Volume I Issue IV: August – 2014

Transcription

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International Multidisciplinary Research Journal
Research Innovator
Research Innovator
A Peer-Reviewed Refereed and Indexed International Multidisciplinary Research Journal
Volume I Issue IV: August – 2014
CONTENTS
Sr. No.
1
Author
Title of the Paper
Dr. Pooja Singh, Dr. Archana Noticing the Unnoticed:
Durgesh & Ms. Tusharkana Anxiousness and High Sensitivity
Majumdar
among Children
Download
1401PDF
2
Rekha Pande
War and Masculinity, Reading Abu
Ghraib in a feminist perspective
1402PDF
3
Shashikant Mhalunkar
Casting Society as an Outcast in
George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s
Daughter
1403PDF
4
6
Dr. Archana Durgesh, Dr. Purity and Virginity: A Difference
1404PDF
Pooja
Singh,
Divyansh
Sharma,
Harshal
Gupta, to be Understood
Alpana
Patal,
Mahima
Shukla, Manshi Tandon,
Kushboo Yadav, Neha Sahu
Colonial to Postcolonial contexts: 1405PDF
Dr. Vitthal V. Parab
The Problems of Linguistic
Minorities in Writing in English in
Mauritius
Madhavi
How to Express Politeness in Hindi 1406PDF
7
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5
Volume I Issue IV: August 2014
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Editor-In-Chief: Dr. S.D. Sargar
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War and Masculinity, Reading Abu Ghraib in a feminist perspective
Rekha Pande
University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, (Andhra Pradesh) India
Abstract
The present paper attempts to read Abu Ghraib in a feminist perspective. We argue that masculinity is
crucial to the way war gains legitimacy in social life, though the forms of these narratives change. In the
present day though these are concealed under the rubric of larger discourses of war on terror, it is
however possible to unpack these narratives. While the military is seen as a very masculine (and also
paternalistic) organisation, and a distinction is made between us and them, the conqueror and conquered,
the former seen as more masculine and the conquered as feminine. The deployment of images of
masculinity by the winning side, as a dominant discourse can also be seen as an increasing brutalization
of society. Women who are part of the military also behave in a very masculine way, since the military
social culture in which women are embedded is the same for both, men and women. The performance
expected of such training is very masculine and the audience is also bombarded with such images in the
films and media day in and day out. This became evident in Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib, as the most
violent and decisive of human acts, is the paradigmatic masculine enterprise with both men and
women participating and a pointer to the increasing brutalization of society in modern times.
Key Words: Feminist, perspective, masculine, war, abuse, torture, terrorism, military, sexuality.
In this paper we argue that masculinity is
crucial to the way war gains legitimacy in
social life, though the forms of these
narratives change. In the present day though
these are concealed under the rubric of
larger discourses of war on terror, it is
however possible to unpack these narratives.
While the military is seen as a very
masculine
(and
also
paternalistic)
organisation, and a distinction is made
between us and them, the conqueror and
conquered, the former seen as more
masculine and the conquered as feminine.
The deployment of images of masculinity
by the winning side, as a dominant discourse
can also be seen as an increasing
brutalisation of society. Women who are
part of the military also behave in a
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very masculine way, since the military
social culture in which women are
embedded is the same for both, men and
women. The performance expected of such
training is very masculine and the audience
is also bombarded with such images in the
films and media day in and day out. This
became evident in Abu Ghraib. The Abu
Ghraib prison was overseen by a woman,
Sgt. Janis Karpinski. The top U.S.
intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was
responsible for reviewing the status of
detainees before their release, was Major
Gen. Barbara Fast. And the U.S. official
ultimately responsible for managing the
occupation of Iraq since October was
Condoleezza Rice. Like Donald H.
Rumsfeld, she ignored repeated reports of
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abuse and torture until the undeniable
photographic evidence emerged.
positions that were formerly exclusively
male - a debate about their presence has
evolved and sharpened since the 1970s.
Many saw the military as a male bastion, a
masculine pursuit, involving strength and
valor. Acceptance into this all male group
required an endorsement of this masculine
culture and its value system. Opponents of
women in the military have expressed
concern about the consequences of gender
integration for military effectiveness. These
critics have typically sounded alarms about
the ‗feminization‘ of the Armed Forces
(Mitchell, 1989). ―Feminization‖ evidently
refers to the increasing numbers of women
in the military and to the policies that have
been made to accommodate them, which
critics view as softening the military and
diminishing its fighting ability. A good deal
of this uneasiness about the military also
derives from the anti-war protests of the
Vietnam era. Indeed, the most recent wave
of the American feminist movement
emerged from the anti-war movements from
the 1960s.Since the tragedy of that terrible
war, soldiering has been viewed by
feminists- and many on the left, generallyas a brutal occupation properly disdained by
decent people. The prevailing perception of
the military continues to be colored by a
fundamental and lingering distrust of trained
killer. The increased utilization of women in
the military after 1973 until at least the early
1990s was connected primarily with military
necessity, not direct feminist pressure
(Segal, 1995). But women activists within
the military environment, both military and
civilian, have often been reluctant to selfidentify as feminists. Indeed, military
women have generally tended to eschew the
Abu Ghraib prison is about 40 kilometres
west of Baghdad. This was one of the sites
where political dissidents were incarcerated
under former ruler Saddam Hussein.
