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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.
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Linda Daugherty
reviewed Women as weapons of war on August 25, 2014 Women as weapons of war
This was a challenging read, and although it dealt primarily with 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, the analysis still rang true. It seems that human nature changes little, so does politics.
Here are some quotes to give you an idea:
"In chapter 3 I analyze the rhetoric of freedom as it has been used by the Bush administration to justify war. In examining presidential speeches, we discover an essential link between freedom and property, between freedom and ownership. We are fighting to protect our property and our right to ownership. Again, freedom is reduced to the free market. In these speeches, the rhetoric of freedom works in tandem with the rhetoric of good and evil. Once more, protecting the Good is reduced to protecting our goods."
"But, as we will see, the fear of losing our wealth, and the determination to protect it at all costs, leads to a paranoid patriotism wherein we feel our wealth threatened on all sides. The flip side of paranoia is delusion of grandeur, which is also evidenced in talk of "the entire free world" and "bringing democracy to the globe." "
"Our sense of ourselves as a nation is strengthened by finding a common enemy, by seeing ourselves fighting the good fight against the forces of evil all around us. Our sense of ourselves as free is emboldened by comparing ourselves to people, especially women, elsewhere whom we imagine as enslaved. The inflated rhetoric of good versus evil, of us versus them, feeds a paranoid patriotism that acts without thinking."
"If we are fighting for eternity, then we are fighting a war without end, perpetual war without the possibility of peace. Another dangerous aspect of this rhetoric of eternity is that it takes the war out of its sociohistorical context. The war is therefore not about oil, or nuclear weapons, or dictators, or maintaining America's position as a superpower, or rebuilding Iraq, or even free elections in Iraq, but about eternal goodness and our faith in God."
"The danger of removing events from their sociohistorical context is that we are not given the information needed to interpret and understand these events. We are given hyperbolic images that stir feeling, often violent feelings of hatred and revenge, but we are discouraged from thinking introspectively about those feelings. We are encouraged to feel violent, to want violence, without thinking about our own investments in that violence or about its consequences."
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