew, ‘Identity Crisis: Gender, Public Discourse, and 9/11’. 44 Bush, ‘President Bush Meets with National Security Team’; 45 Bush, ‘President Building Worldwide Campaign Against Terrorism’. 46 Colin L. Powell, ‘Interview on CNN's Late Edition, 16 September 2001, available at
48 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and “Saving” US State Identity’, pp. 46, 50. 49 Rumsfeld, ‘Defense Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with NBC Today’. 50 Richard B. Cheney, ‘Remarks by Vice President Dick Cheney to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’, 14 November 2001, available at
Constructions of the ‘Other’ In this section I build on the discussion of the division of the ‘War on Terror’ world in to an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, and delineate the roles, actions, feelings, and desires pre/proscribed to the ‘them’ referred to in official US ‘War on Terror’
52 Elgin M. Brunner, ‘Consoling Display of Strength or Emotional Overstrain? The Gendered Framing of the Early “War on Terrorism” in Transatlantic Comparison’, Global Society, 22:2 (2008), pp. 224-225. 53 Jacques Chirac in ‘President Chirac Pledges Support’. 183 discourse. I start by revisiting the notion of the ‘internal Other’ which I addressed in chapter 5 in terms of non-white citizens complicating notions of the US as ‘unified’ and who have not been as easily made part of ‘us’ as ‘White’ citizens have. In this section, I consider the notion of the ‘internal Other’ specifically in terms of Arab/Muslim ‘Others’, who have become highly visible in US discourse after 11 September 2001. The contradictions and anxieties around constructions of the Arab/Muslim ‘Other’ inside the US’ borders reflect what Gillian Youngs explains as ‘the new home front’.54 The nature of terrorism has unsettled ‘traditional state- centred international relations’ perspectives of threats as ‘external’, and the resulting blurring of boundaries between domestic and foreign policy has led to the development of policies and strategies that reflect the nature of these threats as ‘internal’ as much as they are ‘external’.55 I look at the construction of both these threats as predicated upon gendered and orientalist logics below specifically in terms of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ framework that, as I have shown above, underpins the conception of the world put forward in official US ‘War on Terror’ narratives.
Constructing the ‘Other inside’ In the binary framework of ‘War on Terror’ discourse, the division of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is based on (re)producing orientalist understandings of the world in which a ‘civilised’ (read ‘Western’) values such as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ cannot be claimed as ‘natural’ to an ‘Eastern Other’ that comes to be defined by a conflation of culture/religion/race. That is, as Gargi Bhattacharyya points out, although Bush explains the ‘War on Terror’ as a battle against ‘evil’, this is not simply a ‘battle of ideas’; it is also waged against ‘groups of people who come to embody this otherness.’56 These people become racialised precisely because the world is predicated on an orientalist presupposition of ‘absolute and impassable’ difference that has, as I explained in chapter 2, been historically understood by reference to ‘East’ and ‘West’.57 Central to the construction of ‘Other’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse is the idea of ‘acceptable’ Middle Easterners/Muslims. Orientalism is not simply about ‘external Others’ located ‘outside’ or ‘over there’; the logic also constructs ‘internal’ difference. In the ‘War on Terror’ context this includes Arab and Muslim Americans, who have become homogenised in terms of being defined by
54 Gillian Youngs, ‘ ‘The New Home Front’ and the War on Terror: Ethical and Political Reframing of National and International Politics’, International Affairs 86:4 (2010), p. 929. 55 Ibid. 56 Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on the Terror (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), pp. 108-109. 57 Ibid, p. 108. 184 their ethnic, cultural or religious affiliations.58 In the context of a world divided into two camps, an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, the categorisation of Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern peoples within the US becomes problematic, displaying the contingency of the orientalist discourses that create a division between ‘civilised Self’ and ‘barbaric Other’. J. Ann Tickner has pointed out that attacks ‘on people identified by their attackers as Muslim’ after 11 September ‘manifested an unpleasant form of Orientalism’.59 In response to this, the Bush administration condemned such attacks60 and aimed to project that it was ‘not at war with Islam’ and that the War on Terror is ‘a war against terrorism and evil, not against Islam.’61 Bush elaborated that
Americans respect and admire that religion of peace. And I'm proud our country is home to many followers of the Islamic faith. Those who hijacked four airliners on September the 11th are also trying to hijack Islam.62
Bush spoke about Islam and Muslims to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People:
I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends.63
Yet the White House website shows that ‘terrorists’ in the Bush administration’s understanding were almost entirely affiliated with Islam,64 despite figures (even from the US Department of State) that show ‘terrorism originating in the Middle
58 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and “Saving” US State Identity’, p. 45. 59 Tickner, ‘Feminist Perspectives on 9/11’, p. 339. 60 See for example remarks about respecting Muslims in George W. Bush, ‘President Pledges Assistance for New York in Phone Call with Pataki, Giuliani’, 13 September 2001, available at
East is only sixth in order of frequency’.65 In October 2001 Condoleezza Rice argued that ‘[y]ou can't be for terrorism in one part of the world and against it in another part of the world’ but spoke almost exclusively of either al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein and Iraq in her comments.66 Bush also visited a mosque and Islamic centre remarking that ‘[t]he face of terror is not the true faith of Islam’,67 hosted an Iftaar dinner, and celebrated Eid Al-Fitr, all of which are discursive acts through which to predicate the quality of inclusiveness to the US ‘Self’.68 This illustrates the projection of an ‘aesthetic of racial inclusivity’ which is important for asserting superiority in orientalist ‘War on Terror’ discourse.69 Although orientalism functions according to a logic of difference, it also requires the ‘West’ to construct itself as more civilised and progressive than the ‘East’. Bush put forward an image of a US ‘Self’ that was united, overcoming internal divisions and differences, characterising 11 September 2001 as ‘a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite.’70 However, the narratives and identity markers deployed in ‘War on Terror’ discourse reveal attempts to ‘whitewash’ the complexity and multiplicity of American national identities. Bush also asserted ‘I know I don't need to tell you all this, but our nation must be mindful that there are thousands of Arab Americans who live in New York City who love their flag just as much as the three of us [Bush, New York Mayor Giuliani and New York Governor Pataki] do.’71 But clearly both here and in the many statements cited above, he and his administration did feel the need to ‘tell [us] all’ that inclusivity, respect, and equality were part of ‘our’ national make-up. The very need to assert that Muslims are good and peaceful (and often American citizens) indicates that Arabs, Muslims or people associated with Islam are marked a priori as ‘Other’.72 This reading also makes sense against the background of unofficial public ‘War on Terror’ discourse on Muslims and Arabs which characterised them by
65 Sina Ali Muscati, ‘Arab/Muslim 'Otherness': The Role of Racial Constructions in the Gulf War and the Continuing Crisis with Iraq’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 22:1 (2002), p. 133. 66 Condoleezza Rice, ‘National Security Advisor Interview with Al Jazeera TV’, 16 October 2001, available at
73 A 2001 opinion piece in Time magazine, cited in Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine’, p. 244. 74 Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine’, p. 244. 75 Kim Rygiel, ‘Protecting and Proving Identity: The Biolpolitics of Waging War Through Citizenship in the Post-9/11 Era’, in Hunt and Rygiel (eds.), (En)Gendering the War on Terror, pp. 154-157; see also Weber, ‘Flying Planes Can be Dangerous’, p. 145. 76 See for example, M. Jacqui Alexander, ‘ “Not Just (Any)body Can Be a Patriot: ‘Homeland’ Security and Empire Building’, in Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah (eds.), Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Race, Gender, and War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 212. 187 departments, transportation and utility workers well-trained in spotting danger.’77 Cheney explained that ‘we all need to be more alert as a society’ post-September 2001, and to look out for ‘something that doesn't quite fit and doesn't make sense’.78 As Laura Shepherd agues, there is a loyalty demanded by the assertion of a unified national family that serves to delineate who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, and by what criteria this can be judged.79 ‘Appropriate’ behaviour was illuminated by Attorney General John Ashcroft who publicly stated that ‘tactics’ such as criticism of civil liberties curtailment (and the ‘War on Terror’ more broadly) ‘only aid terrorists’.80 White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher informed a press conference that remarks made by Bill Maher questioning notions of military bravery are ‘reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.’81 All Americans are then ‘on watch’, but the internal ‘Other’ must do more to ‘prove’ their status as an acceptable Arab/Muslim – supporting ‘civilised nations’ and the mission to ‘hunt down’ terrorists ‘wherever they hide’82 is to be ‘like us’, as the 2001 Patriot Act prescribed. The Act was conceived of by Ashcroft, and although not an ‘official’ policy, the Act has resulted in racial and gender profiling which functions as a discursive practice, in allowing some people (by virtue of their appearance for example) to be predicated as ‘suspicious’, potentially ‘Muslim’, and by extension, ‘Other’/‘threat’.83
Constructing the ‘enemy Other’: ‘mad mullahs and terrorists’ The construction of the external ‘enemy Other’ in US ‘War on Terror’ discourse leading up to the Afghan war continued in the same vein as the constructions immediately after 11 September 2001. The Taliban and al Qaeda were key examples in the discourse of those who hate democracy and freedom.84 But the ‘enemy Other’ was constructed as broader than these two groups. As Bush
77 George W. Bush, ‘The President's State of the Union Address’, 29 January 2002, available at
188 explained, ‘[o]ur War on Terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’85 The ambiguous ‘enemy Other’ was constructed as specifically male and possessing an aggressive masculinity, threatening to ‘civilised nations’, irrational and unpredictable. Although representations of an ‘enemy Other’ differ in some ways from the Afghan war to the Iraq war, a broad characterisation established at the start of the ‘War on Terror’ is relevant for both conflicts; I make this point here and I will develop it further in chapter 7. From September 2001, Bush put forward a picture of an ‘enemy Other’ that was often referred to in later statements. This enemy, Bush told us, was ‘a different enemy than we have ever faced’; dangerous, irrational and immoral with ‘no regard for human life’, this enemy ‘preys on innocent and unsuspecting people’, and deviously ‘hides in shadows’.86 The enemy rejects civilised values through attacks on ‘our way of life, our very freedom’, and represents ‘evil, the very worst of human nature’.87 Bush illustrated the stark difference between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’:
We're trying to get food to starving Afghans. In contrast, the Taliban regime, those who house the evildoers [al Qaeda], has harnessed international aid -- harassed international aid workers, and chased them out of their country.88
Thus the Taliban illustrated their ‘Otherness’ against the US’ projection of a capable and successful ‘hypermasculine leader’. The latter was respected in the world and provided for ‘the nation’ (evidenced by a successful and strong country and its worldwide leadership role in the ‘War on Terror’), contrasting against the lack of care the Taliban displayed for the Afghan people, (evidenced by allowing their people to starve, collaborating with al Qaeda, and provoking international condemnation). Also central to this, Shepherd explains, was the discursive linking of the Taliban and al Qaeda, positioning Afghanistan as a ‘weak’ feminised state.89 This was also implied in Cheney’s assertion that ‘Afghanistan isn't state-supported terrorism’ but ‘a terrorist-supported state’,90 so feminised that what Cheney and
85 Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War with Fear” ’. 86 Bush, ‘President Bush Meets with National Security Team’; George W. Bush, ‘Presidential Address to the Nation’, 7 October 2001, available at
Bush had at one point called ‘a small group of vicious and violent men’91 could dominate it. The suffering of Afghans was very publicly harnessed in by the administration to an extent it had not been before,92 with Bush proclaiming that ‘there are few places on earth that face greater misery’ and this ‘provides us with a task’ to save Afghans from Taliban rule.93 As such, the war was not, in the Bush administration’s representations, ‘a war against the people of Afghanistan’ they too are victims of the … Taliban regime’.94 Rather, the US, its allies, (non-Taliban) Afghans, and the world shared a common interest, it was asserted, in military intervention. This construction was reiterated and expanded on again two months into the ‘War on Terror’, as Bush warned the world in at the UN General Assembly:
Every nation has a stake in this cause. As we meet, the terrorists are planning more murder -- perhaps in my country, or perhaps in yours. They kill because they aspire to dominate. They seek to overthrow governments and destabilize entire regions.95
The ‘enemy’ in this characterisation is unpredictable and bent on assuming power over – it is assumed – ‘civilised’ nations. Bush reiterated:
Our enemies are evil, and they’re ruthless. They have no conscience. They have no mercy. They have killed thousands of our citizens, and seek to kill many more. They seek to overthrow friendly governments to force America to retreat from the world.96
The ‘enemy Other’ appears to pursue destruction as an end in and of itself, an irrational and morally unjustifiable act that further adds to the seriousness of the threat it poses. Importantly, this serves to again distinguish the ‘enemy Other’s’ aggression and masculine power from the ‘necessary’ actions of the US and its allies. After the beginning of the Afghan war the administration, drawing on the hatred the ‘Other’ felt toward ‘American’/‘civilised’ values, purported that ‘new
91 Richard B. Cheney, ‘Remarks by the Vice President at Celebration for the Marine Corps Birthday’, 10 November 2001,
evil, and they’re ruthless. They have no conscience. They have no mercy. They have killed thousands of our citizens, and seek to kill many more. They seek to overthrow friendly governments to force America to retreat from the world.98
It is the enemy’s characteristics and behaviours that prescribe a ‘War on Terror’ as ‘our ability to bring justice to foreign terrorists is critical to our ability to defend the country against future terrorist threats.’99 Because the enemy ‘want to kill—kill all Americans, kill all Jews, and kill all Christians’, ‘the only possible response is to confront it, and to defeat it.’100 Thus the US finds itself in a situation where ‘we wage a war to save civilization itself…[w]e did not seek it, but we must fight it.’101 Rumsfeld linked the current struggle to two previous battles ‘against totalitarian regimes’ (Nazi Germany and the USSR, it is assumed), further reinforcing the naturalness of the US taking a leadership role.102 This enemy is also presumed to be male, illustrating the operation of gendered logics in ‘War on Terror’ discourse which are based on traditional notions of gender identity and gender roles. Much like the construction of the US ‘Self’, the construction of ‘Other’ identities is based on the gendered presupposition that masculinity is the ‘natural’ expression of ‘men’ (signified by ‘male’ bodies, and similarly femininity is understood as ‘natural’ to ‘women’ and ‘female’ bodies). Thus there is a ‘natural’ link between between maleness/masculinity and soldier/fighter/liberator/invader/resistor. The gendered logics that construct the masculinity of the US ‘Self’ also shape the construction of the need for conflict in Afghanistan as one between competing masculinities. Here, dominant understandings of gender in which masculinities are privileged over femininities organises US responses to the ‘Other’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. It is thus male bodies rather than female ones that are expected to pose a challenge to the masculine US ‘Self’ (this is challenged in the Iraq context, in regards to female suicide bombers as I discuss in chapter 7). The enemy is both explicitly and