Thousands of these dissidents were tortured
and executed. After Saddam Hussein's fall,
the Abu Ghraib prison was used by
American forces in Iraq. The truth of Abu
Ghraib came to light when on Jan. 13, 2004;
Joseph Darby handed over horrific images
of detainee abuse to the Army‘s Criminal
Investigation Command (CID). The next
day, the Army launched a criminal
investigation. Three and a half months later,
CBS News 60 Minutes II and a series of
articles by Seymour Hershin the New
Yorker published photos and stories that
introduced the world to devastating scenes
of torture and suffering inside the decrepit
prison in Iraq. These stories were
accompanied by sensational photographs of
naked prisoners, some engaged in sexual
acts. Soon as evidence unfolded it became
clear that from late 2003 to early 2004,
during the Iraq war, military police
personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency
and United States Army committed human
rights violation against the prisoners held in
Abu Ghraib prison. Women were
conspicuous among the soldiers, grinning,
posing, and giving the thumbs-up sign
beside the tormented male prisoners. Three
of the first seven soldiers charged with the
abuse were women, one of whom, Lynndie
England, became the face of the Abu Ghraib
debacle.
As American women have made inroads
into the activity of war-fighting -and into
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label (Schneider and Schneider, [1988] 1992
reprint ed.).Given their relatively small
numbers in the armed forces and concern to
gain acceptance, women may be hesitant to
adopt a posture that would alienate them
from their male counterparts. But it is also
the case that military women very often take
pride in their organizations and share the
values of the military. The perceived
hostility of mainstream feminism to the
military -along with its connection with
peace activism- accounts for some of the
distance maintained by military women
(Schneider and Schneider, [1988] 1992
reprint ed. 180).
During the 1990s, when women's military
roles were changing dramatically, a number
of sex scandals occurred. These scandals
brought further attention to the issue of
gender integration in the armed forces and
energized feminist critics of the military. It
seemed self-evident to many observers that
this behavior demonstrated that the maledominated military culture fosters an
inclination to demean and assault women.
This view became more compelling in 1996
when it was discovered that male drill
sergeants were sexually assaulting female
soldiers in advanced training at Aberdeen
Proving
Ground
(Titunik,
2008,
143).Although some recent feminist
scholarship breaks with the narrow view of a
homogeneously masculine military culture
and calls attention to the complex character
of the military's gendered culture, the idea
that the military promotes stereotypically
masculine traits and generates hostility
toward women is prevalent. This idea has
gained recognition in the international
policy community, which has recently begun
to take on board the view that masculinity
can be seen as a significant explanatory
variable in political violence and therefore
as a problem that needs to be addressed by
institutional actors seeking to limit levels of
political violence in the twenty-first-century
world (Breines, Connell, and Eide, 2000).
A critical shift that occurred after the 1970‘s
is the emergence of terrorism and therefore
the idea of the counterterrorist emerges and
this is focused not primarily on regiments
but on personalities. Thus we have the
emergence of elite crack troops who
singlehandedly or in small groups decimated
the important links in the chain. This was
the period when the west thought of
terrorism as a chain and a link had to be
broken in the chain. In the late 80‘s, the shift
from the chain to the hub model is seen and
also the term epicenter of terrorism that has
dominated the rhetoric. Thus Afghanistan
was seen as the epicenter of terrorism. As a
counter to this came the images of single
men like Rambo who fought against the
communist threat in a series of films. After
the soviet threat was over, a new villain, the
jihadi emerged and therefore the agenda of
the bad, was already prepared or as some
would argue that the evil inherent in
communism was shifted to the jihadi.
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Today one is familiar with images of naked,
hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying
humiliation and abuse, with the full dossier
of the Army‘s own photographic evidence of
the scandal being made public. It is a
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shocking, night-by-night record of three
months inside Abu Ghraib‘s notorious
cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more
graphic detail than ever before, of the
rampant abuse of prisoners there. The
annotated archive also includes new details
about the role of the CIA, military
intelligence and the CID itself in abuse
captured by cameras in the fall of 2003.
