The article analyses Finland’s and Norway’s female politicians’ war rhetoric with reference to the war in Afghanistan and contrasts it with Laura Bush’s rhetoric and feminism. In the Nordic countries the strong liberal and equity tradition of feminism could open up spaces for thinking differently about war, and yet the co-optation of hegemonic war rhetoric occurs in several ways. The ideograph ‘women-and-children’ is often evoked and added to the hegemonic foreign policy rhetoric without questioning the actual rhetorical work it does. Gender-neutral rhetoric is used to hail into being a collective and unitary western do-gooder identity and to distance Nordic involvement from the US ‘war on terror’. The panegyric of UN Resolution 1325 facilitates the metamorphosis of the militaristic and masculine US-led NATO into a collective peacekeeper capable of saving ‘brown women from brown men’.
Denne fil er hentet fra Handelshøyskolen BIs åpne institusjonelle arkiv BI Brage http://brage.bibsys.no/bi
Kvinnefrigjøring og krig -en selvmotsigelse? FNs sikkerhetsrådsresolusjon 1325 og kvinners rettigheter i Afghanistan
Berit von der Lippe Handelshøyskolen BI
Kirsti Stuvøy Høgskolen i LillehammerDette er siste forfatterversjon etter fagfellevurdering, før publisering i
The focus of this article will be on the televised constructions, both in leading American mass media and in the two leading Norwegian television networks, of Bush's announcement of victory in Iraq on May 1 2003, on board the battleship Abraham Lincoln. The article opens with a consideration of hegemony in mass media, focusing on hegemonic discourse in general, and at times of war in particular. Looking through my 'gendered lenses' might reveal how some kinds of hegemonic masculinity are embedded in this discourse and regarded as universal. The intention is to shed light on how non-hegemonic discourses (such as those in Norwegian media) are restrained, in subtle ways, from being counter-hegemonic. By highlighting the gendered perspectives the article may also serve as a kind of feminist and non-military intervention in dichotomic discourses, be it the dichotomies war-peace, victory-defeat or characteristics attributed to "we" and "them". The approach is strongly influenced by cultural analysis, critical discourse analysis as well as by rhetorics.
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