97 Rumsfeld, ‘Speech: Naval Training Center Great Lakes Graduation’, accessed 12 September 2011; Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, ‘Prepared Statement: Senate Armed Services Committee “Military Commissions” ’. 98 Bush, ‘President Shares Thanksgiving Meal with Troops’. 99 Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, ‘Prepared Statement: Senate Armed Services Committee “Military Commissions” ’; Bush, ‘President Building Worldwide Campaign Against Terrorism’. 100 George W. Bush, ‘President Discusses War on Terrorism in an Address to the Nation’, 8 November 2001, available at
Developing the narrative: Operation Enduring Freedom A ‘War on Terror’ discourse was firmly established in terms of gendered and orientalist logics soon after the attacks of 11 September 2001. In 2005, Bush reflected that
on September the 11th, 2001, we saw the future that the terrorists intend for our country and the lengths they're willing to go to achieve their aims. We faced a clear choice. We could hunker down, retreating behind a false sense of security, or we could bring the war to the terrorists, striking them before they could kill more of our people.105
This sentiment was one that Bush and his administration made repeated references to during the lead up to the Afghan war. The administration’s representation of the attacks immediately after 11 September 2001 focused on a motif of violence, and in the lead up to the Afghan war violence was portrayed as the only language that ‘the terrorists’ could understand. Their actions were portrayed as void of any rational political motives: Vice President Cheney explained, ‘the world increasingly will understand what we have here are a group of barbarians, that they threaten all of us.’106 Powell asserted that this made specific demands of the US: as ‘every civilized nation in the world recognizes that this was an assault not just against the United States, but against civilization’, ‘what we have to do is not just go after these perpetrators, and those who gave them haven, but the whole curse of terrorism that is upon the face of the earth’.107 As I explained above and in chapter
103 Bush, ‘President Asks American Children to Help Afghan Children’. 104 Cheney, ‘Remarks by the Vice President at Celebration for the Marine Corps Birthday’, (emphasis mine). Cheney also referred to the ‘Other’ as men in Richard B. Cheney, ‘Vice President Cheney Delivers Remarks at the Federalist Society Annual Convention Dinner’, 15 November 2001, available at
5, early ‘War on Terror’ discourse predicated ‘Self’ as masculine. Statements by the administration, like the above, that posits ‘feminine’ characteristics like ‘weakness’ and ‘uncertainty’ as worthless against a ‘barbaric Other’ are shaped by a gendered orientalist logic that presupposes masculinity as effective in achieving ‘our’ safety. However, ‘War on Terror’ discourse came to combine both aggressive and altruistic objectives, being waged against the Taliban but for, not only the US, the Afghan people too.108 Bush explained the US aimed to help Afghans:
The United States respects the people of Afghanistan -- after all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid -- but we condemn the Taliban regime. (Applause.) It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists. By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder.109
The military intervention and the PR exercise to ‘sell’ Operation Enduring Freedom had, according to some sources, a 94% support rate amongst the American public.110 While this was due in no small part to the understandable anger and grief that many experienced in response to the attacks of 11 September 2001, it can also be seen as the result of the effective use of gendered orientalist logics in ‘War on Terror’ discourse that drew on dominant understandings of the orientalised ‘Other’ and of gender roles for ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ frame established in early ‘War on Terror’ discourse was, in the context of the Afghan war, developed in line with the (gendered) orientalist trope of ‘saving brown women’.111 This narrative sets up the conflict as one of competing (racialised) masculinities. The rational, civilised, controlled masculinity of the US ‘Self’ as outlined in chapter 5 is discursively situated at the top of a gendered orientalist hierarchy. As outlined in chapter 5, the masculinity of the US ‘Self’ in War on Terror discourse embodies positive expressions of what are traditionally considered ‘masculine’ traits. At the same time, the male ‘Other’ is bloodthirsty and displaying an irrational and unpredictable aggression. In this context, the appropriate response by a masculine US ‘Self’ became paramount – as chapter 5 demonstrated, masculinity of ‘Self’ has been profoundly important to and often reiterated in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. The discussion in chapter 5 demonstrated that the ‘Self’ was constructed by reference to ‘masculine’ predicates (characteristics and actions), and femininity
108 Jill Steans ‘Telling Stories About Women and Gender in the War on Terror’, Global Society 22:1 (2008), p. 163. 109 Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War with Fear” ’. 110 AEI Studies in Public Opinion, ‘America and the War on Terrorism’, 24 July 2008, available at
Barbarism, masculinity, and female protection The Bush administration deployed gendered orientalist ‘War on Terror’ discourse established in September and early October 2001 to characterise the military intervention into Afghanistan as a rescue mission.112 On 20 September 2001, Bush explained why the US intervention into Afghanistan was necessary in the context of widespread violence and oppression perpetrated against Afghans:
Afghanistan's people have been brutalized -- many are starving and many have fled. Women are not allowed to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television. Religion can be practiced only as their leaders dictate. A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough.113
Here, the centrality gender is relevant not only in terms of understanding how women are constructed in discourse preceding the Afghan war, but also in terms of the construction of ‘ordinary’ Afghan men. These men, targets of the Taliban’s performances of irrational and uncontrolled masculinity, are feminised as they are unable to resist the dominance of the Taliban. Through this feminisation, they contribute to the image of Afghanistan as a territory that can be invaded, where US masculinity can be asserted. However, by late September the administration’s rhetoric had started to narrow its focus on the brutality of the Taliban to the
112 Cloud, ‘ “To Veil the Threat of Terror” ’. 113 Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War with Fear” ’. 194 oppression of women. For example, on September 25, Bush spoke of ‘an incredibly repressive government, a government that has a value system that's hard for many in America…to relate to. Incredibly repressive toward women’.114 The next day, Bush linked this directly to Bin Laden, predicating him as ‘a man who hates freedom’ as he is someone who ‘doesn’t mind destroying women and children’, glossing over abuses perpetrated against Afghan men.115 The day before military operations in Afghanistan began, Bush again referenced women as the marker of Taliban barbarism.116 In the official narrative, ‘Other’ men were most visible in the role of violent oppressors: even though Bush admitted the abuses inflicted on Afghan men, it was women (and children) who almost exclusively symbolised victims in the discourse. Bush stated in October 2001:
Nor is our war against global terrorism a war against the people of Afghanistan. The Afghan people are victims of oppression and misrule of the Taliban regime. There are few places on earth that face greater misery.117
Speak to children about a very serious topic made the impact of using only examples of children’s suffering even more poignant. Indeed, the most emotive representations of suffering in the lead up and early months of the Afghan war were centred on women and children. The Administration explicitly connected the treatment of women to backward and ‘uncivilised’ behaviour amongst the enemies of the US and its allies, with Bush stating that the men who attacked the US are the same ‘faceless cowards’ who demonstrate their barbarity in ‘slitting the throats of women’.118 Rumsfeld elaborated on this, linking the integrity of the administration’s attitude towards (Afghan) women to the support the US had for the ‘War on Terror’. In September 2001 he stated that ‘if you look at the support from across the globe, the world does not believe that violence against women and children in free
114 Bush, ‘International Campaign Against Terror Grows’. 115 George W. Bush, ‘President Meets with Muslim Leaders’, 26 September 2001, available at
Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish. … Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. Yet the terrorists who helped rule that country now plot and plan in many countries. And they must be stopped. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.122
Central to this is the projection of the US as a place of civilisation, and its leadership as proponents of ‘civilised values’. That the First Lady was highly visible in the appeal to highlight the plight of Afghan women added to the notion of the US as a place of gender equality and female liberation. Presenting the war in terms of conflict between ‘the civilised’ and ‘the barbaric’ and positioning itself as the leader of civilised nations, the US externalises values that it purports to embody (such as Western liberal democracy, social and technological progress) as values of ‘civilisation’. ‘Civilised values’ are defined by the US in this discourse, here in terms of the treatment of women.123 The violence of the ‘War on Terror’, of the Afghan war, is then justified by the deployment of the (orientalised) ‘Other’ woman as wholly oppressed and symbolic of the uncontrolled masculinity of the ‘enemy Other’ that is expressed in indiscriminate violence. This woman is constructed as unable to protect herself from the barbaric ‘Other’, and as such her passivity and lack of agency invites ‘our’ men to assert their masculinity to conquer the backward (male) ‘enemy Other’.124
119 Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Interview with NBC “Meet the Press” ’, 30 September 2001, available at
The operation of orientalist logics in the construction of the ‘enemy Other’ and narratives around the Afghan war functioned through commonly accepted notions of ‘appropriate’ gendered behaviour, particularly toward women. As Mohja Kahf has shown, the homogenous image of oppressed Muslim women has been vital to imperial projects in its use as a symbol and evidence of the backwardness of ‘Other’ societies as a whole, and the barbarity of ‘Other’ men in particular.125 Images of Muslim women and veiling have a long history of significance in (orientalist) ‘Western’ thought,126 and indeed they are again under increasing scrutiny in burqa-ban debates in Europe. Muslim veiling plays a significant role in the construction of identity (‘us’ and ‘them’), symbolising the non-Western ‘Other’, and the danger this ‘Other’ poses to liberal democratic notions of society, and to ‘our’ civilisation, where freedom and gender equality is valued.127 These discourses inform ‘War on Terror’ understandings of ‘Other’ women and ‘Other’ men. In particular, the burqa became the symbol of oppression for Afghan women (and by extension, Afghanistan itself) in official (and, as I will discuss shortly, popular media) discourses. The salience of headcoverings as symbols in ‘War on Terror’ discourse was illustrated when Bush referred to Muslim women simply as ‘women of cover’.128 State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher linked the US war effort in Afghanistan to liberation through the act of removing the burqa: the US’ efforts were successful, he claimed, because Afghan women could now be seen ‘sometimes even without wearing a burqa’.129 In official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, the image of the oppressed (veiled) Muslim woman came to represent the threat posed by the irrational, backward, violent, and dangerous masculinity of the enemy. The construction of ‘Other’ masculinities outlined earlier also helps to construct the status and gender attributes of ‘Other’ women in this narrative. Through the portrayal of ‘Other’ men as barbaric in terms of (amongst other things) their attitude to women, corresponding femininities were also constructed. That is, the
125 Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 9. 126 Homa Hoodfar, ‘The Veil in Their Minds and On Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women’, Resources for Feminist Research, +22:3/4 (1993). 127 See for example, Valérie Amiraux, ‘The Headscarf Question: What is Really the Issue?’, in Samir Amghar, Amel Boubekeur, and Michaël Emerson (eds.), European Islam: Challenges for Public Policy and Society, (Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies, 2008), p. 134; Annelies Moors, ‘The Dutch and the Face-Veil: The Politics of Discomfort’, Social Anthropology, 17:4 (2009), pp. 399–402; Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008). 128 George W. Bush, ‘President Directs Humanitarian Aid to Afghanistan’, 4 October 2001, available at
130 Bush, ‘President Speaks to United Nations’. 131 Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men, p. 22. 132 Stabile and Kumar, ‘Unveiling Imperialism’, p. 773. 133 Ibid, p. 772. See also Cloud, ‘ “To Veil the Threat of Terror” ’. 134 Paul Wiseman and Jack Kelley as quoted in Stabile and Kumar, ‘Unveiling Imperialism’, p. 773. 198
Bush administration’s women’s rights rhetoric, and accepted military intervention as way to end the Taliban’s oppression of women (they later suggested that women’s freedom to remove their burqas and go out in public unaccompanied by male relatives illustrated their liberation and, implicitly, pointed to the success of the war).135 The FMF’s statements on women in Afghanistan functioned to support official gendered orientalist ‘War on Terror’ discourse, adding to representations of oppressed ‘Other’ women, backward ‘Other’ men and a civilised US that respected not only women, but feminist ideals as well. In support of the ‘liberation’ of (women in) Afghanistan, the FMF stated that ‘the US and its allies must rescue and liberate the people, especially the women and children…the link between the liberation of Afghan women and girls from the terrorist Taliban militia and the preservation of democracy and freedom in America and worldwide has never been clearer’.136 The language used here reflected the Bush administration (and mainstream media’s deployment of ‘the Afghan woman’. Together, these three sources of representation of ‘Eastern Others’ were powerful in their impact. The use of the ‘Afghan woman’ to represent the Bush administration’s construction of ‘Self’, various ‘Others’, and ‘threat’ in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse was effective because of the co-option into official discourse.137 The FMF’s statements are an example of interplay between official and popular discourse in that they both harnessed orientalist images of the ‘Other’ and echoed the language of ‘salvation’. The FMF’s statements functioned to make more plausible ‘emancipation’ as one of the reasons for the Bush administration’s war in Afghanistan. It reinforced the predication of ‘us’ as progressive and enlightened, and ‘them’ as backward and barbaric. If ‘we’ are more respectful of women’s rights than ‘them’, it becomes logical that the role prescribed to ‘us’ (based on this predication) is one of ‘liberation’. These media and liberal feminist discourses enabled the Bush administration to continue to present itself as bringing women’s rights to the backward ‘East’.138 Another discursive move that sustained this was the enacting of the Afghan Women and Children’s Relief Act 2001 which aimed to provide ‘education and better health for every Afghan woman and child’.139 In his comments on the Act, Bush aligned the administration and its
135 Ann Russo, ‘The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:4 (2006), pp. 563, 568, 574. 136 FMF Newswire, as cited in Russo, ‘The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid’, p. 573. 137 Hunt, ‘ “Embedded Feminism” ’, pp. 52-60. 138 Maryam Khalid, ‘Gender, Orientalism and Representations of the ‘Other’ in the War on Terror’, Global Change, Peace & Security, 23:1 (2011), p. 24. 139 George W. Bush, ‘President Signs Afghan Women and Children Relief Act’, 12 December 2001, available at