Now, the pictures are familiar around the
world, along with the faces of American
soldiers - men and women – laughing,
posing, pointing, or giving the camera a
thumb up.The prisoner in perhaps the most
iconic photo from Abu Ghraib, the hooded
man standing on a box with electrical wires
attached to his hands, was being interrogated
by the CID itself for his alleged role in the
kidnapping and murder of two American
soldiers in Iraq. Another prisoner with a
deformed left hand was held at the prison
and photographed by military police on the
same night as the mock electrocution. There
was a photo of the mangled corpse of
Manadel al-Jamadi, known as the ―Ice
Man,‖ who died during interrogation by a
CIA officer. Under the Standard Operating
Procedure, some of the 279 photos and 19
videos depict controversial interrogation
tactics employed in cellblock 1A. Military
intelligence
personnel
and
civilian
contractors employed by the military appear
in some of the photographs with the military
guards, and entries from a prison logbook
captured in the archive show that in some
cases military police believed their tough
tactics were being approved by — and in
some cases ordered by — military
intelligence officers and civilian contractors.
The logbook also documents prisoner rioting
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and the regular presence of multiple OGA
(other government agency) detainees held in
the military intelligence wing. The rise of
quasi-legal organisations like the Black
water company, a military contractor
company and the disputed legal status of
Guantanamo bay all help in the state
evading the responsibility of any direct
doing and thus these actions are the legal
bearing of the private individuals not regular
army in many cases.
As soon as the truth of Abu Ghraib came to
light there were attempts at damage control.
The United States Department of Defense
removed seventeen soldiers and officers
from duty, and eleven soldiers were charged
with dereliction of duty, maltreatment and
aggravated assault. In the Court martial that
followed, between May 2004 and March
2006, eleven soldiers were convicted and
sentenced to military prison,
and
dishonorably discharged from service. Two
soldiers, Specialist Charles Graner and, and
his former fiancée, Specialist Lynndle
England were sentenced to ten years and
three years in prison. The Bush
administration, which recently announced
plans to shut the notorious prison and
transfer detainees to other sites in Iraq,
would like the world to believe that it has
dealt with the abuse, and that it‘s time to
move on. But questions about what took
place there, and who was responsible, won‘t
end with Abu Ghraib‘s closure and this
requires a deep insight into our actions
today.
Barbara Ehrenreich remarked, ―The photos
did something else to me, as a feminist:
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They broke my heart. I had no illusions
about the U.S. mission in Iraq -- whatever
exactly it is -- but it turns out that I did have
some illusions about women. She went on to
remark, ―A certain kind of feminism, or
perhaps I should say a certain kind of
feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was
a feminism that saw men as the perpetual
perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims
and male sexual violence against women as
the root of all injustice. Rape has repeatedly
been an instrument of war and, to some
feminists; it was beginning to look as if war
was an extension of rape. There seemed to
be at least some evidence that male sexual
sadism was connected to our species' tragic
propensity for violence. That was before we
had seen female sexual sadism in action.
(Ehrenreich, 2004) She was very right in
her conclusions that, what we need is a
tough new kind of feminism with no
illusions. Women do not change institutions
simply by assimilating into them, only by
consciously deciding to fight for change. We
need a feminism that teaches a woman to
say no -- not just to the date rapist or overly
insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to
the military or corporate hierarchy within
which she finds herself. In short, we need a
kind of feminism that aims not just to
assimilate into the institutions that men have
created over the centuries, but to infiltrate
and subvert them( Ehrenreich,2004).
individuals, and the social culture in which
they are embedded. Very little focus has
been on what war has done to our society
today and what it does to both men and
women.
President Bush said, ‗Their
treatment does not reflect the nature of the
American people. That‘s not the way we do
things in America‘, thus distancing himself
from the perpetrators at Abu Ghraib and
implying that they are evil, deviant, and
fundamentally
different
from
most
Americans (Milbank, 2004).Others have
pointed out to the stress as a risk factor for
aggressive behavior; conformity with peers
obedience to authority; and the devaluation
of those who are not part of our social group
(Fiske et al., 2004). Yet the fact remains that
there was a large majority of people who
agreed with what had happened at Abu
Ghraib and silently also approved of it.
It is long-established, that US imperialism
has, since 9/11, manifested itself more
aggressively as an overt empire. Empire
here is intended in Hardt and Negri‘s sense
of an all-embracing world system of global
capital that is distinct from traditional
territorial imperialism: ―Empire establishes
no territorial center of power and does not
rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a
decentered and deteriorating apparatus of
rule that progressively incorporates the
entire global realm within its open
expanding frontiers (Hardt and Negri, 2000).
