Gender, Globalization, and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones [1 ed.] 0415817358, 9780415817356

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Gender, Globalization, and Violence

This wide-ranging collection of essays elaborates on some of the most pressing issues in contemporary postcolonial societies, in their transition from conflict and contestation to dialogue and resolution. It explores from new angles questions of violent conflict, forced migration, trafficking and deportation, human rights, citizenship, transitional justice and cosmopolitanism. The volume focuses more specifically on the gendering of violence from a postcolonial perspective as it analyses unique cases that disrupt traditional visions of violence by including the history of empire and colony, and its legacies that continue to influence present-day configurations of gender, race, nationality, class and sexuality. Part One maps out the gendered and racialized contours of confl ict zones, from war zones, prisons and refugee camps to peacekeeping missions and humanitarian aid, reframing the field and establishing connections between colonial legacies and postcolonial dynamics. Part Two explores how these conflict zones are played out not just outside but also within Europe, demonstrating that multicultural Europe is fraught with different legacies of violence and postcolonial melancholia. Part Three gives an idea of the kind of future that can be offered to post-confl ict societies, defi ned as contact zones, by exploring opportunities for dialogue, restoration and reconciliation that can be envisaged from a gendered and postcolonial perspective through alternative feminist practices and the work of art and their redemptive power in mobilizing social change or increasing national healing processes. Though strongly anchored in postcolonial critique, the chapters draw from a range of traditions and expertise, including confl ict studies, gender theory, visual studies, (new) media theory, sociology, race theory, international security studies and religion studies.

Sandra Ponzanesi is Head of Humanities at University College Utrecht and Associate Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Critique at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality Core editorial group: DR . KATHY D AVIS (ICON [Institute for Cultural Inquiry], Utrecht University), PROFESSOR JEFF HEARN (managing editor; Örebro University, Sweden; Hanken School of Economics, Finland; University of Huddersfield, UK), PROFESSOR ANNA G. JÓNASDÓTTIR (Örebro University, Sweden), PROFESSOR NINA LYKKE (managing editor; Linköping University, Sweden), PROFESSOR CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY (Syracuse University, USA), PROFESSOR ELŻBIETA H. OLEKSY (University of Łódź, Poland), DR. ANDREA PETÖ (Central European University, Hungary), PROFESSOR ANN PHOENIX (Institute of Education, University of London, UK) Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality is committed to the development of new feminist and profeminist perspectives on changing gender relations, with special attention to: • Intersections between gender and power differentials based on age, class, dis/abilities, ethnicity, nationality, racialisation, sexuality, violence, and other social divisions. • Intersections of societal dimensions and processes of continuity and change: culture, economy, generativity, polity, sexuality, science and technology; • Embodiment: Intersections of discourse and materiality, and of sex and gender. • Transdisciplinarity: intersections of humanities, social sciences, medical, technical and natural sciences. • Intersections of different branches of feminist theorizing, including: historical materialist feminisms, postcolonial and anti-racist feminisms, radical feminisms, sexual difference feminisms, queerfeminisms, cyberfeminisms, posthuman feminisms, critical studies on men and masculinities. • A critical analysis of the travelling of ideas, theories and concepts. • A politics of location, reflexivity and transnational contextualising that reflects the basis of the Series framed within European diversity and transnational power relations.

1 Feminist Studies A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing Nina Lykke 2 Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization Denise M. Horn

3 Sexuality, Gender and Power Intersectional and Transnational Perspectives Edited by Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Valerie Bryson and Kathleen B. Jones

4 The Limits of Gendered Citizenship Contexts and Complexities Edited by Elżbieta H. Oleksy, Jeff Hearn and Dorota Golańska 5 Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research Researching Differently Edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Gabriele Griffin and Nina Lykke 6 Making Gender, Making War Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices Edited by Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg 7 Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies Edited by Mona Livholts 8 Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures Passionate Play Jenny Sundén and Malin Sveningsson 9 Heterosexuality in Theory and Practice Chris Beasley, Heather Brook and Mary Holmes 10 Tourism and the Globalization of Emotions The Intimate Economy of Tango Maria Törnqvist 11 Imagining Masculinities Spatial and Temporal Representation and Visual Culture Katarzyna Kosmala

12 Rethinking Transnational Men Beyond, Between and Within Nations Edited by Jeff Hearn, Marina Blagojević and Katherine Harrison 13 Being a Man in a Transnational World The Masculinity and Sexuality of Migration Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila 14 Love A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Anna G. Jónasdóttir and Ann Ferguson 15 The Politics of Recognition and Social Justice Transforming Subjectivities and New Forms of Resistance Edited by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli and Bob Pease 16 Writing Academic Texts Differently Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing Edited by Nina Lykke 17 Gender, Globalization, and Violence Postcolonial Conflict Zones Edited by Sandra Ponzanesi

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Gender, Globalization, and Violence Postcolonial Conflict Zones Edited by Sandra Ponzanesi

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Sandra Ponzanesi to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender, globalization, and violence : postcolonial conflict zones / edited by Sandra Ponzanesi. pages cm. — (Routledge advances in feminist studies and intersectionality ; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Social conflict. 2. Transitional justice. 3. Social justice. 4. Globalization. 5. Postcolonialism. I. Ponzanesi, Sandra, 1967– HM1121.G46 2014 303.6—dc23 2014000146 ISBN13: 978-0-415-81735-6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-58464-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments I

Introduction: New Frames of Gendered Violence

ix xi 1

SANDRA PONZANESI

PART I Conflict Zones: Colonial Haunting and Contested Sovereignties 1

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence: Monstrosity and Rape in Borderland War

27

JOLLE DEMMERS

2

Thin Ice: Postcoloniality and Sexuality in the Politics of Citizenship and Military Service

46

VRON WARE

3

American Humanitarian Citizenship: The “Soft” Power of Empire

64

INDERPAL GREWAL

4

Female Suicide Bombers and the Politics of Gendered Militancy

82

SANDRA PONZANESI

PART II European Frictions: Memories, Migration, and Citizenship 5

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality: Torture and the French-Algerian War CHRISTINE QUINAN

111

viii Contents 6

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States: From Eritrea to L’Aquila

126

MARGUERITE WALLER

7

Doing “Integration” in Europe: Postcolonial Frictions in the Making of Citizenship

145

MARC DE LEEUW AND SONJA VAN WICHELEN

8

Coffin Exchange

161

PAULO DE MEDEIROS

PART III Contact Zones: Transitional Justice, Reconciliation, and Cosmopolitanism 9

“Invisible Wars”: Gendered Terrorism in the US Military and the Juárez Feminicidio

177

ALICIA ARRIZÓN

10 Political Transitions and the Arts: The Performance of (Post)Colonial Leadership in Philip Miller’s Cantata REwind and in Wim Botha’s Portrait Busts

196

ROSEMARIE BUIKEMA

11 Justice by Any Means Necessary: Vigilantism among Indian Women

214

AARONETTE WHITE AND SHAGUN RASTOGI

12 On Love and Shame: Two Photographs of Female Protesters

229

MARTA ZARZYCKA

13 Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular: Gender Entanglements, Social Media, and the Religion–Secular Divide

245

EVA MIDDEN

Contributors Index

265 271

Figures

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 10.1 10.2 10.3 12.1 12.2

12.3

Hilla Medalia, To Die in Jerusalem (Ayat and Rachel side by side). Hilla Medalia, To Die in Jerusalem (fi lm poster). Rachel Levy. Ayat al-Akras. Portrait II (Patriot), 2009. Portrait bust (Mother), 2010. Untitled (Witness Series I), 2011. Egyptian army soldiers beat a young woman during a protest at Tahrir Square in Cairo on 17 December 2011. Lefteris Pitarakis, Egyptian activist kissing a riot police officer during antigovernment clashes in Cairo on 28 January 2011. Illustration from an Egypt protest leaflet.

93 94 97 98 205 206 208 232

236 237

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Acknowledgments

This book was conceptualized as a result of the 7th European Feminist Research Conference entitled “Gendered Cultures at the Crossroads of Imagination, Knowledge and Politics,” which was held on 4–7 June 2009 at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. In particular, the book takes inspiration from the strand I coordinated entitled “Global Connections: Migration, Consumption & Politics.” Several contributors in this volume participated in the conference, but the book has taken on a life of its own, developing new relations around the topics of gender and postcolonial confl ict zones and taking new directions thanks to the exciting new contributors who have come on board. The result has been a fascinating journey through “(in)visible” colonial and postcolonial histories that probes new interdisciplinary engagements and accounts for different forms of representation and material legacies. These many encounters have made the making of Gender, Globalization, and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones a common project of critique, intervention, and commitment to global transitions and its many frictions. I want to thank all my colleagues at the Utrecht Graduate Gender Program at Utrecht University for having provided endless inspiration, collegial support, and intellectual rigor. Thanks to all the students who have been part of the courses where the initial concepts and ideas for this book have been shared and compared. My gratitude goes to Whitney Stark for her lucid editing, Gianmaria Colpani for his unfailing critical control, and Federica D’Andrea for generously helping out in the fi nal stage. Finally I want to thank Nina Lykke and Jeff Hearn for having taken this book into their series Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality, to the anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback, and to Max Novick for his kind support throughout. Utrecht, 30 September 2013

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Introduction New Frames of Gendered Violence Sandra Ponzanesi

This volume challenges the assumption that women are absent from war and confl ict because of some traditional, natural link between women and pacifism, an assumption based on the femininized qualities of caring, nurturing, mourning, and empathy. By contesting the divide between private and public space, Gender, Globalization and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones aims to analyze how the gender dimension emerges as multiple and ambivalent, ranging from women in frontline positions to women in more subsidiary and invisible roles. The scope is to explore how racialized and gendered bodies have played a crucial role from colonial to current global conflicts. This introduction in particular places the book in the context of the disciplines of gender studies and feminist theory and in their intersections with conflict studies, visual culture, and media and literary studies, maintaining the focus on a postcolonial and intersectional approach that intertwines discursive representations with sociocultural practices. By asking, ‘Where are the women?’ Cynthia Enloe (1989) has opened new lines of investigation into the multiple roles that women play in war (as mothers, lovers, soldiers, munitions makers, caretakers, sex workers) and the consequences of such gendered divisions of labor for women’s citizenship. In her seminal book, Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989), Enloe proposes a radical analysis of globalization that reveals the crucial role of women in international politics today. She unveils the implications for feminist issues of governments promoting tourism, companies moving their factories overseas, soldiers serving on foreign soil, showing that the real landscape is not exclusively male. She describes how many women’s seemingly personal strategies—in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty—are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. Enloe exposes policymakers’ reliance on false notions of “femininity” and “masculinity,” and lays bare an apparently overwhelming world system in which women play a crucial role. Following this approach, feminists have started to document women’s experiences of war and the complex gender dimensions in war. Contrary to the stereotypes about war deaths that feature male combatants, women

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Sandra Ponzanesi

form the majority of casualties in war. It is well known, in fact, that women and children account for a high proportion of civilian casualties and war refugees and are also more likely to be the victims of rape in war. Furthermore, feminist scholars have also demonstrated that women are directly involved in war making as revolutionaries, militants, soldiers, spies, and participants in the military-industrial complex, just as they are actively engaged in war protesting, peace activism, and war resistance (Alexander and Hawkesworth 2008: 3). However, there are also other positions that women have in war that are less accounted for because of being recognized as subsidiary to those of men—as mothers, lovers, soldiers, munitions makers, caretakers, and sex workers, as highlighted by Enloe—but also subsidiary to other women combatants as clerks, couriers, porters, nurses, laundry workers, cooks, childcare providers. Women often have functioned as “intermediaries” in the colonial contact zones, as nannies, domestics, concubines, comfort wives, prostitutes (i.e., the Malinche for Mexico), but also as political ambassadors, translators (exemplary cases are Pocahontas for the New World and Krotoa for South Africa), and spies (the famous case of Aphra Ben, or the exotic dancer Mata Hari, executed in France in 1917 under charge of espionage for Germany during World War I). The Malinche is, for example, an interesting national figure. The name refers to an indigenous woman who played an active and powerful role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary. She accompanied the European conqueror Hernán Cortés and was also his mistress and bore him a son, who is considered one of the first mestizos (people of mixed race, between European and indigenous blood). In Mexico today, the Malinche is still a potent icon, seen in various and often conflicting aspects, including the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, or simply as the symbolic mother of the new Mexican people. For centuries women have also been involved in freedom or terrorist movements, the defi nition of liberation versus terrorism being given according to the legitimacy granted to state violation. Women have traditionally been more prominent in the utopian groups. Whereas many of the groups to which women are attracted share Marxist or at least socialist ideology, the political goals of the group often determine the shape of women’s involvement. In the socialist utopian groups, feminism is high on the agenda as is the emancipation of all subdued groups within society. However, as Talbot (2001: 167) writes: ‘In situations where there is a contest over the sovereignty of a group—from colonial independence struggle to ethnic disputes and irredentism—women are often drafted into the confl ict, but frequently only as “handmaidens” to help achieve a goal that ignores their particular social problems.’ In Women and Terrorism (2008), for example, Margaret Gonzalez-Perez draws a distinction between the participation of women in domestic and international terror groups. She focuses on the relationship among women, the state, and terrorism so as to argue that women choose to engage more

Introduction

3

actively in domestic terrorist groups because these organizations directly challenge the state, thereby providing an opportunity to transform traditional gender roles. In contrast, international terrorist organizations target external, “nebulous” opponents, such as imperialism, capitalism, and Western culture, offering no venue for addressing the issue of gender inequality (Gonzalez-Perez 2008: 20). Given this rich and complex background, the scope of the volume is to challenge racial and gender formations in conflict zones by contesting traditional stereotypes of women as perennial victims, perpetual peacemakers, or the embodiment of the nation that men seek to protect and defend, hence showing how women negotiate their survival, enact resistance to oppressive or supposedly liberating forces, and mobilize to protest war discourses and to advance their own political agenda. The focus is, therefore, on providing an intersectional analysis of the widespread, complex, and elusive phenomenon of the role of gender in conflict zones by setting up a new framework that establishes links between the roles that gender has played in the discourses of national formations and in anticolonial movements (liberation activists, female combatants, freedom fighters, armed guerrillas) and current international confl icts (i.e., humanitarian aid people, peacekeepers, soldiers, suicide bombers, prostitutes, migrants, asylum seekers). The book also highlights whether we can speak of a development in the role, agency, emancipation, and visibility of women’s participation in armed struggle and confl ict zones, or whether we are in the presence of the reiteration of patterns, representations, and stereotypes. It is thus important to take the category of gender, which includes masculinities and queer studies, in order to track the development and changes of feminist engagement with issues of war, securitization, and reconciliation. Although studies on war and terrorism are abundant, interestingly the intersection between a gendered and a postcolonial framework is lacking—even though many of the conflicts, both on local and global scales, are often consequences or the aftermath of colonial legacies and unfi nished colonial business. At the same time many of the new ethnic struggles and territorial disputes taking place are being dictated by a neocolonial organization of space and power that is resonant of colonial dynamics, in which gender is instrumentalized as a tool for conflict and ethnic division, and often as a weapon of rape, war, and genocide.

(POST)COLONIAL PERSPECTIVES: FEMALE COMBATANTS AND ANTICOLONIAL MOVEMENTS This book aims to keep in mind a postcolonial genealogy of women involved in freedom movements and account for the role, agency, and visibility of their involvement through history. According to Fanon, the transformative power of violence is not restricted to male fighters. In ‘Algeria

4

Sandra Ponzanesi

Unveiled’ (1965), Fanon discusses the psychological transformation that some Algerian women underwent during the war, advocating their right to exist as autonomous human beings. Fanon resists the patriarchal tendency to exclude women from history. His writing acknowledges the extensive and multiple roles Algerian women played during the national war of independence. This includes not only the role of combatants, but also the revolutionary role of the sex worker as a political actor. Fanon broke new ground in suggesting that revolutionary violence held transformative potential for women as well as for men. He claimed that Algerian women’s participation in the armed struggle altered their feminine colonized identities and family relations in positive ways that challenged feudal, patriarchal traditions (White 2007: 860). The position articulated by Fanon continues in many other nationalist movements in which women have taken active part in the struggle in the role of female combatants, often also in leadership positions. Fanon argues that despite the fact that the status of African women has been severely undermined under colonial rule, their participation in the various African liberation movements effectively mobilized women. This refers to their participation in not only anticolonial movements, such as the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération National), but to many others in Africa, and especially to those of Marxist imprint. These are the ANC, in which women also participated in the armed wing (Umkhonto we Sizwe, translated as Spear of the Nation and abbreviated as MK) and got their training in camps outside South Africa, such as in Angola and Mozambique; the Swapo, Namibian liberation front; the FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front; the ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Union, which fought for the liberation of Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia) from white settlers, among others. However, recent interpretations by influential African feminists and scholars are more critical of the straightforward reading of women’s involvement in liberation struggles as being tantamount to their emancipation. Gender relations have indeed played a crucial role in the operation of colonization and also in the rise of nationalist movements, but not always with the desired outcome. Anne McClintock (1997) has broadly discussed the image of the woman as a site of controversy, as an object of control more than as a locatable agency within the conflicting policy of empire. She elaborates on ‘Algeria Unveiled’ (Fanon 1965), the influential essay mentioned above in which Franz Fanon includes the liberation of women within the nationalist project of Algerian liberation. Fanon illustrates in an original way how, during the Algerian war, the veil played a pivotal role in the power relations between the Algerians and the French and how during the revolution it became a symbol of resistance. This was attributable to the fact that in the colonialist fantasy, to unveil Algerian women meant to possess them, standing for a metonymical process amounting to possessing Algeria as a country. According to Winifred Woodhull (2003: 573), Algerian women were ‘at once the emblem of the colony’s refusal to receive

Introduction

5

France’s “emancipatory seed” and the gateway to penetration.’ Fanon was one of the fi rst critics to recognize the “historical meaning of the veil,” analyzing how Algerian women veiled, unveiled, and reveiled themselves while participating in terrorist activities in order to reverse the colonial stereotypical expectations of the French army while trespassing the limits of patriarchal traditional roles. The question remains whether women have gained their own subjectivity via mimicry, in Irigaray’s sense of the term, or whether the strategic unveiling is simply a symptom of their “designated agency,” a term coined by McClintock to describe an agency by invitation, only: ‘female militancy in short is simply a passive offspring of male agency and the structural necessity of the war’ (1997: 98). Whereas Fanon deals with nuances in the independence struggle of Algerians and represents women as part of this common effort, he does not fully consider how women’s distinct agency should be implicated in nation formation. According to McClintock, although at fi rst he had refused to invest the veil with an essentialist meaning (the sign of women’s servitude), Fanon goes no further than describe women as the arsenal of a male position in combat and, in the end, he denies the historical dynamism of the veil. Various feminist critics have engaged with Fanon’s essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ and have attempted to read it against its grain to articulate possibilities of female agency around the gaps of the dominant history writing. Meyda Yeğenoğlu (2003), for instance, points to the shifting signifier of the veil. The veil allows women to see without being seen, creating a position of empowerment and frustrating the Western man’s desire to know what is behind the veil. Thus the veil interrupts the scopophilic pleasure of the Western male gaze and becomes a site of resistance. During the Algerian war, women used the veil as a mask, a mobile signifier played out against the French officer’s urge to make Algerian women more like French women, and as a displacement of colonial representations. A significant and beautiful illustration of this phenomenon is to be found in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966). The film follows the tactics and strategies of the Algerian FLN, the armed movement that organized the masses to rebel against French colonization. The film effectively visualizes the strategic role played by women, as illustrated by Fanon, who carried weapons and bombs under their veils, deceiving the French military at checkpoints. Once this device was discovered, all women were suddenly subjected to severe scrutiny. Mimicking the colonial masquerade, militant Algerian women deliberately started to dress up in Western clothes, cutting their hair and “unveiling” their faces, toying with the French expectations and stereotypes of the role of women in Islamic society. The French misread the unveiled Algerian woman as a form of Western conversion and therefore as a victory over the FLN. This is represented in a suggestive scene in The Battle of Algiers, where three women undergo a process of metamorphosis, by cutting and bleaching their hair, wearing miniskirts, and trying to pass

6

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the checkpoints by flirting with the French soldiers. Those three women, who had been “selected and instructed” by the FLN, that day place three bombs in the modern part of Algiers (different from the labyrinthic and impenetrable Kasbah), killing several French civilians, including women and children. In her reading of The Battle of Algiers, Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne (2007) analyzes how the film initially sets out to pay tribute to women activists, beginning with the image of a woman pushing a straw basket with her foot and ending with the demonstrations of December 1960, in which a woman without a veil is seen dancing with a flag that bears the initials FLN. However, their contributions to the struggle, unlike those of men and children, are severely underplayed. Women appear on screen for a mere fifteen of the fi lm’s 121 minutes and, at times, the significance of their role in the war of national liberation is overlooked altogether (AmraneMinne 2007: 342). The film does not focus on any of the famous militant women, such as Djamila Bouhired, who was one of the major women figures of the resistance during the battle of Algiers and was arrested in April 1957. La Dépêche quotidienne d’Alger led with the headline: ‘Capture of Djamila Bouhired in Casbah, Tuesday at Dawn,’ yet never once is her name mentioned in the film (Amrane-Minne 2007: 346). Neither does the film mention another famous female revolutionary, Djamila Boupacha, whose epic tale has been narrated by Simone de Beauvoir (see the contribution by Christine Quinan in this volume). The underrepresentation continues even after the period itself. As Amrane-Minne writes, the underrepresentation of women in the Algerian war of decolonization has been reported in studies of the period, including in the work of some historians. This can be partly attributed to a traditional view of the role of women, which assumes that it is normal for women to help out during wartime with the kind of everyday tasks they usually perform anyway. The fact that they have often risked their lives, and even occasionally their children’s lives, to deliver supplies, meet contacts, or provide shelter to members of the resistance is often overlooked. Even women with political duties or technical responsibilities (such as running a field hospital or the secretariat) have remained in obscurity (Amrane-Minne 2007: 348). There have been very few films focusing on the role of women in conflict zones. As far as Pontecorvo’s film is concerned, the fact that women are poorly represented can be explained, as Amrane-Minne suggests, by the fact that the film focuses more on the urban guerilla tactics and methods used against the overwhelming imperial power, rather than on individual cases, or on the role of emancipation for women in the movement for liberation. It is true that artists, writers, and historians all offer partial views of the events, and that the whole story can never be portrayed. Yet this continuous silencing and removal of women’s participation in militant movements, even with the historical distance, reconfi rms many of the stereotypes and the marginalization of women as not participants in war, nor as active political agents.1

Introduction

7

The position of women in combat in other African countries has been studied by postcolonial feminist scholars who have attempted to account for the at times paradoxical renegotiations of boundaries between the private and public sphere. Aaronette White (2007) investigates whether anticolonial violence has the same psychological effects predicted by Fanon, whether the debilitating effects of a colonized identity are transformed through revolutionary violence, and whether participation in revolutionary violence has the same effects for men and women. Notions of combat as the ultimate model of manliness might generate modes of masculinity in newly independent states that are incompatible with sexual equality. White argues that the gendered dimensions of revolutionary violence produce differing effects for women and men militants, at times with dire consequences for women who cannot reintegrate into society at the end of confl ict. Ruth Iyob (2005), for example, explores how postcolonial narratives of Eritrea produced tegalit, female combatants from rural areas who have learned only the skills of war. The author writes that 1991 was not only a historic year that marked the liberation of Eritrea from Ethiopian occupation, but also the centenary of the consolidation of Italian rule. At this time in history, which marks the coming together of colonial and postcolonial histories, the most popular poster in Eritrea depicted a bare-breasted adolescent girl. Another poster accompanying the narrative of postwar Eritrea was that of the exoticized women of the Rashida community. These two posters circulated internationally and the Rashida women, portrayed dancing or in indolent postures, became the most common representations of the New Eritrea. The official narrative history was extolling the tegalit (female combatants) who constituted 30 percent of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) that liberated the country in 1991. Whereas pre-independence posters of Kalashnikov-toting women combatants became less visible, the ubiquitous colonial postcards of half-naked women continued to be proudly displayed as commercial items in shops. Women combatants, who had entered the public arena as agents of change, were no longer accorded the public space they had carved out through their participation in the war (Iyob 2005: 234). A decade after liberation, the heroines of the maquis—in particular these combatants from the rural areas who had learned only the skills of war—were abandoned to the vagaries of the free market society and rejected by traditional, patriarchal society. Instead of rebalancing power relations, the participation in anticolonial wars often disproportionately disempowered African women while reinforcing African men in their role as combatants. Many testimonies and fi rst-person accounts of African women combatants suggest that military life ‘often undermined their sense of agency as a result of increased vulnerability to gender-specific human rights abuses perpetrated by enemy troops as well as by their own comrades. These abuses included rape, torture, brutal abduction, forced pregnancies, forced sex work, and other forms of sexual harassment, molestation and discrimination’ (White 2007: 868–69).

8

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For example, Thandi Modise, ANC member of parliament and former guerilla commander of the ANC military wing, warns against romanticized notions of the life of South African women combatants (such as in the posters depicting images of a liberated African woman with her baby in one hand and her rifle in the other). Modise told how she had to protect herself from apartheid forces as well as from her own comrades. Instances of sexual molestations and harassment were ignored by the ANC leadership and politically silenced. Postwar accounts explain that girl soldiers were particularly at risk of rape, being young, poor, and illiterate and therefore most vulnerable to such human rights abuses while fighting on the front lines (Lyons 2004; Modise and Curnow 2000). Interesting to this purpose is the South African novel by Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story (2001). David’s Story is about a man, a member of the guerilla, who questions himself and turns toward his past. The one constant throughout the novel is the women and their struggle to find their voice. Dulcie, a female activist involved in the ANC, particularly in the secret armed wing, MK, becomes the key for both the narrator and David. However, she remains elusive throughout the novel, frustrating the reader and the narrator, who eventually exclaims, ‘I wash my hands of this story’ (Wicomb 2001: 213). Wicomb’s David’s Story is the search for the unheard female voice as illustrated by the difficult quest for Dulcie. Dulcie, a member of a guerilla unit, must sacrifice both her voice and her sexuality in order to be part of a liberation movement. She is never fully articulated in the novel, but her importance in David’s life and to the movement is incalculable. The gaps in Dulcie’s story need not be read as negative, subtextually laden spaces but as peaks highlighting a vast landscape of representational issues. Dulcie’s elusiveness is a statement of the elusiveness of the double victim of colonialism and patriarchy. Another example is the 1996 fi lm Flame, directed by Ingrid Sinclair, which was the fi rst fi lm to be set during the historical period of the Zimbabwean liberation movement, or chimurenga. The struggle was backed by international support and eventually it forced the white settler regime to capitulate to majority rule in 1980. Shot in Zimbabwe with an entirely Zimbabwean cast, the fi lm is based on the accounts of women who joined the liberation war. It is also the fi rst fi lm that accounts for the gender asymmetries within the liberation movements, of women not ranking as high as their male counterparts, of women being raped by their male comrades, and of women who had to retire to the private sphere once independence was achieved while several of their male counterparts were rewarded with ministerial positions. The fi lm has been criticized for portraying rape, and therefore creating a stain on the gloriousness of the independence struggle. This is because in order to support the nationalist cause that often equalized male interests, women were silenced or denied the prizes they had paid for with their involvement in the political organizations. This confi rms many accounts in which women combatants were relegated to the private sphere after the achievement of independence or left drifting in society as their involvement in the struggle movement tainted

Introduction

9

them with negative stereotypes that would not conform to the domesticity of the new role required of women in the newly independent nation. These negative representations vary from seeing women ex-combatants as too promiscuous, with loose morals or associated with the spread of AIDS, to being seen as too rebellious, not feminine enough, feisty and too difficult for marriage, too old, barren, or not representing the traditional role model as mothers. Subject to these public denigrations, many women decided to conceal their former role as combatants in order to avoid being permanently ostracized from society and to settle in the respectable roles of wives and mothers when possible. Women combatants therefore actively contributed to their own erasure from the history of independence in order to guarantee their survival in the dynamics of ordinary life. As White further concludes: the return to family life might be a practical and empowering choice for many women ex-combatants. In many other cases, however, motherhood and wifehood were not presented as options but as mandates for all respectable women (McFadden 2005). Pressure to restore traditional gender hierarchies has been accompanied by historical revisionism. Representations of women combatants as equal contributors to the revolution have been censored. Men return as heroes whose role as independence fighters fortify their evolving masculine identities, but women identities as revolutionaries have been suppressed in popular accounts of war. (2007: 876) Women who participated in the liberation struggle have been expected to make the necessary practical and emotional adjustments and to go back to their traditional roles as mothers and wives in newly independent nations (Mama 2000; McFadden 2000). This urgency to return to normal, implying embracing the old gender patterns, was often in stark opposition with the promises of social change and gender emancipation heralded before and during the struggle for independence. Women combatants were asked to put down their weapons, return to the domestic sphere, and bear children for the new independent nation (Enloe 2004). In short, women are interpellated by male revolutionary rhetoric but hardly come to share the success of political governance once their revolution overturns colonialism or the oppressive regime. As McClintock (1997) has argued, women are often the symbols of national formation but rarely their subject.