140 Colin L. Powell, ‘Afghan Women: Remarks at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’, 19 November 2001, available at
143 Laura Bush, ‘Mrs. Bush's Remarks to Women CEOs’, 20 March 2001, available at
in 1977, women made up some 15 percent of the Afghanistan highest legislative body. By the early 1990s, women comprised something like 70 percent of the schoolteachers, 50 percent of the government workers. And 40 percent of the doctors in Kabul were women.151
‘Then’, he stated, ‘the Taliban took over’; the next point in Afghanistan’s history, according to this account, was the US military intervention. With the ‘Taliban in retreat’ Afghans, ‘especially the women, are free of that repression’.152 Rumsfeld failed to point out that the period between the early 1990s (the height of women’s participation according to Rumsfeld) and the 2001 war was marked by the violence of civil war, which the US played a central role in and was a significant factor in women’s retreat from public life.153 Similarly, Bush, in asserting that ‘[w]e strongly reject the Taliban way…[w]e strongly reject their brutality toward women and children’154, effectively concealed the US’ role in bringing the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and in creating the conditions for violations of human rights (including women’s rights). In November 2001, the US Department of State website published a ‘Report on the Taliban’s War Against Women’, also presenting a selective picture of Afghan women, and the perpetrators, causes and context of abuses committed against them.155 These representations also ignore the negative impact the Afghan war has had on women in particular, as Amnesty International has reported156 (interestingly, Krista Hunt suggests that the US State Department has used similar reports to justify the project of ‘liberation’).157 This discursive narrative becomes dominant by drawing on identities that are readily recognisable in the orientalist discourses that have gained currency in ‘the West’. Representations of barbaric ‘Other’ men/oppressed ‘Other’ women in gendered orientalist discourses depend on the totalising image of the oppressed
149 Ratna Kapur, ‘Unveiling Women’s Rights in the War on Terror’, Duke Journal of Gender, Law & Policy, 9 (2002), pp.213-214. 150 Zine, ‘Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism’, p. 34. 151 Rumsfeld, ‘DoD News Briefing - Secretary Rumsfeld’. 152 Ibid. 153 Ahmed-ghosh, ‘Voices of Afghan Women’, p. 114; Sonali Kolhatkar, ‘By Any Standard, This is a War Against Afghans’, in Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter (eds.), September 11 2001: Feminist Perspectives (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002), pp. 210-211. 154 Bush, ‘President Signs Afghan Women and Children Relief Act’. 155 US Department of State, ‘Report on the Taliban's War Against Women’, 17 November 2001, available at
Muslim/Arab woman. Predicated on successfully representing those who are deemed unable to speak for themselves, any experiences of these women that might undermine the civilised barbaric/ victim savior dichotomy are overlooked. Thus, official representations focused on putting forward images of oppressed Afghan/Iraqi/Middle Eastern/Muslim, rather than images of women as active agents in their own fight for human rights. Feminism and female-based resistance in the ‘East’ is largely ignored, and importantly, the male supporters of such movements do not feature in dominant US narratives.158 For example, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) unsettled the image of the passive victim by being actively involved in Afghanistan not only after the Afghan war, but also during the years of (often gender-based) violence before it.159 Cheney stated in November 2001 that the Northern Alliance were ‘Afghans who have been involved for a long time in a very difficult struggle there’,160 acknowledging at least some agency in Afghanistan. But this occurred only after the passivity of Afghanistan as a nation had been established before the war started, and did not acknowledge any women’s activism. Elaheh Rostami-Povey’s field work in Afghanistan shows that many women ‘found a space in which to exercise autonomy and agency’, often with the support of men, many of who Rostami-Povey spoke to rejected a belief in male superiority.161 Powell acknowledged that ‘[d]uring these years of great suffering, the women of Afghanistan have been the backbone of the Afghan society. It is in large measure a thanks to their endurance, their ingenuity, their courage that their country has survived.’162 In October 2001 RAWA representatives were invited to the Sub-Committee of the US House on International Operations and Human Rights. They lay bare the US’ involvement in the conditions women faced in Afghanistan, and requested aid rather than intervention. RAWA has publically stated that the war, in their view, war would not only be devastating for Afghans but encourage fundamentalism.163 After this, Jill Steans reports, these Afghan women became less important to and were marginalised by the Bush administration.164
158 Anne E. Brodsky, With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 191. 159 Ibid; Steans ‘Telling Stories About Women and Gender in the War on Terror’, p. 170. 160 Cheney, ‘Interview of the Vice President by the BBC’. 161 Elaheh Rostami-Povey, Afghan Women: Identity and Invasion (London and New York: Zed Books, 2007), pp. 1-3, 7. 162 Powell, ‘Afghan Women’. 163 Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, ‘Statement on the US Strikes on Afghanistan’, in Hawthorne and Winter, September 11 2001: Feminist Perspectives, pp. 95-96. 164 Steans, ‘Telling Stories About Women and Gender in the War on Terror’, pp. 170-171. 203
Conclusion The construction of the ‘Other’ in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse harnesses dominant understandings of gender roles, masculinity and femininity, which are constructed through racialised and orientalist stereotypes. In the days after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and in the lead up to the Afghan war, the Bush administration drew on gendered orientalist logics to define ‘the world’ and the type of ‘threat’ the US (and ‘the civilised world’) faced. The ‘enemy Other’ that posed this threat was predicated in ways that constructed ‘him’ as wholly ‘male’ (as the ‘natural’ embodiment of masculinity), with ‘Other women’ (and some men) represented as wholly oppressed and lacking agency. This discursive construction of the ‘Other’ also functioned to (re)produce the superior masculinity of ‘Self’ established both in and beyond the ‘War on Terror’ context (examined in chapters 4 and 5). The juxtaposition of deviant and ideal masculinities in official discourse serves to reinforce the ‘naturalness’ of these characterisations, and of the (racially) hierarchical performances of masculinity and femininity, adding to the narratives in which ‘the West’/US is the embodiment of civilised values, and the ‘East’ boasts only oppression, violence, terrorism, and barbarity. The deviant, barbaric and irrational masculinity of the ‘Other’ is central to the narrative, (re)producing ‘early’ ‘War on Terror’ discursive gendered orientalist binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ by reference to actions and attitudes toward women. Constructing (gendered) violence as symbolic of ‘the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us’,165 military intervention is prescribed: ‘feminine’ actions such as negotiation (perhaps conceived of as inaction in masculinist ‘War on Terror’ discourse) are necessarily proscribed. Male and female bodies in this discourse are, in line with broader discourses of gender, conceived of in binary ways which broadly mirror the US ‘Self’. For example, ‘Other’ men embody masculinity in terms of a desire to be authoritative, powerful, and strong, whereas ‘Other’ women perform femininity by conforming to traditional feminine roles, are ‘naturally’ weaker and lack the agency of their male counterparts. The configuration of both ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ is, in this way, inspired by a belief in the naturalness of traditional gender roles. The performances of these gender roles along racialised lines then become a point of difference between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, with gender roles being shaped by orientalist binaries. For example, whereas maleness becomes equated with ‘masculine’ traits and is dominant in both ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, the logics of orientalism work to configure these masculinities
165 Bush, ‘ “The Taliban’s War Against Women” ’. 204 according to racialised hierarchies that assert the superiority of US masculinity over that of the ‘Other’. These basic assumptions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ are key to my discussion in the next chapter, as their (re)production enabled gendered orientalist logics to be harnessed in the discursive prescription of another military intervention, the Iraq war. That is, it is the very discursive construction of identities and narratives in 2001 ‘War on Terror’ discourse (of ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘Self’, ‘Other’, appropriate performances of masculinity, femininity, how these are attached to racialised and orientalised bodies, and narratives of ‘liberation’) that allows subsequent identities and narratives of and about the ‘Other’ to be convincingly constructed.
205
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Chapter Seven
Gendered Orientalist Narratives: Iraq
Chapter 6 demonstrated that official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse around the Afghan war was based on gendered and orientalist logics that constructed competing masculinities and subordinate femininities and deployed them in gendered orientalist narratives. While a key narrative in the discourse around the Afghan war focused on ‘saving women’, the Iraq war, as I will show, was different in that a broader narrative of ‘oriental despotism’ featured more heavily than that of ‘saving women’. Situating this chapter in relation to chapter 6, it is important to note that the context of the Iraq war differed from the Afghan war. For example, the Afghan war was largely retaliatory and had wide international support, whereas the Iraq war showed more evidence of planning, a longer period of public debate and justification, and was much more contentious internationally. This chapter will consider these differences, but also explain that the construction of the ‘Other’ remained shaped by the gendered orientalist logics were central to early ‘War on Terror’ discourse and narratives around the Afghan war. The importance of the discussion in chapter 6 for my discussion in chapter 7 rests on the construction, in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, of a progressive, egalitarian, benevolent, strong, and moral, ‘Self’ placed in opposition to a backward, oppressive, barbaric, undeveloped and uncivilised ‘Other’. Although the ways in which specific identity categories for the ‘Other’ is predicated differently in each context, the basic presupposition of a world predicated on orientalist and gendered binaries (us/them, masculine/feminine, male/female) is absolutely central to both interventions. As I argued in chapter 6, this logic has allowed for the construction of a broad-scale conflict in which both ‘us’ and ‘them’ were predicated on gendered orientalist assumptions that privilege US hypermasculinity. This was established in early ‘War on Terror’ discourse, and (re)produced in narratives around the Afghan war. That is, the vision of a world under immediate threat from ‘barbaric Others’ was made ‘true’ not only through representations of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ as locked in a ‘clash of civilisations’, but also through the (discursive) responses prescribed, such as the Afghan war and the narratives around it. The ‘War on Terror’ and the Afghan war 206
undertaken under its umbrella were represented as conflicts between two distinct masculinities constructed as oppositional through orientalist logics (the civilised, rational, progressive ‘Self’ and the barbaric, backward, and irrationally violent ‘Other’). I argue in this chapter that it was the (re)production of these identities and understandings of ‘the world’ in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse not only during 2001 but also through 2002 and 2003 enabled US-led intervention into Iraq. Of course, there were significant differences in the contexts of the Afghan and Iraq wars. The first was undertaken very soon after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and the devastation of those attacks circumscribed any strong opposition to military intervention, particularly from other states (in particular, Article V of the NATO treaty was invoked which showed support for a military response).1 However, the lead-up to Iraq was strikingly different. Here, the US could not rely on clear and direct attack on US soil (although, as the UN had not passed a resolution authorising military action and because it was al Qaeda and not Afghanistan who had attacked the US in 2001, it is argued by some that the Afghan war was illegal, not only the Iraq war).2 The lead-up to the Iraq war, on the other hand, saw the US (and UK) engage with the UN to some degree (making a case to the UN for military intervention in Iraq based on Iraq’s purported acquisition of WMDs and evasion of weapons inspections) but ultimately proceeded with war despite lacking UN approval.3 Arguably, preparation for the war was to some extent underway as early as the 1990s in the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century, some members of which joined the Bush administration. However, the impact of PNAC has been explored in chapter 4, and thus the focus of chapter 7 remains on ‘War on Terror’ discourse under the George W. Bush administration. The chapter will start by examining the consolidation of the early ‘War on Terror’ discourse, taking key elements established in 2001, and examining how these were (re)produced through early 2002. The year before the 2003 war is important for understanding how the discourse established immediately after September 11 2001 and through the Afghan war is inextricably linked to representations in the lead-up to Iraq. That is,
1 Elgin M. Brunner, ‘Consoling Display of Strength or Emotional Overstrain? The Gendered Framing of the Early “War on Terrorism” in Transatlantic Comparison’, Global Society, 22:2 (2008), pp. 217, 221. (Article V provides that an armed attack against one member is an armed attack against all). 2 See for example Marjorie Cohn, ‘Bombing of Afghanistan is Illegal and Must Be Stopped’, International Review of Contemporary Law, 51 (2002); John Quigley, ‘The Afghanistan War and Self-Defense’, Valparaiso University Law Review, 37 (2003); Myra Williamson, Terrorism, War, and International Law: The Legality of the Use of Force Against Afghanistan in 2001 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). 3 Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 21-22. 207
how these are all part of one ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I also look at the ways in which official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse post-2001 (re)produced basic gendered and orientalist assumptions but also developed to include ‘new’ enemies after the main military battles of the Afghan war, and in doing so (re)produced ‘the world’ as one in which war remained necessary. The chapter will then go on to examine in more detail the construction of the ‘Other’ in the Iraq context. I argue this ‘Othering’ is organised around two main motifs in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, of ‘oriental despotism’ and the ‘sexuality of the Other’. The ways in which these are predicated is prescriptive of ‘our’ knowledge about the ‘Other’ as threatening and deviant. ‘Oriental despotism’ in this discourse functions to construct Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Ba’ath regime as typical of the ‘Orient’s’ inability to govern or provide for itself, politically and economically. Iraqis, unable to resist this oppressive rule on their own, are feminised and in need of ‘liberation’, mirroring the logic of ‘saving Afghan women’ examined in chapter 6. ‘War on Terror’ representations of Iraq are predicated on gendered orientalist logics which function to construct both an ‘enemy Other’ that is discursively linked to the ‘enemy Other’ constructed in the Afghan war (‘al Qaeda/Taliban’), and a narrative of liberation around which to organise rhetoric in support of the Iraq war. As explained in chapter 3, discourses cannot achieve complete fixity of meaning although this is attempted. A particularly significant example of a challenge to ‘War on Terror’ discourse is found in the Abu Ghraib scandal; in the final part of this chapter, I look at Abu Ghraib as an example of the operation of gender, sexuality, and orientalism in response to events that threated official constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in US ‘War on Terror’ discourse.
