Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?

Abstract

This essay explores the controversy spawned by the release, in April, 2004, of the photographs taken by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Its particular concern is with photographs that depict American servicewomen engaged in various forms of abusive conduct against Iraqi prisoners. In its opening half, the essay examines and criticizes the responses to these photographs offered, first, by right-wing commentators and, second, by American feminists, most notably Barbara Ehrenreich. All read these photographs as a referendum on feminism and, more particularly, its commitment to the cause of gender equality; and all do so, I argue, on the basis of a naive understanding of gender. In its latter half, accordingly, the essay offers a more adequate understanding of gender, one loosely grounded in the work of Judith Butler and the concept of performativity. Referencing various official interrogation manuals, as well as the investigative reports released in the wake of this scandal, the essay employs this concept in offering a more adequate account of the gendered import of the deeds depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs. It concludes by arguing that what is important about these photographs is neither whether the perpetrators of the exploitation they depict are male or female, nor whether the deeds they portray somehow compromise the feminist quest for gender equality. Rather, what is important are the multiple ways in which specifically gendered practices, which can be detached from the bodies they conventionally regulate, are deployed as elements within a more comprehensive network of technologies aimed at disciplining prisoners and so confirming their status as abject subjects of U.S. military power. This essay has its origins in a roundtable titled "Gender Relations in the Age of Neo-Liberalism," which was conducted in conjunction with the 2005 meeting of the Western Political Science Association. I wish to thank the other participations on that roundtable, Jane Bayes, Mary Hawkesworth, and Judith Hicks Stiehm, as well as Paul Apostolidis, Renee Heberle, Jinee Lokaneeta, Jeannie Morefield, Aaron Perrine, Kari Tupper, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the essay.

Fallgirls: gender and the framing of torture at Abu Ghraib

“…To be clear, applying Rojek's notion of the chaos of modernity 2, it is possible to understand this deviance, in that a lack of modernity 1 "masculine" order led to the abuse. In other words, I agree in part with Kaufman-Osborn (2005), that "a logic of emasculation" informed the abuse at Abu Ghraib, where disciplinary techniques strip prisoners of masculinity and torture is through forced feminization-"emasculate in order to subjugate". However, I argue that this "logic" was itself irrational (even if the idea that I make is that the deviance itself was gendered, as was the chaos.…”

Gendering and Constructing Violence in Ellen McLaughlin's Ajax in Iraq

“…This threat and intimidation by males towards women seem that it has become a familiar situation in society. In the regard of threat Kaufman-Osborn (2005) states that "men seek to secure the wholesale subordination of women by isolating and terrifying them either through violence or threats of violence" (p. 608). That's why even the first appearance and the first words of Ajax when Athena calls him to get out of his tent is the following "I see you, Daughter of Zeus!…”

“…is humiliated and insulted by the sergeant who is in charge of her. In this regard, Kaufman-Osborn (2005) states that the woman may be subjected to "sexual humiliation that gender is usually victim to" (p. 616). It is rape which is considered a form of violence that usually most women are subjected to even in the military and even when she is a soldier.…”

Captured by the camera's eye: Guantánamo and the shifting frame of the Global War on Terror

“…Just as the focus on the Abu Ghraib abuse photos camouflage the institutional forces that may have led to those abuses, the focus on the practices within the images of Guantánamo occludes the overall institutional forces that are at work to 'breed and sanction such exploitation'. 101 In other words, these reframing processes engage in a double silencing: one that hides the widespread extent of these practices, and the second that hides their systematic, institutional and hierarchically approved nature. The Bush administration repeatedly held up Guantánamo as representative of its humane and progressive approach to detention in the GWoT, providing unprecedented numbers of official photographs for release, but through the constant promotion and management of the domain of the representable of Guantánamo, the unrepresentable 'outside the wire' has remained relatively invisible.…”