It is fair to say that the United States has
come to be dominated by two grand and
dangerous hallucinations: the promise of
benign US globalization and the permanent
threat of the ―war on terror.‖ One cannot
understand the extravagance of the violence
Most of the analyses of Abu Ghraib have
focused on causation and responsibility how
such atrocities could be committed, what
led up to the specific acts of torture and
abuse, and who (or what) is responsible. The
overriding concern is with understanding
how torture can occur and what aspects of
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to which the US government has committed
itself after 9/11—two countries invaded,
thousands of innocent people imprisoned,
killed, and tortured—unless we grasp a
defining feature of our moment, that is, a
deep and disturbing doubleness with respect
to power. Taking shape, as it now does,
around fantasies of global omnipotence
(Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End
All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of
impending attack, the United States has
entered the domain of paranoia: dream
world and catastrophe. (McClintock, 2009,
51). Abu Ghraib‘s imperial regime of
sodomy can be understood as a means of
disciplining the body into a hierarchy in
which the sodomitical — the anal, the oral,
the animal — is subjugated to vision as the
noblest sense, a disembodied intellectual
force. This division between the senses and
the mind has become embodied as Western
common sense, so naturalized that it is hard
to think of other ways of being. Empire
renders this divide spatially, so that America
becomes ―mind‖ and the rest of the world,
especially the Muslim world, becomes
―body.‖(Mirzoeff, 2006, 36). There is
paranoia about ethnic cleaning and to make
the world a safe zone.
detainees to foreign countries whose
regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights
violations inside detention facilities in Iraq.
We have many records of this torture. In
mid April 2002, Camp X-Ray was shut and
replaced by a multi-building complex
known as Camp Delta. The harshest wing of
Delta is called Camp Echo. Hicks was held
in Camp Echo, in a solitary cell. He was not
allowed outside of his cell for exercise in the
sunlight, from July 2003 until March 10,
2004. The effects of solitary confinement
were profound. A letter sent home by him,
from the base in late 2004 reads:
Dear Dad, I feel as though I’m teetering on
the edge of losing my sanity after such a
long ordeal—the last year of it being in
isolation. There are a number of things the
authorities could do to help to improve my
living conditions, but low morale and
depression seems to be the order of the day.
Hicks remains at Guantánamo, just one
victim of American torture (Otterman2007,
7).
According to the official Standard Operating
Procedures (SOP), a team comprises a
clinical psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a
mental health specialist whose foremost
mission is to ‗consult on interrogation
approach techniques‘. It is also their job to
inform interrogators about ‗cultural issues
pertaining to the detainee population‘ and to
provide ‗input into the development of
strategies for increasing positive behaviour,
such as implementation of incentive
programs, reinforcement programs for
positive behaviour, and increasing access to
Abu Ghraib is only one small incident of the
systematic tactics the United States has used
in four-plus years of the global war on
terror. There have been many allegations of
abuse, torture and other practices that violate
international law, from holding prisoners
without charging them at Guantánamo Bay
and other secretive U.S. military bases and
prison facilities around the world to the
practice of ―rendition,‖ or the transporting of
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recreational and social activities‘. Oddly,
teams are also supposed to craft ‗strategies
for increasing pro-American sentiment‘
among detainees. (Otterman, 2007, 146).
Hence the system of torturing for the
detainees was well developed and in place
and beyond any jurisdiction.
have treated the prisoners that way if they
had
been
white.
England
looked
extravagantly outraged. Roy says, ―That's
the first time I've heard that. One of the guys
convicted was African-American. I don't
remember any overt racism. You're in a war,
and you're the good guys and they're the bad
guys, and that's how most Americans see the
world. And those were the bad
guys.‖(Brockes, The Guardian, 2009)
Lynndie England, the 29-year-old former
U.S. Army Reserve prison guard who was
convicted of abusing detainees in the 2004
Abu Ghraib scandal, said in an interview,
that she doesn't feel sorry for the Iraqi
prisoners she was accused of abusing.She
believed the prisoners were getting what
they deserved. Their lives are better. They
got the better end of the deal,‖ she said.
―They weren't innocent. They're trying to
kill us, and you want me to apologize to
them? It's like saying sorry to the
enemy.‖(Nina Mandell, 2012, New York
daily news).But England, who served almost
two years in a military prison, said she has
lost sleep over whether the uproar
concerning the released Abu Ghraib abuse
photos cost the lives of fellow American
troops. ―I think about it all the time—
indirect deaths that were my fault,‖( Roza,
Lauren ,2012, The Envoy).It would be the
testimony of England, Charles Graner and
the five other soldiers identified in the
photos that when they arrived at the prison,
the abusive practices - keeping inmates
naked, making them wear female underwear
and crawl on the floor - were already
established in some form as part of preinterrogation ―softening up‖ techniques
approved by military intelligence officers(
Brockes, Emma, The Guardian, 2009).