Consolidating gendered orientalist discourse The characterisation of the ‘War on Terror’ as a long-term exercise was central in official US discourse both during and after the initial months of the Afghan war, on the basis that an imminent threat to the US and the ‘civilised world’ still existed. The continued (re)production of these key elements of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, a binary division of the world and the types of people in it, was instrumental in constructing the Iraq war as a necessary action under the ‘War on Terror’. Gendered orientalist discourse remained important in this period, both in terms of the continuing involvement in Afghanistan and the ‘War on Terror’ more broadly. The narratives of barbarism and oppression deployed in the Afghan war, linked to ‘our’ security, became important in terms of consolidating the continuing 208
need for a ‘War on Terror’ as a ‘new kind of war’.4 On September 11 2001, the Bush administration predicated itself as ‘the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity’.5 Through 2002, the Bush administration’s conception of the world and the US’ place in it remained predicated on, and (re)produced, binaries of good and evil; as such, ‘War on Terror’ discourse continued to mark the US as the leader of the ‘civilised world’. The consolidation of military control in Afghanistan did not lead to the reduced significance of (gendered orientalist) insecurity in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Rather, the constitution of the threat from the ‘Other’ was broadened, and military engagement with Iraq was discursively constructed as necessary. Iraq’s incorporation into ‘War on Terror’ discourse, and in particular Hussein’s construction as an ‘enemy Other’, was suggested as early September 2001. For example, when asked about the possibility of war in Iraq, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice explained that ‘our policies toward Iraq simply are to protect the region and to protect Iraq's people and neighbors’, ‘and, certainly, the United States will act if Iraq threatens its interests’.6 She also asserted that ‘Iraq remains a threat to American interests, to interests in the region and to Iraq's neighbors and its own people’ because it sought to acquire WMDs.7 Colin Powell, questioned about the lack of condolences from Iraq after the al Qaeda attacks, linked Hussein to the attacks by predicating him as ‘one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth’, without ‘the slightest drop of the milk of human kindness…flowing in his veins.’8 In official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, a failure to declare loyalty to the US’ marked out Hussein as ‘one of the more despicable
4 This was a phrase repeated many times between September 11 2001 and the end of 2003, see for example George W. Bush, ‘Guard and Reserves Define Spirit of America’, 17 September 2001, available at
persons on the face of the Earth’ and without ‘any sense of understanding of this loss of life and the fact that not just the United States, but…Arab nations’ also suffered casualties.9 Not only had Hussein ‘chosen’ to be ‘Other’ (by rejecting ‘us’), but his lack of care for ‘his own people’ (as citing a lack of compassion for Arab casualties suggests) foreshadowed the subsequent construction of Hussein as a dehumanised ‘oriental despot’ (discussed in detail in the next section of this chapter). In November Cheney very publicly agreed with his 60 Minutes interviewer that one of the September 11 hijackers had links to Iraqi intelligence, and then went on to discuss the possibility of terrorists obtaining WMDs.10 By December 2001, he made the link clearer, stating that ‘the evidence is pretty conclusive that the Iraqis have indeed harbored terrorists.’11 It was Bush who most clearly lay out the logic of the administration on Iraq in 2001. When asked about how broad the ‘War on Terror’ might be, Bush stated:
Afghanistan is still just the beginning. If anybody harbors a terrorist, they're a terrorist. If they fund a terrorist, they're a terrorist. If they house terrorists, they're terrorists. I mean, I can't make it any more clearly to other nations around the world. If they develop weapons of mass destruction that will be used to terrorize nations, they will be held accountable. And as for Mr. Saddam Hussein, he needs to let inspectors back in his country, to show us that he is not developing weapons of mass destruction.12
Deepa Kumar’s research on media and the military-industrial complex in the context of the lead-up to the Iraq war shows that the Bush administration’s discursive links between the attacks of 11 September 2001 and Iraq were fairly well-received by the US public at least. This was possible because of the salience of (gendered) orientalist discourses in and beyond the ‘War on Terror’, in which not only are ‘they’ can be homogenised: one ‘type’ of Arab (for example Saudi Arabian) comes to stand for all Muslims and Arabs. For example, Kumar explains that almost 50% of Americans accepted a link between Iraq and the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US, and many even assumed some of the hijackers to be Iraqi (although none were).13
9 Colin L. Powell, ‘Interview on CNN's Late Edition’, 16 September 2001, available at
In a speech to the UN, Bush elaborated on the threat to ‘civilisation itself’ which had been established in 2001 and Afghanistan. In his speech, the ‘enemy Other’ (embodied in ‘the terrorists’) was an ambiguous groups who were predicated as possessing a desire to locate ‘weapons of mass destruction, the tools to turn their hatred into holocaust. They can be expected to use chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so.’14 As explained in chapter 6, early ‘War on Terror’ discourse had established a binary world in which a failure to pledge support to the US as led by the Bush administration resulted in association with ‘the terrorists’ (‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’)15 The barbaric masculine threat posed by the ‘Other’, constructed after the September 11 attacks and in narratives around the Afghan war, continued to be asserted in official discourse in 2002. This revolved around the (re)production of a binary world in which an irrational ‘Other’ attempted to assert ‘his’ masculinity through indiscriminate violence. The link between the ‘enemy Other’ and Iraq was made explicitly in the 2002 State of the Union Address. The ‘Axis of Evil’ constructed was key here; the extension of the ‘War on Terror’ it asserted found some favour in mainstream discourses.16 In this address, Bush constructed an ‘Axis of Evil’ consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The ‘Axis of Evil’ referred to ‘regimes that sponsor terror’, who have ‘terrorist allies’, and whose menace lay in ‘the madness of the destruction they design’.17 Iraq’s inclusion was explained thus:
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.18
14 George W. Bush, President Bush Speaks to United Nations’, 10 November 2001, available at
Rice concurred, arguing that the US and its allies, entrusted with the security of the world, ‘cannot take the word of this dictator, who lies, pathologically lies.’19 The image of the untrustworthy and duplicitous ‘Oriental’20 conjured up here lent weight to Bush’s assertion that ‘the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers’ because these states ‘could provide these arms [WMDs] to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred’.21 Cheney also agreed that ‘Iraqis have indeed harbored terrorists’; Donald Rumsfeld asserted that it was a ‘fact’ that ‘there are al Qaeda in a number of locations in Iraq’22 and spoke of ‘terrorist states’ linked to al Qaeda.23 Rice warned that ‘a stubborn and extremely troubling fact that the list of states that sponsor terror and the lists of states that are seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction overlap substantially.’24 Although these ‘facts’ were by no means indisputable, the very act of articulating them served to create a discursive link between a religious group (al Qaeda) and a secular dictatorship (Ba’athist Iraq)25, thus discursively redefining Iraq’s location vis-à-vis terrorism. This was effective because of long-standing orientalist understandings of ‘Arabs-as-Muslims/Muslims- as-Arabs’; imagery of what Rice called ‘the forces of chaos’26 (located in ‘the East’) vs ‘our’ masculine logic and rationalism; and the discursive linking of threatening ‘Other’ masculinities that had been drawn on so vividly in official and unofficial discourses ‘War on Terror’ since 11 September 2001. This made it possible for the administration to, in March 2003, reassert fairly discredited assertions against Iraq by reiterating the events of September 2001, and the ‘successes’ of the Afghan war.27 Through 2002, the US continued to assert ‘threats’ to ‘civilisation’ on the basis of WMDs, in particular focusing on Iraq’s (alleged) possession of these.28 The
19 Condoleezza Rice, ‘Interview With Condoleezza Rice; Pataki Talks About 9-11; Graham, Shelby Discuss War on Terrorism’, CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 8 September 2002, transcript available online at operation of orientalist logics here serves to construct the (inappropriate) use of WMDs as the domain of the ‘Eastern Other’ to the exclusion of anyone else. That is, ‘Western’ states and their allies that did possess WMDs could not, in this logic, be conceived of as dangerous by their possession of WMDs. For example, the US, UK, and Israel possess (and have used) a range of WMDs (such as nuclear or biological weapons) but were not targeted in the Bush administration’s discourse (and the Coalition’s use of depleted uranium for example was obscured).29 Thus as the US (and some of its allies) possesses WMDs itself, official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse constructs these as dangerous on the basis of who possesses them. Thus weapons that in Iraqi hands are a threat to the ‘civilised world’ become a legitimate defence policy for the US and its allies, as (some) states can be ‘trusted’ with weapons while non-state actors cannot.30 But these assertions are undercut by the US’ inconsistent attitude toward Iraq’s access to WMDs. For example, during the Iran-Iraq war Iraq’s armament was legitimised by reference to the threat of the Islamic regime in Iran.31 It is the inherent instability of the ‘Other’ and ‘his’ inherent antipathy toward ‘civilised values’ of democracy, freedom, and progress that renders WMDs dangerous in this discourse. Discursively constructing links between Iran and Iraq also ignored the history of (at best) unfriendly relations between Iran and Iraq.32 The suggestion that they could be working together against the ‘defenders of freedom’ is underwritten by an orientalist understanding of the world in which the ‘Other’s’ hatred for the West could overwrite longstanding enmity between the two. This was made possible by the continual assertion, since the attacks of 2001 and through the Afghan war (see discussion in chapter 6), of a ‘new world’ in which an ever-present ‘enemy Other’ threatened the basic tenets of ‘civilisation’. This was (re)produced through 2002, as outlined above, and in particular in terms of the whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020406-3.html>, accessed 13 June 2011; Colin L. Powell, ‘Interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show’, 22 October 2002, available at (re)production of ‘the world’ as one in which the ‘Other’ ‘cannot be held back by deterrence, nor reasoned with through diplomacy’33; they ‘are ruthless…resourceful, …hide in many countries’ and ‘[t]here is no doubting they wish to strike again and are working to acquire the deadliest of all weapons.’34 This is because ‘[w]e face an enemy of ruthless ambition, unconstrained by law or morality’ and who ‘as the enemy is not only ‘determined to expand the scale and scope of their murder’ but are successful in their aims to ‘continue to murder innocents, their methods will only grow more deadly’; left unchecked ‘the gathering storm of terrorism will unleash its fury on us all’.35 Wolfowitz recounted a comment by a worried mother: ‘people are still out there whose sole intent is to try once again to kill my children’.36 The significance of using personal examples lies in the inclusion of the audience (‘ordinary people’) as a powerful method of interpellation. In a March 2002 speech, Bush elaborated on the reasons for this barbarity, and its fixation on the US: [w]e fight an enemy that are nothing but a bunch of cold-blooded killers. They can't be rehabilitated. They hate what America stands for. They hate our religious tolerance. They hate our freedom of speech. They hate freedom of the press. They despise freedom.37 The logic underlying the aims of the ‘enemy Other’ were thus inextricably linked to the values the US embodied (and by extension the values of the ‘civilised world’), much the same as rhetoric around the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the Afghan war (in chapter 6). Indeed, Powell explicitly drew on the attacks in asserting the existence of an imminent threat from an ambiguous ‘Other’ in 2002: the evil menace that murdered thousands of persons on September 11 still wears many faces around the globe and still possesses lethal intent. Destroying Al Qaeda's operational base in Afghanistan is not enough. The coalition against terrorism must advance on all fronts - political, financial, legal and military - to root out terrorists wherever they live and plot.’38 33 Richard B. Cheney, ‘Remarks by the Vice President to the Council on Foreign Relations’, 15 February 2002, available at 214 In mid-2002, Bush reinforced this world view, stating that ‘America is leading the civilized world in a titanic struggle against terror. Freedom and fear are at war -- and freedom is winning.’39 Despite the assertion in this speech that the coalition was winning this war, the administration continued to construct an imminent threat, declaring that ‘thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us, and this terrible knowledge requires us to act differently.’40 The role of the US in early ‘War on Terror’ discourse and narratives around the Afghan war (discussed in chapter 6) were crucial to (re)asserting the authority of the US ‘Self’ (and the ‘hypermasculine leader’ embodied the Bush administration). In July 2002 Bush reiterated the conception of the US ‘Self’ as the embodiment of the ‘civilised world’ (detailed in chapters 5 and 6), and deployed it again this time in service of a broad narrative of liberating the ‘East’ from oppression: This war [War on Terror] will take many turns we cannot predict. Yet I am certain of this: Wherever we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom. … We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace - a peace that favors human liberty. We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. … And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent. Building this just peace is America's opportunity, and America's duty.41 Rice too reiterated that ‘[a]s the world's most powerful nation, the United States has a special responsibility to help make the world more secure’; her assertion also drew on a masculinist understanding of war, peace, and security, arguing that the al Qaeda attacks ‘reinforced one of the rediscovered truths about today's world: robust military power matters in international politics and in security.’42 It was this anxiety about not wielding enough masculine power to ward off threats from the (deviant) masculinity of the ‘enemy Other’ that spurred the administration into ‘trying to harden the country.’43 In the 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS), Bush linked the US’ ‘responsibility to lead in this great mission’ to military power.44 In the above representations of the world, potential threats to ‘civilisation’ can only be dealt with through masculine power, as embodied in the US military. Containing a 39 George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation’, 6 June 2002, available at 41 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’, 1 June 2002, available at hypermasculine ‘Other’ can only be achieved through asserting a superior (‘Western’) hypermasculinity, as the gendered orientalist logics underscoring the prescription of war in Afghanistan had ‘proven’. Bush made this clear in the West Point speech of July 2002, drawing together elements of ‘War on Terror’ discourse that had been established immediately after 11 September 2001; through the Afghan war; and reiterated in the early 2002 period, to prescribe intervention in the form of a pre-emptive strike policy. Formulated on the basis of a gendered and orientalist understanding of the world post-11 September 2001, in particular the key actors in it, Bush’s speech reiterated the construction of the threat between competing masculinities. This was clear in the assertion of ‘a threat with no precedent’ produced by ‘a few dozen evil and deluded men’ who have, according to Bush, obtained ‘more money and more men’.45 In his articulation of the doctrine at West Point, Bush placed the US in the role of an active masculine protector (‘we cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best’) against an oriental despot (‘[w]e cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them’.)46 The narrative of competing masculinities was reiterated in this speech: ‘the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.’47 The speech reinforced the characterisation of the ‘War on Terror’ as a conflict against an ambiguous, varied, yet united and unambiguously male enemy (‘disrupt his plans’). In the logic of orientalism, expressions of barbarism (violence, mistreatment of women, political oppression) serve to conflate various groups and construct a ‘united enemy’ that the strong, capable hypermasculine US must protect the world against. Bush warns against ‘threats hidden in caves and growing in laboratories’ as though they are one and the same.48 Here, the religious fundamentalist doctrine of the Taliban and al Qaeda (the threat hidden in caves) and Hussein’s largely secular regime (responsible for the threat growing in laboratories) are conflated; they are assumed to share the same motives and goals despite the evidence of enmity between them, and Hussein’s own repression of fundamentalist groups inside Iraq.49 The ‘enemy’ is again located firmly in the realm of the ‘Othered’ Middle East and Muslim world, but there is no distinction between 45 Bush, ‘President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’. 46 Ibid. [emphasis mine]. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy, 134 (2003), pp. 57- 58. 216 the two types of threat referenced. The binary logic underlying the relationship between ‘terrorists’ and ‘free societies’ in this speech paints a clear picture of a ‘world under siege’ that the Bush administration now envisages. Indeed, this, along with the location of the threats in various ‘dark corners of the world’, is critical to the narrative of ‘War on Terror’ discourse in which the US must engage in pre- emptive wars to defend itself, its allies, and the ‘helpless victims’ of the ‘enemy Other’. Thus Bush could claim that: If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long — Our security will require…a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.50 The (re)assertion of the US, drawing on 2001 and Afghan war discourse, as the ‘leader’ of the ‘civilised world’ again illuminates the centrality of masculinist logics in ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Meghana Nayak, Christopher Malone, and L. M. H. Ling point out that some European leaders did not uncritically accept the representations put forward by the Bush administration.51 Dissent, this time from states, again presented a challenge to US ‘War on Terror’ discourse and elicited ‘hypermasculine disdain’ from the Bush administration.52 Rumsfeld described those European states who criticised the doctrine of ‘pre-emptive strikes’ and impending war against Iraq as ‘old Europe’.53 Ling draws attention to the interplay between this statement and Francis Fukuyama’s characterisation of Europe as ‘filled with “old” men and women’, weak and unable to lead the world.54 This was mirrored in mainstream media, for example in the (homo)sexualisation and feminisation of France after French criticism of the possibility of a ‘pre-emptive’ strike Iraq.55 As Cheney explained, the US was the leader: the ‘hopes of the civilized world depend on us’.56 In ‘War on Terror’ discourse, this characterisation, predicated on 50 Bush, ‘President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’. 