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©2014 Isra Ali All Rights Reserved ©2014 Isra Ali All Rights Reserved HAVE FREEDOM, WILL TRAVEL: GENDERED DISCOURSES IN THE WAR ON TERROR By ISRA ALI A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Communication, Information and Library Studies Written under the direction of Deepa Kumar And approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey JANUARY 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Have Freedom, Will Travel: Gendered Discourses in the War on Terror By ISRA ALI Dissertation Director: Deepa Kumar This project examines how women traveling from North America and Western Europe to Afghanistan in the era of the War on Terror go about making media about Afghan women, and considers the experience of contemporary travelers alongside those of European women who traveled to the Muslim world in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. This work expands on and revises existing cultural studies scholarship on the representation of brown bodies in a post 911 world, using an anti-colonial lens to examine the work of journalists, independent documentary filmmakers, and activists. It pays particular attention to the varied ways in which the concept of feminism is deployed to advocate for or against ongoing military occupation of Afghanistan. This project asks: what is the relationship between feminism, Afghan women, and the War on Terror? It examines articles, broadcasts, images, films and websites, produced about Afghan women alongside interviews, memoirs, and other materials these traveling women make about their own experiences of being “liberated” women working within the danger of the war zone and the “traditional” culture of Afghanistan. It examines intersections of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class with gender through an analysis of the term traveling women use to describe their experience of being foreign and female in Afghanistan – the ‘third sex.’ This work traces how the ‘third sex’ come to be in ii Afghanistan after 911, and how they access Afghan women. This makes visible the networks of media, military, and non-governmental agencies they rely on there and how these relationships shape news output in the war zone. I then parse out the conflicting perspectives of liberal feminists and radical feminists as they emerge online in the discourse on militarism and Afghan women’s liberation, making visible the relationships amongst Afghan and non-Afghan feminist organizations and media outlets. The conflicts that emerge amongst liberal and radical feminists are indicative of the challenges that arise when feminists attempt to articulate cross-cultural, global, concepts of gender equality and liberation. These challenges are compounded by the context of the War on Terror, and the use of humanitarian logics to rationalize military endeavors. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance, dedication, and encouragement of Dr. Deepa Kumar. I would also like to thank Dr. Ethel Brooks for her valuable contributions to this project. Their mentorship and support has contributed immeasurably to my development as a scholar, and to the character and scope of this work. Thank you also to Dr. Jack Bratich and Dr. Regina Marchi for the time and energy they have given to the project as evidenced in their thorough readings and insightful comments. I would also like to acknowledge the Department of Journalism and Media Studies and the School of Communication and Information, as well as the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Center for Race and Ethnicity, for all of their support throughout my time at Rutgers. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………. iv LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………… vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………... vii I. INTRODUCTION: Gendered Discourses in the War on 1 Terror Women Reporting on Afghanistan Visibility and Credibility Traveling Women, Gendering Orientalism and the ‘Third Sex’ II. CHAPTER 1: Print Journalism and the ‘Third Sex’: 19 Women Traveling to Afghanistan to Report on Afghan Women for The New York Times and Time Magazine 2001-2005 Editors and Letters to the Editor The Reporting Translating Journalism to Expertise III. CHAPTER 2: Making the images of Afghan women: 67 Television Correspondents and Freelance Photojournalists in Afghanistan The Story of Bibi Aisha Producing Images of Subordination and Suffering from the Perspective of the Third Sex Mobility on the Ground, and the Infrastructure of the War on Terror Heroism, Humanism and Television Correspondents IV. CHAPTER 3: Documentary Film and the ‘Third Sex’ 125 Feminism, documentary, and visibility Coming to Afghanistan Networks The Third Sex, Afghan Women, the Logic of Humanitarian Warfare V. CHAPTER 4: Online Interactions and Feminist Discourse 171 in the War on Terror The War on Terror, and Online Exchange Personal Narratives The Exchange VI. CONCLUSION 225 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………… 236 v LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1 News Coverage Before and After 911…………………………….. 41 vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustrations Page 1. Dr. Marzia Mohammadi by Kate Brooks………………………. 89 2. Stillborn birth, Badakshan Provincial Hospital by Paula 95 Bronstein………………………………………………………… 3. Live birth at Badakshan Provincial Hospital by Lynsey Addario.. 96 4. The Candidate by Stephanie St. Clair…………………………… 97 5. Victim and Police Officer by Veronique de Viguerie…………… 98 6. Burqa Clad Women by Stephanie Sinclair………………………. 100 7. Feminist in Chief, Cover of Ms. Magazine January 2009………. 187 vii 1 I. INTRODUCTION: Gendered Discourses in the War on Terror The goal of this project is to develop a clearer understanding of how the concepts of feminism, gender equality, and liberation, have been rather seamlessly co-opted into the rationale for war and ongoing occupation in Afghanistan in the public discourse. In order to better understand this phenomenon, I look at the work of a select group of women who travel to Afghanistan from North America to Western Europe to write about, make images of, and film documentaries about Afghan women. I examine how these women come to produce this work on Afghanistan in this moment in history, and how the dissemination through different media platforms and venues (print, photography, television, film and digital media) impacts how it travels and circulates through the discourse on War on Terror militarism from 2001 on. The work of these women tells us a great deal about the roles women play in the maintenance and proliferation of the War on Terror over the course of a decade through their participation in the production of knowledge about gender, sexuality, and Afghan culture. A close analysis of the media produced by these women also reveals the relationships between the production of knowledge about Afghan women in news media, and the discourse produced by feminists that advocates for or against militarism in Afghanistan. The latter part of this work examines how liberal and anti-war feminists use digital media to engage one another in a public debate on troop surges, troop withdrawals and the end of the war in Afghanistan after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. This debate makes visible the interrelated nature of reporting on Afghan women and advocating for Afghan women, and the impact of the state’s implementation of Orientalist logics to make the case for war on both of these actions. 2 In the realm of public discourse, the relationship between terrorism, the War on Terror, and gender equality in Afghanistan was established quickly, in the short period between the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 and the declaration of war (dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom) in Afghanistan on October 7th 2001. It is during this period that spokespersons for the United States government explicitly make the case that war in Afghanistan will democratize Afghanistan and liberate Afghan women. In the first chapter, I look at the editorials and letters to the editor authored by women that appear in internationally circulating and venerated mainstream news media outlets (The New York Times and Time Magazine) during this period. These editorials establish the explicit ways in which the administration of George W. Bush sets about overtly framing the War in Afghanistan as a mission in service of democracy and human rights, through the argument that this war will engender equal rights for Afghan women. This section shows how the administration frames this as a particularly gendered issue by deploying female statesmen to talk about Afghan women and their oppression by the governing party of Afghanistan, the Taliban. This blatant propagandizing by the state was met with a number of critiques from scholars of empire, Orientalism, and Islamaphobia, who saw in this narrative a contemporary re-configuration of long-standing Orientalist notions about gender and sexuality in Muslim societies1. In the realm of mainstream public discourse however, the 1 At the outset of the War on Terror this critique is seen in in Lila Abu-Lughod’s 2002 article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Charles Hirschkind & Saba Mahmood’s 2002 peice “Feminism, the Taliban and Politics of Counter-Insurgency” in Anthropological Quarterly. This critique has been reiterated more recently in Kristan Hunt and Kim Rygiel’s volume (En) Gendering the War on Terror, Deepa
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