The ‘Afghan Girls’: Media representations and frames of war

Abstract

In this article, I survey almost a decade of visual representations of Afghan women, which have emanated from first world media organizations and have circulated in transnational media space. Only one of the photographs is explicitly linked with a political discussion. However, all of the photographs contribute to a set of possible statements about veiling and unveiling. Through discourse analysis informed by a genealogical approach, I demonstrate how these photographs contribute to the constitution of a set of power relations whereby the United States and its allies have sovereignty and where it seems ‘natural’ that these sovereign nations can intervene in the affairs of another nation, in the name of ‘saving’ the women of that nation. I argue that these photographs are part of the constitution of a particular regime of representation, where media representations are inextricably linked with military conduct.

Acknowledgements

This essay developed from a Professorial Lecture presented in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong in 2010, and papers presented to the Sydney Feminist History Group and the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 2011. I have benefited from discussion on those occasions, and from conversations with Fiona Paisley, Sneja Gunew and Ramaswami Harindranath. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for their comments. Thanks to Erik Ropers for assistance in obtaining permission to reproduce illustrations.

Notes

 1. The same photograph appears both inside and on the back cover of the Reuters' collection, Afghanistan: Lifting the Veil, and is used to illustrate Sullivan (2002, 10).

 2. For definitions of the fetish, fetishism, and fetishisation, see: Erwin (2002, 414–6); Wright (1992, 41–45, 113–20, 327–31). Mulvey (1984 [1975], 361–73).

 3. A series of classic works bear titles which are variations on the theme of ‘Unveiling’ (Forster 1829; Woodsmall 1983[1936]; Fanon 1965[1957]; Mernissi 1975).

 4. Patrick Wolfe (2002, 380) has commented on the ‘historical purchase of the “white men saving brown women from brown men” sentence, which as the crocodile tears that fell with the bombs on the women of Afghanistan attest, captures a feature of transnational domination that continues into the present’. Wolfe is referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's (1999, 287) use of the phrase ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ in her account of the debates over the practice of sati (the immolation of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre) in colonial India.

 5. For other discussions of Steve McCurry's photographs of Sharbat Gula, see Mackie (2003, 9–11), Szörényi (2004, 2–12) Hesford and Kozol (2005, 1–5). In this article I take a genealogical approach which covers a wider range of representations over a longer time span in the context of a broader representational regime which, I argue, is shaped by militarism.

 6. The staging of the photograph is not apparent in the final product which appears on the front cover of National Geographic. However, a series of the original shots is reproduced in the documentary, In Search of the Afghan Girl. The other shots have different coloured backgrounds, suggesting that McCurry tried different backdrops (which appear to be the neutral-coloured wall of the schoolroom and then the green of the schoolroom door which provides such a stunning contrast to the young woman's clothes, and which picks up the green of her eyes).

 7. The features of this genre are apparent in a collection of McCurry's photographs, Portraits (1999). Each right-hand page of the volume takes the form of a photograph of one individual (occasionally more than one person: for example, a mother and child). The facing page simply provides the location and date of the photograph. Very few of the photographs are of identifiable individuals. The photograph of the still-anonymous ‘Afghan Girl’ appears on the cover of the collection. I was able to identify Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, and actor Jimmy Stewart, but their photographs were simply captioned as ‘Rangoon, Burma, 1995’, ‘Dharmsala, India, 1997’ and ‘Los Angeles, USA, 1991’, (McCurry 1999, unpaginated).

 8. See also the cover of the book Unveiled: Voices of Women in Afghanistan (Logan 2002), where the different coloured type used for the elements ‘un’ and ‘veiled’ in the first word of the title means that the word seems to simultaneously say ‘veiled’ and ‘unveiled’.

 9. On the theme of technology in this quest, see also: Mackie (2003, 11) and Szörényi (2004, 8–10).

10. By the time of the Iraq conflict, the management of the media by the US government and military through the practices of embedding, and through prohibitions on depictions of dead (US) soldiers was the subject of controversy (Butler 2009, 63–100).

11. Among the many recent books which deploy this trope, see: Yasgur (2002); Logan (2002); Rasool (2002), Goodwin (2002 [1995]); Reuters (2002). See also countless newspaper and magazine articles, including: Waldman (2001, 3); Sullivan (2002, 10). There was also an earlier wave of books about the oppressiveness of Islamic regimes, some of which were reissued in the wake of the events of 2001–2. The recent wave of books about Afghanistan revives some of the conventional themes of these books. Geraldine Brooks’ (1995) book about Islamic women–Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women–manages to avoid mentioning the veil in the title, but the use of the word ‘hidden’ still suggests a secret to be uncovered.

12. See, for example: Logan (2002) Unveiled: Voices of Women in Afghanistan; Goodwin (2002 [1995]) Price of Honor: Muslim women Lift the Veil of Silence on The Islamic World; Voices behind the Veil; Rasool (2002) My Journey Behind the Veil: Conversations with Muslim Women.

13. See, inter alia, Benard (2002) Veiled Courage: Inside the Afghan Women's Resistance; ‘Beneath the Veil: Inside the Taliban's Afghanistan’ (2001); Mernissi (1975) Beyond the Veil; Rasool (2002) My Journey Behind the Veil: Conversations with Muslim Women; Rodriguez and Ohlson (2007) Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes behind the Veil; Yasgur (2002) Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom.

14. Orientalist paintings focused on extreme punishments such as beheadings, or the extreme violence of Sardanapalus, who had the women of his harem murdered and his possessions destroyed so that his victor in battle would not have access to them. See Kabbani (1986).

15. The cover on the occasion of Bin Laden's death has a photograph of Bin Laden's face, superimposed with a red cross, and above the Time masthead, the words ‘Special Report: The End of Bin Laden’ (Time, 20 May 2011). The edition on the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William has a medium shot of the couple kissing, with the words ‘The Royal Wedding April 29, 2011’ in small print, and the words ‘Special Commemorative Issue’ above the Time masthead (Time, 16 May 2011). Aisha's photograph, by comparison, is supported with a total of 30 words: ‘What happens if we leave Afghanistan by Aryn Baker’, and a further 21 words in smaller type describing what happened to her. Above the masthead are the words ‘Inside: Joe Klein on the challenge in Pakistan’.

16. Needless to say, the headline is somewhat illogical, for the US troops stationed in Afghanistan for almost nine years had been unable to protect Aisha. As one commentator noted, ‘A correct and accurate caption would be “What Is Still Happening, Even Though We Are in Afghanistan”’ (Scocca 2010). (In June 2011 President Obama announced the gradual withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.)

17. Aisha can also, then, be connected with a series of women who have travelled to North America and have received cosmetic surgery. One such would be Kim Phuc, the young woman photographed running away from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War (Chong 2000). Others would be the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, who traveled to the United States for cosmetic surgery to disguise their disfigurement due to the bombing (Barker 1986). In all of these stories, the United States is recast as benefactor rather than aggressor (despite the fact that both Kim Phuc and the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ had suffered disfigurement due to US military attacks). Like the story of the search for Sharbat Gula, these stories underline the technical superiority of the United States.

18. In this, it is similar to the photograph of Kim Phuc, the young girl photographed running away from the napalm attack during the Vietnam War.

19. As Butler paraphrases Adorno: ‘And here we have to see–as Adorno cautioned us–that violence in the name of civilization reveals its own barbarism, even as it “justifies” its own violence by presuming the barbaric subhumanity of the other against which that violence is waged’ (Butler 2009, 93; Adorno and Horkheimer 1972; Adorno 2005).