51 Meghana V. Nayak and Christopher Malone, ‘American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony’, International Studies Review, 11:2 (2009), p. 259; Ling, ‘The Monster Within’, p. 391. 52 Ling, ‘The Monster Within’, p. 391. 53 Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Secretary Rumsfeld Briefs at the Foreign Press Center’, 22 January 2003, available at assumptions about male virility as directly related to power, functions to (re)position the US as a leader, as protector of ‘us’, ‘our friends’, and ‘civilisation’: the hypermasculine US asserts dominance over not just ‘Eastern Others’ but also those who, although a priori are ‘our friends’, must be discursively punished if they threaten to unsettle the ‘truths’ of this discourse. In a particularly telling example, a Department of Defense news report shows Rumsfeld deploying an aggressive masculinity in response to a student questioning the appropriateness of ‘war’ to describe the situation after 11 September 2001: Then, leaning closer to the microphone, Rumsfeld concluded, “So I'd go back to your teachers and tell them THEY'RE WRONG.” To this, the audience erupted with whistles, cheers and applause.57 The challenge to the construction of the post-September 11 2001 world as ‘war’ threatens cannot be accepted as to do so would be to unravel the discursive knowledge about ‘them’ and ‘threat’ (constructed so powerfully from September 2001 and through the Afghan war) that enables Iraq to be constructed as warranting military intervention. The positioning of the US at the forefront of bringing ‘freedom’ to all nations culminated in the NSS of September 2002 which articulated the ‘pre-emptive strike’ doctrine as a formal policy that would be instrumental in paving the way for the Iraq invasion.58 Indeed, the NSS also betrayed a deep-seated desire to assert masculinity: Roxanna Sjöstedt demonstrates that the document, in asserting an active role in for the US, harks back to the leadership position put forward in the Truman Doctrine, which (as explained in chapter 4) was underscored by masculinist logics.59 For example, in the NNS the US was predicated as being in a position to, and choosing to, actively take a leadership role: Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty. In a world that is safe, people will be able to make their own lives better. We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.60 whitehouse.archives.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20020719-1.html>, accessed 12 August 2012. 57 American Foreign Press News Service, ‘Rumsfeld Hits Home at Pentagon Town Hall’, 7 March 2002, available at The document incorporated a range of speeches by Bush and his administration, thus illustrating that the policy it espoused was enabled by elements of ‘War on Terror’ discourse discussed in chapter 6. In the foreword to this document, referring to ‘the clashing wills of powerful states’ and ‘the evil designs of tyrants’ and the need to ‘further freedom’s triumph over all these foes’, Bush positions the US as welcoming ‘our responsibility to lead in this great mission.’61 America, as a truly liberal and progressive society, is thus responsible for ensuring global peace. That this world based on liberal values is to be consolidated through American military power is deemed necessary, and indeed becomes to be the only way to ultimately ensure a conflict free world. In asserting this, the NSS reflected the presupposition of liberal democracy and free-market economics as not only central to the ‘Self’ (see chapter 5) but beneficial for the world, and by extension, reflected these onto the ‘ideal’ world that pre-emptive strikes would bring about. This ‘bridging’ period of ‘War on Terror’ discourse also reflected the gendered logics that shaped discourse around the Afghan war, specifically in terms of the construction of ‘Other’ women and the impact of this on constructions of the masculinities of both the ‘Self’ and the ‘enemy Other’. As explained in chapter 6, gender played a role in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse as a marker of ‘civilisation’ and in the construction of a narrative of liberation based on assumed gender roles (white men saving brown women). A key part of the discourse surrounding the Afghan war, it was also reiterated and drawn upon in the period after the early successes of the war. For example, Bush claimed in early 2002 that the Coalition’s victory over the Taliban had ‘liberated the women of Afghanistan’.62 Powell, speaking at an event marking International Women’s Day, put the USA forward as ‘the champion of the human rights and well being of women…worldwide’ and linked US foreign policy with a ‘joint struggle’ with US women’s rights supporters ‘on behalf of women of the world’.63 In official discourses, the rhetoric of saving Middle Eastern/Muslim women thus remained important, and ‘liberation’ was portrayed as central to the ‘War on Terror’ even after the initial need to justify the first military action had passed. Indeed, the ‘liberation’/‘saving’ (certain types of) ‘Others’ along with the earlier discussion of ‘threat’ and the US’ role as ‘protector’ of its allies, of ‘civilisation’, function as discursive points through which to (re)produce the identity of both ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ that had been constructed in (and since) early 61 Ibid. 62 Bush, ‘2002 State of the Union Address’. 63 Colin L. Powell, ‘Remarks at Reception to Mark International Women's Day’, 7 March 2002, available at < http://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/8691.htm>, accessed 9 August 2011. 219 ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Thus the discursive construction of identities in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse between the first few days after 11 September 2001 and the build-up to the Iraq war were constructed according to the same basic logics, and were (re)produced throughout this period. In understanding the discursive enabling of the 2003 Iraq war, the importance of pre-2003 ‘War on Terror’ discourse lies in its continual (re)production of the very identities, ‘truths’, knowledges, narratives, and logics that could discursively enable intervention into Iraq. The characterisation, in the lead up to Iraq, of a threat from a barbaric, irrational ‘Other’ and the positioning of the US ‘Self’, the construction of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in terms of competing masculinities, illustrate how ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘terrorist’, ‘civilised’, ‘barbaric’, and so on function to enable one action (the creation of a ‘War on Terror’) and (re)produced narrative (‘war to save civilisation’/ ‘war to liberate Afghanistan’) to enable another (‘war to liberate Iraq’). The way these narratives were played out in the Iraq war, inextricably linked to the narratives around the Afghan war but adapted to the new context, will be discussed below. ‘Liberating’ Iraq The start of the Iraq war in March 2003 garnered more controversy than the decision to take military action in Afghanistan; there was far less support both in the US and amongst other states for a military intervention into Iraq.64 Bush stated that the purpose of the war was ‘to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.’65 The intervention was linked to the Afghan war explicitly: ‘as we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies -- and freedom.’66 This can be read as an attempt to reinforce the tenuous link between Hussein and al Qaeda. The Afghan war took place in the context of the trauma of an attack on US soil barely a month earlier; the war in Iraq was significantly different in this respect. The credibility of the US and UK’s claims 64 For US support rates see Pew Public Research Center, ‘Public Attitudes Toward the War in Iraq: 2003- 2008’, 19 March 2008, available at regarding WMDs was seriously challenged, the UN (having been engaged long-term with Iraq and weapons inspections) was not cooperative in the way the US (and UK) had hoped it would be, and the need for pre-emptive war led by the US was critiqued.67 Still, the way the war was represented in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse built on the discursive construction of the ‘War on Terror’ narrative in the Afghanistan context. That is, the construction of the situation in Iraq, its relationship to US (and ‘Western’) security, and the need for military involvement was shaped by and drew on gendered orientalist identities and narratives. Moreover, the deployment of gendered orientalism in the lead up to and after the Afghanistan war functioned not only to discursively necessitate war in Afghanistan, but also laid some of the groundwork for the gendered orientalist narrative surrounding the Iraq invasion. The construction of the world as one under siege by terrorists was a key factor in the facilitation of the pre-emptive strike doctrine elucidated in Bush’s West Point speech and the NSS. The reasons put forward publicly by the Bush administration for the 2003 war centred on the security threat posed by Hussein to the US and its allies, and the atrocities the regime inflicted upon its own people. Again, as with the war in Afghanistan, the US presented the Iraq conflict as born not out of choice but necessity. The ‘Other’ had, through his own actions, left the US no alternative but to declare war: ‘Our nation entered this conflict reluctantly, yet with a clear and firm purpose. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. … It is a fight for the security of our nation and the peace of the world, and we will accept no outcome but victory.’68 However, the discourse of war also drew on humanitarian concerns; the speculative (and later disproved) links between Iraq, WMDs, and al Qaeda were supplemented by a narrative in which the US and its ‘coalition of the willing’ would use war to bring freedom, democracy, progress, and liberation to Iraq. During the course of the ‘War on Terror’, the Bush administration drew on many markers of civilisation and barbarity in order to denote the ‘Other’, for example, by reference to the use of violence, (il)legitimate targets, gender roles and the protection of women. One of the most important indicators of barbarity and civilisation in official War on Terror discourse centred around democracy and political governance. ‘War on Terror’ discourse in the Iraq context drew on this discourse. Although it differed in 67 Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel, ‘(En)Gendered War Stories and Camouflaged Politics’, in Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (eds.), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2006) pp. 6-7. 68 Bush, ‘President Discusses Beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom’. 221 expression from the Afghan context, gender, sexuality and orientalism were again deployed in official US narratives on Iraq, its people, its leadership, and its place in the world, culminating in a ‘necessary’ war. Constructions of the ‘Other’: ‘oriental despotism’ The ‘unacceptable’ masculinity of the ‘Other’ in the Iraq context, while predicated on orientalist presuppositions, is not simply a replication of official US representations of the Afghan ‘Other’. An umbrella category of ‘dangerous enemies’ who ‘want to destroy our way of life’ was reiterated at various points through the ‘War on Terror’, but the Afghan and Iraqi ‘enemies’ were constructed in varying ways. As explained in chapter 4, the US has been willing to encourage the spread of its own political and economic models of capitalism and democracy at various points in its history. As explained, this agenda has predicated, and (re)produced, constructions of ‘non-Westerners’ as unable (or unwilling) to establish economically and politically productive societies without assistance. This recalls tropes of ‘oriental despotism’, a concept that was prevalent in eighteenth and nineteenth century orientalist writings about the ‘East’ (particularly prominent in British representations of India). Oriental despotism referred to the perceived status of indigenous rule in the ‘East’, and was significant for the connotations of lawlessness and servitude it implied; people in the ‘East’, it was argued, displayed political backwardness, in the form of despotic governments they accepted (even desired) or were unable to resist.69 In orientalist discourses, the presence of what is conceived of as oriental despotism serves to further confirm the barbarism and backwardness of both ‘Other’ peoples and their rulers. In the colonial context, oriental despotism was directly contrasted with the law and order that the British believed they were bringing to India.70 As Edward Said, and more recently, Benjamin Isakhan and John Richardson have demonstrated, contemporary mainstream ‘Western’ discourses have also framed ‘East-West’ binaries around the concept of democracy and economic progress, aligning ‘the Western world’ with thriving (liberal) democracy and capitalist economic structures that are perceived as the only legitimate forms of governance. The ‘Muslim/Middle Eastern world’ is conceived of as backward, with the prevalence of non-democratic regimes and economic stagnation in the region cited as evidence of this. Purported reasons for a lack of democratic practices in this region range from the ‘nature’ of the people (lazy, uneducated, having an 69 Yahya Sadowski, ‘The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate’, Middle East Report, 183 (1993). 70 Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 7. 222 aversion to freedom) to oppressive despots who are unwilling to give their peoples freedom.71 However, this overlooks histories of democracy and other types of political participation in the Middle East, and particularly in Iraq.72 Much like the narratives around the Afghan war, the construction of the ‘enemy Other’ centred on Iraq’s leaders rather than ‘ordinary people’.73 In the lead up to the war, Bush gave a series of statements in which he spoke about Iraq in terms of the ‘War on Terror’. Bush dedicated a speech to elaborating on the threat that Iraq posed, (part of the ‘Iraq: Denial and Deception’ section of the White House website) and outlined Iraq as the location of the gravest threat(s) against the ‘the world’. This threat that Iraq posed, according to Bush, arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions -- its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror. … It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people.74 Oriental despotism was linked directly to the practice of worldwide terrorism. Not only is the Iraqi government’s terrorism against its own people troubling, but this attitude toward using violence (differentiated from ‘our’ use of it) makes it particularly likely that Iraq’s irrational and frustrated leadership will inflict it against others through supporting international terrorist networks. This had particular salience given the dominant discourses around the Gulf War (discussed in chapter 4) in which Hussein was also constructed by reference to predicates of violence, totalitarianism, and murder.75 This was further supported by the link Bush created between Iraq and the narratives predicated on barbaric and irrational masculinities in earlier ‘War on Terror’ discourse, particularly in terms of Afghanistan: We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability -- even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved 71 Benjamin Iskahan, ‘Oriental Despotism’, Transformations 16 (2008); Benjamin Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 3-4, 8; See also John Richardson, [Mis]Representing Islam (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004). 72 Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq, pp. 149-150, and chapters 2-3. 73 Jill Steans ‘Telling Stories About Women and Gender in the War on Terror’, Global Society 22:1 (2008), p. 163. 74 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Outline Iraqi Threat’, 7 October 2002, available at today, to confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.76 This was reiterated by the administration in a series of texts in late 2002 and the first three months of 2003. Powell’s appearance at the February 2003 debate at the UN with the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN was a particularly significant example of this.77 Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling explain that Powell predicated his narrative on dichotomies of us/them, good/evil, rational/irrational. He asserted a link between terrorist groups and Iraq’s (later disproved) possession of WMDs, culminating in the conclusion that Hussein’s uncontrolled masculinity was ultimately a threat not only his own people but to ‘innocent people around the world’.78 Rumsfeld, in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, began his statement with a reference to the 2001 al Qaeda attacks and segued into a broader discussion of terrorism and WMDs, in which Hussein was predominant. Speaking of the ‘enormous appetite’ states ‘like Iraq’ have for WMDs, Rumsfeld asserted that ‘it is not a possibility—it is a certainty’ that such states would gain access to powerful weapons. Bush continually linked the 2001 attacks to the security of the world, and to the Ba’ath regime. In February 2003, Bush prefaced discussion on Iraqi weapons inspections with a reminder of the 11 September 2001 attacks as indicative of a new and changed world; in this world, Iraq posed a threat because of its purported attempts to obtain WMDs and a ‘hatred of America’ (indicated by a lack of allegiance to US foreign policy).79 Thus the Iraq war, in Rumsfeld’s words, becomes ‘part of the Global War on Terror’ because ‘stopping terrorist regimes from acquiring weapons of mass destruction is a key objective of that war.’80 The (re)production of the ‘enemy Other’ in this context also mirrored Afghan war narratives also in the ‘Othering’ of ‘ordinary Iraqis’ who like Afghan women became products of ‘War on Terror’ discourse. I look at them as being constructed as weak and helpless (reminiscent of the feminisation of Iraq during the Gulf 76 Bush, ‘President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat’. 77 Colin L. Powell, ‘U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council’, 5 February 2003, available at War)81, reduced to a feminised group in need of remasculinisation, which the US offered through military intervention to remove Hussein. The construction of Iraq as a ‘weak state’ also allowed the US the opportunity to (re)produce its own masculinity, as had been done throughout ‘War on Terror’ discourse and indeed in a range of historical US attitudes toward intervention as I explained in chapter 4. Thus the construction of the ‘Iraqi threat’ was accompanied by (and constructed through) a narrative ‘liberation’ of oppressed ‘Others’. From the outset of ‘War on Terror’ discourse, as explained in chapter 6, the desire to ‘liberate’ those oppressed by the ‘enemy Other’ was drawn upon in terms of a battle between competing masculinities. In discourse on Afghan war, the liberation of Afghan women became a way to demonstrate both the barbarity of the ‘enemy Other’ and the necessity for war as not simply defensive, but altruistic. In the Iraq context, a war to prevent the use of WMDs by Hussein was also envisioned as a war of liberation, illustrated by the name of the military campaign, ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’ (later changed to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’). Bush made it clear in an address to the UN general assembly that [t]he United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people. They've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal.82 The White House devoted a section of its website to documenting not only the actions of the Iraqi government with regards to weapons inspection, but also documenting abuses carried out against Iraqis.83 This resonates with ‘a particular understanding of statecraft and responsibility’ harking back to the historical discourses on US intervention explored in chapter 4.84 In the contemporary context this interplays with the notion of ‘rogue states’ which, in the Middle East context, is predicated on orientalist understandings of the duplicitous ‘Other’ who cannot be trusted, has his own understanding of ‘truth’,85 and refuses (or is unable to) provide for ‘his’ people in the way that the US ‘hypermasculine leader’ can.86 This allows for what Douglas Kellner calls Bush’s ‘Orwellian features of Doublespeak’ where ‘ “humanitarian” action, and the killing of 81 Cristina Masters, ‘Bodies of Technology: Cyborg Soldiers and Militarised Masculinities’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7:1 (2005), pp. 118-119. 