Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations From The War In Iraq

Abstract

In this era of the increasing importance of gender, many conflicting images of women populate news headlines and political discourses. In the 2003 war in Iraq, Americans saw images of a teenage woman as a war hero, of a female general in charge of a military prison where torture took place, of women who committed those abuses, of male victims of wartime sexual abuse and of the absence of gender in official government reactions to the torture at Abu Ghraib. I contend that several gendered stories from the 2003 war in Iraq demonstrate three major developments in militarized femininity in the United States: increasing sophistication of the ideal image of the woman soldier; stories of militarized femininity constructed in opposition to the gendered enemy; and evident tension between popular ideas of femininity and women's agency in violence. I use the publicized stories of American women prisoners of war and American women prison guards to substantiate these observed developments.

Keywords:

• Abu Ghraib
• Feminism
• Iraq
• Jessica Lynch
• military
• torture

Notes

1. It has come to my attention that my inclination to call the acts at Abu Ghraib torture is not universally shared. Nonetheless, I make a conscious decision to use the word throughout this article, following MacKinnon's (1992) reasoning. Torture is a word of ultimate prohibition; sexualized violence perpetuates sex inequality; sex inequality prevents human equality. Even without MacKinnon's reasoning, however, there is a reasonable case for characterizing this abuse as torture. The UN Convention Against Torture (of which the USA is a member) defines torture as severe pain and suffering, either physical or mental, inflicted to obtain confession, to punish, to coerce or to discriminate by someone in their official capacity. The acts at Abu Ghraib were perpetrated by American soldiers in their official capacity and caused severe physical and mental pain.

2. Lynndie England attempted to plead guilty to the charges surrounding Abu Ghraib; a court determined her unable to assess her own guilt. At trial, the court considered the question of whether England knew what she was doing was wrong at the time or whether she was manipulated by the man that she was seeing so she did not have agency in her own actions. Her attempt to plead, and the surrounding questions about her boyfriend's manipulation, appeared in newspapers in the USA fairly consistently during her trial.

3. There is not any credible research suggesting a definite figure for the number of women who were imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. The Taguba report includes one incident where a woman was abused, but does not discuss how many women were imprisoned there. A report by the American Prospect in February 2005 includes interviews with three women imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. That article suggests that there were around three dozen women at Abu Ghraib, a figure that it presumably obtained from one of the interviews. Still, it does not document a source, and cannot be confirmed.

4. Sources reviewed included international newspapers, including the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Financial Times, Prague Monitor, Copenhagen Post, St Petersburg Times, Mexico Daily, Santiago Times, the Syndney Morning Herald, the East African Herald and the Daily Mail and Guardian (all English versions).

5. Lizzie Borden (1860–1927) was an American woman accused of the brutal double murder of her father and stepfather with an axe in 1892. She was acquitted at trial and no one was ever convicted of the crime, but the legacy of her story is in the intensive and sensationalistic news coverage of Lizzie's actions, including accusations of her homosexual erotomania, her psychotic tendencies and other facets of her personality.