WOMEN AND TERRORISM: RETHINKING LEGACIES OF FEMALE ARMED INSURGENCY The discussion around questions of nationalism versus terrorism, occupation versus resistance, lack of sovereignty versus right to self-determination, is obviously subject to dispute and contestation. The term terrorism

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stems from the French Revolution, when the Jacobins instigated hundreds of civilian deaths. Terrorism is generally understood as any use of violence that also targets civilians and that is motivated by political goals. Yet terrorism is a much instrumentalized and flexible concept and its application and defi nition depend not only on the nature of the violence and the target themselves, but on the legitimacy attributed to state violation. 2 It has, therefore, in the course of time become an instrument of propaganda and persuasion, very much part of the mediatic exploitation and communication rhetoric of governments and political organizations. There are many types of terrorisms, as categorized by security experts, such as left-wing and right-wing terrorism, religious terrorism, single issue or special interest terrorism, national or ethnic terrorism, and race-based or hate terrorism, among others (Dyson 2012: 22–32; see also Purpura 2007: 17). Of course, this list can include many other forms of terrorism, such as narcoterrorism, cyberterrorism, ecoterrorism, or nuclear terrorism, which all signal that terrorism is not simply about separatism and the nation-state but about confl icts that have gone transnational and viral, leading to a rhetorical redefi nition of the terroristic threat from a local problem to a general affront (see Lizardo and Bergesen 2003). To add an explanation to this gender-neutral listing, it must be mentioned that women have traditionally been more prominent in utopian groups than in nationalist ones. Women have, for example, participated in movements fighting within the state, such as the Red Brigades (Italy), Farc (Colombia), Lotta Continua (Italy), and Baader-Meinhof (Rote Armee Fraktion, Germany). They have also participated in organizations fighting external enemies, such as LTTE: Tamil Tigers, or Tamil Eelam (Sri Lanka); Black Widow (Chechnya); Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, AlAqsa Martyr Brigades (Palestine); Al-Qaeda (Iraq and transnationally); PKK: Kurdish Workers’ Party (Turkey); ETA (Spain); IRA (Ireland); Hezbollah (Lebanon); and so forth. In general, the construction of “terrorist” is a highly masculinized one, as the perception of femininity excludes the use of indiscriminate violence. Rhiannon Talbot (2001) argues that the average depictions of women terrorists draw on notions such as (a) extreme feminists; (b) only bound into terrorism via a relationship with a man; (c) only acting in supporting roles within terrorist organizations; (d) mentally inept; (e) unfeminine in many ways; or (f) any combination of the above. The representation of women terrorists within this particular discourse tends to present them as a dichotomy. The identity of a woman terrorist is cut into two mutually exclusive halves; either “the woman” or “the terrorist” is emphasized, but never together. Not surprisingly, when a woman terrorist is represented, her culpability as an empowered female employing traditionally masculine means to achieve her goals very rarely emerges. She is seldom a highly reasoned, nonemotive, political animal that is the picture of her male counterpart; in short, ‘she rarely escapes her sex’ (Talbot 2001: 165).

Introduction

11

Palestinian female suicide bombers, for example, are either idolized as daughters of Palestine, mothers of the nation, sisters of death, or depicted as monsters, deviant, and unstable. This contributes to the understanding of the female suicide bomber as oxymoronic. As Dorit Naaman writes: While the dozens of male suicide bombers’ identities and life stories are hardly ever delved into, their reasons are assumed to be clear and grounded in both political and religious ideology. In contrast, a woman as a suicide bomber seems so oxymoronic that an individualized psychological explanation for the deviation must be found. However, this sort of psychological explanation fails time and again. The image of woman as the symbolic nurturer, healer, and spiritual mother of the nation is challenged beyond repair, a rupture that is dealt with in the Arab world quite differently than it is in the West. (2007: 936) As it was for the militant women in the French-Algerian War, the Palestinian female suicide bombers’ effectiveness ironically depends on their invisibility as sexualized and racialized subjects. Their violent actions attack and threaten not only the enemy, but also the internal patriarchal order by disturbing normative notions of masculinity and militarism. In their video messages, women bombers even challenge Arab leaders to come to action and take up their responsibilities, chastising them for their weakness and silence. It is, therefore, important to include the phenomenon of female suicide bombers within the debates on terrorism, but also as part of the historical process that has not recognised women as involved in freedom or terrorist movements for centuries. Even within the case of Palestine, the prominence of female suicide bombers tends to be thought of against the existence of many feminist grassroots movements that have existed since the fi rst Intifada and that have seen the political participation of women in many leading and decisive positions (see my own contribution in this volume).

CONTEMPORARY DEBATES: MILITARIZATION, SECURITIZATION, AND FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS In 2009, Helen Benedict published The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. The book comprises portraits of five women from different ethnic and class backgrounds who served in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. By tracking the personal records of these women, the book shows that women enter the military for the same reasons as men: to escape a dead-end life, because it is a job, or simply because they are patriotic and want to serve. Yet, as Benedict documents, many fi nd out that they are fighting two wars: one against the official enemy and one against their male comrades. The constant threat of being assaulted or raped by their

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colleagues makes their role in Iraq a double war (see the contribution by Arrizón in this volume). More women soldiers are fighting in Iraq than in any other American war in history, yet they face a dual challenge: they are participating in combat more than ever before, but because only one in ten soldiers is female, they are often painfully alone, isolated from the expected female support. This isolation, along with a military culture hostile to women, denies them the camaraderie soldiers depend on for survival and subjects them to sexual persecution by their comrades. As air force sergeant Marti Ribeiro said, ‘I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine’ (Benedict 2009: 47). One soldier, the nineteen-year-old Mickiela Montoya, revealed that there are only three kinds of female you’re allowed to be in the military: ‘a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. Well in the beginning I was considered a ho ’cause I was nice to people. Then I realized what they were saying about me so I became a bitch. I wasn’t mean but I had to change so nobody would think I was flirty’ (2009: 167). The continuous sexual harassment was at times replaced with a protective attitude: ‘It’s because you are our little sister. We don’t want something to happen to you.’ To which Mickiela would reply, ‘Don’t look at me like I am your little sister, ’cause I am not. I am soldier, not a gender. I am soldier just like you’ (174). The situation reminds one of the role of female combatants in colonial liberation movements, where women were co-opted into taking part in the construction of the new nation freed from foreign colonial domination, and yet the accounts show that many of these women were subjected to continuous violation, not from the enemies but from their own comrades (the case of the ANC is an obvious one, or other liberation movements such as Frelimo and Zanu, to mention but a few). Whereas women in military positions are still suffering prejudices, stereotyping, and internal sexual harassment that can be compared with that of their female counterparts in liberation movements, there are also women soldiers in the US military, in Iraq and Guantanamo, who misbehave and, such as Lynndie England and the debacle of Abu Ghraib made clear, who have often been the perpetrators of illegitimate interrogation practices and torture. The sexual elements of the naked male bodies tortured and photographed in Abu Ghraib were blatantly heightened by the presence of the US women soldiers taunting the Iraqi men in many of the photographs that became notorious throughout the world and not only created huge embarrassment for the US administration, but also rephrased many of the debates on women and violence. Can imperial misrule do away with gender misrule, as McClintock asks? How can we explain the role of women such as prison guard Lynndie England, who shocked the world with photos she took with her fiancé, Charles Graner, at Abu Ghraib and in which she is often placed in a prominent position? The scope of this volume is to tackle some of these irksome issues by creating connections between the legacies of the colonial past and the realities of the postcolonial present as marking the new global dynamics of gender

Introduction

13

in warfare or conflict zones. As the intricacies of the positions in anticolonial movements amply demonstrate, new conceptualizations of gender, race, ethnicity, nationhood, age, language, men and masculinities, and subjectivities and agency complicate earlier assumptions about the unitary experience of women in wartime. The volume engages with new theoretical and analytical approaches to gender and violence in a globalized perspective by overcoming the binary reading of women in conflict zones as either the recipients of a gender-specific war strategy of sexual violence, such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda most recently, or as active participants in war and conflict. The binarism and divide between these two approaches marks the limits and biases of traditional feminist approaches to conflict and militarism. As Dubravka Zarkov (2006: 214) points out, we can speak of a turn in the 1990s when classical feminist studies faced a challenge in acknowledging sexual violence against women while also taking into account the participation of women in violent conflict. In the classical feminist studies of the 1980s, the perspectives were mostly focused on the experience and vantage point of Western feminists, prioritizing their perspectives against the knowledge produced in other parts of the world. Therefore, much of the classic feminist scholarship on war and militarism produced in the 1980s foregrounded the experience of Western women and strongly framed the reading of women’s participation in violent conflict in other parts of the world. This liberal approach to feminism is centered around the debate on equality versus difference, which underpins Western biases. Liberal feminisms struggle to counter discrimination and to secure women’s access to all social spheres, especially those perceived as exclusively male, such as the military, whereas radical feminists struggle to preserve women’s difference, the difference between nurturing femininity and violent masculinity. This debate has produced a rich and diverse body of feminist knowledge about war. Many studies focus on the transformative power of war, such as in the case of women led to leadership and entrepreneurial positions during World War II while the men were away, which produced drastic social transformations leading to emancipation and empowerment through the 1950s and 1960s. Other studies focus on the essentialized notion of women as maternal and peace loving as their starting point. Many, although less prominent, studies focus on women’s participation in nationalist militias (both in the West and in the so-called third world), or in militant, separatist, and guerrilla movements, arguing that women’s presence would bring transformation in masculinist institutions such as the military (Zarkov 2007). These studies have been greatly influential in understanding the relationships among women, gender, and war (although not always from a transnational perspective) and have developed the analysis of militarism as constructed on shifting notions of masculinity and femininity. At the same time, many of these studies have tended to frame the relevance of gender as an analytical tool, making a problematic link between women’s agency

14

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and women’s participation in armed struggles as potentially empowering and emancipatory, especially when linked to anticolonial and antifascist movements, as we have illustrated above with the feminist responses to Fanon’s position. The occupation of Iraq, in particular violence against men in Abu Ghraib, and the incitation by women to violence in Rwanda foreground women’s capacity to perpetrate violence and therefore not only blur the clear distinctions between victims and perpetrators, but also question the nature of gendered ethnic violence in “new wars” (as discussed by Demmers in this volume). Feminist critique of new hegemonic war discourses such as the one about “new wars” is indeed lacking, although in the last couple of years feminists have engaged with the discourses of the “War on Terror.” Therefore, the neat political, ideological, and theoretical constructions of combat as exclusively masculine crumble and questions of agency and leadership become muddled when perspectives and experiences are not Western European or North American (Zarkov 2006: 215). These realities became ever more complex in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both theoretically and geopolitically. The emergence of black, postcolonial, and third world feminist critiques have substantially changed and challenged the classic (read: Western and white) understanding of the involvement of women in war, confl ict, and revolutions. The unsettlement of Western hegemonies in the production of feminist knowledge has gone hand in hand with an increased demand for new theoretical reflections within global feminist movements to suit the changing geopolitical situation of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mohanty 2002). Therefore, the comparative and transhistorical approach required by a postcolonial and intersectional analysis of gender and violence is highly suitable to reveal the hidden dynamics at stake that empower women while also co-opting their participation in national movements for the sake of conservative patriarchal goals. Other recent studies have highlighted the role of women not as directly involved in war zones, but in fighting terrorism at home, such as in the supposedly peaceful US. Here the issue of securitization of the nation-state against external forces reaches paranoid proportions. In her article ‘Security Moms’ (2006), Inderpal Grewal explores the paradoxical intertwining of feminism with neoliberal discourses on securitization in the early twenty-fi rst century. Grewal does not discuss the security state in terms of victimization of female subjects by militant masculinity, but rather she examines how militant masculinity within neoliberal contexts brings forth a rearticulation of the public–private divide that has consequences for feminism and female subjects and citizens. The focus in the article is on a 2004 American figure, the “security mom,” which emerged in the Republican electoral campaign in order to introduce a new category of voters. These are mothers who are married, have children, and own a gun to protect the security of their family. The figures that security moms fear the most

Introduction

15

are “Islamic terrorists” and “criminal illegal aliens”; these figures call for a new type of surveillance in which mothers have a task to protect their children and other innocent victims. Grewal highlights how these constructions of the figure of the security mom actually rely on feminist discourses; part of the assembled iconicity of the security mom is a feminism that has been reworked through neoliberal and conservative discourses of the state and its limits. Grewal asks: How to explain such subjects in the twenty-fi rst century, which brings together a nationalism that produces women as mothers, a conservative feminism, and new forms of racialization and deracialization? . . . Here we see ideas of security and safety within imperial and transnational contexts of neoliberalism and geopolitics, and the production of a subject in relation to rearticulations of outsiders and insiders, home and homeland. (2006: 28) Grewal further elaborates on the relationship between empire and domestic ideologies, which has a long history in the US, showing that public and private are often interconnected and integrated. Neoliberalism emphasizes the fluidity between the two realms, rather than the decline of the state or the triumph of the private. In the public realm of defense, the state remains powerful by using female subjects within the private sphere, such as security moms, to produce soldiers and patriots, as well as to become both the subject and the agent of security through new surveillance technologies that emphasize the governmentality of security. By integrating a postcolonial perspective, Grewal shows how security reworks space and territory in an assemblage in which gender, race, and the nation become integrated. Security enables domestic spaces to expand rather than contract, resulting in the production of national and imperial subjects. Security is produced through citizen-subjects who are differentiated from noncitizen-subjects, such as undocumented immigrants, the racialized other, or foreign terrorists (O’Tuathail, cited in Grewal 2006: 31). Gender and race are key issues as race and territory, home and homeland, family and nation become coextensive. Motherhood becomes the subject for militant nationalism, but it should not be forgotten that it relies on new technologies of motherhood, as developed by second-wave feminism, that opened up opportunities for women and girls. Moms become active agents in protecting the security, health, and welfare of their children, combining the active role of surveillance with regulatory mechanisms based on race, class, and gender. If this constant surveillance creates a continued “War on Terror” within the private and public spaces in the US, it also diverts the attention from the most obvious preoccupation of violence against women, that of domestic violence. Whereas the main political message of the women’s movement continues to be that women are more at risk of physical violence at home rather than

16

Sandra Ponzanesi

outside it, and at the hand of relatives, lovers, and acquaintances rather than strangers, the “War on Terror” has curiously inverted this belief, as well as relied on it in order to create a gendered form of widespread anxiety about safety that takes shape in ideas of motherhood and family (Grewal 2006: 35). The violence against women is displaced onto Islamic fanatics, illegal aliens, and urban gangs. The technologies of welfare activated by the state to promote the safety of women and to prevent violence against women have become part of a project that resuscitates patriarchal power through the creation of a law-and-order apparatus, but also by externalizing danger and moving it onto bodies seen as a foreign threat to the nation or to proper citizens. As Grewal again remarks: Finally, it is precisely by expanding the domestic space into the extraterritorial realms of American power (Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan) that a denial of ‘family violence’ can take place. At the same time, it is through the daily reminder of the domestic as a violent space that the boundaries of ‘home’ become unstable. This instability and constant tension between the daily reminder of ‘private’ violence in the home and the attempts to displace this violence onto dark and foreign Others suggests that a feminist critique of neoliberalism within a feminist context must see the public/private divide as dynamic and fluid. (2006: 38) Although many security experts address questions of states and geopolitics while ignoring gender, race, and sexuality, many feminists have pushed for a critique of masculinity and militarism not only in far-off conflicts, but indeed in those close to home, where the slippages between violence and gender seem less obvious. Bearing in mind how colonial dynamics are still at work within contemporary realities of war and conflict helps to establish wider comparative frameworks that unearth the intricacies of women’s agency in conflict positions. It also helps to formulate alternative ways of accounting for gendered violence, not as a quantifiable and fi xed reality, but as a shifting and mutable dimension. This requires increasingly more sophisticated scholarship capable of breaking traditional disciplinary boundaries and of forging new alliances with fields outside traditional feminist studies, although the latter has always been inherently interdisciplinary.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK The book follows a three-layered structure that aims to set up theories, practices, and directions for the future. The fi rst part, entitled ‘Confl ict Zones: Colonial Haunting and Contested Sovereignties,’ presents critiques on gender and violence that follow a feminist and postcolonial approach, creating connections between the

Introduction

17

colonial legacies of the past and the morbid symptoms that have remained in the postcolonial present. The chapters in the fi rst part offer critical and comparative work on the role of gender in the transition from colonial to postcolonial formations, highlighting the strongholds and impasses of women in confl ict zones created by the new world order, such as in relation to refugee camps, borderlines, and humanitarian missions, and in response to the “new wars” and the role of women as suicide bombers. Jolle Demmers’s contribution, ‘Neoliberal Discourses on Violence: Monstrosity and Rape in Borderland War,’ focuses on the defi nition of “new wars”, from 1990, with renewed emphasis after 9/11, that frames conflicts as perpetrated by criminal and terrorist countries that become a threat to regional and global security. She analyzes, in particular, how sexual violence is singularized, decontextualized, and depoliticized, combining insights from the fields of conflict studies, critical transnational feminism, and sexual politics with recent studies of violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This neoliberal framing of violence resurrects colonial dichotomies by transforming part of the global south into a “dangerous social body” that legitimizes narratives of containment. This chapter not only analyzes how war is framed, but also intends to gain insights into the politics of representation, emphasizing the need to examine the discursive and institutional continuities. Vron Ware’s chapter, ‘Thin Ice: Postcoloniality and Sexuality in the Politics of Citizenship and Military Service,’ focuses on the role of the armed services in multicultural and postcolonial societies, such as Britain, analyzing the transformed relationship between soldier and the notion of citizenship. In particular, it examines the representations of minority soldiers in both official and popular media contexts. It suggests that the militarization of femininity and diversity essentially reshapes, challenges, and entrenches social and political norms at home, adding legitimacy to the military as a democratic and progressive institution. Feminist and antiracist analyses of routine or demotic representations of soldiers, whether on a national level or within a comparative framework, offer a glimpse of “the presence of war” in daily life. Inderpal Grewal’s chapter, ‘American Humanitarian Citizenship: The “Soft” Power of Empire,’ argues that global confl icts and related inequalities are exacerbated rather than alleviated by humanitarian projects from the global north. These projects are central to imperial citizenship, as visible in the US, which has come to necessitate humanitarianism for the neoliberal citizenship of the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst century. In my own chapter, ‘Female Suicide Bombers and the Politics of Gendered Militancy,’ I investigate the exorbitant interest of media, gender scholars, and security experts in the phenomenon of female suicide bombers, which is often isolated from its sociocultural and political context, and very often reduced to personal and psychological motivations. Women are labeled as either martyrs (shahida) or terrorists, daughters of Allah or

18 Sandra Ponzanesi monsters, perpetrators or victims, through explanations that rarely escape gendered stereotypes and orientalist readings. More often, Islamic suicide bombers, especially Palestinian female suicide bombers, are chosen as a pars pro toto, a stock character in mainstream efforts to explain suicide bombing as a phenomenon after 9/11; however, female suicide bombers also pertain to many secular groups and have been around since the mid1980s. Through the analysis of recent scholarship, artistic productions, and media discourses, the chapter engages with a possible alternative reading of female suicide bombing that escapes narrow gender or religious interpretations. The second part of the volume, entitled ‘European Frictions: Memories, Migration, and Citizenship,’ explores how these confl ict zones are played out not outside but within Europe, demonstrating that multicultural Europe is fraught with different legacies of violence and postcolonial melancholia. The chapters pursue the notion of Europe from new critical positions in order to account for the imbrications of gender with identity, citizenship, nationhood, and violence and how this reverberates through and across global conflicts. In the chapter, ‘Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality: Torture and the French-Algerian War,’ Christine Quinan takes the 1960 legal case of Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian woman who was brutally raped and tortured by the French military during the French-Algerian War (1954– 1962), as her point of departure. The case had been picked up at that time by French intellectuals, such as Simone de Beauvoir, and amply publicized. Quinan argues that narratives such as that of Boupacha have aided in the construction of a cohesive French nationality based on civility and human rights because these were representations and accounts of Algerian women tortured by French men. Quinan traces also some critical parallels between this case and the US occupation of Iraq, particularly the highly publicized systematic abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. Although the historical and political contexts are undoubtedly different, the 2004 torture scandal again demonstrated how normative gendering and the invocation of shame play a role in reinforcing national identity and further exposes the legacies of colonization that continue to mold gender, race, nationality, and sexuality in global politics and cultural representations. Marguerite Waller’s contribution, ‘Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States: From Eritrea to L’Aquila,’ investigates the conceptual underpinnings and the empirical practices of nations involved at both ends and along the way of migration routes leading from the Horn of Africa, particularly Eritrea, to postcolonial Europe. It asks to what extent the formerly colonized sending nations, and no less the EU receiving nations, are embroiled in problematic assertions of national sovereignty. This deep (colonial) reluctance makes the EU nations unable to see themselves as the cause of troubles because of their anti-immigrant policies and practices. Human rights and the logic of sovereignty appear to be on a collision course, made

Introduction

19

visible by the congruencies between the Italian government’s dealing with survivors left homeless by the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake and its treatment of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen’s chapter, ‘Doing “Integration” in Europe: Postcolonial Frictions in the Making of Citizenship,’ analyzes how “culture” in the Dutch context is paradigmatically disciplined on new aspiring citizens. By employing cultural tropes of sexual freedom, gender equality, freedom of speech, and individuality as emblems of Dutchness, integration is identified as the successful adaptation to hegemonic liberal and secular virtues, leaving little room for cultural or religious variations. The authors argue that the need to reinstate Dutchness signals its very crisis, and that (multi)culturalism—as a depoliticized ideology of secular liberalism that conveniently silences racism or postcolonial ressentiment—reinforces revivals of national identity. By reflecting on the immense popularity of Dutch citizenship testing, the chapter assesses the paradoxes, frictions, conflicts, and complexities involved in the bigger project of imagining a postcolonial, multiethnic, and postsecular “Europe.” Paulo de Medeiros’s chapter, ‘Coffin Exchange,’ deals with cinematic representations of conflict and trauma that build on notions of colonial legacies influencing the morbid state of postcolonial Europe as a friction zone. In A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast) (2005), director Margarida Cardoso revisits the trauma of the colonial wars (1961–1974) in which one of the principal issues is that of the contact zone between the Portuguese and Africans and always also in terms of a gendered conflict. Fatih Akins’s Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) (2007) presents instead the theme of the friction in the relations between Germans and Turks. One of the fi lm’s symmetrical asymmetries that stands out is that of the exchange of coffi ns, as the bodies of two murdered women are returned to Turkish and German soil, respectively. Combining postcolonial critique, film studies, critical theory, and gender theory, the chapter shows how different forms of violence, some explicit (colonialism) and others implicit (terrorism), are still inextricably connected to the articulation of gender, ethnicity, and race, blocking the possibilities for imagining new transnational citizenship. The third and fi nal part of the volume, titled ‘Contact Zones: Transitional Justice, Reconciliation, and Cosmopolitanism,’ explores the realities of postconfl ict societies and accounts for alternative solutions, such as retribution, restitution, mourning, and/or transitional justice, that pave the way to possible contact zones and to a gendered notion of cosmopolitanism and human rights. Alicia Arrizón, in her chapter, ‘“Invisible Wars”: Gendered Terrorism in the US Military and the Juárez Feminicidio,’ analyzes how two documentaries, The Invisible War (2012) and Señorita extraviada (2001), expose a climate of impunity north and south of the US–Mexican border that denies truth and justice to victims of sexual violence in the US military and

20 Sandra Ponzanesi the feminicidio (‘femicide’) in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Arrizón uses both materials to analyze the gendered relations of power embedded in the two represented contexts that produce and enable widespread, and yet ‘invisible,’ sexual terrorism aimed at women. She calls for envisioning effective borderless projects to reevaluate human rights violations against women, such as military sexual abuse and feminicidio, as symptomatic of gender/ sex hierarchic inequalities that extend beyond geopolitical borders. Rosemarie Buikema’s chapter, titled ‘Political Transitions and the Arts: The Performance of (Post)Colonial Leadership in Philip Miller’s Cantata REwind and in Wim Botha’s Portrait Busts,’ explores the role that the arts can play in the accomplishment of processes of political transition. Buikema addresses, in particular, the relationship between art and politics by means of a case study of two different works of art, namely, the cantata REwind (2006), by Philip Miller, and a series of sculptures—among them Portrait Busts (2010) and Witness Series I–V (2011)—by the sculptor Wim Botha. These artifacts are discussed in the context of the late twentiethcentury phenomenon of political leaders and/or nation-states being called to account for political or ethnic minority groups. The chapter addresses a number of ethical and pragmatic issues having to do with the maxim of “never again” that, since the Holocaust, marks all recent political transitions. Drawing from feminist theory concerning the conceptualization of revolution and revolt, the chapter explores how the arts can have the medium-specific potential of transcending the mandate of tribunals and truth commissions as instruments of transitional justice in South Africa. Aaronette White and Shagun Rastogi’s piece, ‘Justice by Any Means Necessary: Vigilantism among Indian Women,’ presents an intriguing account of how women handle communal violence by taking the situation into their own hands. Through an analysis of news reports and documentary footage on the Gulabi Gang and ethnographic reports on the Mahila Aghadi, both from India, the authors illustrate how women who engage in violent forms of justice seeking require us to expand social-psychological concepts of retributive and restorative justice, women’s agency, and community organizing. The chapter proposes a grassroots feminist analysis in the Indian context that integrates a feminist defi nition of punishment and ethical violence in connection to a perception of justice and the role that women play in reorganizing and protecting community values; something that is very relevant in today’s India with the many upheavals surrounding rape, gender violence, and the inefficiency of the legal system. Marta Zarzycka’s contribution, ‘On Love and Shame: Two Photographs of Female Protesters,’ examines two photographs of female protesters, both taken in 2011 in Cairo, and underlines a strong link between civil protest and the politics of gendered representations. Bearing in mind the long tradition connecting femininity with feelings and emotions, the chapter reflects on the gendered rhetoric that mediates the reception of such photographs. She argues that both love and shame, understood as a form of social

Introduction

21

presence, shaped by and shaping us in our contact with (photographed) others, call for rethinking the concept and practice of political resistance and its visual testimonies. In her chapter, ‘Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular: Gender Entanglements, Social Media, and the Religion–Secular Divide,’ Eva Midden focuses on the uprisings in Egypt to investigate the consequences of the way these events have been discussed in popular media. Her argument is that exactly the combined focus on gender, new media, and secularism/democracy has created a specific narrative of the “Arab Spring” and has made other narratives of the possibilities, background, and aims of the uprisings invisible. In this context, it is proposed that an alternative view could benefit from a postsecular critique that includes a critical perspective on the combination of secularism, gender, and new media. The different original contributions address the blind spots around the imperial formations within the new global order, marking the continuities and divergences between past and present operations of domination, oppression, and imperialism. The link between past and present colonial conditions is necessary: fi rst to keep the fi nger on the pulse of racial and gender inequalities based on colonial dissymmetrical relations; second to learn to recognize the insidious dynamics of power and abuse which are at stake beyond the simplifying rhetoric of a few bad apples as the underlining justification for the misbehavior of a few American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. As McClintock has argued in her ‘Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib’ (2009), the transformed relation between gender and violence in a globalized world is predicated upon the return of the repressed, in the form of colonial haunting, that addresses the question of perpetration, witnessing, and justice in new terms. Accounting for the complicity of women in masculinized forms of militarization, as well as for the transformative role that women’s participation in militant movements entails, is central to the different contributions contained in this volume. Although of course this is neither a complete nor an exhaustive overview of all entanglements of women, globalization, and violence, it does account for the gendered postcolonial interventions with its traces, legacies, and genealogies that need to be addressed in the field of security and conflict studies, both in historical and representational terms. NOTES 1. Another useful response to Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’ is offered by Assia Djebar, who, in the essay-novel Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1992) (original in French Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, from 1980), seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and their voices by revealing the limitations, but most especially the richness, of the women’s oral tradition. 2. A case in mind could be Nelson Mandela, accused of terrorism by the South African Apartheid regime for his armed political interventions and crowned

22

Sandra Ponzanesi with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, along with de Klerk, once the confl ict reached a political resolution.

