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Abstract
This article explores how the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein manipulated gender constructs in its nationalist and political discourses to maintain its authoritarian power in an environment of external and domestic conflict. It charts a relationship between war and the sexual objectification of Iraqi women, who came to be objectified as symbols of the nation and social markers of its boundaries in regime propaganda during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988). A sexualized political discourse that conflated external threats to territory with sexual threats to Iraqi women was used by the regime to unite the nation with a potent sense of belonging and galvanize it to battle. This sex/threat paradigm was in turn played out on women's bodies as the regime began controlling their sexuality as a means of patrolling the symbolic borders of the nation, imagined as an endogamous space with Saddam as the head of the national family. Following the Gulf War and the revolt of minority groups against the regime, I look at how the regime sought to re-establish control over its restive population following the 1991 Gulf War by advocating a strict code of morality, accompanied by overtures to Islam and tribalism. Women viewed to have breached the national moral order were targeted for violence by the regime, which in encouraging violence toward women sought to deflect internal violence and tension away from itself.
Notes
1. In keeping with how most Iraqis referred to their former leader, whose monolithic cult of personality has been well documented, I shall refer to the former Iraqi President as just Saddam. For the purposes of this study, I also use the terms regime and Saddam interchangeably.
2. In March 1991, Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq and ethnic Kurds in the north staged uprisings that were brutally suppressed by the regime's Republican Guard. Thousands of Kurds fled over Iraq's northern borders, leading the UN to partition part of northern Iraq into what it called a “safe haven.” The revolt became known as the 1991 Intifada.
3. The interviews were conducted as part of my master's thesis research into how war impacted the social and legal status of women under Saddam's rule (CitationSmiles 2005). I interviewed ten women and two of their husbands throughout July 2005, locating them in Amman through personal contacts and through a translator. The interviews focused on the women's individual relationship to the state and were unstructured and “gendered” in that I was free to exchange information in the spirit of reciprocity (see CitationDenzin and Lincoln 2000: 658).
4. At the time of writing, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that 1.5 million Iraqis have fled the country, many to Syria and Jordan, with 1.6 million internally displaced (see CitationUNHCR Global Appeal 2007).
5. Reports by CitationAmnesty International (2001) and the International Federation for Human Rights and Human Rights Alliance France (2002) have corroborated these last two points.
6. My translator in Jordan complained about being mistaken for an Iraqi prostitute while waiting for me on a busy street corner in Amman. She had been catcalled by men in passing cars and blamed it on what she was wearing, a full-length black abaya, which she said was commonly worn by Iraqi sex workers.
7. All names of my interviewees have been changed. As background, Samar was a 40-year-old housewife who identified as coming from an upper-middle-class Baghdad family. She had been educated to a university level yet her husband had not allowed her to work. She reported being the victim of domestic violence and was in the process of trying to get a divorce when I met her.
8. Codes of female sexual honor are also found in North African, Mediterranean, and Central and South Asian cultures.
9. Saddam did not tolerate any criticism, joke, or rumor at his expense. While working as a freelance journalist in Iraq in 2003, I visited the ransacked headquarters of Saddam's secret service in Baghdad, where I witnessed filing cabinets full of death warrants, some for Iraqis condemned to death for telling jokes about their leader.
10. The United Arab Emirates joined the multinational coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990 (CitationRahman 1997: 304), yet later backed calls for UN sanctions to be lifted against Iraq (CitationTripp 2007: 253).
11. Schoolchildren were taught to call their leader Baba Saddam, or ‘father.’
12. Al-Khafaji writes about how Saddam alternatively posed as a tribal patron to minority groups along the lines of the tribal concept of dakhala practiced under the Ottomans, which bestowed different levels of belonging and entitlement on community members (2000: 277). He writes about how minority communities like the Kurds were viewed by the regime as dakheel, or strangers seeking protection, that would historically be granted such by a tribal chief in exchange for loyalty (2000: 277–278).