82 George W. Bush, ‘President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly’, 12 September 2002, available at countless Iraqis and destruction of the country will produce “freedom” and “democracy” ’.87 Thus ‘Othering’ functions here in two ways. Firstly, it serves to ‘dehumanise’ the ‘enemy Other’ in order to legitimise and require violence against him, as this is the only ‘language’ the ‘Other’ could understand.88 Secondly, there is also a process of dehumanisation taking place against the ‘feminised Other’, the ‘ordinary’ population of Iraq. That is, the ‘doublespeak’ Kellner refers to is only possible because of an understanding that Iraqis are ‘blank spaces’89 on which to write the suggestion that ‘they’ are able to (and perhaps desire to) endure the violence of war in a way that jars with, for example, dominant understandings of the impact of violence on ‘ordinary Americans’ (as reactions to the 11 September 2001 attacks showed.) Rather, in the Bush administration’s conception, the ‘first to benefit from a free Iraq’, secured by war, ‘would be the Iraqi people, themselves’.90 The application of the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes in this arena of the ‘War on Terror’ is underscored by a view of the ‘East’ as inherently despotic, as the Bush administration outlines its intent to ‘bring democracy’ to the ‘darkest corners of the earth’, harnessing the narrative of oriental despotism. In bringing democracy to Iraq, the US positioned itself as bringing democracy to all of the ‘East’, as Bush asserted: Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.91 These plans for the democratisation of Iraq have an aggressive and militaristic flavour, but are still based at least partially on the notion that there is a need for ‘liberation’ of various peoples in the ‘East’ and that the US is best placed to accomplish this. The narrative of ‘liberation’ is summed up in Bush’s February 2003 assessment of the ‘future of Iraq’: ‘Today they live in scarcity and fear, under a dictator who has brought them nothing but war, and misery, and torture. Their lives and their freedom matter little to Saddam Hussein -- but Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us.’92 This statement illustrates well the function of predication as intimately linked to pre/proscription that I have been examining thus far in the 87 Kellner, ‘Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying’, p. 636. 88 Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence’, p. 42. 89 Muscati, Arab/Muslim ‘Otherness’ ’, p. 133. 90 Bush, ‘President Discusses the Future of Iraq’. 91 George W. Bush, ‘President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours’, 17 March 2003, available at narrative of the Iraq war. The processes of predication discussed in this chapter, of ‘us’ (as committed to ‘Western’ democracy and liberal institutions, signified as ‘freedom’) posited against ‘them’ (as either barbaric and despotic, or weak and in need of guidance) explains why, in Rice’s words, ‘America seeks a great world beyond the victory over terror. We seek not merely to leave the world safer, but to leave it better; to leave it a world that makes it possible for all men and women to experience the exhilaration and the challenges of freedom.’93 The reach and (re)production of this logic beyond official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse is illustrated in Tyler Wall’s research on white, male US soldiers in Iraq. The soldiers he interviews understand the war in terms of the basic gendered and orientalist logics of the Bush administration, conceiving of ‘good Iraqis’ and ‘bad Iraqis’ framed by reference to ‘civilised values’, with the US and its soldiers ‘humanitarian rescuers’.94 The specific ways in which ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ could be secured for ‘us’ and for Iraqis, in official discourse, was predicated on neoliberal understandings of the ‘desire for freedom and democracy and open markets’ which had, for example, been the driving force behind the ‘powerful story’ of Eastern European states ‘ridding [themselves] of a totalitarian dictator’.95 Rice elaborated on these ideas in the context of the US’ NSS, linking the absence of this specific type of ‘freedom’ to ‘terrorists and tyrants’ (who are ‘different faces of the same evil’) by asserting that the US’ strategy against these groups included the alleviation of poverty and political repression around the world. Rice explained the Bush administration’s view on the relationship between a specific understanding of economic/political progress and terrorism/tyranny as follows: Today, there is an increasing awareness – on every continent – of a paradigm of progress, founded on political and economic liberty. The United States, our NATO allies, our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, Japan, and our other friends and allies in Asia and Africa all share a broad commitment to democracy, the rule of law, a market-based economy, and open trade. In addition, since September 11th all the world's great powers see themselves as falling on the same side of a profound divide between the forces of chaos and order, and they are acting accordingly.96 It was free trade, Rice explained, ‘that advances economic growth at home and abroad and advances the forces of freedom, as well.’97 Indeed, the reconstruction of 93 Rice, ‘Remarks by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy’. 94 Tyler Wall, ‘Philanthropic Soldiers, Practical Orientalism, and the Occupation of Iraq’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 18:5 (2011). 95 George W. Bush, ‘Interview of the President in European Print Roundtable’, 18 November 2002, available at Iraq saw a ‘neoliberal makeover’ of Iraq, and a desire to ‘educate’ Iraqis on the virtues of free-market development.98 However, juxtaposing this with aftermath of war in terms of the specific configuration of democracy and economic ‘development’ that has been put in place in Iraq highlights the problematic nature of ‘liberation’ by the Coalition of the Willing. As Isakhan has detailed, the complexity of Iraqi experiences with political participation and authoritarian government is largely overlooked such constructions.99 ‘Other’ women, femininities, and gendered orientalism Representations of ‘Other’ women, which were central to Afghan ‘War on Terror’ narratives, also made some appearance in narratives around Iraq, as symbolic of oppression and despotism. ‘Other’ women were brought into Iraqi narratives in ‘War on Terror’ discourse through descriptions of violence against women and references to their roles in Iraq’s social and political life.100 In two key speeches preceding the Iraq war, Bush referred to rape and rape rooms as evidence of the need for a war of ‘liberation’101, and the background paper for his September 2002 speech to the UN on Iraq also featured a section on violence against women.102 While rape is not an exclusively the experience of ‘women’, Bush made gendered statements, referring to ‘the systematic rape of wives and daughters’103, Hussein’s regime ‘practic[ing] the rape of women as a method of intimidation’,104 and argued that ‘every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed’.105 But 98 Anna M. Agathangelou, ‘Bodies of Desire, Terror and the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the 'New' Imperium’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 38:3 (2010), pp. 717-718; Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence’, p. 43. 99 Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq, pp. 149-150. 100 Meghana Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity After 9/11’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8:1 (2006), p. 49; see also US Department of State, ‘Iraqi Women Under Saddam’s Regime: A Population Silenced’, 20 March 2003, available at some references to rape rooms and sexual violence did not specify a gender.106 I read this as illustrating that in the gendered logic of orientalism, it not only ‘female’ bodies but also feminised bodies (as ‘ordinary’ Iraqis have been constructed) that are susceptible to sexual violence (and my discussion of the Abu Ghraib abuses lends weight to this). US Administrator to Iraq Paul Bremer outlined the abuses of women’s rights by Hussein’s regime and followed this with the claim that the US was committed to promoting women’s rights in Iraq.107 In May 2003, the Whitehouse webpage featured a compilation of quotes from Iraqis entitled ‘Voices of Freedom: 100 Liberation Quotes’. One of these quotes asserted that ‘[n]ow Iraq is free, we are demanding freedom and equal rights that Iraqi women have always been deprived of.’108 Later on, in the build-up to the first elections after US occupation, the Bush administration’s website published a series of quotes by Iraqis on their hopes for Iraq and the elections. One of the quotes relating to women is particularly significant in terms of building a picture of Iraq as the location of gender inequality: I hope women will have a good future in Iraq. They are tired, they are sad, they are trapped in the house . . . We have a lot of women who are educated, active, who quit college because society was so repressive. Now they are coming back.109 But, as feminist scholars have pointed out, women’s rights in Iraq pre-2003 were relatively protected110 (certainly compared to Afghanistan), women were encouraged to join the workforce, and were ‘rewarded’ with maternity leave, equal pay, and free tertiary education.111 While this in no way diminishes the violence (physical and structural) perpetrated against women (and men), it does illustrate another set of differences between Afghanistan and Iraq that official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse sought to obfuscate in service of constructing a monolithic ‘enemy Other’. Similarly to the Afghan example, war in Iraq has led to an increase in the 106 White House, ‘A Decade of Deception and Defiance’; Bush, ‘President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly’; Bush, ‘President Delivers “State of the Union” ’. 107 Donna Miles, ‘Bremer Notes Human Rights Progress in Iraq’, American Forces Press Service, 10 December 2003, available at very violence it was alleged to prevent.112 At times, Iraqi women have been attacked by the Coalition of the Willing’s troops and contractors (as well as Iraqis), and the 2005 Iraqi constitution has been criticised for its inadequate inclusion of women’s rights.113 Although less ubiquitous than the image of ‘the oppressed Afghan woman’, the harnessing of women’s rights and abuses in Hussein’s Iraq serve the purpose of discursively linking al Qaeda to Iraq through common ‘acts of barbarism’. By recalling the narrative surrounding the Afghan war (in which the symbolism of Afghan women served competing masculinities and denoting values of ‘civilisation’), acts of violence against women in a different geographical location became one expression of a common commitment (between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda) to barbarism, terrorism, and threats to ‘our’ security and ‘way of life’. Stacy Takacs writes that the ‘emphasis on women facilitates the Orientalist confusion of the War in Iraq with the War on Terrorism.’114 I agree that the continuing reference to women is significant, but I emphasise that the war in Iraq was, discursively, part of the ‘War on Terror’ rather than ‘confused’ with it. In light of my analysis of Bush administration discourse thus far, the mandate and scope of the ‘War on Terror’ has been constructed very broadly from its earliest days, when Iraq was specifically referenced. Thus the conflation of Afghan and Iraqi women (and indeed all Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern women) is a very considered discursive construction that harnesses orientalist presuppositions of all ‘Eastern Others’ arising out of the same ‘essence’. It is because of this that the largely secular nature of Iraq’s pre- war leadership can be overlooked and put forward as of the same ilk as Islamic fundamentalists al Qaeda and the Taliban. In this sense, it is not that ‘terrorism’ is confused with Hussein’s atrocities, but rather that the Ba’ath regime’s expressions of despotism are constructed as ‘terrorism’, in the perpetration of abuses against Iraqis and collaboration with non-state (religiously-based) actors such as al Qaeda. Another discursive point at which the narratives of the Afghan and Iraq wars intersect is the gendered orientalist placement of ‘Other’ women in passive roles. This both occurs through and is unsettled by female suicide bombers, illustrating the contingency and limits of gendered orientalist discourse. It has been reported 112 Hunt and Rygiel, ‘(En)Gendered War Stories and Camouflaged Politics’, pp. 7-8, note 3. See also, on Iraqi women’s experiences before and after the start of the war, Al-Ali and Pratt, What Kind of Liberation?. 113 Katrina Lee-Koo, ‘ ‘War on Terror’/‘War on Women’: Critical Feminist Perspectives’, in Alex J. Bellamy, Roland Bleiker, Sara E. Davies and Richard Devatak (eds.), Security and the War on Terror (Routledge: London and New York, 2008) pp. 50-51. 114 Stacy Takacs, ‘Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-9/11’, Feminist Media Studies, 5:3 (2005), p. 300. 230 that during the Iraq war, there had been an increase in numbers of female suicide bombers (affiliated with both religious and secular groups) attacking US interests in Middle East, including in Iraq.115 A search for references to female suicide bombers on the archives of the George W. Bush White House web pages brings up only two references to the possibility that suicide attacks in Iraq may have been carried out by women. One of these acknowledges that a woman might have been a perpetrator of a suicide bombing, as a Bush administration official explains that ‘these types of high-profile attacks that are using female suicide bombers are deplorable’.116 This reflects dominant scholarly and popular causal explanations for female suicide bombers, which are highly gendered and construct these women as a homogeneous group. For example, in these constructions women are driven to suicide bombing by emotional reasons whereas men are thought to make a rational choice to become suicide bombers based on religious or political affiliation. Others claim women are not making a choice at all but are coerced by men (of course, some suicide bombers, men and women, are coerced).117 In asserting that women are being used and are not deciding their role in anti-US violence in Iraq, the (potential) agency of female suicide bombers is discursively proscribed. In official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, this is reflected in the inability to see ‘Other’ women as capable of utilising violent action for political ends, protesting against US-led military intervention. That the attacks are using women rather than the other way around (re)produces the narrative of ‘oppressed’ women who must be ‘liberated’, with these women constructed as pawns who lack agency or free will.118 At the same time, suicide bombers in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse are predicated male. This is done explicitly using gender pronouns ‘he’ or ‘him’ (for example ‘the only way a suicide bomber can recruit is when he finds somebody hopeless119), and implicitly by predicating suicide bombers as terrorists, a group which, as I have explained in chapters 6 and 7, is itself constructed as male 115 Shirin S. Deylami, ‘Saving the Enemy: Female Suicide Bombers and The Making of American Empire’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2012.699782 (forthcoming 2012), pp. 1-2; Lindsey A. O’Rourke, ‘What’s Special about Female Suicide Terrorism?’, Security Studies, 18:4 (2009), pp. 694, 699; Debra Zedalis, ‘Beyond the Bombings: Analysing Female Suicide Bombers’ in Cindy D. Ness (ed.) Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization (Milton Park, Oxon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 49-52. 116 Dana Perino, ‘Press Gaggle by Dana Perino’, 29 July 2008, available at and masculine.120 Thus official discourse (re)produces the presupposition of early ‘War on Terror’ discourse that the violence that threatens the ‘civilised world’ is an expression of masculinity, and is attached to male bodies only. ‘Other’ women who do not conform to the passive role prescribed to them have their gender identity questioned, constructed as ‘deviant’ in their adoption of masculinity, as illustrated some representations of female suicide bombers.121 The sexuality of the ‘Other’ Official US ‘War on Terror’ discourses do not only limit constructions of the ‘enemy Other’ to violence, and deviancy in terms of rejection of democracy and neoliberal economic structures. Deviancy in this discourse has also been ascribed through the sexualisation of the ‘Other’. This served to reinforce the representation of the male ‘Other’ as inferior to the ‘Self’ in ‘War on Terror’ narratives. For example, in 2003 the White House compiled a series of personal stories from mainstream (Western) media outlets about life under the Ba’athist regime from Iraqis. Some of the stories were about the sexual deviancy of members of the regime; one in particular detailed the activities of Uday Hussein, ‘a floor-to-ceiling cage in the corner of the club's kitchen where he says monkeys were kept for Uday because he liked to have the animals watch him when he was deflowering virgins.’122 Weaving together stories of sexual deviancy with the torture inflicted on Iraqis who defied Hussein, his sons, or their associates served as confirmation of uncontrolled/uncontrollable and deviant Arab/Muslim male sexuality. This deviancy served as further proof of the threat posed by the ‘Other’, and the sexuality of the ‘Other’ became particularly important after the start of the Iraq war. Firstly, it served to (re)produce the discourse around uncontrolled masculinity threatening ‘us’ and more specifically ‘our women’ through the Jessica Lynch story. Secondly, the scandal represents a site at which we can see how official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse responds to very visible challenges to it. 120 An example of specifically linking suicide bombers to terrorists is Bush’s statement that ‘There is no containing terrorists who will commit suicide for the purposes of mass murder’, George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the Vice President at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy’, 17 October 2003, available at ‘Saving’ Jessica Lynch Despite the attempts by the Bush administration to justify war in Iraq by reference to WMDs and ‘liberation’, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ faced rising levels of unpopularity and military setbacks in the early weeks of the Iraq war.123 At this point, sexuality became particularly important in gendered orientalist logics in terms of reasserting the necessity of war. The capture-and-rescue narrative of Lynch at Nasiriya in April 2003 (re)produced the identity categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that were central to ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Footage and pictures of Lynch’s rescue showed her being carried by US marines, with a US flag. By May the incident was exposed as manufactured: Lynch was in fact not rescued from hostile Iraqi forces, was not abused, not subjected to sexual abuse, and was looked after by staff at the Iraqi hospital where was found by US troops.124 However, the contrived ‘manly’ heroics of US marines thwarting the ‘enemy Other’ and reclaiming ‘our’ female soldier were initially compelling (and attracted widespread media coverage). This episode (re)produced long-standing gendered orientalist images Arab/Muslim men who seek to enact (sexual) violence against (‘White’) women, which Elgin Brunner argues inherently ascribes primitiveness, ineptness and a certain amount of weakness to the ‘enemy Other’.125 Lynch being carried by her (overwhelmingly male) rescuers is powerfully symbolic of the ‘threat’ to civilisation the Bush administration had been warning the world about since 2001, which itself was symbolised here by official and medial allusions to (interracial) rape. The extension of this ‘threat’, embodied in the ‘enemy Other’, to ‘our’ women had arrived; in gendered orientalist logic, the war in Iraq was then not only necessary but long over-due. Media portrayals, based on Pentagon (dis)information, of the ‘daring’ ‘rescue’ of Lynch by US forces126 symbolically reasserted the gendered orientalist logic this is predicated on, by simultaneously constructing the ‘enemy Other’ as hypermasculine and feminised. That is, male (it is assumed) Iraqi soldiers present a hypermasculine threat to ‘Western’ values because ‘our’ (female) soldiers embody ‘the nation’.127 But through the performance of superior hypermasculinity by ‘our’ military, the ‘Other’ is dominated. Lynch’s purported battle with Iraqi forces also functioned to highlight the gender equality that US women enjoy, which was so 123 Melissa Brittain, ‘Benevolent Invaders, Heroic Victims and Depraved Villains: White Femininity in Media Coverage of the Invasion in Iraq’, in Hunt and Rygiel, (En)Gendering the War on Terror, p. 81. 