REFERENCES A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast) (2004) Movie directed by Margarida Cardoso, Portugal: Atalanta Filmes. Alexander, Karen and Hawkesworth, Mary (eds.) (2008) War & Terror: Feminist Perspectives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Alexander, M. Jacqui and Mohanty, Chandra T. (eds.) (1997) Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, London: Routledge. Amrane-Minne, Danièle Djamila (2007) ‘Women at War: The Representation of Women in The Battle of Algiers,’ trans. A. Clarke, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 340–49. Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) (2007) Movie directed by Fatih Akin, Germany: The Match Factory. Benedict, Helen (2009) The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, Boston: Beacon Press. Djebar, Assia (1992) Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. M. de Jager, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Dyson, William E. (2012) Terrorism: An Investigator’s Handbook, 4th edition, Waltham: Anderson Publishing. Enloe, Cynthia (1989) Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, London: Pandora Press. Enloe, Cynthia (2004) ‘All the Men Are in the Militias, All the Women Are Victims: The Politics of Masculinity and Femininity in Nationalist Wars,’ in The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 99–118. Fanon, Franz (1965) ‘Algeria Unveiled,’ in A Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chavalier, New York: Grove Press, pp. 35–67. Flame (1996) Movie directed by Ingrid Sinclair, Zimbabwe, France, and Namibia: Black and White Film Co., JBA Production and Onland Production. Gonzalez-Perez, Margaret (2008) Women and Terrorism: Female Activity in Domestic and International Terror Groups, London: Routledge. Grewal, Inderpal (2006) ‘“Security Moms” in the Early Twentieth-Century United States: The Gender of Security in Neoliberalism,’ Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1/2, pp. 25–39. Grewal, Inderpal and Kaplan, Caren (eds.) (1994) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Iyob, Ruth (2005) ‘Madamismo and Beyond: The Construction of Eritrean Women,’ in Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller (eds.) Italian Colonialism, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 233–44. Kaplan, Caren (1994) ‘The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice,’ in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds.) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 137–52. Lizardo, Omar A. and Bergesen, Albert J. (2003) ‘Types of Terrorism by World System Location,’ Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 162–92. Lyons, Tanya (2004) Guns and Guerrilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle, Trenton: Africa World Press.

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Mama, Amina (2000) ‘Transformation Thwarted: Gender-Based Violence in Africa’s New Democracies,’ African Gender Institute Newsletter, vol. 6, pp. 1–3. McClintock, Anne (1997) ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race, and Nationalism,’ in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds.) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 89–112. McClintock, Anne (2009) ‘Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,’ Small Axe, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 50–74. McFadden, Patricia (2000) ‘Radically Speaking: The Significance of the Women’s Movement for Southern Africa,’ Women’s World, available at: http://www. wworld.org/programs/regions/africa/patricia_mcfadden3.htm, accessed on 17 September 2013. McFadden, Patricia (2005) ‘Becoming Postcolonial: African Women Changing the Meaning of Citizenship,’ Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1–22. Modise, Thandi and Curnow, Robyn (2000) ‘Thandi Modise, a Woman at War,’ Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, no. 43, pp. 36–40. Mohanty, Chandra T. (2002) ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggle,’ Signs, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 499–535. Mohanty, Chandra T. (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Naaman, Dorit (2007) ‘Brides of Palestine/Angels of Death: Media, Gender, and Performance in the Case of the Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers,’ Signs, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 933–55. Purpura, Philip P. (2007) Terrorism and Homeland Security: An Introduction with Applications, Burlington: Elsevier. REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (2006) Cantata by Philip Miller, Cape Town: St. George’s Cathedral. Señorita extraviada (2001) Documentary directed by Lourdes Portillo, San Francisco: Xochitl Productions. Talbot, Rhiannon (2001) ‘Myths in the Representations of Women Terrorists,’ Eire-Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 35, no. 3/4, pp. 165–86. The Battle of Algiers (1966) Movie directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy and Algeria: Igor Film and Casbah Film. The Invisible War (2012) Documentary directed by Kirby Dick, US: Ro-co Films International. White, Aaronette M. (2007) ‘All the Men Are Fighting for Freedom, All the Women Are Mourning Their Men, but Some of Us Carried Guns: A Raced-Gendered Analysis of Fanon’s Psychological Perspectives on War,’ Signs, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 857–84. Wicomb, Zoë (2001) David’s Story, New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Woodhull, Winifred (2003) ‘Unveiling Algeria,’ in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds.) Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 567–85. Yeğenoğlu, Meyda (2003) ‘Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism,’ in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds.) Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 542–66. Zarkov, Dubravka (2006) ‘Towards a New Theorizing of Women, Gender, and War,’ in Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, and Judith Lorber (eds.) Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, London: Sage, pp. 214–33. Zarkov, Dubravka (2007) The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Breakup of Yugoslavia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Part I

Conflict Zones Colonial Haunting and Contested Sovereignties

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1

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence Monstrosity and Rape in Borderland War Jolle Demmers All war is terrible. It makes no sense to call one kind of war “barbaric” when all that is meant is that it is cheap. —Paul Richards (1996) Fighting for the Rainforest, p. xx

The icon of the raped female body has gained eminence in Western media and in policy representations of postcolonial confl ict. Juxtaposed against the vandalized female is the evil black male: a ruthless, oversexed, primitive savage. Especially in what was once, and now again, is deemed the dark continent. News reports classically spend their opening sections with explicit and intimate descriptions of these masculine transgressions, often accompanied by mystic references to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. To accommodate these caliginous fantasies, the confl ict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for one, has served as hospitable gratifier. Upon listening to women’s rape stories in Goma in 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton termed sexual violence ‘evil in its basest form’ (The Guardian 2009). Wartime rape is categorized as ‘the monstrosity of the century,’ 1 and the rapists as ‘savage beasts’ (New York Times 2007). A UN official called the DRC the ‘rape capital of the world’ and ‘the most dangerous place on earth to be a woman’ (BBC News 2010). There is nothing new about the representation of borderland war as monstrous. Today’s media portrayals contribute to the recycling of familiar colonial fantasies of the African male as a barbaric, brutal, and vengeful killer and rapist who mutilates and even eats his victims, or simply as an ‘animal’ (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2010: 12). Authors such as Césaire (1955/1972), Fanon (1963), Mudimbe (1994), Mama (1997), and Cooper (2002) have all addressed the long history in Western writing of the “ethnologizing” and racializing of African bodies as violent and in need of discipline and rescue. Nonetheless, it is exactly the revival of colonial fantasies in the twenty-fi rst century that calls for scrutiny. As is argued in this chapter, this iconic reanimation is exemplary of a larger and fundamental shift in policy and media discourses on conflict zones. During the Cold War, violent intrastate confl icts in the “non-Western” world were mostly seen as “proxy wars” and explained in terms of ideological divides and

28 Jolle Demmers superpower strategy, at times combined with political turmoil connected to processes of postindependence state building. After the Cold War, these conflicts have been coded as “ethnic” and ancient hatreds and primordialist identities were identified as root causes. Increasingly since the late 1990s, conflicts are framed as evil, driven by greed and terror. Particularly after 9/11, this has become the dominant policy framework through which wars are understood and dealt with. Organized violence in the DRC, Nigeria, Mali, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Iraq, and Afghanistan is depicted as evil, greed motivated, and dangerous. Rather than understanding such forms of violence as interconnected to the international system, they are portrayed as endemic and inherently “local.” This chapter aims to critically review representations of contemporary war (often coined as “new wars”) through describing the shifts in framing and the construction of new dichotomies, as well as conceptualizing their political functionality. Drawing on frame analysis, I will examine why it is that gendered discourses on rape have gained prominence and how they are used, appropriated, and abused for a complexity of reasons. What is offered is not an in-depth analysis of mass rape, the complexity of war in the DRC, or its media representations. In line with Turcotte (2011: 201), this chapter fi rst and foremost aims to ‘re-politicize the stakes involved in what Gayatri Spivak calls “epistemic violence”’: the violence of knowledge and the role of the academic in the production of knowledge. Combining insights from the fields of conflict studies, critical transnational feminism, and sexual politics with recent ethnographic studies of violence in the DRC (Autesserre 2012; Douma and Hilhorst 2012; Dunn 2003; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 2010), this chapter will take the case of mass rape in the DRC to explore the confusing ways in which sexual violence is singularized, decontextualized, and depoliticized. The core argument outlined holds that discourses on monstrosity and rape figure as powerful metaphors. First, by invoking the image of the “evil local,” they work to enforce a neoliberal logic of blame and accountability. Second, by reimagining parts of the global south from a series of “strategic states” into a “dangerous social body,” they legitimize new technologies of containment. Third, discourses on rape serve as income-generating strategies for both the “aid industry” and its “consumers.”2 Working from a structurationist approach, this chapter not only examines the ways in which violence is framed, but also intends to gain insight in the politics of portrayal, emphasizing the need to examine the discursive and institutional continuities that enhance or constrain certain framings of the world.

APPROACH: THE POLITICS OF PORTRAYAL Discussions on why rape has gained prominence in media and policy representations of postcolonial conflict easily get stuck in abstract dualism.

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 29 Through the lens of cosmopolitan humanism, the efforts of Western advocacy campaigns on wartime rape, such as the Enough Project, Save Darfur, or Invisible Children, are seen as forms of meaningful (feminist) solidarity, with Kantian foundations. Conversely, those who are skeptical of such claims to universal validity argue, in the lines of Carl Schmitt (1932/1996), that every argument about values is in actuality an attempt to exercise power. Although this chapter shares more with the latter position, it aims to look beyond dualistic formulas and rather to try and unravel the complex dialectics between grand design and people acting appropriately. That is, to study the interaction between power, knowledge, and subjectivity and the ways in which people, often unintentionally, reproduce certain regimes of truth. Empirically, we need to explore the conditions under which discourses of rape are produced and distributed and the ways they translate into institutional practices and examine how these practices play out in local settings. Such an interpretive epistemological stance implies placing the subject in systems of knowledge and directs our attention to, as will be outlined below, a discursive framing of the world. Central to the analysis of war and violent confl ict is the politics of portrayal: how discourses, frames, and images are used to represent the reality of war and the use of violence. Our understandings of violent confl icts are influenced by ideological and social-scientific paradigms and interpretative frames. Framing implies claiming. By framing one not only ‘simplifies and condenses the “world out there” by selectively encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present or past environment,’ as Benford and Snow (2000: 614) defi ne, but one also puts moral claims on, for instance, the (il)legitimacy of an act of violence. As stated by Brass (1996), the selection of a form and level of explanation for contemporary violent confl ict is a serious political act. Representations have political implications. Frames shape our views on what violence counts as barbaric (sexual violence in Africa) and what does not (the use of drones in Afghanistan). Frames also influence which events will be singled out (sexual violence against women) and which will not (nonsexual atrocities, sexual violence against men). They also affect the ways in which we, often unintentionally, cast blame and responsibility (focusing on the “savage beasts” and not on “systemic failures”). Framing, here, is understood as an active, processual phenomenon and the outcome of ‘negotiated shared meaning’ (Gamson 1992). As an analytical tool, frame analysis forms part of the larger field of discourse analysis, where discourses are understood as ‘social relations represented in texts where the language contained within these texts is used to construct meaning and representation. . . . The underlying assumption of discourse analysis is that social texts do not merely refl ect or mirror objects, events and categories pre-existing in the social and natural world. Rather, they actively construct a version of those things. They do not describe things, they do things. And being active they have social and political implications’ (Jabri 1996: 94–95).

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Discourses always are exercises in power. Evidently, some actors have greater “powers to define” than others, allowing for hegemonic groups to mobilize structures of signification in order to legitimate their sectional interests (Giddens 1984). At the same time, it is not the case that those in power can construct discourses out of whole cloth: discourses are constructed dialectically; they need to be both socially meaningful and politically functional. Drawing on Fairclough, I argue that we have to consider the conditions of possibility for, and the constraints on, the ‘dialectics of discourse in particular cases,’ taking into account the circumstances ‘which condition whether and to what degree social entities are receptive of or resistant to certain discourses’ (Fairclough 2003: 209). Concretely, this can be done by asking whether the social order, in a sense, “needs” a certain problem (e.g., an “evil invader,” an “ethnic other,” or “barbaric rapist”), and whether ‘those who benefit most from the way social life is now organized have an interest in the problem not being solved’ (Fairclough 2003: 210). Importantly, such a discursive understanding of the world by no means underestimates the materiality of social systems. Global neoliberalism, for instance, has produced consequences that are not simply a product of interpretation or even of discursive construction. As emphasized by Jabri (2010: 4): ‘To suggest otherwise would in effect be to deny the possibility of a critical social science and its capacity to reveal the workings of power in socio-political and economic relations.’ It is because of this aim for critical reflection that this chapter offers an analysis of how the “spectacularization” of violence against women in conflict zones works to obscure underlying systemic causes of violence. What I intend to show in the second section of this chapter is how in multilayered, sometimes even contradictory and unintentional, ways narratives of monstrosity and rape help to sustain a neoliberal hegemony. In outlining the argument, I will address the literature on frame resonance (why do certain stories “cling”?) and relate it to the notion of neoliberal governmentality to see why it is that the aid industry increasingly taps into spectacular and simplistic narratives of suffering and rescue.

FRAME RESONANCE AND NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY As Turcotte (2011: 202) argues for the case of US mainstream narratives of gender violence in the Niger Delta, such a representational politics is confi ned not only to the parameters of political economy. To come to fruition, a constant exchange between the state and the social imaginary is also necessary. Images of borderland confl icts resonate among Western audiences because they tap into deeply embedded discourses of race, masculinity, and threat. As stated by Turcotte: The state mobilizes the language of threatening black men as a mnemonic practice to conjure up the images and imaginations of racial

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 31 threat with the US public, which is then reproduced and projected onto African societies. These ethnologized, racialized, and masculinised discourses historically generate public support for the hegemonic project of whiteness, which necessitates the criminalization of communities of colour in order to secure US citizenships. (2011: 202) The notion that certain frames resonate because of historically and culturally embedded violent imaginaries is given evidence-based support by Benford and Snow’s (2000) study of framing processes and social movements. One of the factors accounting for variation in the degree of frame resonance is “empirical credibility.” This refers to the perceived fit between certain framings and events in the world. The issue is not whether frames are actually factual or valid, but whether their empirical referents lend themselves to being read as “real.” ‘The more culturally believable the claimed evidence, and the greater the number of slices of such evidence, the more credible the framing and the broader its appeal’ (Benford and Snow 2000: 620). While acknowledging that indeed ‘empirical credibility is in the eyes of the beholder,’ Benford and Snow also emphasize that the difficulties some movements experience in expanding their ranks is due in part to the empirical incredibility of their framings (2000: 620). In addition to issues of credibility, the resonance of a frame is affected by its salience to the target audience. Benford and Snow found convincing evidence that what they named ‘experiential commensurability’ constitutes an important factor to this salience. Are the framings congruent or resonant with the personal, everyday experiences of the targets? Or are the framings too abstract and distant from their lives and experiences? Not surprisingly, evidence suggests that the more experientially commensurate the framings, the greater the salience and the greater the probability of mobilization (Benford and Snow 2000: 619–22). Stories of mass rape in the DRC resonate with audiences worldwide, as sexual abuse takes place everywhere. The image of the “feminine” as stereotypically associated with a need for protection, lifegiving, and peacefulness, builds on sexist discourses at play in society more generally. By implication, these stories serve as the necessary counterpart to militarized mythologies of the “masculine” as warrior and protector (Enloe 1990; Goldstein 2001). It is the exceptional bodily violations and the explicit and detailed descriptions of mass rape, but also the reassuring distancing to “other places,” that draws Western public attention. As the literature on postcolonialism and sexual politics points out, the consequent “rescue narratives” demand that victimized “third world women” must be saved from “evil” perpetrators. These stories are both commensurate and political. Uncritical representations of gendered violence in distant geopolitical locales help to garner support for the wars and interventions of the state (e.g., invading Afghanistan to free Afghani women) (Turcotte 2011). These fi ndings provide insight into why certain “frames of violence” resonate among an audience. In many ways, they reflect what Autesserre (2012)

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refers to as the aspect of ‘simplicity.’ In her analysis of representations of the Congo, she shows that certain stories resonate more when they assign the cause of the problems to the ‘deliberate actions of identifiable individuals’; when they include ‘bodily harm to vulnerable individuals, especially when there is a short and clear causal chain assigning responsibility’; and when ‘they suggest a simple solution’ and ‘can latch on to pre-existing narratives’ (2012: 207). Narratives of mass rape and advocacy projects aiming at the rescue and protection of rape victims neatly fit the above requirements. The widespread public fascination with images of wartime rape undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that depictions of warfare offer “viscerally exiting” and “voyeuristic glimpses” into theaters of violence that, for most viewers, are alien to everyday experience. As Griffi n comments (2010: 8): ‘For many, portrayals of violence or threat seem to excite an estranged, fearful and yet persistent curiosity.’ The tendency of people to give heightened attention to visual indicators of potential threat or danger is not lost on those who make a living out of attracting viewer attention. From the fi rst European picture magazines of the 1920s and 1930s to today’s corporate-media-dominated 24/7 news cycle, and from the Spanish War to the Iraq War, “high-impact images” of violence, death, and destruction is what grabs viewer attention. But that aid organizations, advocacy networks, NGOs, and foreign policy desk officers also abide by the logic of the spectacle is a more recent phenomenon that is intricately connected with neoliberalism as a global political project, and it has repercussions for the way sexual violence is portrayed. Neoliberal governmentality provides the backdrop against which to understand the ways in which aid organizations advertise (“brand” and “market”) their projects. As a new modality of government, it not only relocates activities from the public realm to the market by means of direct privatization, public–private partnerships, or outsourcing, but also extends the logic of the market to the operation of public functions. As scholars of institutional isomorphism have long suspected, organizational environments have powerfully homogenizing effects on their constituencies. ‘When placed in competitive, market-like settings, non-profit groups are likely to behave like for-profit counterparts’ (Cooley and Ron 2002: 36). Competing to raise money and secure contracts from international fi nancial institutions, advocates resort to simplistic narratives to “sell” their projects. As a number of case studies have pointed out, fundraising and advocacy efforts succeed best when staff members put forward simple narratives, including well-defi ned “good” and “evil” individuals and clear-cut perpetrators and victims (Autesserre 2012; Lanz 2009; Mamdani 2009; Turcotte 2011). The KONY 2012 campaign that was released on the web in 2012 is perhaps the most explicit example of this. Carefully scripted as commercial, it “sells” the capturing of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s Joseph Kony in exactly the same way Apple brands its new iPhone. In their report on aid campaigns in the DRC, Douma and Hilhorst (2012: 10) describe how ‘in areas where reports of mass-rape occur, an influx

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 33 of organisations compete over the registration of victims outbidding each other with promises of assistance.’ Any analysis of sexual politics and representations of rape should take into account the ways the neoliberal capitalist logic has permeated the aid industry.

NEOLIBERALISM AS PROJECT AND DISCOURSE In examining the spectacularization of rape, the above analysis does not suffice. The resonance of simplistic frames, the rise of neoliberal governmentality, and the commodification of aid are pieces of the puzzle, but the crux is something more fundamental. Underlying the politics of portrayal is the way in which capitalism has transformed from a redistributive, Fordist– Keynesian model to its current neoliberal form and the impact this has had on lives and relationships worldwide. Through massive deregulation and privatization measures since the 1970s, the capitalist system has undergone restructuring and transformation. It is characterized by the rise of transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, which has been able to break free from the state constraints to accumulation of the post–World War II era and has gathered an extraordinary amount of power and control over global resources and institutions. Wealth inequality under capitalist globalization has been so extreme that even participants at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos acknowledged that severe income disparity is among the five risks considered most likely and impactful in the ‘global risk landscape’ and is raising the spectre of worldwide political and social instability (World Economic Forum 2014: 17). In order to continue, such a dynamic is in constant need of legitimization. The impact of neoliberalization is felt particularly strong in the global south. In Africa, for instance, the neoliberal reforms that came with debt conditionality were in effect a death sentence to smallholding peasant farming. Devoid of the protectionist measures enjoyed by farmers in Europe and the US and with full exposure to the fluctuations of global food prices, these peasant households were incapable of competing on the global market and saw their position deteriorate rapidly over the years (Bryceson 2012; Bryceson and Jamal 1997). Massive urbanization, land confl ict, and food insecurity are pervasive all over Africa. Neoliberalization has also strongly impacted social and political orderings. Whereas states in Europe went through phases of strong economic protectionism, thriving on colonial exploitation and a strategy of primitive accumulation, the state- and nation-building processes of developing countries are marked by very different contextual realities. Not only do they suffer the consequences of a history of extraction and exploitation; they also often have only experimented briefly with economic models of state-led growth. Clearly, the economic development and trajectories of developing countries show massive differences, from the long history of import substitution characterizing

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many Latin American states to the postcolonial neo-patrimonial state in Africa, the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of Southeast Asia, and the economic protectionism in postindependence India and Indonesia. A central argument, however, is that although the “neoliberal revolution” of the late twentieth century played out differently, it went with a worldwide erosion or disintegration of state structures. The incapacity of governments to monopolize national territories and control economic dynamics has eroded the decision-making power and legitimacy of the state in many developing countries (and certainly also in advanced industrial countries). Processes of state and nation building are either weakened and delegitimized or frustrated and impeded. For clarity’s sake, I do not regard the set of politico-economic forces and arrangements called neoliberalism as a magical shaping power, pulling the strings of everything in the world around us. And, certainly, I would fall into my own “simplicity trap” if the above evokes images of “evil neoliberals” polluting “noble and progressing indigenous development.” There is no need to romanticize the mostly authoritarian, clientelist, or revolutionary nationalist regimes supporting state-led development in the global south. In addition, as my own research on the micropolitics of neoliberalization in Mexico illustrates, the transition to a free market economy, although a key component of IMF aid conditionality, was adopted and promoted by networks of local political technocrats and business corporations, creating forms of ‘neoliberal caciquismo’ (Demmers 1999). The core issue is that neoliberalization engenders fundamental social, political, and material transformations, which require study. Neoliberalization as ‘concrete political program of commodification’ and as ‘hegemonic project’ driven by a concrete transnational capitalist alliance has been documented and researched extensively (Bourdieu 2004; Harvey 2003; Klein 2007). In these studies, a careful analysis is given of how the agenda of economic transformation under the sign of the free market has come to dominate global politics in the last three decades. What is highlighted are the institutional arrangements of neoliberalism, such as the unbinding of existing markets through deregulation of fi nance, the privatization of public sector agencies, and the outsourcing of services (including prisons, health care, education, security). A theme that so far has received less empirical research is the ways in which neoliberalism sustains itself culturally and socially: how it impacts the public imagination and has managed to become the new dominant social “normalcy.” As Braedley and Luxton (2010) and Greenhouse (2010) argue, neoliberalism has seeped into our social and political fabric and deeply reconfigured people’s relationships to each other, their sense of membership in a public, and their conditions of self-knowledge. ‘Neoliberal reform—now a generation or more in the making—has restructured the most prominent public relationships that constitute belonging: politics, markets, work and selfidentity’ (Greenhouse 2010: 2). It is hence significant to study neoliberalism

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 35 not merely as a hegemonic ideological project, but also as discursive and institutional practice, and see through which modalities of government and technologies of power it manages to project a coherent program of interpretations and images of the world onto others (Ward and England 2007). This approach proposes an understanding of neoliberalism as process, where its ‘articulation with existing circumstances comes through endlessly unfolding failures and successes in the relations between people and their socially constructed realities as they are (re)imagined, (re)interpreted, and (re)assembled to influence forms of knowledge through the “conduct of conduct”’ (Springer 2012: 137). In what follows, I propose an understanding of neoliberalism as hegemonic ideological project emerging through and constitutive of discursive and institutional practices that render it an inevitable form of human conduct.

