Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality by Thobani Sunera;

Author:Thobani, Sunera;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Chapter 4

Feminism at war

The Abu Ghraib photographs discussed in the previous chapter captured more than the willing participation of US servicewomen in the sexual torture and killing of Iraqi men. This documentary record was met with expressions of shock, horror and grief by some of the most influential feminists in the United States. Even now, as one reads their public reactions, it is difficult to overlook the depth of the sense of betrayal that runs through what became a collective feminist lament:

Even those people we might have thought impervious to shame, like the secretary of defense, admit that the photos of abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison turned their stomachs. The photos did something else to me as a feminist: They broke my heart. . . . If you were doing PR for Al Qaeda, you couldn’t have staged a better picture to galvanize misogynistic Islamic fundamentalists around the world.1

Why would the murderous violence of the US military and the armies of its allied nation-states be met with the language of ‘heartbreak’, ‘shame’ and ‘betrayal’ by feminists? After all, it was the armed forces of the world’s most powerful state – overseen by a right-wing neoconservative party – that had perpetrated the torture, for it was the Pentagon and the CIA that were allegedly responsible for the violence. Yet for these feminists, ‘Women soldier’s participation in the brutal acts of torture stands as the single most shocking revelation to emerge from Abu Ghraib.’2 Might such torture and killing have been rendered less heart-wrenching, understandable perhaps, were it perpetrated only by male US soldiers, intelligence officers, contractors and guards? Why would the instinctive affiliation of feminists – including those on the left, who would presumably be critics of state violence – be with the perpetrators of state violence and not with the brutalized victims, who also included Iraqi women and children? Why the collective pronouncement of shame? Perhaps the use of the occasion by feminists to take yet another swipe at ‘misogynistic Islamic fundamentalists’ to denounce the very Muslims in US custody who were being terrorized provides a clue. It should be recalled that some of these same feminists had earlier rejoiced at the stationing of US servicewomen in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, congratulating the women soldiers for ‘irking’ the Saudis by their very presence.3

The substance of the above feminist response to Abu Ghraib, the specific issues on which it was focused and those that it pushed out of view, is instructive.4 The question feminists repeatedly asked was the following: Where had feminism gone wrong? This problem was apparently particularly vexing as many of these feminists had championed the opening up of military service to women, defining this as a major advance in the state’s recognition of the equal citizenship of women.

The explanations feminists offered to the question of why/where feminism had ‘gone’ astray were variations on a number of main themes. The US servicewomen who had participated in the torture must themselves be victims of sexual abuse;

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