124 Ibid, pp. 83-84; Laura Sjoberg, ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations From The War In Iraq’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 9:1 (2007), p. 86. 125 Brunner, ‘Consoling Display of Strength or Emotional Overstrain’, p. 236. 126 Deepa Kumar, ‘War Propaganda and the (AB)Uses of Women: Media Constructions of the Jessica Lynch Story’, Feminist Media Studies 4 (2004), p. 300. 127 Takacs, ‘Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-9/11’, p. 302. 233 central to the construction of ‘Self’ (chapter 5) and instrumental in the narrative of Afghan liberation. As a female solider, Lynch was symbolic of the equality and liberation enjoyed by US women, bolstering the idea of the US as the location of civilised values. However, the masculinist logics of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse are revealed in the valorisation of the men who rescued her.128 Deploying the narrative of ‘rescue’ was necessary then to reassert the masculinity of the US as necessity of war was being questioned, which implicitly also questions the need for militarised US masculinity. A logic of gendered orientalism operated in the Lynch narrative, exploiting superficial allusions to egalitarianism-through-gender-equality alongside thoroughly gendered and orientalist narratives of (female) vulnerability and rescue in order to elevate the civilised hypermasculine US ‘Self’ over the barbaric hypermasculine ‘Other’. The Lynch story also highlights a gendered logic that is highly racialised not only in term of orientalising the ‘Other’, but also in terms of how the ‘Self’ is constructed. Dominant representations of this story focused on Lynch, whereas the ‘battle’ that had sparked the rescue included at least two non-white US soldiers. One was African-American Shoshana Johnson, whose experience actually resembled the embellished version of Lynch’s capture; the other was Native American Lori Piestewa who died in the attack on the group’s vehicle. It was Johnson who suffered serious injuries, she was also held by Iraqi forces for twice as much time as Lynch was in an Iraqi hospital. In this sense, Johnson was rendered ‘unfeminine’ in media coverage: she was a POW while Lynch was a victim, and received only a fraction of the media coverage that Lynch did (as did Piestewa’s death). For example, documentaries on the capture at Nasiriya broadcast on mainstream TV channels focused overwhelmingly on Lynch. Johnson and Piestewa’s stories were largely sidelined as Lynch came to represent, as mainstream media labelled her, ‘America’s sweetheart’ and the ‘all American girl’.129 When Johnson and Piestewa were spoken about they served to provide context for Lynch’s story, becoming detail rather than worthwhile subjects themselves.130 Most press accounts of Johnson and Piestewa referred to their status as single mothers to define them, which Robin Riley argues reinforces their status as stereotypical 128 Sjoberg, ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others’, pp. 85-86, 94-95. 129 Kumar, ‘War Propaganda and the (Ab)Uses of Women’, pp. 308-309. 130 John W. Howard III and Laura C. Prividera, ‘Rescuing Patriarchy or Saving “Jessica Lynch”: The Rhetorical Construction of the American Woman Soldier’, Women and Language 27:2 (2004), pp. 92-94; Robin L. Riley, ‘Valiant, Vicious, or Virtuous? Representation and the Problem of Women Warriors’, in Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah (eds.) Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) pp. 193-196. 234 ‘women of color’.131 Media representations thus reflected the gendered and racialised logic that privileges and distorts ‘White’ experiences. Relating this to official discourse, my search of US government websites brought up over 3000 mentions of Lynch but less than 400 of Johnson. On the Department of Defense website, Lynch is featured in articles and statements by Rumsfeld and other senior Defense figures that reinforce the manufactured story of her rescue. Johnson is mentioned in two stories (one with Lynch and one focusing on African American women the armed forces) but features in no statements by senior officials.132 That Johnson’s story was obscured in media and official discourses is unsurprising given that historical ‘captivity scenarios’ that made Lynch’s ‘story’ so compelling have been predicated on the presupposition (arising out of long- standing (re)production of) unequivocal ‘difference’ between a ‘White Self’ (and vulnerable ‘White’ women) and the Native American/African American ‘Other’.133 As such Johnson’s ‘removal’ from the story of ‘daring rescue’ is the result of the function of gendered orientalist logics. Cristina Masters explains that Lynch was the only one who was worth ‘saving’ in this scenario as only the ‘White woman’ could be vulnerable in this narrative.134 Ironically, as Laura Sjoberg points out, female US soldiers face a high risk of rape from their male counterparts in the army, but it was the risk of rape by the ‘enemy Other’ that was emphasised in both mainstream media and military reporting on Lynch (and other female soldiers in Iraq).135 In ‘War on Terror’ discourse, which is predicated on gendered orientalist logics, the image of an Africa-American woman (and a single mother) cannot stand for the ‘vulnerability’ and ‘purity’-under-threat in this scenario, not least because of racialised historical captivity scenarios. But the function of this gendered orientalist logic (where ‘White’ women must be saved from barbaric ‘Eastern’ men) is itself predicated on broader racialised and gendered discourses of national ‘Self’ in the 131 Riley, ‘Valiant, Vicious, or Virtuous?’, pp. 192-193. 132 See for example, Linda D. Kozaryn, ‘Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch: Home to the Mountains’, 22 July 2003, available at US. These understandings exist in and beyond ‘War on Terror’ discourses; as the discussion of US ‘Selves’ in chapters 4 and 5 demonstrated, dominant notions of what the enlightened progressive and superior Western ‘Self’ ‘is’ and ‘looks like’ reflect the ‘norm of Whiteness’. Indeed, the US military itself is shaped by hierarchies of race and gender: women from non-‘White’ backgrounds disproportionately recruited for lower paying jobs and marginalised.136 Dominant representations of events at Nasiriya that were ‘White’-centric must be read against the long history of what Patricia Hill Collins has explained as constructions of ‘White’ US citizens as ‘mature, civilized adults’ in contrast to backward, childish and undeveloped ‘domestic Others’.137 Indeed, orientalist logics require the US ‘Self’ to ‘be White’ in order to stand in contrast to the ‘Other’ (both domestic and international). ‘Deviant’ sexualities at Abu Ghraib The ‘enemy Other’ as, I have explained above, is marked as dangerous and barbaric through constructions of his aggressive and deviant sexuality. But this ‘Other’ is also constructed and humiliated by attacks on his sexuality, which also serve to reinforce the superiority masculinity of the US ‘Self’. The most visible ‘War on Terror’ example of this is found in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, where performances of (US) hypermasculinity asserted dominance over the ‘enemy Other’ but in doing so undermined the basic presuppositions of the discourse itself. My brief introduction to the Abu Ghraib scandal in Chapter 5 asserted that the scandal (rather than the acts of abuse themselves) threatened constructions of the civilised ‘Self’ as well as its gender identity. That is, the images of a women (Lynndie England) taking part in what is ‘supposed’ to be a masculine exercise of power illustrated the contingency of dominant understandings of gender in which ‘masculine’ is a natural attribute of ‘male’. These acts of abuse and in particular the women involved in them threatened both the dominance of (male) hypermasculinity in the construction of the US ‘Self’, and its projection of ‘civilisation’. These projections of ‘Self’, as I have argued throughout this thesis, are key characteristics on which ‘War on Terror’ narratives of intervention are predicated; without these, the discursively constructed ‘boundaries’ between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are more easily revealed as blurred, complex, and unfixed. The Abu 136 John W. Howard III and Laura C. Prividera, ‘Masculinity, Whiteness, and the Warrior Hero: Perpetuating the Strategic Rhetoric of U.S. Nationalism and the Marginalization of Women’, Women and Language, 29:2 (2006), p. 30. 137 Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Like One of the Family: Race, Ethnicity and the Paradox of US National Identity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 24:1 (2001), p. 19. 236 Ghraib abuses are important for my discussion in this chapter also, for understanding the sexualised construction the ‘Other’ and to reveal the contingency of the gendered orientalist logics of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. As Melanie Richter-Montpetit argues, the Abu Ghraib abuses ‘follow a pre-constructed heterosexed, racialized and gendered script’ that informs the ‘save civilisation itself’-fantasy’ that is central to ‘War on Terror’ discourses (both media and official).138 As Timothy Kaufman-Osborne argues, these acts then become not ‘just’ abuse but a particular kind of abuse: they function as acts of ‘imperialist and racist violence’.139 The logic of gendered orientalism functions here in the deployment of the racialised and gendered identities that inform dominant interpretations of the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The imagery and performance of the sexual and racial abuse at Abu Ghraib prison serves to reinforce the differences between ‘Other’ and US power and masculinity that have been examined throughout this thesis. The infliction of violence by US soldiers against the male ‘Other’ here serves to feminise them by making them discursively (as well as physically) powerless, and simultaneously reassert the superiority of US masculinity. Mainstream and official US and ‘Western’ responses to the abuses at Abu Ghraib must be understood as shaped by the heteronormativity upon which dominant understandings of gender (and thus gendered orientalist discourse) are predicated. The photographs show how the racialised ‘Other’ is not only metaphorically penetrable (achieved through ‘successful’ military invasion), but also how he is literally homosexualised and ‘dominated’ by ‘our’ superior masculinity. This logic is predicated on a specifically orientalist set of presuppositions about the ‘Arab mind’. Mainstream responses to the photos (including ‘expert commentary’) revolved around the humiliation the male victims must have suffered in an honour- based society – not the terror, fear, or pain, but a sense of dishonour in terms of the implications, in Arab society, of being ‘party’ to the homosexualising acts that many of the photos portrayed.140 The desire to ‘understand’ the (male) Muslim mind and the type of knowledge about this ‘Muslim mind’ offered in such accounts draws on orientalist assumptions that ‘the’ Muslim man’s greatest fear is to be dominated. In particular, it assert that abuse by a woman makes this particularly devastating. As Mann and Richter-Montpetit point out, it is unsurprising that this 138 Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence’, pp. 39, 41. 139 Timothy Kaufman-Osborne, ‘Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?’, in Tara McKelvey (ed.), One of the Guys: Women as Torturers and Aggressors (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007) pp. 152-153. 140 Bonnie Mann, ‘How How America Justifies Its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity and Sovereignty’, Hypatia, 21:4 (2006), pp. 158–159. 237 conclusion is reached given that being dominated by women is humiliating in the logic of the hypermasculine US ‘Self’ also.141 Being raped demonstrates powerlessness and is humiliating because of the feminisation that comes from being subjected to an act of penetration, and a type of abuse that has overwhelmingly female victims.142 This is because in dominant understandings of gender, violence and aggression are ‘natural’ for men. Men are expected to ‘perform’ masculinity (and possess masculine power) through acts of violence, whereas women are ‘naturally’ non-aggressive.143 On the one hand, England’s actions undermined the boundaries between masculinity and femininity (as attached to male and female bodies) that the US ‘Self’ was predicated on. But at the same time, this very appropriation of masculinity by England served to ‘undermine’ the ‘enemy Other’. That is, such acts inflicted by a woman gain their power because they undermine the valorisation of a specific kind of hypermasculinity that is the defining feature of backward and unenlightened ‘Eastern’ societies in ‘War on Terror’ discourse.144 Dominant ‘Western’ understandings of the Abu Ghraib scandal then reinforced ‘civilisational’ boundaries in and beyond ‘War on Terror’ discourse by deploying ‘our’ gendered orientalist ‘knowledge’ about (heterosexual) men in Arab/Muslim society. Gendered orientalism functions here (again) to give those who construct dominant representation power over ‘them’, enabling ‘us’ to script ‘their’ thoughts and feelings in ways that (re)produce these people as ‘Other’. Official reactions to the scandal too functioned to (or at least aimed to) (re)produce the civilised, developed, enlightened ‘Self’ that I have argued through chapters 5, 6, and 7 has been central to official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse (and, in chapter 4, to broader discourses of international politics and intervention). The administration expressed their shock and disgust at the pictures.145 Bush personally acknowledged the ‘humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners’ but also explained that he was ‘equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America’.146 In doing so, he constituted a failure to 141 Ibid., 159; see also Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence’, p. 47. 142 Nayak, ‘Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11’, p. 51; Sjoberg, ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others’, pp. 94–5. 143 Miranda Alison, ‘Wartime Sexual Violence: Women’s Human Rights and Questions of Masculinity’, Review of International Studies 33:1 (2007), p. 76. 144 Richter-Montpetit, ‘Empire, Desire and Violence’, pp. 47, 51–52; Sjoberg, ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others’, p. 95; Jasmine Zine, ‘Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Engagement’, in Hunt and Rygiel, (En)Gendering the War on Terror, p. 33. 145 Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding The Torture Of Others’, The New York Times, 23 May 2004, available at understand the ‘true nature and heart’ of the US ‘Self’ as equal to sexualised torture against Iraqis. Bush also explained that ‘the actions of those folks in Iraq do not represent the values of the United States of America’,147 and later that Abu Ghraib was only a ‘symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who...disregarded our values’.148 As such, he repositioned the location of the ‘problem’ away from the (physical, psychological, and emotional) suffering of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He effectively further dehumanised them by reducing their experiences to the same level as the indignity that the administration felt over an event that, as Osborne has explained, reflects the systemic sexualisation of torture in the US military.149 ‘Other men’ in gendered orientalist discourse then, do not suffer in the same way that Afghan women did. What I mean here is that it is only certain kinds of ‘Others’ (passive women and men) whose suffering can be acknowledged, those ‘Others’ who can be saved by ‘us’. The scandal also threatened to blur the line between the ‘barbaric Other’ and the ‘civilised US Self’ that the Bush administration had been so keen to project in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse. As I have explained, this strict boundary is central to the binaries that inform gendered orientalism, and representations of the deviant sexuality of Hussein and his sons in the lead-up to the Iraq war juxtaposed with the Abu Ghraib abuses could ‘un-do’ these boundaries. Thus the administration needed to re-centre the discursive focus. Rumsfeld attempted to do this by apologising to the prisoners but then lamenting that the abuses became public and shifting responsibility for this to the news media:150 We’re functioning … in a war-time situation …[with] people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media…151 What was important was to assert that ‘we’ were still the ‘civilised’ one, morally superior to the ‘Other’.152 This could be done by letting the world know that the 9.html>, accessed 15 January 2012. Parts of Bush’s comments here were reproduced on the White House website as a separate document the following day, indicating their importance (see White House, ‘Global Messenger’, 7 May 2004, available at attacks ‘made us sick to our stomachs’, ‘us’ being all ‘decent Americans’.153 Bush said to a reporter: ‘[t]he acts were abhorrent, Steve. They sickened my stomach. I know they sickened yours, too. You're a decent American. Any decent soul doesn't want a human being treated that way.’154 The reassertion of a US ‘Self’ unified in its respect for ‘civilised values’ took priority. Bush demonstrate this by following the above short comments with a much longer commentary about the character of the US and its troops: the troops we have in Iraq, who are there for security and peace and freedom, are the finest of the fine, fantastic United States citizens, who represent the very best qualities of America: courage, love of freedom, compassion, and decency. … the actions of the people in that prison do not reflect the nature of the men and women who wear our uniform. We've got brave souls in Iraq, sacrificing so that somebody can be free. And helping that -- the Iraqi citizens be free, it helps America be more secure. There are thousands of acts of kindness and decency taking place every day in Iraq, because our soldiers, our men and women in uniform, are honorable, decent, loving people.155 What was at stake, what Bush attempted to (re)assert here, was the construction of the Iraq war as necessary for neutralising an imminent threat to the ‘civilised’, but also to ‘liberate’ Iraqis. Sjoberg points out that official discourse had a marked absence of explicit gender references in responses to Abu Ghraib, and shows that this ‘silence’ illustrates that there is still a type of gendering taking place here. That is, a rendering of gender as unimportant despite its clear centrality to the acts.156 Using gendered orientalism as a lens through which to read this official response, however, shows that gender was important here for another reason also. As demonstrated, the civilised, egalitarian and progressive hypermasculinity of the US in official ‘War on Terror’ discourse conceives of the world in terms of competing masculinities. In refusing to accept responsibility for the acts, the administration’s discourse reflects the desire to ‘re-fix’ the characteristics of the US ‘Self’ that became destabilised as a result of the publication of evidence of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Although perhaps silenced on one level as Sjoberg suggests, reading official responses in terms of the gendered orientalist construction of ‘War on Terror’ discourse (from 11 September 2001 to the Abu Ghraib scandal and beyond) illustrates that gender (as refracted through orientalism) is central to official (and unofficial) responses to what became a very public challenge to the (racial and gender) superiority of the ‘Self’. ‘We’, in orientalist discourse, are not ‘like them’ 153 Bush, ‘President Bush, Jordanian King Discuss Iraq, Middle East’. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 Sjoberg, ‘Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others’, p. 91. 240 and must not become like ‘them’. It is gendered orientalist logics that prompt the official response outlined above, that must reassert the gendered (as hypermasculine) US ‘Self’ as good, brave, and just in keeping ‘Iraqi citizens…free’ and making ‘America…more secure’157 in the face of the deviant masculinity of the ‘Other’ who threatens the entire world. Conclusion The discursive prescription of the war in Iraq was entirely dependent on orientalist and gendered identity categories and narratives developed in ‘early’ ‘War on Terror’ discourse as constructed through the (lead-up to and waging of) war in Afghanistan. The binary world of ‘us’ and ‘them’ constructed here, structured by orientalist and gendered understandings of a masculine ‘enemy Other’ and the leadership duty of a hypermasculine civilised ‘Self’, provided the context for the construction of Iraq, Hussein, and Iraqi citizens. That is, ‘early’ ‘War on Terror’ (the first few days after 11 September) constructions of various (masculine and feminine) ‘Others’ along with the narratives of threat that they were deployed in were (re)produced through the enactment of war in Afghanistan. It was because of this that the ‘enemy Other’ could continue, in the Iraq context, to be discursively as embodying an imminent threat to ‘us’ that could only be neutralised through masculine acts such as war. This is not to say that ‘War on Terror’ discourse or context was identical in the Afghan and Iraq wars. There were significant differences in terms of the reaction of various states and populations to the notion of war, and the involvement of international bodies such as the UN. Discursively, however, the narratives around Afghanistan and Iraq were both constructed according to the same basic gendered orientalist logic: positing ‘barbaric Other masculinity’ against ‘civilised Self masculinity’. In the Iraq context, this was organised around the motif of ‘oriental despotism’ which functioned to construct Hussein as ‘Other’ and ‘feminised victims’ to be ‘liberated’, and, most importantly, created a discursive link between Hussein, the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, and the Afghan Taliban. Although thin on evidence, a discursive construction of an inherently barbaric (male) ‘Other’ in ‘War on Terror’ discourse functioned to bring together al Qaeda and its religious doctrines with Ba’athist Iraq as a unified ‘enemy’. 157 Bush, ‘President Bush, Jordanian King Discuss Iraq, Middle East’. 241 Moreover, ‘oriental despotism’ in this discourse harnessed the suffering of Iraqis, and connected it to a broader despotism that typified the ‘Orient’s’ inability to govern itself (which Afghanistan had also illustrated). Hussein was discursively aligned with the ‘mad mullahs’ of early ‘War on Terror’ discourse through the trope of oriental despotism, in which his long record of human rights abuses could signify his collusion with those who instigated the attacks of 11 September 2001. The sexuality of the ‘Other’ was also deployed to construct the deviancy of Hussein’s regime. In creating the image of the ‘oriental despot’, a feminised ‘Iraq-as-victim’ was simultaneously constructed. The Ba’ath regime came to be seen as typical of the ‘Orient’s’ inability to govern itself; unable to resist this oppressive rule on their own, a feminised Iraqi populace was then constructed as in need of liberation through a military campaign led by the superior hypermasculinity of the US ‘Self’. Gendered and orientalist logics function in this narrative to both construct an ‘enemy Other’ bent on destroying the ‘civilised world’ and a narrative of liberation around which to organise rhetoric in support of war, predicated on and (re)producing the basic logics developed in ‘early War on Terror’ discourse and applied to the Afghan context. 242 _____ Chapter Eight Conclusions The central aim of this thesis has been to demonstrate how official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse employs logics of gendered orientalism in representation of identities, events, ‘facts’, and knowledge, in order to create a ‘reality’ in which military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq become discursively possible. The specific (and new) gendered orientalist discourse analysis I have developed in this thesis has allowed me to interrogate, complicate, and destabilise the particular discursive processes (of presupposition, predication, pre/proscription, and (re)production) that have enabled the construction of narratives of liberation in two key moments in the ‘War on Terror’ (Afghanistan and Iraq). I have shown that these narratives (cast as narratives of ‘liberation’ and relatedly of ensuring global security) are predicated on and (re)produce gendered orientalist logics. These logics allow actors to presuppose knowledge, to construct identity categories, to predicate and categorise people, and to pre/proscribe certain actions and behaviours. Official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, constructed through gendered orientalist logics, ultimately prescribed military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. In his 2009 farewell address, Bush summed up the ‘War on Terror’ and its military interventions as follows: Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States. …good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere. Freeing people from oppression and despair is eternally right. This nation must continue to speak out for justice and truth. We must always be willing to act in their defense -- and to advance the cause of peace.1 As I have demonstrated in this thesis, such representations deploy binary understandings of the world, of the people in it, of ideas, of behaviours appropriate 1 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Delivers Farewell Address to the Nation’, 15 January 2009, available at to particular types of people. As I explained in chapter 2, I follow Edward Said in conceiving of a ‘repository’ of orientalist knowledge (knowledge about ‘the East’ constructed by ‘the West’) that has shaped dominant understandings of people, places, ideas, and so on related to ‘the East’. Where I differ from Said is in my understanding orientalism as a gendered discourse which gives very particular insights into ‘War on Terror’ (and other) discourses that cannot be achieved if we only look for orientalist logics. For example, reading the construction of Iraq and Saddam Hussein as orientalist illustrates the centrality of markers of ‘progress’ and ‘appropriate governance’ to render Iraq and Hussein as backward ‘Others’ cast as either victim (Iraq) or despotic (Hussein). Reading this as gendered as well as orientalist allows us to also see that the very construction of Iraqis as victims depends on their feminisation (as passive, unable to ‘stand up’ to Hussein) as well as orientalisation (a lack of desire for democracy). And, it is gendered orientalism that allows us to understand the corollary construction of US ‘Self’ in relation to the feminised (passive) ‘victim Other’ and masculine (threatening) ‘enemy Other’. That is, the ‘Self’ is then constructed against the ‘Other’ as embodying another kind of masculinity: aggressive but rational, utilising military power but civilised, and so on. These constructions are predicated on the broader gendered orientalist logics that construct ‘the world’ as one of masculine competition between various ‘types’ of men (‘Western’, ‘Eastern’). Gendered orientalism as a discourse analytic (DA) approach is then instrumental in identifying the identity categories and narratives deployed in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, and revealing how these become intelligible. Understanding ‘War on Terror’ logics, representations, and narratives as gendered and orientalist, I have, in this thesis, examined how ‘the world’ was conceived of in the Bush administration’s discourse after 11 September 2001. In the lead up to the Afghan war, the Bush administration drew on gendered orientalism to define the post-11 September world and the ‘new enemy’ the US now faced. This enemy ‘other’ was constructed as paradigmatically male, with ‘Other women’ represented as wholly oppressed and lacking agency, by reference to orientalist tropes of barbarism and backwardness. This discursive construction of the ‘Other’ was also mutually constitutive of construction of the US ‘Self’. Indeed, this ‘Self’, as masculine, ‘White’, civilised, progressive, has antecedents in pre-‘War on Terror’ discourse. That is, gendered and racialised logics, as I explained in chapters 4 and 5, have been central to discourses of intervention much before the ‘War on Terror’. The importance of historical projections of a masculine, ‘White’, 244 civilised, progressive US ‘Self’ (against a range of backward/ barbaric/uncivilised/undeveloped ‘Others’) is central to understanding how ‘War on Terror’ discourse developed as gendered and orientalist. The al Qaeda attacks threatened not only the US as a physical place but also its discursive identity. As such, the response to these attacks centred on reasserting the masculinity that had been ‘lost’ here, and doing so required the construction of ‘Others’ against the projection of the ‘Self’. The ease with which resulting constructions of oppressed women, barbaric men, and hypermasculine US heroes, could be harnessed (and illustrated so well in Bush’s farewell speech above) points to the saliency of dominant gendered and racialised (at times orientalist) discourses. In particular, as I explained in chapter 4, gendered and racialised logics have long been central to (and (re)produced in) dominant US foreign policy discourses. The US has, at various historical moments, been concerned with constructing a national ‘Self’ that is both gendered (masculine) and racialised (‘White’) against uncivilised/underdeveloped/weak ‘Others’ who are marked as such in racialised (if not always overtly racist) and gendered ways. These historical moments provide the discursive antecedents that function to make ‘War on Terror’ discourse itself intelligible, illustrating how deeply ingrained these logics are in dominant understandings of what it is to be ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, and so on. Indeed, the overlap between official and other ‘War on Terror’ discourses (as referred to at various points in chapters5, 6, and 7) reiterates the saliency of gendered and racialised/orientalist logics in contemporary dominant ‘Western’ discourses. As I have illustrated throughout this thesis, gendered orientalist logics, illustrated in ‘War on Terror’ discourse, draw on dominant understandings of the binary division of gender, gender roles, sexuality, masculinity and femininity which are themselves configured (and were configured by) racialised and orientalist stereotypes. A key way in which this was made intelligible and ‘naturalised’ in the construction of US ‘Self’, I argued in chapter 5, was through the use of familial metaphors in which people were ‘naturally’ divided into specific genders and gender roles. Not only did the Bush administration represent ‘the national’ as a family and position itself as the ‘leader’ of this US ‘family’, it was also then tasked with exerting its hypermasculine power in protecting the ‘US family’ from attacks perpetrated by the ‘Other’. In providing this ‘knowledge’ about the world, the Bush administration drew on gendered and orientalist logics to construct an appropriate response the attacks of 11 September 2001. From the very first texts produced by 245 the Bush administration in the aftermath of the al Qaeda attacks, the world was unequivocally conceptualised in terms of binaries – ‘us’/‘them’, ‘man’/‘woman’, ‘Self’/‘Other’, ‘barbaric’/‘civilised’ and so on. In this world, a US-led ‘we’ were ascribed values of civilisation, progress, logic, egalitarianism, freedom, and democracy. The ‘Other’ (‘them’) by contrast possessed a masculinity that was irrational, barbaric, and indiscriminately violent. Women in these representations were largely constructed through femininities, and femininities in ‘War on Terror’ discourse largely served to enable particular kinds of masculinities to be constructed. That is, in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse ‘us’ and ‘them’ were constructed in terms of competing masculinities, and femininities served to illustrate this. For example, both ‘their’ and ‘our’ women were at risk from the uncontrolled masculinity of the ‘Other’ (the Taliban’s plans to impose ‘their views on the rest of us’, the ‘threat’ of sexual violence against Jessica Lynch in Iraq). Femininities, or at least those associated with the US ‘Self’ also played a more active role but again to support the masculine ‘Self’, for example in the deployment of female soldiers as evidence of ‘our’ progress in gender equality, and ‘militarised mothers’ who supported the war effort. Official representations of the world post-11 September 2001 created a sense of great insecurity based on the threat posed by the irrational hatred and uncontrolled masculinity of the ‘Other’. As I explained, the ‘Other’ was marked as barbaric not only by what ‘he’ inflicted upon the US on 11 September 2001, but also because of broader failures to conform to what was projected as ‘our civilisation’. That is, the US was projected unequivocally as a place of freedom, prosperity, gender equality and so on (obscuring for example the very real poverty experienced by some parts of US society, and the Bush administration’s own curtailing of women’s rights). This was necessary in order to position the US, in this battle of orientalised masculinities, as the bearer of civilisation, and able to exert its masculine power to ‘save’ ‘oppressed Others’. The discursive construction of the military interventions of the ‘War on Terror’, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were constructed in this context, and prescribed (were made possible) because of this. Gendered and orientalist logics in the Afghan context were expressed in narratives of ‘saving civilisation’ and ‘liberating women’. Discourse around the Afghan war drew on the binary world constructed after 11 September 2001 to predicate ‘us’ as ‘civilised’, ‘progressive’, ‘democratic’, and ‘strong’, and ‘them’ as ‘barbaric’, ‘backward’, ‘violent’, and ‘repressive’. This enabled the construction of an ‘Other’ (located in and beyond Afghanistan) who, in seeking to assert an irrational 246 hypermasculinity against ‘our’ values and people, constituted an imminent threat. The particularly emotive narrative of ‘saving Afghan women’ was central to the construction of imminent threat, by symbolising the deviant and backward masculinity of the ‘Other’, and simultaneously substantiating the construction of the US ‘Self’ as embodying an acceptable civilised hypermasculinity (in aspiring to ‘save’ Afghan women). Gendered orientalist discourse was (re)produced throughout 2001 and 2002, with the Afghan war the most visible example. It was this (re)production (of logics, ‘knowledge’, identities, and narratives) that discursively enabled another ‘War on Terror’ intervention, this time into Iraq. ‘War on Terror’ discourse around Iraq drew explicitly on the construction of threat in and beyond the Afghan example, forging a discursive link between Afghanistan and Iraq, the Taliban and Hussein, based on gendered orientalist understandings of ‘Other’ desires and behaviour. That is, the assertion that Iraq was in possession of WMDs (and intended to use them against the ‘West’), and that Hussein had collaborated with Al-Qaeda to plan attacks on the US and its allies, was only made possible because of the gendered orientalist presupposition that all ‘Other men’ who have the power to exert their masculinity do so, and on the earlier predications (in and beyond ‘War on Terror’ discourse) of these men as irrational and uncontrolled. It was only through this gendered orientalist logic and ‘knowledge’ of the ‘Other’ that a relationship between secular Iraqi leadership and religiously fundamentalist al Qaeda could be forged. The lack of evidence to prove this link was obscured in official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse by the gendered orientalist narrative of an uncontrollable deviant masculinity bent upon destroying the ‘civilised world’. Although the specific contexts were different (Afghanistan was a less planned war, Iraq had ongoing UN involvement) the same logics of ‘War on Terror’ discourse enabled the prescription of intervention (and proscription of alternative options) for both Afghanistan and Iraq. That is, in both the Afghan and Iraq narratives, the same typology of ‘Other’ (and ‘Self’) was drawn upon, and the same logic of masculine competition between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ (with ‘feminised victims’) was deployed. Although, for example, the Afghan war narrative featured Afghan women in a way that Iraqi women did not occupy in the narrative of the Iraq war, both narratives were ultimately predicated on the masculine logic of protection. In this logic the ‘feminised’ must be saved: in Afghanistan the passive Afghan women became this victim, in the Iraq narrative Iraqi society itself became feminised. Thus the logics might expressed in different ways but remain consistent at the basic level. 247 This thesis has, in interrogating the discursive representations and narratives of official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, destabilised the gendered orientalism at play in the creation of knowledge and truth that has made these interventions possible. By applying a specific DA approach (that incorporates the logics of gender and orientalism as discourses), the discursive processes that are used to construct ‘War on Terror’ representations and narratives can be exposed. This then challenges the gendered and orientalist logics that underpin them, and unsettles the ‘naturalness’ of dividing people in binary ways (‘us’/‘them’, ‘men’/‘women’). Doing so is a vital project, as the ‘War on Terror’ example illustrates: the power of gendered orientalism is harnessed easily and to significant effect, enabling, for example, military interventions that purport to liberate ‘Others’ but in doing so limit their agency and enact different types of violence against them. Gendered orientalist discourses of intervention have long been deployed in the service of intervention or other forms of imperialism. These discourses must be continually destabilised and their contingency revealed precisely because they are harnessed so easily and have such significant effects. 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