SEGREGATION: WE ARE NOT TO BLAME Since the 1980s, the World Bank has dominated mainstream debates on development in Africa. Through its global reach and insidious control of aid to African countries, it has exerted strong influence over donor agencies and, through this, on ways in which wider networks of consultancy and research have been fi nanced and organized (Williams 2011). The World Bank gained its powerful position in the 1970s with the oil crises of 1973–1974 and 1979 and the concomitant debt crisis, when many African governments could no longer afford their Keynesian-inspired state development programs (often directed to agricultural improvement) and turned to the lending services of the World Bank and IMF for support. It is in these moments of crisis that framing plays a crucial role. As an international bureaucracy staffed primarily by economists and heavily weighted toward American geopolitical interests, the World Bank’s diagnostic frame focused on corrupt and rent-seeking bureaucrats in African governments and parastatals as the source of the crisis, segregating economic decline in Africa from the larger turmoil in global markets at the time (Wade 2002). This paved the way for implementing heavy-handed structural adjustment programs (SAPs) designed to open up national economies, impose stringent austerity programs, and radically downsize the state (World Bank 1981). As a result, ‘African achievements in the fields of health, education, and productive services of the preceding two decades were reversed—and the 1980s were often described as the continent’s lost decade’ (Bryceson 2012: 292). Throughout the following decades, the World Bank and other aid agencies continued to draw on a framing of Africans as rent seeking and corrupt in order to legitimize their interventions. This became particularly pervasive by the turn of the twenty-fi rst century when the World Bank, confronted with the long-term deflationary effects of its reform programs, launched two campaigns under the headings of “Good Governance” and

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“greed as driver of civil war” in order to counter-frame their policies among mounting criticism. In both campaigns we can see what Benford and Snow call ‘boundary framing’ at work: attributional processes that seek to delineate the boundaries between “good” and “evil” and construct “us” and “them” categories. Both campaigns were a reaction to critique, now also coming from within the organization (e.g., Stiglitz 2002), on its neoliberal restructuring policies. Undeniably, and in spite of the rhetoric about curing sick economies, “neoliberalized” regions (particularly the former Soviet Union and large parts of Africa) where plagued by high levels of unemployment, poverty, growing income disparities, political turmoil, and violence, and the rise of “enclave economies” revolving around a number of high-value commodities (oil, diamonds, gold, coltan, timber). The Good Governance campaign, apart from a repetition of earlier representations of African states as mired by corruption, collapse, and rent seeking, claimed that it was not the neoliberal model that was to blame for the political turmoil and lack of economic progress, but rather the immature, corrupt, and inefficient state administrations of developing countries (for a more detailed overview, see Demmers, Férnandez Jilberto, and Hogenboom 2004). The call for less state in the 1980s was gradually substituted by a call for a better state: a ‘competent, non-corrupt and accountable public administration’ (World Bank 1994: 5). The idea that participation in the global market was ultimately for the benefit of all remained the backbone of the policy. By dissecting good and bad, invoking images of the “purity” of the market being “spoiled” and “polluted” by culpable agents, the Good Governance campaign, by means of its framing, focused blame and responsibility at the level of deliberate actions of corrupt individuals. By identifying “bad government” as the source of African development problems, the World Bank absolved itself from responsibility for the long-term detrimental impact of its restructuring programs in Africa. The devastating impact of the Bank’s market liberalization policies on, for instance, agriculture, with undercapitalized African producers having to compete on the global market with—generously subsidized—OECD farmers, was carefully left out of the picture (Fine 2009; Fox and Brown 1998). What Good Governance did for the economy, the “greed theory” does for war: it places blame and responsibility at the level of the local actor. Where advocates of the Good Governance recipe argue that it is bad leadership, not neoliberalism, that causes stagnation, the greed theory holds that it is greed, not grievance, that causes violent conflict in Africa. It is not difficult to see the attractiveness of such an idea for not only politicians and policy makers, but also for the media industry hunting for “footage.” Instead of understanding civil war and collective violence in Africa as manifestations of systemic failures and mechanisms, it is the concrete faces of local actors who become the flash point for policy discourses and media imagery. The World Bank report Breaking the Conflict Trap (2003) marked the proliferation of

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 37 the greed theory, a neoclassical economic theory of violent conflict. Based on quantitative statistical analysis, and an idea of the individual as utility maximizer, the report claims to provide evidence that today’s civil wars are fought by greedy rebels who are willing to put their lives on the line in return for immediate profit. Despite the fact that in academia the greed theory was dismissed as flawed (even to a certain extent by its own inventors), it strongly resonated within the aid and media landscape. What the above overview shows us is that the current singular focus on sexual violence cannot be studied in isolation. It forms part of a larger frame alignment by means of which blame and responsibility are cast. Fundamental here is the way in which a politics of segregation is promoted, where violence and evil are located in the individual and separated from a more comprehensive analysis of systemic failures and mechanisms (colonialism, structural adjustment, the global market). This not only implies a segregation between the culpable (corrupt regimes, greedy male rebels) and the innocent (the poor, the female), but also enforces scalar hierarchies: through multiple and mundane bureaucratic practices and routine operations, global governance institutions produce a spatial order through which authority over “the local” is legitimized. This is what Ferguson and Gupta (2002) call “transnational governmentality.” Institutions such as the World Bank are not simply bureaucratic apparatuses; they also are powerful sites of symbolic and cultural production. They are ‘constructed entities that are conceptualized and made socially effective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices that require study’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 981). By recycling the imaginary of the violent, corrupt, and evil African male (and its counterpart: the abused and suffering African female), the World Bank, and the network of NGOs and donor agencies operating in its slipstream, not only justifies its restructuring practices, but also represents itself as superior to and encompassing of other centers of power. Women’s mutilated bodies become symbols of Africa’s “local” problems, justifying “global” solutions. The portrayal of the African male as corrupt and evil is complemented with another, equally influential, boundary framing of the local as dangerous. Here, too, rape figures as a metaphor but now as the means and justification of securitization, legitimizing the new technologies of containment of the post–Cold War era.

THE BORDERLANDS AS DANGEROUS BODY A number of scholars (Cramer 2006; Dexter 2007; Duffield 2002, 2007, 2008; Willett 2010), arguing from a political economy approach to contemporary violent confl ict, have scrutinized the relation between local “borderland” wars and the power hierarchy of the global governance system. By analyzing the rise of the “new wars” discourse, these authors not

38 Jolle Demmers only describe the shift in framing and the construction of new dichotomies, but they also conceptualize the ways they legitimize a global regime shift from geopolitics to biopolitics. Central to this analysis is the representational transformation of parts of the global south from a series of “strategic states” at the time of the Cold War into a “dangerous social body.” As argued by Duffield (2007, 2008), what is “new” about the “new wars” is their alleged illegitimacy. What has changed is not so much the nature of violent conflict, but the international denial of any legitimacy to warring parties within “failed states.” For most of the twentieth century, supporting conflicts waged by irregular armies was an accepted feature of international conflict—certainly during the superpower rivalry of the Cold War. Because a direct military confrontation between the two superpowers was impossible, Moscow and Washington exported their geopolitical rivalry to the developing world. This resulted in the much discussed interstate and intrastate “proxy wars” and a merger of local and geopolitical antagonisms and alliances. The massive transfer of weapons to both governments and insurgents in the “strategic states” of Central and South America, Africa, and Asia greatly enhanced local insecurities and instabilities in these regions. Largely, however, local wars were seen as legitimate and were supported with funding, arms, and political patronage. Importantly, during the Cold War, development aid and donor-led peacekeeping and conflict resolution activities were circumscribed by state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the norms of nonintervention. The end of the Cold War, however, changed all this. Warring parties in internal conflict lost their geopolitical strategic functionality. The rapid withdrawal of financial and political support after 1989 forced warring parties in the former “strategic states” to turn to other sources of income and support, such as the shadow economy and overseas diasporas. Rather than strategic allies, they turned into potential threats, which needed to be contained (the quintessential example of this is, of course, the US relation to the Mujahedin in Afghanistan). It is against this backdrop that the “new wars” label gained prominence within the discourse of the United Nations, World Bank, donor governments, regional organizations, and NGOs. Duffield points out how these conventional descriptions create a series of “us” and “them” dichotomies: Their wars, for example, are internal, illegitimate, identity-based, characterised by unrestrained destruction, abuse civilians, lead to social regression, rely on privatized violence, and so on. By implication, our wars are between states, are legitimate and politically motivated, show restraint, respect civilians, lead to social advancement and are based on accountable force. In describing their wars, by implication, such statements suggest a good deal about how we like to understand our own violence. They establish, for want of better terms, a formative contrast between borderland traits of barbarity, excess and irrationality, and metropolitan characteristics of civility, restraint and rationality. (2002: 1052)

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 39 By constructing the imagined space of the “borderland,” a powerful legitimation was established for the new Western humanitarian interventionism that came with the new hierarchy of power of the post–Cold War era. The “new war” label of chaos and barbarity was used as a moral justification for this increased interventionism, coined the New Humanitarian Order by Mahmood Mamdani (2009). For not only did internal wars cease to be politically functional; the emerging shadow economies and network wars were above all seen as dangerous, as seriously threatening Western ways of life. This was of course greatly enhanced by the 9/11 attacks and the global War on Terror, resulting in the idea of underdevelopment as dangerous and hence the turn to the securitization of development. For Duffield (2007: 122), ‘the bad forms of global circulation associated with non-insured surplus population penetrate the porous borders of mass consumer society, damaging its social cohesion and destabilizing its way of life.’ It is in this light that Duffield argues to understand the rise of ‘human security’ and ‘state fragility’ as technologies of containment. The renewed wave of Western humanitarian and peace interventionism in the post–Cold War period and its fashions of ‘human security’ and ‘state fragility’ are primarily technologies of power aimed at controlling people living on the margins of global society. The main development recipe in this context is the encouragement of local self-reliance (or “sustainable development”). Whereas the notion of self-reliance began as a challenge to the world economy by advocating endogenously determined autonomous development, the term has been transformed over the past decades to mean support by international agencies for do-it-yourself welfare programs in the periphery. In its transformed meaning, self-reliance has become ‘complementary to and supportive of hegemonic goals for the world economy’ (Cox 1983: 173). Duffield applies Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ in his critique of this liberal understanding of development. Simply put, where geopolitics is a form of politics in which power is executed through a control over territories, biopolitics is the exertion of power through the disciplining and regulation of people. Biopolitics is primarily about governing the life (and death) of the population. For Duffield, rather than a way to “better” people, development has become a technology of security, aimed at containing the circulatory and destabilizing effects of underdevelopment’s surplus labor (or “waste life”) on the Western way of life. ‘Rather than moving toward global equity, for decades western politicians have proved to be either unable or unwilling to moderate mass society’s hedonistic thirst for unlimited consumption. . . . The expectation that those excluded from the feast—the international surplus population—will be satisfied with basic needs is, at best, unrealistic and racist’ (Duffield 2007: 70). ‘Human security’ should not be understood by its common defi nition as ‘prioritising people rather than states’ but as a form of long-distance biopolitics, that is, as ‘effective states prioritising the well-being of populations living within ineffective ones’ (Duffield 2007: 122). What follows is the emergence of “governance states”—that is, zones

40 Jolle Demmers of contingent sovereignty where the West, through complex networks of public–private governance, shapes the basic economic and welfare policies. While its territorial integrity is respected, sovereignty over life is internationalized, negotiable, and contingent. In the long run, the “new wars” discourse seems to pave the way for the surrender of the borderlands to regimes of private networks of local businessmen, multinationals, and private military corporations, creating a “market” for endless outside emergency assistance.3

THE MULTIFUNCTIONALITY OF WARTIME RAPE Classifications of violence and violent conflict are cumbersome. Classifications are tools to advance our thinking, but they can also muddle analysis. The act of classification necessarily involves simplifying the world, and that is not a bad thing per se. Nevertheless, as Cramer argues, simplifications can be misleading. This happens when ‘the definitions involved work like borders separating artificially or at least crudely phenomena that might be closely related’ (Cramer 2006: 84). Any analysis of contemporary violence in the DRC, or any violent conflict for that matter, needs to accept the complexity, multicausality, and interconnectedness of violence. It is tempting at this point to come up with a counter-framing of the DRC violence as colonial and neoliberal based. And, surely, there is much to say in advancing this claim. A mere glance at the Congo’s recent history suffices to show the gross simplicity of the new wars meta-frame. From its “invention” as a land of savages in dire need of Belgian civilization by Leopold II, who, as its personal owner, made a fortune in rubber and ivory, into five decades of colonial rule and wealth extraction, the Congo and its people suffered under violent oppression widely seen as the most brutal in all colonial Africa (see Dunn 2003). After independence, the country was run for three decades by the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, who, heavily backed by the US as a Cold War ally, continued the tradition of private wealth accumulation. Not long after Laurent Kabila toppled Mobutu’s government in 1997, with the aid of Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, and Burundi, the country found itself in the midst of what came to be the deadliest confl ict since World War II, involving seven foreign armies and several militia groups, killing millions of people (IRC 2008). Add to this the ways in which the dictate of global neoliberalism smothered any possible attempt at industrialization and the mutation of the Congolese economy into a highly unstable and militarized corporate enclave economy, and the prosecution case is clear. It is this conundrum that shows that any analysis of violence in the DRC, including that of mass rape, has to take into account the systemic crises and complicated intersections of the colonial, imperial, and capitalist violence of the international system. Pitched at this level of abstraction and generality, the

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 41 pattern of cause and effect seems robust. Any ethnography of violence in the DRC, however, will show us that the story is endlessly more complex, ambivalent, and, yes, localized. A purely political economy approach to the DRC violence is bound to be limited and mono-causal. But the point here is not to be exhaustive. Rather, the DRC case illustrates not only that discourses of monstrosity are dominant and misleading, but also how such imaginings have repercussions on the ground. They do things. As recent ethnographies (Autesserre 2012; Douma and Hilhorst 2012; Dunn 2003; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 2010) show, the proliferation of a singular and decontextualized focus on wartime rape of the past decade is problematic for a number of reasons. Apart from the recycling of racialized stereotypes, the singular focus on sexual violence disconnects this type of violence from the many other forms of violence (mass killing, torture, forced recruitment) committed. The conceptualization of sexual violence as somehow “outside” other forms of violence by being gendered ultimately contributes to the dehumanization of those who rape (and also, ultimately, those who are raped). The exclusive focus on rape hampers our understanding of the relationship between sexual violence and other violence. Eriksson Baaz and Stern argue for a more comprehensive approach. Various forms of violence are not only connected; they are manifestations of the same systemic failures and mechanisms. ‘By treating sexual violence as a phenomenon sui generis we risk ending up with counter strategies that are inherently flawed’ (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2010: 13). Furthermore, the DRC experience shows that the recent attention to rape cases, but also the resources pouring in from donor agencies, risks feeding into perceptions of “rape as an income-earning strategy.” This fi nding of how the prominence of donor policies and human rights projects have caused people to “instrumentalize” rape in contexts of poverty and a corrupt judiciary is confi rmed by a number of sources (Douma and Hilhorst 2012; French 2011; Hollander 2011). Allegations of rape (often it is fathers or brothers who accuse other men of having raped their female family members) become increasingly entangled in disputes over land, income, and property, and also are seen as a way to get access to health services. Apart from an effective income-earning strategy for individuals, local governments are eager to produce high figures of imprisoned “rapists” to attract donor programs (on medical care, and also education and credit facilities). As Eriksson Baaz and Stern (2010: 54) argue: ‘The emergence of these types of rape accusation must be seen as the result of the comparably massive resources channeled by international agencies and international organizations into providing services relating to sexual violence.’ Ironically, these examples show how dominant discourses on barbaric borderland violence are instrumentalized, but also—and importantly—reinforced locally. This is how stories on barbarianism, for a multiplicity of reasons and in very different contexts, are kept alive.

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CONCLUSION Representations of violence in the DRC are not only “epistemic,” but also translate into concrete and lived material realities on the ground. Such representations work to obscure structural and global histories of violence. Rather than understanding mass rape in the DRC as endemic and local, we need to recognize the “new wars” as connected to neoliberal restructuring, systemic inequality, and postcolonial state structures. The proliferation of a singular and decontextualized focus on wartime rape has not appeared randomly. The portrayal of the African male as monstrous fits the “new wars” frame shift of the late 1990s. Although often not intentionally, government officials, media networks, NGO analysts, and human rights workers join in a politics of portrayal that works to justify the failures and dominance of global neoliberalization and produces new forms of transnational governmentality. This is the tragedy of the spectacle. No matter how sincere the concerns among Western audiences and compassionate the antirape campaigns of the aid industry, as long as they remain what they are, personalized, consumptive, and victim centered, they do not invoke any kind of change in systemic relationships. Humanitarianism as business depends on the marketization of violence. Imaginaries of the African male as savage beast, and the passive, mutilated African female in need of rescue, appeal to Western consumers. These representations, however, precisely because they are so appealing, also show how feminist agendas help shape—surely unwillingly—a neoliberal hegemony by drawing attention away from systemic accountabilities. For such portrayals create a “geopolitical disconnect” that situates sexual violence as purely local. As Elizabeth Goldberg indicates, ‘markets of/for violence’ maintain segregated understandings and practices of violence (Goldberg, cited in Turcotte 2011: 203). The politics of portrayal is thus first and foremost a politics of segregation, which situates mass rape as a borderland problem that has no connection to metropolitan audiences other than that of consumption, altruism, and rescue. NOTES 1. See the documentary directed by Lisa F. Jackson, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007). 2. The steadily inflating “aid industry” consists of a transnational, networked congregation of people working for donor governments, aid-coordinating bodies, international NGOs, UN agencies, the World Bank, local NGOs, community groups, and private military corporations, as well as private contractors and commercial companies. 3. Parts of this section are taken from my book Theories of Violent Conflict (2012).

REFERENCES Autesserre, Séverine (2012) ‘Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on the Congo and Their Unintended Consequences,’ African Affairs, vol. 111, no. 443, pp. 202–22.

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 43 BBC News (2010) ‘UN Official Calls DR Congo “Rape Capital of the World,”’ 28 April 2010, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8650112.stm, accessed on 16 June 2013. Benford, Robert D. and Snow, David A. (2000) ‘Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,’ Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 26, pp. 611–39. Bourdieu, Pierre (2004) Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market, London: Verso. Braedley, Susan and Luxton, Meg (2010) Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Brass, Paul (1996) ‘Introduction: Discourses of Ethnicity, Communalism, and Violence,’ in Paul R. Brass (ed.) Riots and Pogroms, New York: New York University Press, pp. 1–55. Bryceson, Deborah Fahy (2012) ‘Discovery and Denial: Social Science Theory and Interdisciplinarity in African Studies,’ African Affairs, vol. 111, no. 443, pp. 281–302. Bryceson, Deborah Fahy and Jamal, Vali (1997) Farewell to Farms: De-Agrarianization and Employment in Africa, Aldershot: Ashgate. Césaire, Aimé (1955/1972) Discourse on Colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press. Cooley, Alexander and Ron, James (2002) ‘The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action,’ International Security, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 5–39. Cooper, Frederick (2002) Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, Robert W. (1983) ‘Gramsci, Hegemony, and International Relations: An Essay in Method,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 162–75. Cramer, Christopher (2006) Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing, London: Hurst and Company. Demmers, Jolle (1999) Friends and Bitter Enemies: Politics and Neoliberal Reform in Yucatán, Amsterdam: Thela Publishers. Demmers, Jolle (2012) Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Demmers, Jolle, Férnandez Jilberto, Alex and Hogenboom, Barbara (2004) Good Governance in the Era of Global Neoliberalism: Conflict and Depolitisation in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, London: Routledge. Dexter, Helen (2007) ‘New War, Good War and the War on Terror: Explaining, Excusing and Creating Western Neo-Interventionism,’ Development and Change, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 1055–71. Douma, Nynke and Hilhorst, Thea (2012) ‘Fond de commerce? Sexual Violence Assistance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ Occasional Papers series #2, Disaster Studies, Wageningen University. Duffield, Mark (2002) ‘Social Reconstruction and the Radicalization of Development: Aid as a Relation of Global Liberal Governance,’ Development and Change, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 1049–71. Duffield, Mark (2007) Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Cambridge: Polity. Duffield, Mark (2008) ‘Global Civil War: The Non-Insured, International Containment and Post-Interventionary Society,’ Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 145–65. Dunn, Kevin C. (2003) Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Enloe, Cynthia (1990) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Eriksson Baaz, Maria and Stern, Maria (2009) ‘Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC),’ International Studies Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 495–518. Eriksson Baaz, Maria and Stern, Maria (2010) ‘The Complexity of Violence: A Critical Analysis of Sexual Violence in the DRC,’ Sida Working Paper. Fairclough, Norman (2003) Analysing Discourse, London: Routledge. Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, New York: Grove Press. Ferguson, James and Gupta, Akhil (2002) ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,’ American Ethnologist, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 981–1002. Fine, Ben (2009) ‘Development as Zombieconomics in the Age of Neoliberalism,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 884–904. Fox, Jonathan A. and Brown, David (eds.) (1998) The Struggle for Accountability: The World Bank, NGOs and Grassroots Movements, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. French, Howard (2011) ‘Congo: Rape, Savagery, and Stereotypes, the Heart of Darkness,’ available at: www.youtube.com?v=NXJEVoaHoHU&feature=play er_embedded, accessed on 16 June 2013. Gamson, William A. (1992) Talking Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, Anthony (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldstein, Joshua S. (2001) War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, The (2007) Documentary directed by Lisa F. Jackson, US: Women Make Movies. Greenhouse, Carol J. (ed.) (2010) Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Griffi n, Michael (2010) ‘Media Images of War,’ Media, War and Conflict, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 7–41. Guardian, The (2009) ‘Clinton Sees Evil in Sex Crimes in Eastern Congo,’ 12 August 2009, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8653126, accessed on 16 June 2013. Harvey, David (2003) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hollander, Theo (2011) ‘Unpublished Fieldwork Notes from DRC,’ Centre for Confl ict Studies, Utrecht University. Jabri, Vivienne (1996) Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jabri, Vivienne (2010) War and the Transformation of Global Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, Naomi (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books. Lanz, David (2009) ‘Save Darfur: A Movement and its Discontents,’ African Affairs, vol. 108, no. 433, pp. 669–77. Mama, Amina (1997) ‘Shedding the Masks and Tearing the Veils: Cultural Studies for a Post-Colonial Africa,’ in Ayesha Imam, Amina Mama, and Fatou Sow (eds.) Engendering African Social Sciences, Dakar: CODESRIA, pp. 63–80. Mamdani, Mahmood (2009) Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, London: Verso. Mudimbe, V.Y. (1994) The Idea of Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Neoliberal Discourses on Violence 45 New York Times (2007) ‘Rape Epidemic Rises Trauma of Congo War,’ 7 October 2007, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/world/africa/07congo. html?pagewanted=all, accessed on 16 June 2013. Richards, Paul (1996) Fighting for the Rainforest, London: Heinemann. Schmitt, Carl (1932/1996) The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Springer, Simon (2012) ‘Neoliberalism as Discourse: Between Foucauldian Political Economy and Marxian Poststructuralism,’ Critical Discourse Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 133–47. Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2002) Globalization and its Discontents, New York: Norton. Turcotte, Heather M. (2011) ‘Contextualizing Petro-Sexual Politics,’ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 200–220. Wade, Robert H. (2002) ‘US Hegemony and the World Bank: The Fight over People and Ideas,’ Review of International Political Economy, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 621–44. Ward, Kevin and England, Kim (2007) ‘Introduction: Reading Neoliberalization,’ in Kim England and Kevin Ward (eds.) Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 1–22. Willett, Susan (2010) ‘New Barbarians at the Gate: Losing the Liberal Peace in Africa,’ Review of African Political Economy, vol. 32, no. 106, pp. 569–94. Williams, David (2011) The World Bank and Social Transformation in International Politics: Liberalism, Governance and Sovereignty, London: Routledge. World Bank (1981) Accelerated Development in Sub-Sahara Africa: An Agenda for Action, Washington: World Bank. World Bank (1994) Development in Practice: Governance—the World Bank’s Experience, Washington: World Bank. World Bank (2003) Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, Policy Research Report, Washington: World Bank. World Economic Forum (2014) Global Risks 2014: Ninth Edition, Geneva: World Economic Forum.

2

Thin Ice Postcoloniality and Sexuality in the Politics of Citizenship and Military Service Vron Ware

In September 2012 the British media was agog at the news that a female soldier serving in Afghanistan was rushed into emergency care, where she gave birth to a baby five weeks prematurely. Much was made of the fact that the medical team was not equipped to handle obstetrics, which meant that qualified pediatric staff had to travel from the UK with an incubator. The woman, Lance Bombardier Lynette Pearce, was described as “unknowingly” pregnant, having conceived shortly before deployment to Helmand (Hough and Pearlman 2012). Along with the routine medical explanations as to how pregnancy can be undetected for so long, commentary also dwelt on the question of whether women should have a routine urine test before serving on the front line. It soon emerged that up to two hundred British female soldiers had been ‘aero medically evacuated’ from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq because of pregnancy over the previous five years (Hough and Farmer 2012; Leake 2010). The coverage was in stark contrast to a feature that ran just a few weeks earlier that highlighted the use of female soldiers in Afghanistan as a ‘secret weapon’ (Baskerville 2012). On this occasion, readers were told of the work of Britain’s seven Female Engagement Officers, soldiers who were specially trained to work with predominantly male regiments and who constituted ‘part of what the military call the “white picture”; that which doesn’t fit into the tactical or strategic considerations of a war zone’ (Baskerville 2012). The online magazine article, written by Alison Baskerville, an embedded reporter, was carefully illustrated with images that emphasized the femininity of the soldiers while simultaneously stressing the dangers of their task. Pictures of female toiletries, the outside of the shower tent, the inside of the gym, and a glimpse of a woman sleeping in her underwear testified to the difficulties of keeping up standards expected of “our” women. Meanwhile, another photo showed a uniformed officer “getting to know” an Afghan family. The group, which consisted of an elderly man and ten small children, was seated around the soldier, whose rifle was strategically placed on the ground beside her. Several weeks after this feature was aired, Baskerville’s work was shown in an exhibition in central London. The show, which was actually called ‘The White Picture,’ duly received significant publicity, not least because

Thin Ice

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the work had been commissioned by the country’s largest veterans’ organization, the Royal British Legion, and was timed to coincide with Remembrance Day, one of the most hallowed rituals in the national calendar. Headlines such as ‘Weapons, Warpaint and Washing: A Modern Portrait of Women Warriors’ (Lydall 2012) greeted commuters reading their free evening papers on the tube. The images were widely available on media websites along with interviews with Baskerville. In an article in The Guardian, she described how the women officers, when approaching communities, ‘set aside their weapons, and seek out the wives. “They are in the frontline, but they have to walk into the compounds, take off their helmets and suddenly become more feminine”’ (Hopkins 2012). The prominence of these stories as national media events helps to identify the question that prompted this chapter: how do representations of military work that circulate at home change public perceptions of what the military does elsewhere in the name of national defence and security? There is undoubtedly a discrepancy between the two scenarios of female soldiers on the front line—the fi rst indicating that the female body is a liability and the second demonstrating that femininity plays an invaluable role in counterinsurgency (McBride and Wibben 2012). Where the former can be regarded as a titillating news item from the war zone, the second is squarely aimed at the hearts and minds of a domestic population growing increasingly impatient with a futile and exorbitantly costly campaign. But these contradictions appear less pronounced when both sets of images are viewed as stereotypes that naturalize gender difference as well as reinforce the links between sexuality, femininity, frailty, and danger. Although women’s involvement in military work cannot be regarded as commensurable with what “real” men are required to do, these fleeting but entertaining glimpses of familiar female predicaments—unexpected pregnancy, washing your underwear without running water—nonetheless demand critical attention for the ways in which they mediate notions of embodied difference and mystify the concept of sexual equality. Here they serve as fitting examples of how the militarization of femininity as well as masculinity is implicated in the reshaping, challenging, and entrenching of social and political orders at home. The use of female soldiers in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations (Bridges and Horsfall 2009; Khalili 2011; Kronsell and Svedberg 2006, 2012) has many precedents, not unlike the deployment of particular ethnic groups on the basis of their cultural affi nities (Enloe 1980; Ware 2013). One detail that escaped closer scrutiny in the fi rst instance was that the fi rst soldier was not a British national. It transpired that she was born in Fiji and had been recruited into the British Army as a Commonwealth citizen, one of more than two thousand fellow Fijians, including her own brother and the unmarried father of her child. The combination of the woman’s “unknowing pregnancy” and her nationality captivated the British media, competing with news of Prince Harry’s deployment, a

48 Vron Ware formidable attack on Camp Bastion, mounting numbers of NATO deaths at the hands of Afghan security forces, and two unrelated suicides of serving British soldiers in Afghanistan. As a reminder of the vulnerabilities of women in the military, this “British Marmy” negated the idea that they were particularly qualified for modern counterinsurgency work. At the same time, the woman’s status as a postcolonial migrant in a supremely national institution was at odds with the dominant discourse of heroism, patriotism, and self-sacrifice that permeates current discussions of military service (Ware 2010a). In the context of an important argument about intersectionality and violence, my aim is to connect the employment of nonnationals and ethnic minorities as soldiers with a gender-based perspective on military work. These two analytical projects have their own trajectories but they also overlap—or intersect—in fundamentally important ways. A national armed force that is inclusive of minorities conveys fundamental ideas about the terms of citizenship offered by the nation as a political body, while also adding legitimacy to the military as a democratic and progressive institution (Basham 2013). Joseph Soeters and Jan van der Meulen (2007) point out that the term “cultural diversity” does not mean that all minorities are treated as the same. The ‘history of women in the military is quite different from that of ethnic minority soldiers and their past’ (Soeters and van der Meulen 2007: 3), they note. Expressed in the simplest terms, where ethnicity has historically provided a rationale for enlisting (and promoting) certain groups on the basis of their suitability for warfare, gender has invariably been the basis for keeping women out. Behind this sweeping generalization there are many important qualifications and historical variations, but in the context of the argument in this chapter, the inclusion of ethnic minorities and women on equal terms within the same military workforce has been a feature of the late twentieth century.