When it is pointed out that they wouldn't
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The Abu Ghraib photographs are analyzed
in the context of orientalism in the U.S.
chain of command, a phenomenon linked to
what feminists call ―the politics of the gaze‖
--the vulnerability of women and other
subalterns to virtual as well as actual
violation by those in positions of
domination. They are compared to evidence
of other rituals of violence, such as
lynching, orchestrated by elites and imitated
by popular-culture entrepreneurs. The sexual
politics of Abu Ghraib includes the
deployment of female figures to brand,
scapegoat, and repair the damage from
discovery of the photographs, thereby
trivializing the policies and behaviors of
U.S. officials and eliding the American
public's responsibility for the continued U.S.
failure to condemn, much less to halt, the
torture carried out in their name (Tetreault,
2006).
Abu Ghraib became a byword for sexual
humiliation and torture, and the events
which occurred there provoked outrage
across the world, and questions were raised
as to how and why occupying forces had
sunk to such depths of depravity. Men‘s
participation in combat depends on
feminizing the enemy and enacting rape
symbolically (and sometimes literally)
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thereby using gender to symbolize
domination (Goldstein, 2001). It is
Goldstein's position that men in combat use
feminized needs to exert their dominance
over the enemy, engaging in both literal and
symbolic sexual acts to achieve both
psychological and physiological superiority
over the enemy. By feminizing the enemy as
the object of penetration (real and
imagined), American imperial military
culture supermasculinizes not only its own
male soldiers, but also its female soldiers
who can partake of the feminization of Iraqi
men. Thus both male and female American
(and British) soldiers can participate in
sodomizing Iraqi soldiers with chemical
lights, beat them, urinate on them, force
them to perform homosexual acts (while
hurling racial and sexual epithets at them),
unleash dogs on them, and kill them. Such
practices clearly demonstrate that white
American male sexuality exhibits certain
sadistic attributes in the presence of
nonwhite men (and women) over which
white (and sometimes black) Americans
(and Brits) have government sanctioned
racialized
power
(Massad,
2007,46).Romances are imaginary scripts
for the necessity of violence. It is not
surprising, therefore, that nearly all the
elements of the current wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan – torture, eroticized violence…
[etc.] – are parts of the narratives of various
romances.‖(Ebert and Zavarzadeh, 2008,
99).
some of the happenings and project itself as
a modern benevolent state and hence step
into a grey zone, where the state knows what
is happening and yet does not. . In many of
the writings on Abu Ghraib, Lynndie
England was ‗othered‘ from the US public.
Her physical appearance and engagement in
torture called into question not only her
womanhood, but also her ‗Americaness‘.
Representations of England disconnected
her from the wider US public, with Bush
and Rumsfeld explaining the abuses as the
work of ‗rogue‘ soldiers, a ‗few bad apples‘
(Enloe, 2004). ‗Real‘ femininity could now
be constructed in opposition to England as
she took on the identity of the ‗other‘.
Othering Lynndie England not only had the
effect of ensuring gendered assumptions of
femininity remained undisturbed, it also –
like the military wives and nurses –
provided another body for militarised
masculinity
to
be
rearticulated
through(Welland, 2010 )
In the attempt to set right the happenings in
Abu Ghraib, the state also kept itself aloof.
While a Pre Colonial state would not have
been ashamed of its use of force in the
modern state there is an attempt to disown
They were trying to humiliate us, break our
pride. We are men. It’s okay if they beat me.
Beatings don’t hurt us, it’s just a blow. But
no one would want their manhood to be
shattered. They wanted us to feel as though
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In many of these scenarios, there was an
attempt to enact a stylized power imbalance,
with a sexual overtone. As such, these
practices align with the sexualized power
imbalance that comprises the prototypical or
traditional heterosexual relationship, with
man in a dominant or active role and woman
in a submissive or passive role (Zurbriggen,
2008). To support this reading, Zurbriggen
points to the testimony of Dhia al-Shweiri, a
former prisoner at Abu Ghraib, who told the
associated press that:
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we were women, the way women feel, and
this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman (
Zurbriggen, 2008).
change in attitudes towards relations
between men and younger boys. Whereas
the Western notion of homosexuality was
not relevant to the sets of social definitions
in earlier periods, the moral climate in
Turkey and the Arab world after the late
nineteenth century became one of censorial
horror at ―sexual deviance‖ and practices
which had once been commonplace were
condemned.
