Playing the Hero Card: Masculinism, State Power and Security Feminism in Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Elisabeth Anker, Laurie Naranch and Holloway Sparks for helpful comments on earlier iterations of this article.

Notes

¹ Wendy Brown defines prerogative power as “the legitimate arbitrary power in policymaking and legitimate monopolies of internal and external violence in the police and military.” See (Brown 176).

² While these tropes are not entirely new and can be seen in earlier instantiations of colonialism and militarization, the contours of the cultural project of the War on Terror are specific. See (Battacharyya) and (Puar and Rai).

³ One can think of at least half a dozen popular terror-themed television shows that have dominated the airwaves and ratings in the last decade and a half including 24, Homeland, Sleepercell, Quantico, the Blacklist, and State of Affairs.

⁴ It should be noted that television shows after 9/11 have attempted to depict other types of terrorism, including right-wing extremism and the threat of communist insurgents, yet the vast majority of cultural depictions of terrorism link back to Islam and particularly the Middle East.

⁵ As Mahmood Mamdani argues, good Muslims embrace the American liberal ethos while bad Muslims bask in the backwardness of their religion (Mamdani 17–20).

⁶ By political, I mean the narratives deployed by politicians, including former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, but also popular forms of culture that convey political messages including popular news magazines such as Time and Newsweek as well as books, films, YouTube videos, and television.

⁷ Most of the victims of the crash at the World Trade Center were men.

⁸ There are clearly cases in which women’s stories have come to the forefront. Many of us recognize the names of Lynndie England or Jessica Lynch or have read stories about the US Marine Corps use of Female Engagement Teams but these names and stories rarely occupy the dominant cultural construction of heroism in the war against terror. In the case of England, she represents the sexual violence and barbarity of the American military. Lynch, in contrast, reifies a masculinist narrative that questions the ability of women to fight and the need for men to rescue women. And as Keally McBride and Annick T.R. Wibben point out Female Engagement Teams reflect a gendered narrative about the role of counterinsurgency rather than masculinist drive toward security and counterterrorism (McBride and Wibben 199–215).

⁹ There is no doubt that there are other important female figures in the War on Terror ranging from former Secretary of States Rice and Clinton to the infamous subject of the Abu Ghraib photographs Lynndie England. I choose two partially fictionalized characters, Maya in the film Zero Dark Thirty and Carrie Mathison in the series Homeland to explore the gendered cultural constructions of the War on Terror as they have an immense impact on the average American audience, perhaps even more so than news articles of real actors. In turn, women are also strikingly included in counterinsurgency projects and offer a more complex account of gender and security in these activities, yet it is important to note the popular cultural focus of American film and television continues to focus on a narrow form of security as necessitated by violence and vengeance. For an excellent analysis of the production of gender in counterinsurgency see McBride and Wibben 199–215; Mesok 64–68; Khalili 1471–1491.

¹⁰ By homoterritorialism I mean the perpetuation of territorial conquest through masculinist relationships in which women are rendered objects of contest. Territory, here, is not only conceptualized as the control of space but as a regulative form of power that helps constitute our very imagining of the world. Thus, “homoterritorialism” is not simply about the geography of empire but about the ideological dominance of a certain masculinist worldview (Deylami 178–179).

¹¹ See also (Sjoberg and Peet 163–182).

¹² This gendered orientalism can even be seen in the most feminized encounters with the Muslim Other including counterinsurgency projects that rely on the ostensible connections between female military personnel and Afghani women. For example, Elizabeth Mesok deftly shows that Female Engagement Teams in counterinsurgency projects produced counterinsurgency vis-à-vis particularly tropes of gender, race, religion and sexuality to “symbolically define the United States as culturally superior and benevolent, as respectful of presumed religious mores and committed to women’s equality” (61). While Mesok deftly shows the way in which traditional tropes of femininity were utilized to engage both Afghani women and other soldiers through gendered affective practices and how those affective practices can and could challenge the gendered nature of the military and war-making it is important to note that these practices coincide and even shore up a conception of institutionalized state security that grounds itself in a logic that continues to idealize a certain form of racialized white masculinity.

¹³ See the leaked pictures from Abu Ghraib in which male prisoners are forced to simulate fellatio on other prisoners or are stacked in nude pyramids on top of one another, as an example of this.

¹⁴ Most famously the Cofounder and President of the Feminist Majority, Eleanor Smeal, came out in favor of the US attack on Afghanistan as a liberatory necessity in the wake of the vicious patriarchy of the Taliban. For a critique of the Feminist Majorities connection to feminist imperialism (Russo 557–580).

¹⁵ For a critique of this kind of liberatory feminism see Mahmood (1–39).

¹⁶ There is no doubt that women have been essential to the war effort but both in terms of active decision making and the day-to-day works of combat, men have dominated the prerogative aspects of the state.

¹⁷ Brown focuses on abstract rationality in terms of the bureaucratic modality of the state but in many ways intelligence operations within the security apparatuses of the state are heavily bureaucratized.

¹⁸ The beginning of season one starts with Carrie’s return to Langley after she is put on probation for conducting an unauthorized operation in Iraq.

¹⁹ Interestingly, we might also read Brody as the negation of abstract rationality. As an idealized soldier coming home to reaffirm American exceptionalism, he fails because of his emotional connections to the death of Isa, the young son of his captor.

²⁰ Carrie’s reinstatement into the CIA is not predicated on the fact that she was correct about Brody’s treason but rather was a product of necessity.

²¹ We also see this choice in Saul’s story with his wife, except that she essentially leaves him for the simple fact that he is never around. It is clear that for many years he had chosen his commitment to national responsibility over his familial obligations.

²² The camera pans to a picture of the two them of Maya’s desk after Jessica’s death.