THE HOME FRONT In a recent essay, Michael J. Shapiro (2011: 109) asks, ‘In what sense is war present, now that remote targeting occurs, as info war displaces the industrialized warfare of the past and lethality is frequently delivered from the home front?’ Mindful of this question, this chapter pays close attention to the figure of the soldier as one that is capable of transmitting to domestic populations a wide range of beliefs and practices concerning warfare itself. It argues that a close examination of the soldier-workercitizen as a racialized and gendered construct can offer an effective means of exposing the hidden material and fi nancial resources that are required to commit a country to war and keep it there. Keeping an eye on representations of soldiering as a form of ‘supercitizenship’ (Lutz 2002b) can provide a focus for tracking the ideological energy involved in securing

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public acquiescence and marginalizing opposition as a form of disloyalty to the national state. A number of factors are changing the roles that modern soldiers are required to perform in the name of national security and peacekeeping: human rights discourse with its emphasis on individual and group rights (Basham 2013; Forster 2012), risk analysis, privatization of legalized violence, technological developments, including the increased use of drones, and the profound impact of commercialization on the security sector. As Anna Leander writes (2009: 3), the last two decades have seen ‘the development of a global market for force.’ National military institutions now operate alongside and in conjunction with a vast array of development agencies and civilian NGOs as well as privatized security forces providing remunerative employment to a martial workforce that includes thousands of exsoldiers from different countries. Yet national military service, performed either by conscripts or by volunteer-recruits, remains a central mechanism for strengthening the links between naturalization and nationality that operate at the heart of the ‘citizenship-protection nexus’ (Leander 2009). Asking how, where, and why the relationship between soldiers and citizens delineates the boundaries of our political communities suggests important lines of investigation in countries with significant numbers of postcolonial citizens, settlers, and migrants. For those researching the politics of citizenship, belonging, and national identity, paying attention to an army’s employment policies and strategies when the country is at war becomes an important way of investigating the limits of the nation—both as an idea and in policy terms (Krebs 2004; Ware 2010b). This is an issue that has far-reaching implications for ordinary citizens who have little or no knowledge of how military organizations work, implications articulated by the often unexamined belief that soldiers deserve privileges and exemptions on the basis of their readiness to sacrifice their lives for the nation. It has acquired a new urgency during the decade since 2001, a period in which war has become normalized in the political life of many NATO countries. One consequence of this normalization, in the UK at least, is that the figure of the soldier has been transformed in proportion to the lack of critical attention. Military culture is now ubiquitous throughout the media, constantly visible in news, TV dramas and reality shows, fi lms, bookshops, documentaries, digital games, forums, art, and photography. Although there has been a proliferation of valuable work on war, security, and military intervention since 2001, most of the publications about soldiers’ lives have taken the form of memoirs, autobiographies, novels, or reportage by embedded journalists. Media scrutiny of cases involving women and minorities provides an important method of bringing military matters to the attention of civilian audiences, offering discursive spaces in which ideas are negated, produced, and absorbed. As Trish Winter and Rachel Woodward (2007: 7) suggest, this scrutiny is also constitutive, ‘in

50 Vron Ware that it shapes the terms through which information is made meaningful.’ New sources of media, such as online blogs, forums, and commentaries, have greatly facilitated the public airing of once-private observations of serving soldiers, overlapping with more traditional forms of information, such as newspapers, radio, and TV. In academic terms, however, studying the organizational culture of armed forces tends to be the preserve of military social scientists more likely to be grounded in psychology, political science, and international relations than sociology or gender and postcolonial studies (Higate and Cameron 2006). There are exceptions, of course, but the specializations entailed in analyzing military organizations do not necessarily engage with demotic representations of soldiers, whether on a national basis or within a comparative framework (King 2011; Tresch and Leuprecht 2011). Tarak Barkawi (2006) makes a similar point in the introduction to his book Globalization and War: ‘Specialists in war and the military pay insufficient attention to society, politics and culture, while sociologists, cultural theorists and to a lesser degree political scientists are not sufficiently attentive to the importance of war to their subject matters. . . . War and society stand in a dynamic interrelationship with each other’ (28–29). In an intervention entitled ‘Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique’ (2011), cowritten with Shane Brighton, he asserts that within the interdisciplinary field of ‘war studies’ the ‘generative powers’ of war have been largely neglected: ‘There is little in social life not touched by war, as its presence in the spheres of gender, economy, and technology indicates’ (127). The business of fighting, which they argue is ‘war’s most distinctive activity,’ both ‘compromises knowledge about war and forces the unmaking and remaking of social and political orders’ (126). Central to their argument is the fact that the armed services—their standing in society as well as their legitimization as a tool of governance— perform a significant role in this process of establishing, or undermining, these orders: Not only are effective militaries, and the knowledges required to constitute, govern, and use them, necessary for the survival and flourishing of polities, but political orders entail narratives regarding the authoritative and legitimate command of armed force. War, truth, and power form an intimate complex of relations. (Barkawi and Brighton 2011: 142) Although the domestic role of military institutions emerges within this matrix of war, truth, and power, the volatile figure of the contemporary soldier-as-citizen often escapes deeper analysis (Cowen 2008). Meanwhile, feminists have been proactive in arguing for a radical rethinking of violence across the spectrum of international relations. Claudia Aradau (2012: 121) writes that ‘inserting the concept of violence within critical security studies has a “de-bordering” effect as it reinserts

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the debates into the tradition of critical theory and rebuilds the link with peace research.’ Because the issue of women’s rights has been made integral to militarized reconstruction projects, as well as becoming a pretext for war itself, a gender-based critique of security discourse in terms of counterinsurgency, peacekeeping, and humanitarian intervention is an especially urgent matter (Cohn 2013; Kronsell and Svedberg 2012). However, a feminist focus on the politics of gender in the context of violent conflict or global governance structures will not necessarily be alert to the mundane diet of militaristic propaganda directed to domestic populations within those countries that dispatch their armed forces to war. What discipline, what specialized field of study, is required to make sense of the fact that the British Army advertised the exhibition ‘The White Picture’ on its own website with one particular picture: the close-up of women’s underpants drying on an ad hoc washing line?

THE MILITARIZATION OF EVERYTHING The concept of militarization is valuable here because it addresses the effects of long-running wars on domestic populations, and, as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon, it is both relevant and accessible to those who are neither specialists in military sociology and security studies nor intimately familiar with the burgeoning field of international relations. Writing soon after 9/11, Catherine Lutz (2002b: 723) defined militarization as ‘simultaneously a discursive process, involving a shift in general societal beliefs and values in ways necessary to legitimate the use of force, the organization of large standing armies and their leaders, and the higher taxes or tribute used to pay for them.’ Author of a detailed study of Fayetteville, home to the US military base at Fort Bragg (Lutz 2002a), Lutz has suggested that militarization is intimately connected ‘not only to the obvious increase in the size of armies and resurgence of militant nationalisms and militant fundamentalisms but also to the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality’ (2002b: 723). Cynthia Enloe has instructed a generation of feminists on how to think critically about military institutions, defi ning this concept as follows: Militarization is a step-by-step process by which a person or thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas. The more militarization transforms an individual or society, the more that individual or society comes to imagine military needs and militaristic presumptions to be not only valuable but also normal. (2000: 3) Her work has entailed a long-running engagement with processes of militarization in different national and regional locations, exemplifying from

52 Vron Ware a feminist standpoint what this labor actually involves. She argues that charting the spread of militarization demands an attention to cultural as well as institutional, ideological, and economic transformations, which means that it requires a host of skills: ‘the ability to read budgets and to interpret bureaucratic euphemisms, of course, but also the ability to understand the dynamics of memory, marriage, hero worship, cinematic imagery and the economies of commercialised sex’ (2000: 3). Although there is no space here for an exhaustive, updated analysis of militarization that takes into account the massive impact of securitization—including the increased surveillance of domestic populations—it is worth pointing out that these transformations now include the targeted use of social media. The complex array of cultural, institutional, ideological, and economic transformations that have thrust the armed forces into the public eye in the UK are without a doubt covered by the umbrella of militarization. With the help of multiple social networking accounts, Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been able to access a new dimension of reporting from the war zone, providing a running commentary on successful military operations as well as drawing attention to positive encounters with Afghan civilians through details of reconstruction projects and human interest stories. The representation of the armed forces as modern, professional, humanitarian, and human relies heavily on the projection of a culturally diverse workforce in accordance with the composition of British society. This underlines the importance of recruitment policy as a key element in the interrelationship between civil and military, nation and nationality, service and citizenship.

MARCHING ORDERS The UK’s position as a key member of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operation—which involves more than fi fty countries—means that it offers a prime case study for analyzing the social and cultural changes within its military institutions over a decade of deployment.1 The year 1998 proved to be a significant turning point in this process, beginning with the decision to recruit new soldiers from Commonwealth countries in order to address both a chronic labor shortage and new legal obligations to diversify its workforce (Ware 2012). During the same year the army also introduced a new “gender-free” selection test and widened access to female recruits from 47 to 70 percent, including all jobs with the exception of those that required soldiers to ‘close and kill the enemy’ (MoD 2002). The following year, the European Court of Human Rights declared that the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces was illegal, and in 2000 the UK government announced that the armed forces would henceforth recognize sexuality as a private matter (Basham 2009). As the decade progressed, the value of an integrated military was put to strategic use in the war to shape perceptions of British military power

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as “a force for good.” During the fi rst days of the No Fly Zone (NFZ) imposed on Libya, the fi rst female British Typhoon pilot was deployed in a small contingent of Royal Air Force (RAF) jets (Hopkins 2011). Described as ‘the flame-haired “top gun”’ in one newspaper (Silverman 2011), the pilot’s gender was used as an occasion to note that there were no bars to women becoming pilots in the RAF. During the same month, the military media operation in Afghanistan posted an item about the ‘heroine of Helmand,’ a twenty-year-old member of the Royal Military Police who had ‘made history’ by arresting seventeen members of the Taliban in ‘a single DAY’ (Drury 2011). The following week, however, both these stories were eclipsed by news from the US media machine boasting that an all-female crew, the Strike Eagles of ‘Dudette 07,’ had ‘made history’ by carrying out an air mission on the border with Pakistan (Daily Mail 2011). It turned out that ‘Dudette 07’ was set up to mark Women’s History Month, and to celebrate the cause of equality in order to counter damaging reports that rape and sexual harassment were ‘rampant’ in the US military (Jamail 2010). Whereas this type of media coverage indicates the versatility of the vulnerable yet intrepid female soldier, this next example explores a less likely manifestation of the ‘presence of war’ permeating British living rooms during this period (Shapiro 2011). On the same day that the UN Resolution 1973 sanctioned the NFZ in Libya, almost eight years after the invasion of Iraq, the UK’s most important war hero faced the prospect of public humiliation at home. Dressed in shiny satin clothes and clasping his scantily clad female partner round the waist, Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, VC, was given his “marching orders” after reaching the semifi nals of the TV competition Dancing on Ice. His fi nal assignment, a solo performance choreographed to Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy,’ was the culmination of months of training, beginning with his fi rst tentative steps on the ice and continuing through the weekly ordeals of condescending judges and a brutal public voting system to eliminate contestants. The degree of sympathy that he received, indicated by his Twitter account, coverage in the tabloid press, and the reaction in the rink itself, was the least surprising aspect of this entertainment. For anyone paying attention to the process of militarization in UK society, this spectacle of a young and damaged war hero appearing as a celebrity on prime-time TV was further proof of the significant shift in social and cultural attitudes toward soldiers during the past decade. Beharry has been an important figure in the politics of military service in the UK, not least because of his record in service. In 2005 he became the fi rst living soldier since 1965 to be awarded the Victoria Cross. Although he remained in the army, he was not eligible for deployment in Afghanistan as a result of his injuries, but he continued to play an important role inside the institution. Buildings are named in his honor, he is frequently cited as a role model, and the status of his award entitles him to represent the British Army at state events, particularly those that commemorate those who have

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died in war. One such occasion was Armistice Day in 2009 at a special service to mark the passing of the last soldier actively engaged in the 1914– 1918 war. Beharry handed a wreath to the queen to place on the Tomb of the Unknown British Warrior in Westminster Abbey (Ware 2012: 8). Throughout the ice-skating contest, the endless jokes and puns referring to his military background ensured that the link between masculinity, discipline, and heroism remained intact. His partner and coach said lovingly on camera that he had taught her to be ‘the best of the best,’ echoing the famous slogan of the British Army’s special forces. At the same time, the synchronized dance routines and costumes offset the normative heterosexuality associated with military culture, a fact Beharry himself acknowledged when he begged not to be dressed in pink. The exercise was also remarkable, however, in that it forced the soldier to reveal his vulnerability by “unlearning” the stilted body movements associated with the parade ground. Since his rehabilitation, Beharry had talked openly about the way that his memory, coordination, and balance had been affected by his injuries, using his experience to raise funds for charities set up to rehabilitate wounded soldiers. His ability to enthral an enormous TV audience was partly explained by his struggle to overcome his own mental impairment through dedication and determination. This is possibly another reason why he, his trainers, and even the judges constantly referred to his progress as “a journey.” Together with his noticeable Caribbean accent, this reminder of how far he had come added a critical element to the increasing visibility of military figures in mainstream public culture. Beharry was not only the sole black competitor taking part in a majority white sport; he was a minority within the army, too. The symbolic importance of Beharry’s minority status was immeasurable. It transmitted a signal that the armed forces were comfortably multicultural, having successfully overcome their previous reputation for endemic racism and bullying. When he fi rst stepped onto the ice on the opening night of the show, as if on cue, a female voice from the crowd interrupted the brief interval before the music began: ‘You’re a hero!’ she cried. For those who had read Beharry’s autobiography, Barefoot Soldier (Beharry and Cook 2006) this was undeniably an electric moment in this military migrant’s own passage from an impoverished childhood in Grenada to an icon of militaristic national identity in Britain. For many others, it merely underlined the rationale of including a soldier as a celebrity—despite the fact that the real-time Twitter feed indicated that he was unknown in the world of show business. However, it would be misguided to dismiss the term “hero” as merely a patriotic response to Britain’s wars. Instead it needs to be analyzed in the context of a much more complex and politically ambiguous critique of the conditions under which soldiers are expected to serve. We now turn to the more public platform of the employment tribunal because it is here that conventional ideas about soldiers as particular kinds of workers and citizens are likely to be challenged and where the legal protection

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of individual rights might be seen to conflict with the conditions of military service. At the time of writing, only those individuals who are protected under the Equality Act 2010 are entitled to take their claims to employment tribunals. The following examples of instances where minority soldiers have filed grievances on grounds of discrimination or harassment offer a chance to review how and why attention to the politics of diversity in the armed forces is intrinsic to a feminist and postcolonial critique of militarization.

MOTHER-MIGRANT-SOLDIER In April 2010, Tilern Debique, a former British soldier, successfully sued the UK MoD for discrimination on grounds of race and sex. She had joined the British Army in 2002 and served in the Royal Signals, rising to the rank of corporal before leaving in 2008. In the meantime she had given birth to a daughter and her grievance was based partly on her employer’s attitude toward her status as a single parent. As a result of reporting late for training and then a month later missing a parade on account of childcare issues, she had been told by her commanding officer that she was expected to be available for duty at all times and that the army was ‘unsuitable for a single mother who couldn’t sort out her childcare arrangements’ (Gabbat 2010). At the hearing, Debique, who represented herself, said that the reaction of her superiors had left her feeling discriminated against and ‘on a path to dismissal’ (Gabbat 2010). The details of the case were hard to discern, such was the torrent of venom that greeted the news of the employment tribunal considering her grievance. Under the front-page headline, ‘Mother of All Defeats!’ the conservative tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail announced that the army faced a £100,000 payout if it was found that Debique had suffered loss of earnings, injury to feelings, and aggravated damages (Allen 2010). Hundreds of words were devoted to ridiculing and undermining her predicament. The Daily Mail editorial commented that she had effectively betrayed ‘the many brave female soldiers who, serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have fought for the right to be treated as equals by the Army’ (Daily Mail 2010). When the tribunal ruled in her favor, the newspaper compared her likely settlement with the compensation received by a male paratrooper who was severely disabled, having lost both legs as a result of injuries sustained in Afghanistan. During the week of the hearing, the tabloids continued to run articles about the subversion of British society by ‘pseudo-courts’ representing a human rights culture that had created a ‘sanctum for political correctness.’ What made this case historic was that it took account of the individual’s immigration status as a citizen of Saint Vincent, awarding her damages for racial discrimination. Debique had claimed that she had planned to bring her sister from Saint Vincent to care for her daughter, but immigration

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law prevented relatives from staying for more than six months. This meant that she was in a different position from UK personnel who would be able to call on family support for childcare. The tribunal panel chairman suggested that the UK Border Agency should make an exception for serving soldiers and commented: ‘We found that such an exception would have put . . . Commonwealth soldiers, and particularly the complainant, on a level playing field with soldiers with families who have the right of abode in the UK’ (The Guardian 2010). The ruling in Debique’s favor confi rmed that her nationality was not perceived as a contentious factor affecting her ability to work as a British soldier. It was her status as a migrant that presented a problem, not to the armed forces as her employer but in the civil area of immigration law. Debique’s ethnicity, however, was used outside the confi nes of the tribunal to articulate anti-immigration sentiments as a way of undermining the legitimacy of her grievance. For one thing, it enabled her claim for compensation to be denounced as a ploy to ‘return home to her poverty-stricken Caribbean village as a rich woman’ (Newling and Knight 2010). The size of the settlement demanded by Debique was regarded as proof of her lack of commitment to her job as a soldier, reflecting the notion that, as a migrant, her motives had been pecuniary and self-interested all along: ‘The youngest of eight children—six girls and two boys—born to Tilman Jordan and Alina DeBique, Tilern spent her first ten years in a tiny wooden two-room shack, sharing one bedroom. Cooking was outdoors, while a standpipe provided water’ (Newling and Knight 2010). Debique’s Caribbean origins provided grounds for condemning her child-raising practices, as well. The same report described how she had left her baby, apparently conceived under ‘mysterious’ circumstances, with relatives in Saint Vincent for the fi rst two years of its life. Instead of interpreting her childcare arrangements as the result of a supportive transnational family struggling to cope in the face of restrictive UK immigration law, this was used as another stick to beat her with in public as a fraudulent mother, a charge that only compounded her crimes as a hopelessly unsuitable soldier.

ROMPING IN THE HAY Debique’s grievance can be usefully compared with another landmark claim made two years earlier when an employment tribunal considered a case of sexual discrimination, as well as discrimination, on the grounds of sexual preference. In this example, Kerry Fletcher, who joined in 1996, becoming the fi rst woman to ride with the King’s Troop, was awarded £187,000 in compensation after the tribunal accepted her evidence of sexual harassment by a male sergeant. Fletcher, who was a UK citizen and open about her homosexuality, was forced to leave the army before her twelve-year

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contract was fi nished after being bullied by the sergeant, who threatened to “convert” her. The tribunal commented: ‘This is as severe a case of victimization following an allegation of sexual harassment as one could see in an employment tribunal’ (Gammell 2008). Analysis of unsympathetic media publicity is useful because it reveals the depth of feeling provoked by the idea of human rights law, which is invariably seen as an imposition by the EU to undermine national values and customs. The lifting of the ban on homosexuals in 2000 combined with the widening of posts available to women had inevitably provoked huge storms about the insidious effects of political correctness enforced by those with no experience and knowledge of military culture. Thatcherite defense pundit Gerald Frost referred to the destructive consequences of applying civil law in the military sphere as ‘cultural subversion’ (2002: 37). The structure of outrage in the reporting on the tribunal hearings of the two women’s grievances was strikingly similar. The lurid media representation illustrated a range of “commonsense” opinions about females in the armed forces, suggesting that for each example of inappropriate behavior there was a model of the deserving and compliant. The image of the intrepid, flexible woman soldier, exemplified by the “heroine of Helmand” or those in the “white picture,” continued to be a valuable tool both in terms of recruitment and in military operations. Being a mother of young children need not be an obstacle, and in fact it could indicate her added readiness to serve the nation as long as she had the equivalent of a “wife” to provide the unconditional care demanded of army spouses (Stocks 2011). However, commentary reiterated the view that the military was not a place for single parents, particularly if they were women and particularly if they asked for “extra” support. It is significant that in each case, the amount claimed and then paid out to the two women was compared with compensation awarded to those injured in the line of duty. As we noted earlier, Debique’s claim for fi nancial compensation on grounds of loss of earnings, injury to feelings, and aggravated damages was portrayed as a form of betrayal because it far exceeded the actual payment awarded to a physically wounded male war hero. The comparison underlined the level of sacrifice that the nation demanded of its real soldiers, most of whom are male (Allen 2010). However, in one newspaper, Kerry Fletcher’s case was compared with Captain Philp’s, thirty, the fi rst woman to lose a limb in service, who was recovering from having her left leg amputated below the knee as a result of injuries she sustained in Afghanistan (Littlejohn 2008). Her claim was also contrasted with the compensation received by Ben McBean, a black marine, hailed ‘the real hero’ by Prince Harry after ‘losing an arm and a leg in Afghanistan’ (Taylor 2008). Viewed alongside other grievances of bullying, racial or sexual discrimination, or harassment, the success of each claimant in court effectively challenged dominant notions of soldiering as a form of labor circumscribed by gender roles and sexuality. Media commentators referred to the women’s

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clothes, partners, and other aspects of their private lives to suggest inappropriate sexual behavior and thereby undermine their claims. The Daily Mail, for example, revealed that Debique called herself Sexy T on her MySpace page, and showed a photograph of her wearing a see-through shirt to cast aspersions on her mothering skills. Fletcher’s openly lesbian identity was ridiculed in an exposé of salacious reportage, building on evidence given in the tribunal about previous sexual misdemeanors she had allegedly committed in the past. Given the importance of normative heterosexuality in military culture, it was hardly a surprise that the tabloid print media went to town on the topic of a promiscuous lesbian soldier demanding compensation for “hurt feelings.” Columnist Richard Littlejohn (2008) described how she was caught ‘romping in the hay’ with ‘a blonde female corporal in the stables at a base in Yorkshire—the catalyst for her obscene pay-out this week.’ During the tribunal hearing, he wrote, ‘We learned that she had sent topless photos of herself to male colleagues, which in other circumstances could be considered sexual harassment on her part’ (2008). Rather than dwell on the sexual politics of soldiering, however, I want to conclude here by showing that particular cases of harassment inside the army, such as Kerry Fletcher’s, can serve an important purpose within domestic, civilian debates about human rights legislation. Littlejohn (2008), who has made a career out of controversial racist and sexist commentary, continued, ‘Nevertheless, in the Looking Glass world of our industrial tribunal system, the default position in sex and race cases is that the complainant is always an innocent victim and the accused guilty as charged.’ By holding the details of one lesbian soldier’s sex life up to ridicule, he was able to prove how misguided the law was in general. In this next quote he demonstrates the folly of paying out large sums of money to individuals who should never have been allowed to join the army in the fi rst place: If she can’t cope with barrackroom banter and has a fit of the vapours when a sergeant jokingly offers to ‘convert’ her to straight sex, how would she react if some mad mullah threatened to saw off her head with a scimitar unless she converted to Islam? Littlejohn’s reiteration of barrackroom banter as an acceptable norm in military culture, larded here with crude but normative racism against Muslims, is a salient reminder of the more intractable elements of institutional culture in which making fun of people is justified as a way of relieving the particular demands of the job. In a militarized environment, banter is recognized as one of the routine ways in which women and ethnic minorities are exposed to sexist and racist abuse and then made to feel like outsiders if they complain. Whereas the Fletcher case drew attention to the corrosive effects of victimization in an authoritarian environment, Littlejohn’s caricature of a self-serving and disloyal individual, hell-bent on rinsing her

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employer for fi nancial gain, was essentially a critique of what he saw as punitive European management laws that defy common sense as well as disrupt Britain’s sovereignty. Whereas the reporting on employment tribunals provides an opportunity for examining changing attitudes to the figure of the soldier, the denunciation of equality as a legal principle, even in, or perhaps especially in, the context of military work provides a clear example of the benefits of adopting an intersectional approach to militarization. Disqualifying females from serving as soldiers on the basis of being lesbians, single parents, or migrants who dare to complain echoes Lutz’s suggestion that militarization, as a discursive process, is connected to ‘the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality’ (2002b: 723). As Aaron Belkin (2012: 6) suggests, ‘women and minorities have not just sustained the power of specific individuals and institutions, but have played an important role in maintaining the ideal of military masculinity as an archetype of what a citizen should be.’

CONCLUSION It has been true for some time that the expansion of women’s roles in modern militaries has been both a corollary and an outcome of feminist social movements. Whereas this has been studied extensively by feminist analysts of gender and militarization, it has been harder to attend to the myriad of registers in which feminism and multiculturalism have also become significant aspects of info-war aimed at domestic civilian populations (Ware 2006). Here it is not specialist military or security expertise that is required, but a vigilant attention to the shifting meanings of military work at home (Enloe 2011). In this chapter, I have identified two ways of seeing powerful links between the apparatus of military power and the negotiation of multiculturalism and gender equality within civil society. The fi rst concerns the role of targeted information about the aims and tactics of war in Afghanistan. I have argued that representations of soldiers that circulate at home—whether conventional, disreputable, or unorthodox—are implicated in shaping public opinion about the efficacy and legitimacy of the operations in which they are embroiled. Although I have focused mainly on gender, it is also clear that questions of national identity, ethnicity, and faith are equally potent in reinscribing the relationship between war, truth, and power. However, images of military work as a progressive occupation in line with social and cultural norms at home are not just effective in controlling perceptions of what militaries do “over there.” Ideas about soldiering have a profound effect on ideas about gender roles—naturalizing bodily difference, for example, while paradoxically appearing to remove barriers to equality. This is illustrated by one of the Female Engagement Officers who was featured in ‘The White Picture’

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exhibition. She revealed to a journalist that when having a break from being feminine on the front line, her real interest lay in skydiving and she could not wait to get back to it. Her professional life, however, was symbolized by her employer with a brightly colored photo of women’s underpants drying on the line in camp. It is hard to avoid the implication that the work of the Female Engagement Officers was being trivialized through this image, which cast the supposed agency of these officers in terms of their feminized, vulnerable bodies. By contrast, the example of serving soldier Johnson Beharry performing in a competitive ice-skating show on TV can be made to illustrate the value of militarized multiculture. The softer version of masculinity that emerged as a result of learning a new skill from scratch, in full public view, only enhanced his status, not just as a black British soldier, but also as a noble war hero. This story points to a second way of seeing connections between military institutions and social and political struggles at home, one that emerges from a feminist practice of alertness to the mundane reporting of soldier stories. Here the politics of race and gender can be seen to intersect in unexpected locations: the predicament of the migrant-soldier-mother; the damaged body of the wounded black “hero”; the furor when minorities, whether women or migrants, receive the benefit of human rights legislation. The attributes that qualify them as model militarized minorities easily revert to liabilities when things go wrong. Although I have used British examples throughout this chapter, the differing histories of military service within different national contexts need to be understood more broadly as long-running, contested, and contestable pacts between citizens and rulers, particularly during these times of perpetual war. 2 NOTES 1. For troop numbers and contributions, see NATO/ISAF contributions by country: http://www.isaf.nato.int/troop-numbers-and-contributions/index. php, accessed on 6 October 2012. 2. Compulsory military service was abolished in Germany and Sweden in 2010, for example, a measure that is likely to have profound consequences for both citizenship and the composition of their respective militaries (Pidd 2011).