This testimony underscores how the tortures
at Abu Ghraib reflected an assumed
hierarchy with American men and women at
the top and Iraqi men, occupying the
subjugated, ―feminine‖ role– a system of
power relations conveyed most starkly in the
photo of Charles Graner and Lynndie
England giving a thumbs up to the camera
while standing over a pyramid of naked and
faceless Iraqi male prisoners.
In understanding gendered war roles, the
potential for war matters more than the
outbreak of particular wars (Goldstein,
2001, 3). The constructions of masculinity
(across cultures and belief systems) motivate
soldiers to fight; because war becomes a
‗test of manhood, and that men‘s war roles
are determined by the supportive roles (of
‗bush wives‘) provided by women. In his
analysis on how gender shapes war systems
and in the making of militarized
masculinity, he contends that just as Hegel‘s
―beautiful Soul‖ protects ‗the appearance of
purity by cultivating innocence‘ about the
cruel world, women‘s dominance in
household sphere creates a kind of
metaphysical refuge for traumatize soldiers,
a counterweight to hellish war (
Goldstein,2001,
323). Although this
gendering of psychological spheres, he
argues, does not seem sufficient to account
for gendered war roles, it reinforces peace
processes. Although analysis on the
gendered nature of war had, a priori, been
male-centric, the patterns of civil wars
however show that women are increasingly
becoming perpetrators of violence (which is
a distortion of the dominant-masculinemilitaristic social order).Males occupy the
ongoing role of potential fighters, even in
The East has had a more open and liberal
attitude towards sex and more sexual
tolerance. Said‘s has argued that just as the
various colonial possessions – quite apart
from the economic benefit to metropolitan
Europe – were useful as places to send
wayward sons… so the Orient was a place
where one could look for sexual experience
unobtainable in Europe… but even that
quest, if repeated by enough people, could
(and did) become as regulated and uniform
as learning itself. In time ―Oriental sex‖ was
as standard a commodity as any other
available in the mass culture, could have it if
they wished without necessarily going to the
Orient.‖ (Said, 2003, 190).As many in the
Middle East began to develop more
Westernized ideas about sexuality during the
nineteenth
century,
previous
sexual
tolerance and relative openness were
increasingly replaced by disapproval. In a
fascinating development in representations
of Oriental sexuality, historical depictions of
lasciviousness and lust associated with
Oriental peoples themselves and are buried
within discourses of repression and sexual
intolerance. The prime example is the
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relatively peaceful societies. This regularity
in gender roles in contrast with much greater
diversity found both in war itself and in
gender roles outside war (Goldstein, 2001,
10)
making of war—and in the creation of both
Charles Taylor, as Warlord, and his National
Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). In later
years of the war, NPFL‘s top female
political operative, Grace Minor, shaped the
(failed) outcomes of the peace processes in
Liberia between 1994 and 1997 (Aning
1998). In Uganda, the current ultra-religious
(Christian) position of the Lord‘s Resistance
Army of Joseph Kony was shaped by Alice
Lakwena‘s Holy Spirit Movement (HSM).(
Kimberly, 2008, 389-404).
The overwhelming message in all that
occurred was that masculinity is crucial to
the ways in which war gains its meaning and
legitimacy in social life. This idea has even
gained recognition in the international
policy community, which has recently begun
to take on board the view that masculinity
can be seen as a significant explanatory
variable in political violence and therefore
as a problem that needs to be addressed by
institutional actors seeking to limit levels of
political violence in the twenty-first-century
world (Breines, Connell, and Eide 2000,
390-391).Similarly, as Walter Laquer, the
author of the seminal volume on terrorism
followed by the sequel new terrorism has
pointed out the difficulty of defining
terrorism and says that there are more than
258 definitions. This has led to a confusing
situation and has also spawned an equal
number of counter terrorism measures some
of which are dubious (Laquer, 2001).
One can see a similar ―phenomena in Abu
Ghraib. War justified anything that
happened and the aim was to bring the
enemy to its knee. The writing was clear in
the walls and loud proclamations were being
made. In fact there was a biblical
justification that was being given. ―I don’t
feel sorry for the prisoners at Abu Ghraib,
they're fortunate they weren't killed in the
first place. If I were there I wouldn't be
taking many prisoners. I'd kill without mercy
that is the job of a soldier. That may sound
terrible to you, but we are dealing with a
particular type of religion and society there.
