Women as Weapons of War

Iraq, Sex, and the Media

Kelly Oliver

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231512459
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Deconstrucción en filosofía

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.

From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Women as Weapons of War, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to bare arms is a sign of freedom and progress.

Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

[1]

Women—The Secret Weapon of Modern Warfare?

The figures and faces from wars in the Middle East that continue to haunt us at the beginning of the twenty-first century are those of women: think of the Palestinian women suicide bombers, starting with Wafa Idris in January 2002; or the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch early in the U.S. invasion of Iraq just over a year later; or the shocking images of Pfc. Lynndie England and Army Spc. Sabrina Harman at the Abu Ghraib prison the following spring. These images and stories horrify yet fascinate us because they show young women killing and torturing. Their stories as they have circulated through the U.S. media create a sense of shock and confusion evidenced by various conflicting accounts of what it means for women to wage war. They have both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women’s equality. And, as reported in the media, tellings of their stories share, perhaps more subliminally, an ambivalence toward women, who are figured once again as dangerous; and now they are represented as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is symptomatic of age-old fears of the “mysterious” powers of women, maternity, and female sexuality. Even as the presence of women in the military seems to signal their “liberation” from patriarchal traditions, the rhetoric surrounding their involvement betrays the lingering association between women, sexuality, and death. We might think that we have moved beyond these questionable images of women, but media representations of women’s recent role in warfare tell us otherwise.

In the past, American women served behind the front lines as nurses in Korea and Vietnam, and women even ferried warplanes in World War II. But the idea of women soldiers working in combat zones is new to the American public. Technically, these women are assigned to supply carriers and military support troops. But given the absence of well-defined “enemy lines” in Iraq, however, women regularly confront combat situations. Women have been active warriors in other countries. For example, some Nazi women became infamous for their torture and abuses of Jewish concentration camp prisoners; Ilse Koch, called the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” was known for riding the camps on horseback looking for interesting tattoos on prisoners that she could turn into lamp-shades made from human skin.¹ Women also served in the Soviet army in World War II. Reportedly, memoirs of German soldiers suggest that they feared the Russian women more than the men, and that they refused to surrender to them for fear of the consequences. And during Pinochet’s regime in Chile some detainees reported that “among the torturers ‘the women were the worst.’ ”² Recounting such tales, Scott Johnson concludes that “such stories rekindle images of Amazons, and the myth of women even more savage than the most savage men.”³ While women are obviously capable of the most heinous abuse and torture, this myth of women more savage than men continues today with the stories of women torturers and women interrogators in Iraq.⁴

The most uncanny images from the U.S. occupation of Iraq are those of women engaging in abuse. Although these images of teenage women who smile while abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib are shocking, they are also somewhat familiar to us as the result of centuries of literature, philosophy, history, religion, and, more recently, film and television in which women have been imagined as dangerous, particularly in terms of their sexuality. By now the virgin-whore dichotomy setup within cultures that historically have excluded female bodies from the properly social or political realm is well known. Women have been figured as either innocent virgins or dirty whores; and in fantasies one easily morphs into the other … the virgin uses her innocence to trap and betray, the whore with the heart of gold saves the jaded man from his humdrum life.

In the case of Abu Ghraib, we see seemingly innocent girls gleefully torturing men. The images are uncanny precisely because they conjure both the strange and the familiar, or perhaps here we could say the familiar within the strange. In his essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as unheimlich, which means both at home and not at home. Things that are uncanny have a double nature: a familiar face that hides a mysterious danger, or the evil villain who is somehow familiar. The double, or doppelganger, both is and is not what s/he seems. It is this ambiguity between good and evil that makes us uneasy. To Freud, the most uncanny figure is that of the mother because she is associated with both life and death, with both plenitude or nourishment and threats of withholding nourishment.⁵ For Freud, the life-giving power of the mother is the uncanny double of her death threat.