REFERENCES Allen, Vanessa (2010) ‘Mother of All Defeats!’ Daily Mail, 13 April 2010, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265446/Single-mother-soldier-wins-discrimination-case-Army-failed-provide-adequate-childcare.html, accessed on 10 August 2013. Aradau, Claudia (2012) ‘Security, War, Violence—the Politics of Critique: A Reply to Barkawi,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 112–23. Barkawi, Tarak (2006) Globalization and War, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

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Barkawi, Tarak and Brighton, Shane (2011) ‘Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique,’ International Political Sociology, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 126–43. Basham, Victoria (2009) ‘Effecting Discrimination: Operational Effectiveness and Harassment in the British Armed Forces,’ Armed Forces & Society, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 728–44. Basham, Victoria (2013) War, Identity and the Liberal State: Everyday Experiences of the Geopolitical in the Armed Forces, Abingdon: Routledge. Baskerville, Alison (2012) ‘The British Army’s Secret Weapon in Afghanistan? It’s the Seven Female Officers in Helmand Province Gaining the Trust of the Locals,’ Daily Mail, 18 August 2012, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ home/moslive/article-2189265/British-Armys-secret-weapon-Afghanistan-Itsseven-female-officers-Helmand-Province.html#ixzz28S6DXYs5, accessed on 5 October 2012. Beharry, Johnson and Cook, Nick (2006) Barefoot Soldier, London: Little, Brown Book Group. Belkin, Aaron (2012) Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898–2001, London: C. Hurst and Co. Bridges, Donna and Horsfall, Debbie (2009) ‘Increasing Operational Effectiveness in UN Peacekeeping: Toward a Gender-Balanced Force,’ Armed Forces & Society, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 120–30. Cohn, Carol (ed.) (2013) Women and Wars, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cowen, Deborah E. (2008) ‘The Soldier-Citizen,’ in Engin F. Isin (ed.) Recasting the Social in Citizenship, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 187–209. Daily Mail (2010) ‘Act of Betrayal,’ 14 April 2010, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1265841/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Act-betrayal. html#ixzz1GaPP9SfC, accessed on 10 August 2013. Daily Mail (2011) ‘The Strike Eagles of “Dudette 07”: All-Female Crew in Historic Mission over Afghanistan,’ 4 April 2011, available at: http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1373179/All-female-U-S-fl ight-squadron-makehistory-launching-air-mission-Afghanistan.html#ixzz1Ijax0qvx, accessed on 10 August 2013. Drury, Ian (2011) ‘The Heroine of Helmand: Young Military Police Officer Makes a Record 17 Taliban Arrests in Single DAY,’ Daily Mail, 3 April 2011, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1373027/The-heroine-HelmandYoung-military-police-offi cer-makes-record-17–Taliban-arrests-single-DAY. html#ixzz1IjW8o6SR, accessed on 10 August 2013. Enloe, Cynthia H. (1980) Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies, New York: Pelican. Enloe, Cynthia H. (2000) Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia H. (2011) ‘The Mundane Matters,’ International Political Sociology, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 447–50. Forster, Anthony (2012) ‘British Judicial Engagement and the Juridification of the Armed Forces,’ International Affairs, vol. 88, no. 2, pp. 283–300. Frost, Gerald (2002) ‘How to Destroy an Army: The Cultural Subversion of Britain’s Armed Forces,’ in Alex Alexandrou, Richard Bartle, and Richard Holmes (eds.) New People Strategies for the British Armed Forces, London: Frank Cass, pp. 37–48. Gabbatt, Adam (2010) ‘MoD Faces Payout after Female Soldier Wins Discrimination Case,’ The Guardian, 14 April 2010, available at: http://www.guardian. co.uk/uk/2010/apr/14/tilern-debique-soldier-army-discrimination, accessed on 10 August 2013. Gammell, Caroline (2008) ‘Lesbian Soldier’s £200,000 Harassment Payout Branded ‘Obscene,’ The Telegraph, 26 November 2008, available at: http://www.

62 Vron Ware telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/3527425/Lesbian-soldiers-200000 – harassment-payout-branded-obscene.html, accessed on 10 August 2013. Guardian, The (2010) ‘Female Soldier Awarded £17,000 by Employment Tribunal,’ 16 April 2010, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/16/tilerndebique-mod-employment-tribunal?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487, accessed on 10 August 2013. Higate, Paul and Cameron, Ailsa (2006) ‘Reflexivity and Researching the Military,’ Armed Forces & Society, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 219–33. Hopkins, Nick (2011) ‘Woman Pilot in Libya Combat Mission,’ The Guardian, 23 March 2011, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/23/ woman-pilot-libya-combat-mission, accessed on 9 August 2013. Hopkins, Nick (2012) ‘Women Soldiers’ Role in Afghan Frontline Villages Caught on Camera,’ The Guardian, 19 October 2012, available at: http://www. guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/19/women-soldiers-helmand-afghanistanphotographs?INTCMP=SRCH, accessed on 9 August 2013. Hough, Andrew and Farmer, Ben (2012) ‘Female Soldiers “Should Take Pregnancy Tests before War Zone Deployment,”’ The Telegraph, 20 September 2012, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9555756/ Female-soldiers-should-take-pregnancy-tests-before-war-zone-deployment. html, accessed on 5 October 2012. Hough, Andrew and Pearlman, Jonathan (2012) ‘Afghanistan Birth Soldier Named as Lance Bombardier Lynette Pearce,’ The Telegraph, 23 September 2012, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9560773/Afghanistan-birth-soldier-named-as-Lance-Bombardier-Lynette-Pearce.html, accessed on 5 October 2012. Jamail, Dahr (2010) ‘Rape Rampant in US Military,’ Al-Jazeera, 24 December 2010, available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2010/12/ 2010122182546344551.html, accessed on 10 August 2013. Khalili, Laleh (2011) ‘Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency,’ Review of International Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1471–91. King, Anthony (2011) The Transformation of Europe’s Armed Forces: From the Rhine to Afghanistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krebs, Ronald R. (2004) ‘A School for the Nation? How Military Service Does Not Build Nations, and How It Might,’ International Security, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 85–124. Kronsell, Annica and Svedberg, Erika (2006) ‘The Swedish Military Manpower Policies and Their Gender Implications,’ in Pertti Joenniemi (ed.) The Changing Face of European Conscription, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 137–60. Kronsell, Annica and Svedberg, Erika (eds.) (2012) Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices, Abingdon: Routledge. Leake, Christopher (2010) ‘As Pregnancies on the Frontline Soar, MoD Tells Women Soldiers: “Carry a Condom,”’ Daily Mail, 16 May 2010, available at: http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1278791/As-pregnancies-frontline-soarMoD-tells-women-soldiers-Carry-condom.html#ixzz28KUPrhv8, accessed on 5 October 2012. Leander, Anna (2009) ‘Contractualized Citizenship, Nationalized Contracting, Militarized Soldiering: The Market for Force and the Politics of Protection Rights,’ Working Paper presented at the ECPR workshop, ‘Practices of Citizenship and the Politics of Insecurity,’ Lisbon, 14–19 April 2009, available at: http://openarchive.cbs.dk/bitstream/handle/10398/7962/Contractual_Citizenship_Working_Paper%5B1%5D.pdf?sequence=1, accessed on 9 August 2013. Littlejohn, Richard (2008) ‘When “Hurt Feelings” Cost More Than an Arm and a Leg,’ Daily Mail, 27 November 2008, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

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news/article-1090050/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-When-hurt-feelings-costarm-leg.html#ixzz1GynnzKbL, accessed on 10 August 2013. Lutz, Catherine (2002a) Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, Boston: Beacon Press. Lutz, Catherine (2002b) ‘Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,’ American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, pp. 723–35. Lydall, Ross (2012) ‘Weapons, Warpaint and Washing: A Modern Portrait of Women Warriors,’ Evening Standard, 22 October, p. 1. McBride, Keally and Wibben, Annick T.R. (2012) ‘The Gendering of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,’ Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 199–215. Ministry of Defence (2002) Women in the Armed Forces: A Report by the Employment of Women in the Armed Forces Steering Group, London: Ministry of Defence. Newling, Dan and Knight, Kathryn (2010) ‘Single Mother Soldier Who Claimed £1.1million over Childcare Left Her Baby after Two Years,’ Daily Mail, 16 April 2010, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266647/Singlemother-soldier-claimed-1–1m-childcare-left-baby-years.html#ixzz1I5V9j2YF, accessed on 10 August 2013. Pidd, Helen (2011) ‘Marching Orders for Conscription in Germany, But What Will Take Its Place?’ The Guardian, 16 March 2011, available at: http://www. guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/16/conscription-germany-army, accessed on 10 August 2013. Shapiro, Michael J. (2011) ‘The Presence of War: “Here and Elsewhere,”’ International Political Sociology, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 109–25. Silverman, Rosa (2011) ‘Female Pilot in Action over Libya,’ The Independent, 23 March 2011, available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ female-pilot-in-action-over-libya-2250933.html, accessed on 9 August 2013. Soeters, Joseph and van der Meulen, Jan (eds.) (2007) Cultural Diversity in the Armed Forces: An International Comparison, London: Routledge. Stocks, Jenny (2011) ‘Men Wear Their War Wounds with Pride, It’s Different for Us Women,’ Daily Mail, 6 January 2011, available at: http://www.highbeam.com/ doc/1G1–245862381.html, accessed on 10 August 2013. Taylor, Alastair (2008) ‘Bullied Lesbian Wants £400k Army Compo,’ The Sun, 23 September 2008, available at: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ campaigns/our_boys/article1721433.ece, accessed on 10 August 2013. Tresch, Tibor S. and Leuprecht, Christian (eds.) (2011) Europe without Soldiers? Recruitment and Retention across the Armed Forces of Europe, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ware, Vron (2006) ‘Info-War and the Politics of Feminist Curiosity,’ Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 526–51. Ware, Vron (2010a) ‘Lives on the Line,’ Soundings, 28 September 2010, available at: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010–09–28–ware-en.html, accessed on 9 August 2013. Ware, Vron (2010b) ‘Whiteness in the Glare of War: Soldiers, Migrants and Citizenship,’ Ethnicities, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 313–30. Ware, Vron (2012) Military Migrants. Fighting for YOUR Country, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ware, Vron (2013) ‘Can You Have Muslim Soldiers? Diversity as a Martial Value,’ in Nisha Kapoor, Virinder S. Kalra, and James Rhodes (eds.) The State of Race, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 121–45. Winter, Trish and Woodward, Rachel (2007) Sexing the Soldier: The Politics of Gender and the Contemporary British Army, London: Routledge.

3

American Humanitarian Citizenship The “Soft” Power of Empire Inderpal Grewal

Recent advertisements for the US military state that the military is a ‘force for good.’ 1 A US Navy advertisement shows images of black and Asian servicemen and women, while suggesting that the Navy is a “calling” and that, as with a religious path, it is a “calling to serve” in order to do good. Another advertisement for the US Marines, entitled ‘Towards the Sounds of Chaos,’ shows images of soldiers moving trucks with boxes labeled ‘AID’ in planes and helicopters, taking supplies to Haiti and working in tsunamihit areas (Dao 2012). According to the New York Times, the ad campaign is ‘partly the result of a national online survey conducted by  JWT, the marketing fi rm, showing that many young adults consider “helping people in need, wherever they may live,” an important component of good citizenship’ (Dao 2012; see also Jelinek 2012). Such campaigns downplay the killing and the battles, or even the educational benefits of the military, and show the marines as bringing help in times of chaos. The opportunity to help others in times of disaster becomes a selling point for military recruitment. What seems evident is that in the US, humanitarianism has become a component of citizenship. This notion of citizenship is naturalized as Westerners—Americans, Europeans, and increasing numbers of individuals across the globe—feel compelled to rescue these others and see themselves as being able to enact this rescue (Adams 2013). Under neoliberal conditions, the US nation-state’s exceptionalism has now dispersed to its citizens. Instead of an exceptional nation, there are exceptional citizens produced by their practices and participation in humanitarianism. The exceptional citizen is a key component of a growing ‘non-profit industrial complex’ connecting individuals to states and to private enterprises (INCITE! Women of Color against Violence 2009). As humanitarians grow in number, their relation to corporate practices is visible in the neologisms that describe such work: “social entrepreneur” and “social enterprises” are terms that suture exceptional individuals to a corporate and neoliberal citizenship. Charity takes on corporate mechanisms, and humanitarianism becomes connected to private enterprises via donations, support, and favorable tax advantages, as well as market-driven and corporate strategies. Whether as “social enterprises,” as NGOs, or as

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charities, these organizations and groups see themselves as separate from the state (Bernal and Grewal 2014). Tax-exempt organizations are understood to be private organizations, distinct from corporations or the state that might be funding them, but also sharing personnel and management practices, resources, and benefits from the state, thus blurring the division between public and private entities in ways typical of neoliberal projects. In recent years, scholarly work on humanitarianism has provided a number of important ways to understand this term. Didier Fassin (2012) analyzes humanitarianism through a notion of ‘humanitarian reason’—the affective and moral dimension—and ‘humanitarian government’—the biopolitical aspect. But he sees both of these as producing inequality, examining how the term came to be important for France’s ideas of government and colonialism and its application in distant regions. Luc Boltanski (1999) has suggested that distant suffering produces what he calls a ‘politics of pity,’ which can be distinguished from a ‘politics of justice’; he argues that the former compels a viewer of suffering to connect politics with humanitarianism within a genealogy of Christian and French revolutionary subject formation. Boltanski’s analysis leaves out colonial and racial histories in his genealogy, and his focus lies more in analyzing how suffering plays into politics and thus poses a problem for the universalizing of suffering. My research places these histories as the foundation on which the new humanitarians construct their Western, Christian, and racial superiority. Lilie Chouliaraki (2010) examines the work done by ‘humanitarian communication’ in media and the repertoires of emotion generated by mediated images of suffering that become part of lifestyles and consumption. She has gone on recently to argue for a ‘post-humanitarian’ politics that emerges after compassion fatigue, connecting consumers to immediate and individualized modes of humanitarianism. Chouliaraki’s important interventions are helpful to understanding the affective and communicative mechanisms of mediated humanitarianism, and her work suggests that fi ne-grained analyses are required to examine the vast enterprise of humanitarianism. Following on these interventions, I turn to a particular nation-state, the US, in order to reveal how humanitarianism enables neoliberal citizenship, and the ways that it both extends and reduces the historical power of the nation-state and its ‘exceptionalism.’ In the process I suggest that neoliberalism is not a unitary project but a shared one with specific social and political characteristics in particular locations. Humanitarian citizenship, which is both national and transnational, is produced through representations, rationalities, spectacle, affect, and practices. One key mode of the humanitarian project in the US is the distinction between distance and proximity, between domestic nonwhite communities and international ones in the global south, between those communities seen as undeserving in the US and deserving distant others. Distance, especially as it is mediated through travel, journalism, television, cinema, and photography, is produced through representations and practices that

66 Inderpal Grewal emphasize inequality and difference. In these mediated distances, certain “truths” are taken for granted: no entity except the West or “good Americans” can rescue these distant others, and those distant others are unable to help themselves. Whereas every now and then the Western media celebrates individual activists in Asia or Africa or Latin America, these individuals are understood as extraordinary and unusual rather than as normative citizens of their countries, as is the case with US humanitarians. Terminologies emphasize how differences are produced. Humanitarianism, for the most part, has come to refer to international efforts to aid non-American others, whereas community service or advocacy seems most often to reference efforts within the US. Moreover, humanitarianism, in distinction to advocacy and community service, relies on notions of charity, missionary projects, and on voluntaristic projects, whereas advocacy groups may try (although not always) to promote rights and liberal citizenship efforts. Such distinctions rely on believing that distant others living in regions outside the US are true victims ready to change, whereas local communities comprise “welfare cheats” and “welfare queens.” Thus the very notion of “humanitarian” relies on racial difference in the US and outside it. Although race often functions as a mechanism through which even those who live in physical proximity can be distanced, these geographically proximate communities are believed to be unable to change and are often blamed for their own conditions, whereas others living outside the US are imagined as worthy, less intransigent recipients of humanitarianism. As an example of how such mechanisms of distancing work, research shows that white evangelical Christians are unable to see how structures of racial inequality pervade life in the US (Emerson and Smith 2000). Perhaps such myopia explains why so many of these missions are directed overseas, and why so many (although not all) US Christian missions often work to “help” in Africa or Asia but continue to excoriate and blame minority groups in the US for their conditions. Such beliefs are not just limited to particular missionary groups, but extend to a broad range of religious and secular groups involved in humanitarianism. Western knowledges have produced distant others as needing and requiring interventions, while celebrating white and Western humanitarians. Claims about successful humanitarian efforts can flourish without being contradicted because these efforts happen in distant places. When “on the ground” research reveals harmful effects of such humanitarianism, the fi ndings can be ignored or understood simply as “controversial.” There is little in popular media about the difficulties and challenges of humanitarianism, or of challenges to the inequalities generated by such projects. A scholar or activist arguing against particular humanitarian aid practices may be heard by a small audience but also ignored; at best, it may take a long time for a critique to be heard simply because it means creating a counternarrative to the huge apparatus of images and knowledges in transnational circulation that argue for the value and success of humanitarian

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aid. Aid regimes have involved so many subjects, institutions, states, and cultural and knowledge productions that it is difficult to interrupt what now seems a hegemonic idea. Even if counternarratives are produced, few can circulate if they do not fit into the ideologies of transnational corporate ownership, of state projects, or of hegemonic ideas of dominant classes and groups. Narratives of “good Americans” circulate widely and profusely and influence perceptions of the US as a nation of exceptional people. Humanitarianism is powerful also because it is not a new formation; rather it builds on histories of “charity,” missionary work, and the “civilizing” project in the so-called developing world through war and institutions such as the church and the state, as well as through newer formations, such as transnational NGOs. The visual and written culture of this long history of missionary and humanitarianism of the “West” legitimizes activities of Western rescuers in distant places (Calhoun 2010). Some scholars argue that the US has been participating in humanitarian imperialism since the war in the Philippines (Clymer 1976). Whereas the humanitarian projects of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries flourish within contemporary consumer and citizen practices in the US, they have emerged also from the work of many linked humanitarian and international agencies seen as “Western” projects since the middle of the twentieth century. From the UN to Amnesty International, Oxfam, Doctors without Borders, and Human Rights Watch, many of these organizations have based their advocacy on furthering a new international form of juridical power, either based on human rights or the International Court or on the need for there to exist some judiciary outside the powers of states (Clarke 2009). Some have argued that humanitarian NGOs constitute a new global civil society on Habermasian lines; others have seen them as the agents of a new imperialism (Kamat 2002). For instance, Kevin Rosario (2003) sees humanitarianism as the product of a sensationalistic mass culture that has existed in the US since the early twentieth century. Miriam Ticktin (2006) argues that humanitarianism constitutes new biopolitical practices and forms of transnational governance. David Rieff ’s (2002) work has become well known for questioning the efficacy of US-sponsored humanitarian intervention. And Ann Vogel (2006) concludes that the formation of nonprofit foundations in the US during the 1990s has created elite mechanisms for wealth distribution, whereas humanitarian projects export American understandings of democracy and form notions of the “global” for many Americans. Despite all these interventions, which now continue with research that tries to assess the impact of NGOs, there remains the widely disseminated “commonsense” knowledge that without such work, “global poverty” or “global problems” would not be solved. Feminism in the US has also played a role in seeing women in the global south as targets of humanitarian projects, although, again, this project is not just an American one. In the aftermath of the UN conferences on women, the emergence of feminist and women’s NGOs has come to occupy

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a large part of development discourse, and these NGOs are also numerous and ubiquitous in the US. Many of these, especially the transnational ones, participate in humanitarian endeavors around the world working on development projects such as “capacity building” or “microfi nance,” focusing on women as targets of rescue. Many of these organizations see themselves as doing what the “corrupt,” “inefficient,” “patriarchal,” or “failed” state refuses to do in relation to improving women’s lives. As Sabine Lang (1997) has argued, the NGOization of feminism has replaced more movementoriented projects; what Sonia Álvarez (1999) has called the ‘NGO boom’ has come to exist transnationally and in development discourse. Rather than elaborating on the representational practices that construct these figures of “women” to be saved, I wish to focus on the subjects who are doing the saving and thus on the emergence of humanitarian citizenship in the US. This citizenship functions not only through meanings attached to notions of distance and proximity, international and national, as I have argued above, but also through changing ideas of public and private, state and civil society. It is transnational and national in that it is constructed against those who are not allowed to be citizens and on behalf of those believed to require Western rescuers; it works through networks of foundations, resources from state and from groups and individuals, and relies on privileged forms of mobility. It is normatively middle class, Christian, and “Western,” placing itself in the “West” and in “America” through civilizational, developmental, and human rights discourses. Although such a subject is also visible in other parts of the West, it has become hypertrophic in the US as a form of normative and exceptional citizenship. This emerging mode of citizenship is governmentalized across many institutions in the US, from the military to schools and colleges to churches and community groups, as well as big and small businesses and corporations. It relies not only on private foundations, but also on numerous state projects, institutions, and regulations. It is also, importantly, a government project endorsed by the White House, by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and by Democrats and Republicans (Clinton 2007). It constitutes what some call the “soft power” of the US state, combining care and surveillance, turning pastoral power into a form of sovereignty. Here “soft power” can be defined as ‘the power of the media to cast cultural difference and political struggle in the language of military confl ict and war,’ thereby revealing how war is mediated as humanitarian in the new century (Chouliaraki 2007: 8). In this mode of citizenship, the emphasis falls on humanitarian projects as animating but also utilizing what are presumed to be the impulses of all Americans as “kind” and “caring” and as “good citizens” of the world and the US. It relies on the self-perception of Americans as “good” and “generous,” giving aid and coming to the rescue of distant others. Muehlebach (2009) has argued that in the case of Italy, neoliberalism has dissolved the difference between the Left and the Right through the articulation of a moral order rather than simply an economic one, and her analysis seems to

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ring true for the US. The humanitarian order encompasses a wide range of individuals, groups, and organizations from both the Left and the Right, and it brought them together within a neoliberal citizenship that partners the projects of militarism and empire. Charity, missionary work, tithing—all these have been religious practices all around the world and in all kinds of traditions. So how is it that this version of giving becomes formative of US citizenship? This is because humanitarianism, Christian missionary work, and community service do not remain distinct, but work across public and private institutions, suturing American nationalism with the state. These practices and their subjects depend on constructions of race, class, sexuality, religion, and gender that are both historically sedimented in histories of colonialism but also easily recuperable in new forms of media and consumption within new digital cultures. There is widespread media circulation of these projects through books, documentaries, feature fi lms, television news and shows, websites, and journalistic as well as art practices. These images and practices traverse the realms of “civilizational” thinking, development discourse, state projects, racial, gendered, and classed divisions, missionary histories, commodity culture, and militarism. They are part of individualized selfimprovement projects, as well as articulations of nationalism and geopolitics. They are neoliberal also because they rely on narratives and images that articulate the state as inadequate and uncaring as well as sovereign. All of these practices governmentalize humanitarianism and nationalize it, as well; in Foucault’s terms, they combine pastoral, disciplinary, and sovereign modes of power, revealing a mobility of practices that suture NGOs, churches, the state, and corporations to American individuals, consumers, libertarians, conservatives, and progressives. They produce American citizenship as neoliberal, and can be either Christian or secular, as missionary projects or human rights protections. This citizenship is also multicultural (allowing participation of many racialized groups) as well as the work of a normative American who is white, because the dominant and widespread visual culture of these humanitarian projects constructs racial difference between the white donor and the nonwhite receiver. It is also gendered, sometimes relying on essentialist representations of masculine (and colonial) adventure and travel and sometimes on the nurturing feminine subject. Because humanitarianism is a term that references the “giver,” the “humanitarian,” rather than the receiver, it is as much about self-making as it is about a world in which such self-making is seen as essential to the welfare of not only many in the US, but also to the world. It combines the work of self-help with the work of “helping others” (volunteering helps in promoting self-worth, fi nding jobs and careers), relying on a media culture and its commodities to disseminate its narratives and power. Humanitarianism has become an integral part of the economy, having brought together corporations, foundations, and individuals through common and diverse projects. As Denis Kennedy (2009) asks, ‘How has the

70 Inderpal Grewal humanitarian project . . . been transformed into a $10 billion a year industry?’ The humanitarian economy flourishes because consultants, NGOs, and UN agencies benefit fi nancially from being mediators of such work along with a network of wealthy corporations, donors, and states. Humanitarianism links corporations, states, and individuals within a corporatized political economy of charity. At its very worst, humanitarianism has emerged as a form of celebrity public relations that makes sure that certain figures continue to circulate and have value so that they can sell a variety of commodities. Numerous for-profit businesses have come into existence for such a purpose. The website Look to the Stars has, for instance, become successful publicizing lists of humanitarian projects done by media celebrities, gathering information from multiple sources to showcase how much charitable work is being done by wealthy and famous people. 2 In doing so, it presents these wealthy elites as models to emulate. Celebrity events, such as charity balls, award ceremonies, auctions, parties, sporting and social events, have generated an economic infrastructure that supports NGOs and humanitarian efforts. In many instances, whether actual support is given to the targets of such humanitarianism is often unclear and unknown. A trenchant article in the New Yorker reveals one example of this economy as John Colapinto (2012) describes the work of Trevor Nielson at the Global Philanthropy Group, based in Los Angeles, which works with wealthy individuals and celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. What the essay reveals is that for some entrepreneurs, such as Nielson, humanitarian work constitutes a new public relations machine useful for the business of rehabilitating reputations and building star image. These entrepreneurs make millions from their clients while their causes receive a trickle of that money. Colapinto gives the example of one celebrity who promised millions to a homeless shelter for youth but ended up just sending old T-shirts, all the while still promising funding for the shelter building. Much of the success of the humanitarian public relations project depends on lack of knowledge about what is actually accomplished. Humanitarianism can, at its best, create publicity for causes and mobilize donations and sentiment. Yet it often does so in ways that contribute to global and national inequality by emphasizing the economic and racial difference between the West and the “developing” world, between rich and poor. It justifies unequal accumulation of wealth and suggests that private charity can supplant structural inequalities and violence generated by histories of colonialism or inequalities based on race or gender. In the US, the neoliberal practices of charity and humanitarianism are replacing demands for rights and entitlements from the state, so that humanitarian citizenship then excludes those who cannot become humanitarians from such citizenship. Class and race come to matter anew in these projects. Vincanne Adams (2013) has shown, for instance, how those impacted by Hurricane Katrina, predominantly those low-income or racial minorities,

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were deprived of any support by a state that shed its welfare function onto for-profit businesses contracted to supply aid. These businesses made millions while those who were meant to be the recipients of aid were left without support; in this case, the nonprofit sector also could not make up for all that was needed.