The same type that Moses came across
called the Midianites. In Numbers chapter
31 God told Moses to kill all the men, boys
and the women who had slept with a man
(Rabbi Stanley, Mosaic Report, 2004). As
far as treating prisoners of war humanly, I
think the Geneva Convention should only
apply if both parties are enforcing it. It's
foolish for us to keep rules that the other
side doesn't want to follow. If they can
behead our guys, we should be allowed to
do the same thing to theirs. Fair is fair. They
want to go to Allah so bad... let's get them
For example, during the Rwandan genocide
extremist Hutu women were actively
involved in the perpetration of genocidal
violations (African Rights, 1995). In Sierra
Leone, Agnes Deen-Jalloh played a
formidable role in the making of the Rebel
group, the Revolutionary United Front
(RUF) ( Abdullah, 1998, 230) and by the
end of the war, thousands of women
(whether coerced or voluntarily) were
combatants (Mazurana and Carlson,2004,
6). In Liberia, President Madam Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf was very active in the
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on their way. (Rabbi Stanley, Mosaic
Report, 2004)
most of us recognize or want to
acknowledge. In a situation that implicitly
gives permission for suspending moral
values, many of us can be morphed into
creatures alien to our usual natures.
(Zimbardo, 2004a, 2004b) In some sense,
then, it is not surprising that atrocities
occurred, given that so many preconditions
were present. But in addition there was
secrecy, no accountability, no visible chain
of command, conflicting demands on the
guards from the CIA and civilian
interrogators, no rules enforced for
prohibited acts, encouragement for breaking
the will of the detainees, and no challenges
by many bystanders who observed the evil
but did not blow the whistle.
The mass spectacle of violation of
September 11th had played a major role in
shaping the American conception of gender,
sexuality and safety (Hall, Amy Laura,
2013). It marked the symbolic castration of
the West. Hall reads the subsequent
popularity of the TV show 24 with its macho
torturing hero Jack Bauer as ―a kind of
collective catharsis – a way many
Americans sought manageably to endure
violation and also to recalibrate a myth of
afflicted, but yet still potent, masculinity.‖
Hall further suggests ―that the gender
politics of such shows may take their form
from the same cultural impulse that led to
the ritualized emasculation of Muslim
prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib,‖
pointing out that sexual violation was a
routine feature of torture at the facility.(Hall,
Amy Laura, 2013).Since the terrorist attacks
on 9/11 and the subsequent Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, popular American television
and cinema have participated in the
normalization and justification of state
torture. Most of the specific conditions that
have been found to set the stage for abuse
were present there. Some of these are (a)
boredom, fear, stress, harsh conditions; (b)
encouragement by authorities (e.g. the CIA
and military intelligence (Hersh 2004a,
2004b); (c) dehumanization of prisoners;(d)
extreme power
differential
between
prisoners and guards; (e) diffusion of
responsibility;
(f)
presumption
of
anonymity; (g) no sanctions; and (h)
modeling of behaviour by peers and
superiors. Human behavior is much more
under the control of situational forces than
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Women earlier had no access into the
military except in lower ranks. Women
entered the military as ‗camp followers‘;
‗soldiers‘ wives, whores, man servants [and]
maids‘ (Enloe, 1988 [1983]: 1), performing
tasks essential to any large military force but
considered ideologically peripheral to its
primary function – combat. When shocking
photos of military prisoners being
humiliated and tortured by military
personnel were released, part of the shock
was in seeing women engaged in torture.
Following the release was a media
fascination surrounding Lynndie England
over the other perpetrators. She claims
viewers were shocked to see a woman
commit such atrocities, and are more
comfortable viewing females and Army
wives or nurses, rather than in typically
masculine acts of torture. In response to the
scandal in general, the military gave the
―bad apple‖ explanation, saying that only a
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few bad people engage is this type of
behaviour. Cynthia describes how this
explanation allows the behaviour to continue
without any real reassessment of the
military, and furthermore she suggests the
whole barrel has gone bad. Through several
methods the military has become more
susceptible to such abuse. First, they shrank
down definition of torture, allowing abusive
techniques to be used in gathering
information. Second, officials who approve
of and use torture have been and are
continually put into major positions of
power within the military. And finally,
intense pressure to get information has
blurred lines between military policing and
interrogation. Furthermore, personnel at the
prison described an atmosphere of chaos and
coercion. Drawing on Judith Butler‘s work
on performativity (Butler 1999 [1990],
1993), militarised masculinity, like any
gendered identity, is understood as neither
stable, nor ever fully attainable. Instead it is
an ‗identity tenuously constituted in time,
instituted…through a stylized repetition of
acts‘ (Butler, 1999, 179). The gendered,
militarised body therefore is per formative
inasmuch that it has ‗no ontological status
apart from the various acts which constitute
its reality‘ (Butler, 1999, 173) 5. However,
as militarised masculinity becomes the norm
it can never be fully internalised and
gendered identities/militarised masculinity
rely on its constant re-enactment.
pornographic paintings and postcards which
proliferated in the nineteenth century, yet
here the standard device of the naked
captive (usually a slave girl – the odalisque)
and the clothed captor (the tyrannical
Sultan) are reversed: in some pictures, ―the
man is the captive of the woman‖ (Tétreault
, 2006, 34), in others ―a clothed – and
grinning – American woman lean[s] over a
pile of naked Arab men while over them all
stands a large, clothed – and smiling –
American man. The ethnic/gender hierarchy
could not be clearer‖ (Tétreault, 2006,
34).The centre for war games established by
the Woodrow Wilson centre has clearly
recognised the role of a digital war after the
first Iraqi war and in this direction a vast
video game market has latched on these war
games and thus the self of the public who
play these games has also become
brutalised.