Significantly, Freud’s analysis of one of his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams makes this connection. In the “Three Fates,” after going to bed tired and hungry, Freud dreams of a woman in a kitchen. She is making dumplings and tells him that he will have to wait; he is impatient and tries to put on his overcoat to leave, but the coat is too long, with strange fur trim and embroidery, and seems to belong to another man. In his analysis of the dream, Freud identifies the woman making dumplings with his mother. His dream appears to him as the wish fulfillment of the basic need for food and love, which he claims come together in the mother’s breast. In his analysis, however, no sooner is the maternal figure in his dream associated with love and nourishment than she becomes a messenger of death. Freud associates the dumpling-making hand motion with an experience from his childhood when his mother taught him that everyone dies and returns to the earth by rubbing her hands together as if making dumplings to show him the “blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we are made of earth.”⁶ Not only in Freud’s dream, but also within patriarchal culture more generally, the mother is the symbol of life-giving nourishment (dumplings), but also of the inevitability of death and returning to the (mother) earth.

The woman in Freud’s dream might be interpreted using another one of his works, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in which Freud talks about the appearance of three beautiful women connected to choice and death in literature and myth, as the three faces of woman—birth, sex, and death—that ultimately belong to the mother: “We might argue that what is represented here are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man’s life—the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.”⁷ Birth, sex, and death are condensed into the figure of woman, specifically the Mother as a triple and ultimate threat. In important ways, Freud’s views of women are symptomatic of his culture’s views of women more generally.

Today, Freud’s theories about women seem outdated, even sexist. But recent representations of women as weapons of war suggests that the associations between women, sex, and death are as powerful as ever. In this chapter I will examine the ways in which women are figured as both offensive and defensive weapons of war. In the case of the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons in particular, women have been identified with sex and their sexuality has not only been figured as a weapon in the media but also explicitly used as a weapon by the military. According to some commentators, just the presence of women in the army naturally turns the scene into a sexual orgy. And the supposed power of that so-called dangerous natural sexuality can be harnessed by the military to “break” and “soften up” recalcitrant prisoners. The use of fake menstrual blood in the interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is especially telling. Patriarchal cultures have traditionally regarded menstrual blood as unclean and disgusting. Now the imagined abject power of menstrual blood is being used as a weapon of war. It is not just that we suppose that our Muslim prisoners will think that they are unclean by exposure to menstrual blood, but also that within our own culture and the rhetoric of the soldiers and media reporting these incidents, menstrual blood is seen as unclean and grotesque. Freud’s analysis of the uncanny effects of the mother and the female genitals or sex in may help explain our ambivalence toward menstrual blood, linked as it is both to life and life-giving powers and to fear, perhaps even fear of death. And it may help diagnose why and how female sexuality and the presence of women could be conceived of and used by the military as an interrogation tactic.

In this chapter I will examine various ways in which women involved in war in the Middle East have been imagined as dangerous weapons linked with death. Insofar as for centuries women and female sex and sexuality have been figured as dangerous and deadly, it should not surprise us now that women are associated with some of the most outrageous horrors of war. What makes women’s involvement in war—from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay to Palestinian suicide bombings—uncanny is a continued ambivalence toward women and female sexuality. The difficulty that we have in comprehending that these girls-next-door can be so violent has everything to do with stereotypes of femininity and female sexuality. Along with the ambivalence toward women manifest in metaphors of women as weapons comes an ambivalence toward feminism, which is simultaneously blamed for unleashing these man-hating aggressive harpies and put forward as a justification for invading and occupying Muslim countries to liberate women. Like the associations between women and death, this selective appropriation of feminism and women’s liberation and equality also has a long history, and has been part and parcel of colonial enterprises for centuries.

Feminism Is Torture

Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker suggests that the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib are the result of what she calls the “myth of gender equality.”⁸ Indeed, the photographs of women’s involvement in torture and sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib rekindled debates over whether women should be in the military and debates over gender equality. They also prompted a debate over the role of feminism not only in response to the photos, but also in the abuses themselves. Writers on both sides of the feminist divide implicate feminism in women’s criminal behavior at Abu Ghraib. For example, on the antifeminist side, MensNewsDaily.com suggests that women’s sadism is not only responsible for Abu Ghraib but also the norm: “all of the females implicated at Abu Ghraib will have little trouble finding jobs in the multibillion-dollar VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) domestic violence industry, just as soon as ‘American, gender feminist justice’ rationalizes away all their misbehavior.”⁹ A columnist for the American Spectator argues that the abuse at Abu Ghraib “is a cultural outgrowth of a feminist culture which encourages female barbarians.”¹⁰ Some conservative journalists have blamed the torture on the women’s feminist sensibilities, arguing that the abusers resented the Islamic attitude of men toward women and therefore enjoyed what they took to be their feminist revenge on the prisoners.¹¹