GREG MORTENSON AND THREE CUPS OF TEA: MEDIA AND PEDAGOGY There are numerous examples circulating in popular culture and media of the value and importance of American humanitarian citizenship and its racializing and gendering processes. An excellent example of this kind of practice is chronicled in the publishing phenomenon entitled Three Cups of Tea (Mortenson and Relin 2006), which is an account of Greg Mortenson’s efforts to establish girls’ schools in remote areas of Pakistan. 3 Recently, Mortenson’s account has been attacked as a fabrication and his NGO is losing its prominence and power, but the narrative is powerful because it belongs to a genre whose elements are understandable and familiar, widely disseminated and read. Educational institutions of various kinds, from schools to universities, have presented Mortenson as an example of a person to emulate, as an exemplary and exceptional individual. Mortenson’s account has been endorsed by celebrities and journalists and supported by wealthy donors and, importantly, by the US military. It is linked to tourist and consumer cultures by showcasing how a tourist and mountaineer, the rugged male and white adventurer, could become a humanitarian. In these websites and books, Mortenson creates a narrative that convincingly combines many of the key aspects of adventure: nationalism, masculinity, travel, tourism, and empire. The narrative constructs the hero as masculine and caring, enmeshed in a lonely and brave struggle. Mortenson emerges as the only person doing this work—the Pakistani state is inefficient and uncaring, locals are patriarchal and religious, and he becomes the lone savior of Pakistani girls (with some heroic sympathetic locals who help, despite being afraid of departing from what are seen as “cultural” norms). There is no other NGO, civil society, or caring Pakistani here. The mountain climber, whose goal was to ascend the highest peaks in the Himalayas, ends up doing humanitarian work, and this book combines the adventure and rugged travel experience—he is not the mass tourist but the heroic mountain climber—with the work of “helping” those presumed to be helpless. Consumption and charity are combined in a powerful package. For all the consumers who see themselves as different from mass tourists (Kaplan 1996), and who wish to combine environmentalism with travel, and for whom travel to the developing world has now come to be imbued with charity, Mortenson is a powerful example. In recent years, the numbers of Americans who travel to Africa or

72 Inderpal Grewal Asia to visit slums, poor neighborhoods, and the children or communities to whom they send money has increased dramatically, producing new itineraries and projects that combine travel with humanitarianism far beyond the ecotourism model. Mortenson has also published a children’s version of his project, Listen to the Wind: The Story of Dr. Greg and Three Cups of Tea (Mortenson and Roth 2009), which has become extremely popular as required reading in schools across the country. A new book, Stones into Schools (2009), continues this publishing juggernaut, claiming to show how peace in what is seen as a volatile region could be achieved and how, as a blurb by Tom Brokaw states on the back cover of the book, ‘one man can change the world’ (Mortenson 2009). Images of Mortenson with hijab-clad smiling girls are visible on the cover of the book, he has a large Twitter following, and he has appeared on all kinds of media outlets and visited colleges, universities, and schools. What is especially remarkable is that the popularity of this book, promoted by the credibility and power of journalists such as Tom Brokaw, occurred at the same time as American drones, in search of the Taliban leaders, were bombing the mountains of Pakistan and producing so-called collateral damage in pursuit of winning the endless “War on Terror.” These are the same areas where Mortenson claims he did his school building, and this regional interest reveals how American “soft power” of humanitarianism circulates in the media and is enabled by powerful state interest. In one news article about Mortenson published in the New York Times, there are some glimpses of the connections between Mortenson and the military, while the article provides information that maintains Mortenson as a heroic and credible figure and ignores any investigation into the results of the humanitarian project. On the front page of the New York Times, journalist Elizabeth Bumiller (2010) reports that ‘in the frantic last hours’ of General Stanley A. McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan in 2010, he reached out to ‘an unlikely corner of his life: the author of the book Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson.’ We learn that Mortenson came to McChrystal’s attention because of a military wife who asked her husband, based in Pakistan, to read the book. The husband then recommended the book to McChrystal. The article goes on to mention that Mortenson was present in meetings of village elders with the US military, showing that McChrystal and Mortenson ended up working together. Bumiller (2010) states that the initial note to Mortenson from McChrystal ‘reflected his [Mortenson’s] broad and deepening relationship with the US military, whose leaders have increasingly turned to Mortenson, once a shaggy mountaineer, to help translate the theory of counterinsurgency to tribal realities on the ground.’ What is remarkable in this article, which is typical of much coverage of Mortenson since his book was published, is that Bumiller accepts both Mortenson—the ‘shaggy mountaineer’—and his account seemingly without any further questioning or verification. Thus

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she tells us that Mortenson is ‘responsible for the construction of more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly for girls’ (Bumiller 2010) and has struggled to undertake this task despite lack of fi nancial resources, even once living out of his car in Berkeley, California. The article does not look to verify whether the schools have been operating or had actually been built—an investigation that was later undertaken by the news program 60 Minutes and by Jon Krakaur, the author-adventurer. Both were able to show that Mortenson had either exaggerated or fabricated some claims. The story that appeared in the New York Times is instructive because it unquestioningly repeats a narrative of the bravery and deprivation of the heroic white man, one who eschews military solutions, and a personal story that provides a sentimental and heroic story. After leaving the military, McChrystal brought Mortenson to speak at Yale University, where McChrystal was teaching a seminar on leadership at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. In a YouTube video of that event, McChrystal presents Mortenson as an exemplary leader, and Mortenson speaks of his “soft power” credentials: he favors “empowerment” rather than war, schools instead of bombs.4 He emerges as a cosmopolitan who has lived in Africa and Asia, in diverse cultures, and who speaks many languages, a seeming throwback to the missionaries and colonial adventurers who saw themselves as melding into the “native” cultures. He becomes a leader in the necessary cultural work of “soft power,” which has convinced some anthropologists and cultural experts in the ‘human terrain systems’ project to support the war in Afghanistan (Jackson and McFate 2005). Mortenson’s circulation across elite and powerful institutions reveals how humanitarianism has come to be so hegemonic. There are so many books, images, fi lms, and media productions that produce this humanitarian narrative that even if Mortenson has been discredited, there are others ready to take his place and show that they could be better humanitarians. The long list of speaking engagements at and awards from schools, colleges, and universities for Mortenson attest to the ways that humanitarianism has become a job qualification as well as an essential part of education. Students travel to Africa, Asia, and Latin America to work and intern in NGOs, and often there is little known about what is actually accomplished or learned. Humanitarianism has become incorporated into school and college curricula. Entrance to colleges often requires evidence of such work, and many high school seniors are assigned community service as a graduation requirement. Businesses have emerged to enable such travels. Large corporations set aside a day for employees to undertake volunteer work; celebrities remake their careers by starting charities and foundations and by attending fund-raisers. Bill Gates, for example, has been able to use his wealth to address health issues across the developing world. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s budget is larger than those of most of the countries in which it works; the Gates Foundation’s efforts to eradicate polio, for example, have recuperated Microsoft Corporation’s public

74 Inderpal Grewal relations image as a helpful rather than predatory organization. From concern about the poor or the world and more recently for “Africa,” “social service” seems to have become central to American subjectivities. The US state encourages such work with tax deductions, direct funding of NGOs, and the creation of service corps: AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and a host of other such programs.

KIVA AND MICROLENDING: THE NEW-MEDIA HUMANITARIANS Visual media are also vital in transnationalizing these activities and, of course, the celebrity media is also full of these stories of helping those “less fortunate” in poor countries. The phenomenon of microcredit and microlending has also spawned new forms of armchair humanitarianism that combines the modes of online retailing with fund-raising practices such as cloudsourcing. On Kiva’s website, there are no hard-luck stories; rather, there are narratives of would-be entrepreneurs who want loans to start small businesses.5 Lilie Chouliaraki (2010) has described such narratives as a new mode of ‘post-humanitarian’ communication that is incorporated into lifestyle choices, distinct from previous humanitarianisms based on grand emotions and representations of suffering. This emphasis on consumption and choices without the discourses of suffering are certainly some of the elements of the online organizations such as Kiva, which use commodity and market strategies to “sell” the women and men seeking microloans. However, as I have shown in the case of Greg Mortenson’s project, grand narratives of suffering, complete with images of little children, remain powerful. The power of such narratives also drives the recent interest in the West in the story of Malala Yousafzai, a young girl from northwest Pakistan (the same region of Mortenson’s activism), who was shot by a Taliban member for advocating education for girls.6 But such humanitarianism seems to coexist with the more entrepreneurial projects of Kiva’s loanees. US imperialism and war rely on multiple forms of humanitarianism to hail diverse subjects into citizenship, through online and armchair participation, travel, and consumption that rely on narratives of heroism and suffering, as well as the power to transform distant others into entrepreneurial and neoliberal subjects through microlending. It has become a rite of passage for middle- and upper-class Americans to be involved in such online activities so that such choices have become part of panoply of consumer choices—a Christmas or birthday or wedding gift can be a goat or money to these women on Kiva. Online sites enable donations to schools that have lost funding because of state retrenchment—you can give to your favorite teacher or to the school district—and many sites enable you to choose specifically the teacher or the project you wish to support in the local school, thus producing popularity contests that might

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be detrimental for the morale of many teachers. These sites have become so normalized as useful and good that they create an amnesia of the time when it was the job of the state to provide teachers and schools with what they needed. The microlending model has taken over a great deal of online gift giving. Now even wedding presents can take the form of online gifts to deserving others. Despite the criticism and questions circulating around microlending, its popularity continues. Microfi nance has often been understood as the new panacea for poverty globally even as critics of the practice have shown its many flaws. For example, microfi nance may increase gendered inequality and rural indebtedness and indeed intensify the power of patriarchies (see, for instance, Karim 2011). It is also based on the assumption that giving aid or state subsidies to people does not improve their lives, and that poor people globally would rather have loans and become entrepreneurs. Yet, because these online organizations are understood to be motivated by humanitarianism, the questionable practices inherent in microlending seem not to matter. Kiva.org is only one of several nonprofits that rely on new media to produce humanitarians online. But it uses its online and Silicon Valley credentials to claim it is different from other nonprofits, and that it is more transparent and provides more direct access and connections between donors and recipients. It encourages donors to form “lending teams” and to debate issues through being a community online, eschewing a corporatist approach and presenting a more communitarian one. However, the images and narrative again work to create distinctions between communities, domestic and international, between American givers and international recipients. On its website, we fi nd images and descriptions of large numbers of people around the world seeking loans for myriad entrepreneurial activities. Unlike the Mortenson narrative that seeks charitable donations to support his work, Kiva seeks microloans from all those who believe that poor people around the globe need more work, rather than aid or even social justice. There are images of brown and black women and a paragraph of information about each recipient who can be helped if the user “chooses” him or her. Donors are urged to give small amounts, even twenty-five dollars, thus seeking to draw ordinary people to become global humanitarians. Most donors for Kiva seem to be based in the US, although there are others across the world. Similar to eBay or other retail sites, some loans include a sense of urgency and opportunity to the deal by listing the hours remaining for the donor to give. More recently, Capital One, the credit card and fi nance company, has donated half a million dollars as a matching loan to expand its partnership, adding some strength to all those who critique microlenders for charging excessive interest on loans (Yahoo Finance 2013). Whereas Kiva’s microlending was formerly focused on international giving, the economic downturn led to calls for enabling microlending to US

76 Inderpal Grewal entrepreneurs. In 2009, at the urging of Maria Shriver, then the California fi rst lady, Kiva.org began to include US recipients who wish to start businesses, although international recipients remain the main borrowers. It partnered with US microcredit organizations, ACCION USA, and the Opportunity Fund in order to disburse loans. Yet this change to microlending within the US created some dissatisfaction among Kiva donors, who wanted the organization to focus on international issues where they felt the need was more dire and where small sums might go further, reflecting the belief that distant others are more open to change than proximate others. A lending team, Unhappy Kiva Lenders Group, came together to voice this dissatisfaction. In response, an oppositional team, USA against Kiva Bigots, was created, which has now morphed to USA 4 Equality. In the process, the Unhappy Kiva Lenders Group has disappeared from the Kiva.org home page,7 indicating that the website is more corporate than community, promoting its policies and monitoring participants’ interaction to achieve its goals. But this change also reveals that changing economic conditions in the US are having some effects on the belief that US low-income communities are cheating the state and cannot be helped. An additional source of dissatisfaction among some Kiva lenders was the realization that Kiva did not provide loans directly, and that the loans went to intermediaries at distant sites. Although the visual technology of Kiva’s site provides a great deal of information, there is no way for anyone to know whether their money has actually reached anyone, because the funds go to local microlending organizations and Kiva is not in the business of seeing if the funds have actually reached borrowers or improved their lives. There is little information on Kiva’s website about the workings and fi nances of the organizations to whom Kiva provides the loans, so that there remains a distance between the lenders and the borrowers. Whereas Kiva.org does provide a graphic of the ways in which the money gets to the recipient, the model does not show us exactly how those “field partners” who are working in the regions where the aid recipients come from fi nd the recipients or give them the funds. Indeed, the visuals of Kiva’s website provide pleasures for the donor-viewers in scrolling through the photographs and narratives of borrowers that foreclose any probing questions while providing the satisfaction for donors that they are helping people in need. Nikolas Kristof’s tweet in 2009 is evidence that such donations allow Americans to feel ‘good’ in both the moral and affective registers of that word: ‘Just made a microloan on www.kiva.org to a Nicaraguan woman. Great therapy: always makes me feel good.’ 8 Sitting at a computer and sending money to an unknown woman provides Kristof with the ability to improve himself, suggesting Nikolas Rose’s (1989) argument that one of the hallmarks of neoliberalism is the self-improving subject. What also makes Kiva so popular is that it provides consumer choices, enabling viewers to scroll through the names and descriptions of people in need, or to choose whether to give to a male or female or community.

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There are quite a few choices—Kiva shows there are so many needy people around the world—even as we learn nothing about why and how so many become needy or even if their neediness and the US consumer’s prosperity are linked. Megan Moodie (2013) has argued that Kiva obfuscates a highly unequal relationship enabled by these networked connections that are assumed to be ‘peer to peer’ but that are actually organization to organization, and that the site, like so many others, provides no information on how and why borrowers (most of them women) become needy; Moodie points out that the risk that is of concern in these transactions is that of the donors, rather than the borrowers. She critiques the belief that such site and online giving provides a closer connection to the clients, as many claim. For instance, the Wall Street Journal reports: some of the newer Web-based nonprofits, such as DonorsChoose and Kiva, are attractive because contributors say they allow them to connect directly with their recipients. Donors or lenders can hand over money directly to, respectively, teachers and students in urban public schools or individual entrepreneurs in developing countries, rather than sending a check that ends up with an abstract recipient. (Silverman 2007) This narrative about both digital media and humanitarianism—that most organizations or states involved in development are corrupt but digital media can provide transparency—utilizes what are seen to be the democratizing aspects of new media. Thus digital media is assumed to be more direct and more transparent because clients are vetted by the new-media organization and because the donor can choose among recipients. These sites rely on the putative closeness and the immediacy of the Internet experience and its possibilities for encouraging consumption, even as they rely on distance to enhance the narrative of need. After the criticism from its donors, Kiva had to admit that they do not actually have direct connection with borrowers. However, they continue to suggest that technology can one day provide this experience. Premal Shah, one of Kiva’s founders, admitted that although legal issues prevent direct peer-to-peer contact, he sees this ‘disintermediation’ happening in the future ‘when people in the developing world begin using their mobile phones to use credit and make payments’ (Strom 2009). Yet the problem is not just technology. It also is that sites such as Kiva.org imply that the viewer is able to decide the more worthy recipient simply by consuming the available online images and narratives. Although these images seem to be different from the usual images of the pain and suffering of distant others in the global south (Chouliaraki 2010), instead producing entrepreneurial and capitalist subjects, all of these projects intensify the inequality between donors and borrowers or suffering others and generous humanitarians. In online NGOs such as Kiva, there is often an underlying assumption that these websites are created not by entrepreneurs, but by those

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who genuinely wish to help. And indeed they could be. But they also do the work of consolidating the power of the humanitarian. They provide images of suffering others that provide a contrast with those who are the rescuers of the suffering. The latter are visible as the communities of Kiva: as lenders and lending teams blogging on the site, who are described on the website as ‘Kiva’s vibrant community of active and inspiring lenders.’ Kiva also supports subcommunities and divergent identities among donors who have “self-organized” into many different identities: Kiva Christians; GLBT lenders; Nerdfighters.9 There are not only representations of rescuers and victims, but an active production of the interactivity and community formation of digital viewers, revealing thereby how much humanitarianism helps in self-making, and in producing Americans’ own identities.

CONCLUSION Didier Fassin (2012) uses the notion of ‘states of emergency’ and Agamben’s formulation of the ‘law of exception’ to argue that the state of exception is a global project of government. In another publication, Fassin and Pandolfi (2010) argue that even groups that are well meaning and ethically motivated to work within humanitarian intervention share a great deal. For instance, they have in common ‘the temporality of emergency . . . reject the sovereignty of states in the name of a higher moral order’ (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010: 15) and ‘together construct a previously unseen political and moral order in which cynicism and ethics mingled and became indistinguishable’ (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010: 22). Fassin and Pandolfi (2010: 15) argue that what has emerged is the formation of a ‘new international political order’ in which ‘the politics of military intervention are now played out in the name of humanitarian morality.’ In the widespread circulation of the humanitarian project in the US, the ‘moral order’ that Fassin describes has become domesticated as an American project through the reiterations and intertextualities of popular media in collaboration with nongovernmental organizations, state security projects, and histories of empire. Sovereign power, fi nally, also includes the ability to produce the ‘moral order’ in which the moral subject is a US citizen. The numerous networks, economic and social projects, and multiple institutional sites that span public and private entities supporting this moral order suggest that such humanitarianism cannot separate itself from the workings of the state, even though neoliberal ideologies might claim the separation. Building on the discourses of efficiency of private and grassroots organizations versus the inefficiency and corruption of states, humanitarianism has become the purview of NGOs and private citizens who are deemed to be more caring, efficient, and honest than many states. However, these organizations and individuals are supported by state funding, citizenship privileges, tax rebates, documents, transportation, and other forms of

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implicit and explicit support. Whereas the visual culture of humanitarianism that circulates in the US constructs public and private divides between state and private citizen, the US government and the American citizen, it also constructs humanitarianism as an American project, propelled by the needs of American citizens to see themselves as generous in helping alleviate the suffering of distant others. In the context of ongoing militarizations and an endless “War on Terror,” neoliberal welfare and humanitarianism are important partners of national and imperial power. NOTES 1. See section ‘About the Navy’ at http://www.navy.com/about/gffg.html, accessed on 10 July 2013. 2. See http://www.looktothestars.org/, accessed on 10 July 2013. 3. Multiple editions of the book have been published and there is also now a website promoting the book and humanitarian endeavors: http://www.threecupsoftea.com/, accessed on 10 July 2013. 4. For Mortenson’s intervention at Yale University, see http://jackson.yale.edu/ jackson-conversations-leadership-stan-mcchrystal-greg-mortenson-nowyale-youtube-0, accessed on 16 July 2013. 5. See http://www.kiva.org/, accessed on 10 July 2013. 6. One example of the coverage of Malala Yousafzai is a BBC article titled ‘Shot Pakistan Schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai Addresses UN’ (BBC News 2013). 7. See the following page http://www.kiva.org/teams?queryString=unhappy+k iva+lenders&search=&category=all&membershipType=all&sortBy=overall LoanedAmount, accessed on 17 July 2013. 8. Nicholas Kristof@NickKristof, https://twitter.com/NickKristof/status/ 37814237375, September 2009, accessed on 18 July 2013. 9. See http://www.kiva.org/teams, accessed on 17 July 2013.

REFERENCES Adams, Vincanne (2013) Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Álvarez, Sonia (1999) ‘Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO “Boom,”’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 181–209. BBC News (2013) ‘Shot Pakistan Schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai Addresses UN,’ 12 July 2013, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23282662, accessed on 18 July 2013. Bernal, Victoria and Grewal, Inderpal (2014) ‘Introduction. The NGO Form: Feminist Struggles, States, and Neoliberalism,’ in Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal (eds.) Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–18. Boltanski, Luc (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. G. Burchell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bumiller, Elizabeth (2010) ‘Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Afghan Advice,’ New York Times, 17 July 2010, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/ world/asia/18tea.html, accessed on 10 July 2013. Calhoun, Craig (2010) ‘The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Humanitarian) Order,’ in Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (eds.)

80 Inderpal Grewal Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, New York: Zone Books, pp. 29–58. Chouliaraki, Lilie (2007) ‘Introduction: The Soft Power of War. Legitimacy and Community in Iraq War Discourses,’ in Lilie Chouliaraki (ed.) The Soft Power of War, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 1–9. Chouliaraki, Lilie (2010) ‘Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication beyond a Politics of Pity,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 107–26. Clarke, Kamari (2009) Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clinton, William J. (2007) Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, New York: Knopf. Clymer, Kenton J. (1976) ‘Humanitarian Imperialism: David Prescott Barrows and the White Man’s Burden in the Philippines,’ Pacific Historical Review, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 495–517. Colapinto, John (2012) ‘Looking Good: The New Boom in Celebrity Philanthropy,’ New Yorker, 26 March, pp. 56–64. Dao, James (2012) ‘Ad Campaign for Marines Cites Chaos as a Job Perk,’ New York Times, 9 March 2012, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/ us/marines-marketing-campaign-uses-chaos-as-a-selling-point.html, accessed on 10 July 2013. Emerson, Michael O. and Smith, Christian (2000) Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fassin, Didier (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, trans. R. Gomme, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fassin, Didier and Pandolfi , Mariella (2010) ‘Introduction: Military and Humanitarian Government in the Age of Intervention,’ in Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (eds.) Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, New York: Zone Books, pp. 9–25. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence (ed.) (2009) The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Boston: South End Press. Jackson, Andrea and McFate, Montgomery (2005) ‘An Organizational Solution for DODs Cultural Knowledge Needs,’ Military Review, vol. 85, no. 4, pp. 18–21. Jelinek, Pauline (2012) ‘New Ads Pitch Marine Corps’ Kinder, Gentler Side,’ Associated Press, 8 March 2012, available at: http://www.startribune.com/ printarticle/?id=141942943, accessed on 10 July 2013. Kamat, Sangeeta (2002) Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kaplan, Caren (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Karim, Lamia (2011) Microfi nance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kennedy, Denis (2009) ‘Selling the Distant Other: Humanitarianism and ImageryEthical Dilemmas of Humanitarian Action,’ Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, 28 February 2009, available at: http://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/411url?, accessed on 10 July 2013. Lang, Sabine (1997) ‘The NGOization of Feminism,’ in Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates (eds.) Transitions, Translations, Environments: Feminisms in International Politics, New York: Routledge, pp. 101–20. Moodie, Megan (2013) ‘Microfi nance and the Gender of Risk: The Case of Kiva. org,’ Signs, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 279–302.

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Mortenson, Greg (2009) Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, New York: Dial Press. Mortenson, Greg and Relin, David O. (2006) Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, New York: Viking. Mortenson, Greg and Roth, Susan L. (2009) Listen to the Wind: The Story of Dr. Greg and Three Cups of Tea, New York: Dial Press. Muehlebach, Andrea (2009) ‘Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy,’ Public Culture, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 495–515. Rieff, David (2002) A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, New York: Simon and Schuster. Rosario, Kevin (2003) ‘“Delicious Horrors”: Mass Culture, the Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modern American Humanitarianism,’ American Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 417–55. Rose, Nikolas S. (1989) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, London: Routledge. Silverman, Rachel E. (2007) ‘Young Money: A New Generation Reinvents Philanthropy: Blogs, Social-Networking Sites Give 20-Somethings a Means to Push, Fund Favorite Causes,’ Wall Street Journal, 21 August 2007, available at: http:// online.wsj.com/article/SB118765256378003494.html, accessed on 9 August 2013. Strom, Stephanie (2009) ‘Confusion on Where Money Lent via Kiva Goes,’ New York Times, 8 November 2009, available at: http://www.nytimes. com/2009/11/09/business/global/09kiva.html?_r=0, accessed on 17 September 2013. Ticktin, Miriam (2006) ‘Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France,’ American Ethnologist, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 33–49. Vogel, Ann (2006) ‘Who’s Making Global Civil Society: Philanthropy and US Empire in World Society,’ British Journal of Sociology, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 635–55. Yahoo Finance (2013) ‘Capital One Fuels Kiva’s Microlending in US with $500,000 Matching Loan Program,’ 25 February 2013, available at: http://fi nance.yahoo. com/news/capital-one-fuels-kiva-microlending-135400308.html, accessed on 17 July 2013.

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Female Suicide Bombers and the Politics of Gendered Militancy Sandra Ponzanesi Do not deplore, do not laugh, do not hate, but understand. —Baruch Spinoza (In Hage 2003: 89)

My body is a barrel of gunpowder that burns the enemy. —Andaleeb Takatka (In Hasso 2005: 29)

INTRODUCTION Although suicide attacks have been a part of human conflicts since antiquity, it is only recently that women have received the attention of international news in their roles as suicide bombers.1 The practice is certainly not superior in number or different in strategy from male suicide bombing, yet the phenomenon of female suicide bombing has raised a far greater alarmism, bewilderment, and consternation than its male counterpart has. Whereas male suicide bombing is often framed as gender neutral and related to extreme techniques of warfare, female suicide bombings get framed in gendered terms and provoke a need for a deeper understanding of how women not only engage in militant action, but decide to die for it. Furthermore, it is explained through personal rather than political motivations, often reconfirming patriarchal and orientalizing patterns. This has to do with not only the assumption of women as creators and protectors of life, and therefore as nurturers rather than murderers and killers, but also with the uneasy overturning of the private and public sphere, with women suddenly coming upstage and disrupting many of the expectations and stereotypes about their roles in the family and society at large and as symbolic models for the nation. The fi rst female suicide bombers appeared in the 1980s with the recruitment of female suicide bombers for Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers. However, it was only with the second Intifada after 2002, 2 which came after the Oslo Accords and the deterioration of the peace process, that the exponential increase of women participating in the Palestinian–Israeli confl ict became more visible and begun to capture international attention. Wafa Idris was the fi rst Palestinian woman to blow herself up on 27 January 2002, followed by many other female suicide bombers within the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.

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Although female suicide bombers belong also to a wide range of secular organizations, it is often framed as an “Islam issue emerging after 9/11,” generating a new range of interpretations and misrepresentations in the spaces where issues of East and West, gender and politics, religion versus secularism, get magnified. Most of the Western analyses have focused on whether female suicide bombers were trying to prove their equality to men or achieve individual redemption. In the fi rst case, the analyses show that women did not achieve betterment or structural changes of their position within Palestinian society. In the second case, personal and psychological motivations are ascribed to the suicide action, often concluding that these women were either “improper,” “shamed,” “undesirable,” or not “redeemable” within the traditional patriarchal order. Suicide bombing is then reductively interpreted as an operation of martyrdom that would be performed by women in order to be rescued from their fallen status as divorced, barren, adulterers, daughters or sisters of traitors, and so forth (see Brunner 2005; Naaman 2007; Rajan 2011). The analyses have been mostly split between a Western front in which a feminist liberal approach, which does not recognize or read the agency of these women, dominates (e.g., Applebaum 2002; Berko 2007; Bloom 2005; Davis 2003; Skaine 2006; Speckhard 2009; Victor 2003), and approaches based on a broader historical contextualization, as well as Arabic media sources and testimonials, in which the same national and religious motivations driving male Palestinian suicide bombers emerge (e.g., Hage 2003; Rose 2004; Hasso 2005; Pape 2005; Asad 2007; Brunner 2007; Naaman 2007; Rajan 2011). In both cases a different intervention needs to be made in order to reframe the notions of agency and political participation in terms that do not become co-opted into either a narrative of emancipation or of religious political militancy. The explanations are often much more complex, intertwined, and difficult to grasp than their male counterparts. Yet the spectacularization of the phenomenon, along with the rise to cult and celebrity status of the victims/heroines/perpetrators, raises important questions of framing and deciphering that can never be univocal or exhaustive. This illustrates how continuing to exclusively use a gender-based approach to explain the phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombers limits our understanding of the wider implications at stake, both historically and politically. An exclusively political analysis fails to grasp the longer continuum of women’s participation in militant movements. It is not the scope of this chapter to provide an exhaustive or extensive overview of the different forms of participation of women in revolutionary, terroristic, or independence movements (more can be found in the introduction to this volume) but to analyze the discourses and framing done by international media, artists, and scholars, especially in the Palestinian case, in order to make sense of the phenomenon and to offer a counter voice that, when possible, more adequately recognizes the contextualized agency of militant women. This chapter aims, therefore, to connect the spectacular

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attention media has given to, and the recent scholarly interest in, this recent phenomenon with a feminist and historically informed analysis of women’s participation in these movements as connected to a longer history of women’s participation in anticolonial or liberation movements. The scope is to offer a possible alternative reading of female suicide bombing that escapes the narrow gendered or religious interpretations done by the media or by scholarly fields entrenched in their own disciplinarity, making an intervention from a feminist and postcolonial perspective.