Iraqis are posited by American super
masculine fighters and bomber pilots as
women and feminized men to be penetrated
by the missiles and bombs ejected from
American warplanes. By feminizing the
enemy as the object of penetration (real and
imagined), American imperial military
culture super masculinises not only its own
male soldiers, but also its female soldiers
who can partake of the feminization of Iraqi
men. Thus both male and female American
(and British) soldiers can participate in
sodomizing Iraqi soldiers with chemical
lights, beat them, urinate on them, force
them to perform homosexual acts (while
hurling racial and sexual epithets at them),
unleash dogs on them, and kill them. Such
practices clearly demonstrate that white
American male sexuality exhibits certain
War then becomes a spectacle and Oriental
spectacle, as the popular vehicle of
colonialist ideology, and as exposing the
Oriental to the politics of the gaze.
(Tétreault, 2006, 34) The Abu Ghraib
photographs
mimic
the
Orientalist
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sadistic attributes in the presence of nonwhite men (and women) over which white
(and sometimes black) Americans (and
Brits)
have
government
sanctioned
racialized
power.‖
(Massad,
2007,
46). Woven through all of Flaubert‘s
Oriental
experiences,
exciting
or
disappointing, is an almost uniform
association between the Orient and sex. In
making this association Flaubert was neither
the first nor the most exaggerated instance
of a remarkably persistent motif in Western
attitudes to the Orient. And indeed the motif
itself is singularly unvaried, although
Flaubert‘s genius may have done more than
anyone else‘s could to give it artistic dignity.
Why the Orient still seems to suggest not
only fecundity but sexual promise (and
threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire,
deep generative energies, is something on
which one could speculate‖ (Said, 2003,
188)
disruption comes at considerable cost.
Foucault argues that sex is not easily
deciphered, but by reconstructing repression
we can analyze it. In other words, repression
is a factor which brings sex into discourse so
we can talk about it. By speaking about sex,
one has the appearance of a ―deliberate
transgression‖ that places the speaker, to a
certain extent, outside the reach of power
(Foucault, 1990).
The boundaries of the militarised masculine
identity are traced by an excluded feminine
identity. Relying on the absent and
denigrated ‗other‘ of femininity forits own
coherence
and
stability,
militarised
masculinity is rooted as much in not being
weak, vulnerable, or in need of saving, as it
is in being strong, powerful and heroic.
Though much has been written and today
the claims are no longer valid that man and
masculinity are innately violent, and woman
and femininity are nonviolent, yet it cannot
be denied that warfare has appeared to
remain
intrinsically
connected
to
masculinity and peace to femininity.In many
of the description, masculinity is constructed
as something fixed which has to be emulated
by women in order to be accepted. However,
hegemonic masculinity is—and always has
been—a dynamic, rather than fixed,
construction. Manhood is typically defined
in relation to a socio-economic or cultural
―other,‖ for example, property ownership,
nationalism, or paternity. Ideological shifts
in any of these spheres - prompted perhaps,
by an economic downturn or an elevated
consciousness resulting from racial, gender,
or sexual liberation movements necessitates a corresponding shift in cultural
Power and privilege are not distributed
evenly across race, ethnicity, gender, age,
class, or sexual orientation. Many strategies
are used consciously and unconsciously to
maintain power and privileges. Both men
and women make use of them. The stronger
use them against the weak. Foucault shows
that Victorian sexuality required repression
which ―operated as a sentence to disappear,
but also as an injunction to silence, an
affirmation of nonexistence‖. Such ―halting
logic‖ was forced to make a few concessions
for illegitimate sexualities. These ―Other
Victorians‖ were regulated to a separate
space of tolerance, ―the brothel and the
mental hospital‖. Repression is the
―fundamental
link
between
power,
knowledge, and sexuality‖ and so its
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definitions of masculinity. Abu Ghraib as
the most violent and decisive of human acts
is the paradigmatic masculine enterprise
ISSN 2348 - 7674
with both men and women participating and
a pointer to the increasing brutalization of
society in modern times.
References:
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