13. Regime propaganda monotonously enforced the image of Saddam—or “the leader, symbol and necessity,” as he awkwardly self-promoted—as the ultimate reference point for Iraqi nationalism. A good example is the lyrics of a Ba'thist song quoted by Abdullah Kamil that goes: “16 million people and that people's name is Saddam!” (1994: 57).
14. In the sexualized discourse of war, to be penetrated is to be soiled and disempowered, a position played out by a passive female during sex. To penetrate is conversely seen as an empowering act carried out by an active male. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war the regime constantly reminded men that the Iranians would rape their women if they invaded the country (Citational-Khafaji 2000: 277). It alternatively evoked imagery of the ruinous Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century to demonize United States-led forces in the 1991 Gulf War (CitationAbdullah 2003: 42). Iraq's occupation of Kuwait was conversely depicted to Western audiences as an ongoing “rape” by United Staates Army commander General H. Norman Schwarzkopf.
15. Al-Khafaji refers to a decree introduced after the Iran-Iraq War in 1990 that granted immunity to men who committed honor crimes. The decree was repealed a month later, only to be re-stated in part in 2001, making his analysis equally relevant to the post-1991 Gulf War period.
16. There is a small but growing body of literature attributing causal value to war in analyzing how state capacities, state society relations, and modes of governance in the Middle East have been transformed by war (see CitationHeydemann 2000).
17. Beyond legislation guaranteeing women formal equality under the 1970 Iraqi Interim Constitution, the Iraqi penal code preserves patriarchal controls over women in the private sphere. The Penal Code Number III of 1969 made provision for mitigated sentences for honor crimes, while granting immunity to rapists who married their victims. It also legalized marital or domestic violence in the form of a “punishment of a wife by her husband,” which Article 41 of the code described as the “legal right” of a man. The latter two laws remain intact in Iraqi legislation today.
18. Suha was a 28-year-old beauty therapist who was born in Zubair near the Kuwaiti border. Married with no children, Suha identified as coming from a lower-middle-class family that had been impoverished during the sanctions. I interviewed her in a small salon she was running in a poor neighborhood in Amman.
19. Delaney has attributed women's correlation to land in Turkey to their perceived reproductive function as the “soil” to men's divine, creative, life-giving “seed,” a paradigm that stems from patrogenerative theories of procreation (1991, 1995).
20. Maha was a 47-year-old housewife from Baghdad who identified as being born into a wealthy family originally from south central Iraq. She attended a technical college after high school, before entering an arranged marriage and having three children.
21. Hind was a 67-year-old former headmistress who identified as coming from a wealthy upper-class Baghdad family. Married at the age of 15, she had three children and pursued a university degree when the youngest two were in high school. I interviewed her in an apartment she had bought and moved into in Amman after her elderly husband died in Baghdad following the 2003 invasion.
22. Rola was a housewife in her forties who left Iraq with her husband in the early 1980s to live in the West and later Lebanon.
23. Mention of the chargad would suggest the man was from a rural area.
24. The deaths of some Palestinian martyrs have reportedly been described as weddings because of a belief held by some Muslims that they will in turn marry “black-eyed” virgins in paradise (see CitationFeldner 2001).
25. While Rola conceded that this concept might have lost its resonance to Iraqis weary after suffering three wars under Saddam, she said in the early 1980s, prior to her leaving the country in 1983, it was still very poignant.
26. Zaid was a 56-year-old academic from Baghdad who earned his PhD in Europe. Married with two children, he described being impoverished during the sanctions.
27. Amina was a 40-year-old mother of three children, who was born in Europe to a European mother and Iraqi father. When her parents’ marriage broke down, her father kidnapped her and flew her back to Iraq where she was raised by her paternal grandparents. She got a university degree before getting married.
Rohde, Achim 2002. When the Land is Feminine, War is Love and the Nation is a Family: Iraqi Gender Policies During the Iran-Iraq War. Unpublished paper presented at a workshop at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany.
Smiles, Sarah 2005. Over Their Dead Bodies: War, Women and Honor in Saddam's Iraq. MA Thesis, American University of Beirut, Lebanon.