While conservatives blame feminism for the brutality at Abu Ghraib, even some feminists associate advances made by the women’s movement with the abuse. For example, columnist Joanne Black concludes: “Throughout history, when they have had the chance, women have shown themselves as capable as men of misusing power and inflicting brutality. They have, till now, merely lacked the opportunity. Feminism has remedied that. Sadly for those of us who thought we were better, women have proved themselves men’s equal.”¹² Brooke Warner blames a postfeminism world in which “young American women” have “a certain I-deserve-it attitude.” She claims that “brashness, confidence, and selfishness are norms” and that “American military culture promotes these values as much as the university system, though it manifests itself as physical rather than intellectual prowess.”¹³ Feminism, then, is implicated in the abuse by both sides for having given women opportunities equal to men’s and for making them more confident—to the point that feminism has created violent women.

Some feminist scholars and journalists explain the abuse by pointing to women’s marginal place in the male-dominated military, which not only makes it more likely that they will follow orders and try to fit in, but also that they will be scapegoated and held up as representatives of all of their sex, which seems to be true of the three women indicted as portrayed in the press. Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that coed basic training is responsible for what one commentator calls the “whorehouse behavior” at Abu Ghraib.¹⁴ The same commentator asks if police soldiers at Abu Ghraib were weak in basic operational skills “because 10 years ago, for political reasons, politicians and feminist activists within the ranks established coed basic training to promote the fiction that men and women are the same and putting young women in close quarters with young men would somehow not trigger natural biological urges?” [my emphasis].¹⁵

Much of the conservative commentary surrounding the Abu Ghraib abuse has explicitly or implicitly associated women and sex. Explicitly, we see comments on women triggering men’s sexual urges and the presence of women leading to “whorehouse behavior.” But, as Susan Sontag points out, these images of women smiling while engaging in sexual abuse and sadistic torture are subliminally familiar from the S&M porn industry, which is booming on the Internet and popular with soldiers, and which traditionally puts women in the role of dominatrix.¹⁶ Feminists have argued for decades that the prevalence of pornography promotes violent images of sex and desensitizes us to sexual violence. Perhaps desensitization to this type of sexual violence is part of why at first human rights groups were not sure how to categorize the abuse.

Gender stereotypes also play a role in the confusion regarding these images: not just because women are the abusers but also because men are the ones being sexually abused. It is important to note that the men in question are racialized men being abused by white women. Of course, we know that female Iraqi prisoners are also sexually abused and raped, but that is so much business as usual that it does not capture our imaginations in the way that images of women sexually abusing men does. It makes us wonder: How can a man be raped by a woman? How can a man be forced to perform, and thereby seemingly be an agent of, sex acts? These questions point to our assumptions about desire, sex, and gender. And it is these gender stereotypes that make the smiling faces of Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman so “abject”—both terrifying and repulsive and at the same time fascinating and captivating. Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva characterizes the abject as something that calls into question borders; it threatens by means of an ambiguity that cannot be categorized. Yet it is precisely this ominous ambiguity that draws us to the abject. Like noticing road kill on the side of the highway while driving, we look at it in spite of ourselves. This is our reaction to the photographs from Abu Ghraib: We are repulsed by them, but we can’t help but look. We are appalled, but we want to see more. And the photographs that are the most uncanny, the most difficult to categorize, are those of women engaging in abuse while smiling for the camera.

Female Sexuality as Tactic

Reportedly gender also plays a role in the abuse itself. Some journalists claim that women were used as “lethal weapons” against Iraqi male prisoners. In the words of a Baltimore Sun reporter, “forcing men in a fundamentalist Muslim culture to parade naked (let alone feign sex acts) in the presence of women was conceived as an especially lethal brand of humiliation.”¹⁷ This report suggests that the presence of women in the Abu Ghraib prison allowed for even more humiliating forms of abuse supposedly used to “soften up” prisoners before inter...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll
• 1. Women—The Secret Weapon of Modern Warfare?
• 2. Sexual Freedom as Global Freedom?
• 3. Perpetual War, Real Live Coverage!
• 4. Innocence, Vulnerability, and Violence
• Conclusion: Witnessing Ethics Again
• Notes
• Texts Cited
• Index