PALESTINIAN SUICIDE BOMBERS Wafa Idris was a twenty-eight-year-old Palestinian who claimed to belong to the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades. She blew herself up in a Jerusalem shopping mall on 27 January 2002, killing an eighty-one-year-old Israeli man and injuring more than one hundred. She became a role model for the participation of other women to come. Idris carried the bomb in a backpack, rather than strapped to her body. Prior to this attack, women had only helped plant bombs; the use of a backpack and the lack of the usual note or video led to confusion regarding her suicide motives. Wafa Idris’s suicide took the world by surprise, including Palestinian leadership, who initially tried to deny any association with the attack. After positive reaction in the Arab world and with people seemingly ready to accept the role of a woman as martyr (shahida), the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack. Idris’s attack, with the seal of approval of the militant leadership, then served as a model for other women to follow. Her story points to the genesis of Palestinian female suicide bombers, showing how male leaders overcame their resistance to female participation after realizing not only the success of women in bringing these missions to completion (managing to bypass checkpoints more successfully than men), but also the international attention they managed to attract for the situation in these conflict zones. Wafa Idris was the first female suicide bomber in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and has been followed by many others (including several failed attempts). Several female suicide attempts can be listed in a quick succession, showing overlapping strategies and choices of actors, to show how the phenomenon took an alarming turn around the period of 2002 and onward: • 27 January 2002: Wafa Idris, twenty-eight, fi rst female suicide bomber in Palestinian territories. University student, graduated. She detonated herself downtown Jerusalem. Affiliated with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. • 27 February 2002: Dareen Abu Aysheh, twenty-one, student at alNajah University in Nablus. Supermarket in Jerusalem. From the Deheisheh refugee camp. Her male cousin had blown himself up in Tel Aviv. Affiliated with al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

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• 29 March 2002: Ayat al-Akhras, eighteen. Supermarket in Jerusalem. From the Deheisheh refugee camp. Engaged. Recently lost a close relative. Affiliated with al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. • 12 April 2002: Andaleeb Takatka, twenty, from Bethlehem. Attack in mall in central Jerusalem. Affi liated with al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. • 19 May 2003: Hiba Daraghmah, nineteen. Blew herself up outside a shopping mall in Afula. Both Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed that Hiba was a member of their organization. • 4 October 2003: Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, twenty-nine. Was a real estate attorney. Her younger brother had been killed by security forces. She detonated herself at a restaurant in Haifa. • 14 January 2004: Reem Salih al-Rayasha, twenty-one. Came from a wealthy family with two children. She was the fi rst female suicide bomber associated with Hamas. Strapped her suicide device to her leg, saying at the checkpoint that she had metal from surgery. • 22 September 2004: Zayneb Abu Salem, eighteen. Blew herself up at the police checkpoint in Jerusalem. From the Askar refugee camp in Nablus and affiliated with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The emergence of female suicide bombers is a social phenomenon that has shocked both the West and the Arab world, signaling an escalation in the conflict. The reactions in the media and the news to Idris’s and the other female suicide bombers’ actions are diverse, but they all focus on recurring stereotypes and the need to label these women as either martyrs, heroes, and angels of death or monsters, terrorists, and mad. The celebratory labels, along with shahida (female martyr), include bride of Allah, daughter of Palestine, or even mother of the nation. But the understanding of these phenomena cannot be reduced to gendered metaphors and ethnic labels. Instead, the disparate reactions all signal a new ideological crisis of the perceived role of women in armed struggles and in religion and traditional gender settings. The problem with most interpretations, from both Eastern and Western analysts and scholars, is that while debating these actions they often collapse gender, ethnicity, and religion into one. As Dorit Naaman writes: Regardless of the narratives the women tried to communicate in their actions and videos, the dominant narrative in the Arab public sphere (political, media and local) tied these women into heteronormative narratives as mothers and brides, narratives that affirmed the gender status quo. Whether discussing mythic brides or monsters, the discourse in both the Arab and the West generally avoids uncomfortable questions of subjectivity, agency, and aggression, all qualities that are not befitting women according to patriarchal norms. (2007: 946) We can assert, however, that the use of female suicide bombers is a relatively recent happening that is not per se linked to Islamic contexts, although

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these are the ones that receive major international attention. The use of female suicide bombers is to be found also in secular organizations such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri-Lanka, which is a Marxist-Leninist group whose members from Hindu families strongly oppose religion. In the case of Palestine, some female suicide bombers left video, audio, or written statements before they killed themselves. Many, such as Wafa Idris, left nothing. For most of them the motives can be only speculated and this has enabled interesting gaps in the representations, not only between male and female suicide bombers, but also in which a revival of orientalistic representation and occidentalist positioning has surfaced. As already mentioned, Palestinian women are also neither the fi rst nor the only female suicide bombers, even though they have attracted the majority of the international media attention. Therefore, a brief excursus in the history of female suicide bombers will be offered here to place the Palestinian case in the wider context of women’s participation in armed struggles—a context that transcends the narrow boundaries of religion and the “War on Terror.”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBERS Idris was not the first Palestinian woman to be recruited to fight for national liberation. Women have taken part in the Palestinian struggle since its onset, with some, including Leila Khaled and Dalal el Moughrabi, having partaken in highly publicized hijacking operations in the 1970s. Idris was not the first female suicide bomber, either; Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers have utilized female suicide bombers since the 1980s. The first female suicide bomber was a seventeen-year-old girl named Sanaá Mehaydali, sent by the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP/PPS), a secular pro-Syrian Lebanese organization, to blow herself up near an Israeli convoy in Lebanon in 1985. Female suicide bombers are/were involved in several other armed organizations in the Middle East, such as in Lebanon, Syria, and Kurdistan, and in the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). They have also been used in the conflict in Sri Lanka, in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, which has been considered dismantled since 2010)—where they are called black tigresses and enumerate the highest number of female suicide bombers. Among those is Thenmuli Rajaratnam, known as Dhanu, the first and most famous Tamil Tiger female suicide bomber. She killed Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, in 1991. Her attack has been defi ned as ‘one of the most horrible of all assassinations in the modern world’ (Rajan 2011: 7). Rosemarie Skaine in her book on Female Suicide Bombers, tried to dig out the personal and psychological motivations for the suicide attack, confi rming the prejudiced gendered reading of this figure: Four of her brothers were killed in confl ict; her home was looted and she was gang-raped. Dhanu belonged to the LTTE from the mid-1980s

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and trained to be a black tigress in the late 1980s. She was the fi rst to use a suicide belt. On May 21, 1991, she killed India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and herself by detonating an explosive vest after bowing down at Gandhi’s feet during an election rally. (2006: 51)3 Suicide bombers have also been involved in the Chechen–Russian confl ict, with a special female unit called the Black Widows. Black Fatima was a famous Chechen rebel whose specific function was to recruit women shahidas, martyrs for Chechnya who become Black Widows. As Skaine writes about Black Fatima: She will appear at the homes of would be attackers and has discussions behind closed doors. After the prospective suicide bomber disappears with the Black Fatima, the parents are often not informed why. They learn later either from members of the terrorist group or by recognizing their daughters on television footage. (2006: 47) Within the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict, women suicide bombers can be a part of many different groups, such as al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (of which Wafa Idris was part), Fatah, to which Wafa Idris was connected, Palestinian Nationalists, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Hamas. This phenomenon is challenging even more conservative groups, such as al-Qaeda, to reconsider the utility of the Muslim woman on the front lines of Jihad. On 17 March 2008, a female suicide bomber blew herself up in Karbala, Iraq, killing more than forty people and injuring more than sixty. Al-Qaeda (which is blamed by the US military for most of the large-scale bombings in Iraq) has increasingly recruited women wearing suicide vests to carry out strikes since tighter security and protective concrete walls have made car bombings more difficult. In February 2008, two female bombers killed ninety-nine people in two crowded Baghdad pet markets. Several attacks have followed, generating much upheaval and claims that al-Qaeda recruited mentally unstable or mentally retarded women for the actions. However, as Pape (2005) argues, no proof of these assumptions can be confi rmed. A case that has created much upheaval was that of the fi rst Western female suicide bomber, the Belgian Muriel Degauque, who exploded herself on 9 November 2005 in Baquba, Iraq, raising much debate about the issue of Western female converts. Muriel Degauque was raised as a Catholic, married the radical Islamist Issam Goris, the son of a Belgian woman and Moroccan father, and converted to Islam and committed to Jihad. She was recruited in Europe to fight with Zarqawi. The couple entered Iraq via Syria in October 2005. He was shot before he could detonate his charges, while she detonated her vest amid an American military patrol, wounding one American soldier. Only some papers and her passport have been recovered (Smith 2005).

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In her article entitled ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ (2011), Katherine Brown analyzes how the construction of Muriel Degauque and her death in the news media can tell us something about Western notions of sex, security, and religion, as well as the stability and hegemony of dominant social discourses. Even though Muriel Degauque’s death in Iraq has been newsworthy precisely because she is female, European, and white Francophone, news media have constantly focused on her Muslim identity in highly gendered terms by emphasizing the reasons for her attack as based on, on the one hand, her marriage to a Muslim (stressing that he was the reason for her conversion, therefore undermining her choice in the process), and, on the other hand, the fact that her youth was troubled and exposed to risky behavior (which made her more prone to radicalism). Media further highlighted that her attack in Iraq threatens the security of European space, thus turning her into an “enemy within.” As Brown writes, even though Degauque is part of a growing trend of European radical female terrorists, many reports clearly emphasize her exceptional status, saying that ‘in particular [she is] not a “real” woman or not a “true” European’ (2011: 716). Brown further comments: This racial Othering of a ‘white’ suicide bomber shows not only the ways in which inherited accounts of gender (femininity) and race are disrupted by her actions, but also how prevailing narratives stabilize dominant characterizations of ‘women’ and ‘European.’ (716) This representation of Islam as foreign to Europe ignores the recent development of vernacular Islam and its presence in Europe for many centuries. This presence continues to be ignored or repressed as religion in the public sphere (through veiling and terrorism) challenges many of the narratives of modernity of the European states.

WHAT DO FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBERS WANT? In her analysis of ‘Female Suicide Bombers in Iraq’ (2009), Anne Speckhard continues to put the accent on suicide terrorism as being driven by traumatic stress and need for revenge. Her reading is that sending groups take advantage of the vulnerable female caught in conflict zones, reframing an act of suicide into an act of national honor, Islamic sacrifice, and courage. Thus, Speckhard writes: when women are in proximity to groups that are able to indoctrinate them into a militant jihadi martyrdom ideology and play upon their vulnerabilities by agreeing to equip them for revenge and send them to what they come to believe as a direct route out of despair and into

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paradise, it’s no wonder that women are volunteering for such missions in places like conflict-torn Diyala. (38) It is obvious that women are understood only through their interpellation into ideological action by subscribing to a reading of grief, despair, humiliation, violation, post-traumatic stress, anger, and loss as fertile grounds for the indoctrination, coercion, exploitation, and tricks of women by “male organized groups.” They get reduced to a ‘designated agency,’ an agency by invitation only, becoming ‘weapons of a male arsenal,’ as McClintock (1997: 98) so lucidly writes. This reading, which interestingly gives attention to the psychological effects of warfare on women, also precludes an alternative reading of female terrorism, one that not only damages the West (by successfully passing checkpoints and reaching their targets, garnering more attention by a media subject to the horrified fascination of women as violent actors), but that also refashions the patriarchal relations in confl ict zones. Speckhard’s conclusions are very much based on the equivalence of third world women with oppression. Her article urges installing programs in the region that would help women to cope with their traumas in order to make them less prone to instrumentalization and deployment for these violent actions. Speckhard (2009: 46) concludes that ‘Iraq was once a thriving country and can be again in the future. Women are necessary for building that future, and should not be left vulnerable to those who would use them for purposes of destruction.’ Such paternalistic and orientalizing frames of analysis preclude a wider range of approaches that would require more information from the suicide bombers themselves, often not available because of their deaths, but also a different way of conducting fieldwork and interpreting secondhand information—including interviews with relatives, friends, and colleagues—which are not guided by preconceived notions about the motivations and the outcomes of the overview.4 Many Western scholars, motivated by liberal feminist ideals such as in the already mentioned works of Victor (2003), Davis (2003), Skaine (2006), or Bloom (2005), have reemphasized over and over again this gendered reading of the phenomenon, trying to isolate the personal from the political, showing the continuing bias of Western readings when it comes to interpret third world forms of agency. They do not reflect, for example, on how Saba Mahmood (2005) has reframed the notion of agency in religious contexts, interpreted not just as resistance to submission, but as a form of ‘piety,’ a form of obedience to religious rules that may grant women observing those rules more autonomy and movement for self-improvement than a Western reading would allow. Furthermore, in these books, female suicide bombers are framed as a completely new phenomenon and separated from similar forms of historical or contemporary political violence in the West. The major characteristics

90 Sandra Ponzanesi connected to the use of an orientalist paradigm with an occidentalist frame are, as Brunner writes: a) a form of decontextualization grounded in an insistence that the individual must be the primary focus of research; b) a construction of women bombers as mistaken or deceived; c) a shift from neutral explanation to recommendations for counterterrorist measures that implicitly assume the perspective of the United States (never attacked by a female suicide bomber yet) and its allies in the so-called war on terror; d) a pronounced tendency to invoke the global dimensions of terrorism when it comes to combating it while eliding the global factors that contribute to structural violence that lays the ground for political resistance and terrorist agency. (2007: 958) According to Jacqueline Rose (2004), who comments on Barbara Victor’s Army of Roses (2003): Victor’s story . . . is a story of romance, passion and cynical intrigue. . . . Personalizing the female martyr can be a way of denying the abuses of the army . . . and of silencing the Palestinian political case. Here the distinction between suicide and martyrdom is crucial. According to Islam it is a sin to commit suicide. . . . Slowly and painstakingly, Victor has turned these women from martyrs to suicides. . . . Not one of these women is truly the political agent of her own life. Mia Bloom suggests, instead, that suicide bombing is an issue foreign to the Western world, a problem of a society that would be better off ‘placing women in leadership roles and giving them the opportunity to have a greater say in their future’ (2005: 165). The specific political context of territorial confl ict and international power relations is largely left aside. In these texts gender is often narrowly constructed, religion is discursively framed as Islam, and the notion of race is used interchangeably with assertions about religion. Within these texts women as perpetrators of political violence are situated in an implicit discourse that pits Western emancipation against the essentialized and orientalized Muslim/Arab woman. As Brunner (2007) points out, these occidentalist practices are unlikely to contribute to a better understanding of international and transnational terrorism. They distort rather than clarify the political violence that emerges as a by-product of structural violence on a larger scale. Other questions need to be asked that make space for controversy, that question the narrow defi nitions of what the problem of suicide bombing is, and that dare to put it into larger geopolitical contexts (of asymmetric international power relations), questioning the focus of a presumed Western self and a supposed orientalized other and trying to reflect on the relations between the two, politically and epistemologically (Brunner 2007: 970).

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Indeed, other scholars have tried to offer different readings of the phenomenon, which at times appears as a construction of Western media, as most of the attacks have not been suicide bombings. As Talal Asad has argued, although there is not one clear and single answer, the explanations in terms of religious (and especially Islamic) motives are still favored ‘partly because they provide a model that combines psychological elements (familiar from criminal trials) and cultural signs (distinguishing them from us), a model that lends itself to the discourse of protection of civilization (committed to life) against barbarism (a love for death)’ (2007: 56). The motives are more complicated than is popularly supposed and the assumptions that there are truths that can be accessed are mistaken, often because the actor dies in the event and therefore his/her motives are not fully retrievable: Ironically it is only at the trial of someone who has failed to complete the operation that the motives of the suicide bombers can be adduced. So the social scientist, novelist, and fi lmmaker endow the dead terrorist with the motives of the living. (Asad 2007: 45) On a different note, Ghassan Hage (2003) explores why the phenomenon of suicide bombing has generated so much suspicions about people and scholars trying to understand the more complex nature of the events, instead of outing a clear-cut outrage. As Hage has clearly argued in the case of suicide bombers, there is a drive to see these actions as unmistakably condemnable on the moral ground that violence is wrong, especially violence that kills innocent people. This outrage that continues to see a contradiction between the notion of martyr or freedom fighter and terrorist insistently focuses on the need to explain the reasons for these actions, considered to be the last resort in conflict zones. Self-annihilation can hardly be appreciated as a way of accumulating personal status and eternal reward. Martyrdom is, therefore, not understood as a sacrifice for the nation, but reduced to the narrow constrictions of the Western definition of suicide, which is only individually based.5 Hage (2003) explains that in a society at war/under siege, social explanations can disrupt the way both the self and the society as a whole are invited to defi ne and stabilize themselves against an other that has to remain different and unknowable. Humanizing the other brings affectively extra fear and threat. Hage develops, therefore, a defi nition that encompasses both these phobias: ‘exighophobia’ (from the Greek exigho, to explain) and ‘homoiophobia’ (from the Greek homoio, the same). ‘In this homoio-exighophobic culture anyone wishing to know and to inquire about the social background of asylum seekers, is perceived as inherently suspect, a nuisance if not a traitor’ (Hage 2003: 87). According to Hage, what is really feared is not the otherness of the other but the other’s human sameness—not xenophobia, then, but homoiophobia. In this homoio-exighophobic culture of post-9/11, any sociopolitical explanation of the Arab terroristic acts is seen as sacrilegious and immoral. Hage goes on by saying that:

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Sandra Ponzanesi in answering the famous question ‘Why do they hate us?’ anyone who deviated from the presidential ‘they hate us because they hate us,’ they hate ‘our values’ and ‘our way of life’ (i.e., they are not humans in the same way we are), was considered not outraged enough and accused of blaming the victim. (88)

In short they are attributed a different value to life they can expend with, but the bottom line always remains that nothing can ever justify suicide bombing. Condemnation is meant to stop the spread of such practices, but, clearly, as Hage (2003: 88) concludes, ‘the knowledge and the modification of the social conditions of their emergence is far more effective than the assumption that they are somehow the product of some transposable cultural or religious “state of mind” disconnected from any social situation, any social conditions, or any specific history.’ Therefore, he closes with a quote from Spinoza. ‘Now more than ever, we could all benefit from Spinoza’s ethical injunction for the intellectual: “Do not deplore, do not laugh, do not hate, but understand”’ (89). Hage’s critical analysis is a perfect introduction to a recent documentary film directed by American-Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia and titled To Die in Jerusalem (2007), which clearly documents attempts at understanding without reversing the stereotypical framing of East and West, reconciliation upon restitution, peace and death.

TO DIE IN JERUSALEM Eighteen-year-old Ayat al-Akhras exploded herself on 29 March 2002, in the Kiryat Yovel supermarket in Jerusalem, West Bank, killing two and injuring more than twenty-eight. Al-Akhras was the third Palestinian suicide bomber, and the fi rst teenager. She left a videotape in which she blamed the Palestinian authorities for failing to fulfi ll Palestine’s duty and inciting them to take up their responsibility and come into action. Ayat’s case is set aside and remarkable because in the attack she killed a girl of her age, the seventeen-year-old Israeli girl Rachel Levy. At the time of their deaths, Western media focused on what was perceived as an uncanny resemblance and parallel between the two girls: both have dark long hair and large dark eyes; they are approximately the same age and height. They lived just four miles apart from each other, one on the Israeli side in Jerusalem and the other in the Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. The American periodical Newsweek published a front cover with the two girls side by side. The title read: ‘A Human Bomb and Her Victim: How Two Teens Lived and Died.’ 6 It galvanized international attention that two girls could end up together in death, one as perpetrator and the other as victim. The interlocking of their destinies into tragedy made the world stop and think about the nature of and the escalation reached by the confl ict zone between Israel and Palestine.

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Figure 4.1 Hilla Medalia, To Die in Jerusalem (Ayat and Rachel side by side). Courtesy of Hilla Medalia.

What gripped the media was the apparent innocence of the two girls, who should have been carefree teenagers, like all their peers around the world, coming instead to symbolize the intractable confl ict in the Middle East. Their parallelism gave a human face to the confl ict, making life grievable on the international platform for both sides, and also a narrative to construct about the motivations for a suicide action. What gets erased from much commentary is that for Ayat it was not just a question of an individual suicide, but the need to engage in action as reaction to the occupation, the frustration of a life led under curfew, checkpoints, routine military incursions, human rights violations, and the total unbalance between the powerful army of a sovereign state and the guerilla warfare of a nation denied political independence and military defense. In 2003 Hilla Medalia started producing the HBO documentary To Die in Jerusalem (2007). Hilla Medalia is an American-Israeli fi lmmaker and producer who also served in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). HBO is a major American television network owned by Time Warner. The documentary focuses on tracing the emotional journey of the two mothers, Ayat’s and Rachel’s mothers, and how they have grieved and mourned in order to process their daughters’ deaths. The intention of the fi lm was to bring the two mothers together in an encounter and dialogue, in which their irreconcilable political differences would be mitigated by their common destiny as mothers suffering the loss of their children. According to this understanding, motherhood and mourning would become the common denominator to stress the nonsensicalness of the violent confl ict created by powerful political leaders that has wrecked the everyday lives of normal girls.

94 Sandra Ponzanesi

victimS

Name:Rachel~VY

Died: March 29, 2002

female bomber

Name: Ayat al-.AkhrBS Died: March 29,2002

Figure 4.2 Hilla Medalia, To Die in Jerusalem (film poster). Courtesy of Hilla Medalia.

The documentary opens up with the image of Rachel’s mother, Abigail, phoning a parents forum in order to get in touch with the parents of her daughter’s killer. Rachel did not come from a particularly privileged family. Abigail had lived for a short period in the US, but after her separation from Amos Levy, Rachel’s father, she had decided to return to Israel. This was a

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difficult adjustment, but in the end Rachel confesses that she was happy to be there. Therefore, the fi lm sets from the very beginning the perspective through which the events are to be narrated or interpreted. Although the filmmaker attempts to construct a mirror narrative between the two girls, their lives, and their personal and social backgrounds, the quest in the film is retained by Rachel’s mother, who ‘wants to know why,’ why this action was necessary, why ‘do they hate me so much to kill my daughter?,’ as she literally says in the movie, echoing Hage’s invocation of the US presidential rhetoric and bringing to the foreground her need to understand by talking to the killer’s mother. The fi lm shifts back six months to present the two girls, shown dancing at a wedding, both in modern clothing, among friends. The extra dramatic effect is achieved by showing the two girls in color against the black-andwhite of their entourage; their names are superimposed on the images. Then the terrible blast in the Kiryat supermarket in Jerusalem brings the viewer to the fatal moment of the suicide attack. The very short video testimonial left by Ayat follows, in which she instigates the Arab rulers to wake up, enough of sleeping and betrayal. Then a very effective voice-over by George W. Bush, a voice that is surprising in its eloquence. At fi rst we only see the pictures of the two girls next to each other and hear the sound bite, ‘when an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up and in the process kills a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl, the future itself is dying.’ Hence we see the image of Bush himself finishing his sentence: ‘the future of the Palestinian people and the future of the Israeli people’ (To Die in Jerusalem 2007). This powerful opening shows archival images of the TV newsreels with Abigail going into the hospital and realizing that she has definitely lost her daughter. The dramatic opening becomes subdued by the emotional realization that the two girls looked so much like each other, creating scene after scene the mirroring effect of two lives developing apart but being joined by the catastrophe of the suicide attack. The mirroring effect of the two lives is reproduced by showing, on the one hand, Rachel’s father and siblings, her brothers, Guy and Kobi, and, on the other hand, Ayat’s parents, Um Samir and Abu Samir, along with her many siblings, a family of eleven living in a refugee camp on the income of her father, who works for an Israeli construction company. People could have thought that he was a traitor, and some Western analysts have focused on the role of Ayat as wanting to compensate for the accusations about her father, even though everyone has understood that, given the conditions in the camp and the large family, he could not be picky about the job he managed to find and hold on to. It was very likely that after Ayat was identified as the suicide bomber, her father would lose his job. At this stage, when the parents are interviewed, they speak in Arabic with English subtitles. They come across as very eloquent and forceful, praising their daughter. Her father says that ‘she excelled in her studies. She had excellent manners and was intelligent as well. Her personality was strong.’ For her mother she was ‘more beautiful than the

96 Sandra Ponzanesi moon,’ engaged to be married to Shadi, who could be characterized as someone who wanted to excel. Now she became famous in death (To Die in Jerusalem 2007). When questioned about the integrity of his parental responsibility because of his approving of his daughter dying, Abu Samir goes on to say that the conditions that the Palestinians live under have forced them and their children to carry out ‘these operations’ as ‘a duty to resist the occupation,’ that ‘resistance is not terrorism,’ ‘for every action there is a reaction.’ He says that ‘what is better than to be a martyr? You are going to die anyway . . . today, tomorrow, in one hundred years. To die in dignity and honor is better than anything’ (To Die in Jerusalem 2007). On the other side, Rachel’s brother Guy says that ‘we are losing a lot of soldiers for no reason. We don’t want to be there [the territories]; they don’t want us there. But nobody’s controlling the terror, and if nobody’s controlling the terror, we don’t have a choice; we have to be there’ (To Die in Jerusalem 2007). Ayat’s and Rachel’s looks are constantly highlighted in a parallel. During an interview, Ayat’s father even points to a picture of Rachel on the front cover of Newsweek, mistaking her for his own daughter. The documentary uses the two lives as a platform to elaborate on the confl ict and the two different communities, but the special focus is on how the two mothers have responded to the deaths of their daughters, and how they have interpreted these deaths. Whereas for the Akhras family the death of their daughter has increased their prestige and status within their community, Abigail’s loss can hardly be turned into a positive effect. The producers did attempt to give voice to the Palestinian/Muslim perspective through Levy’s visits to the Israeli jail, where Arab female terrorists are held. Abigail does not even attempt to hide her prejudices and attacks a suicide bomber for being a mother and for not caring about her children. The visit to the prison ends up almost in a riot with the Palestinian women proclaiming that Israel does not exist, and that Russian Jews, Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews, European Jews, and American Jews should just go back to their countries and leave what was the territory of Palestine to them. Abigail is obviously not amused by such a confrontation and the meeting ends up in an impasse pretty quickly. The director, Medalia, had not realized the difficulties Abigail would encounter trying to travel to the camp, confident that she would be able to arrange a meeting between the two mothers. Ideally Abigail wanted to invite Ayat’s parents to her house, in a gesture of hospitality, without realizing that for Ayat’s parents this is not such an easy thing to do. The whole idea of the encounter sounds naïve after the realization that Ayat’s parents, Abu and Um Samir Akhras, could not just leave the Deheisheh refugee camp outside Bethlehem without authorization. Um Samir Akhras is not allowed to travel without her husband, and, being the father of a suicide bomber, he is not eligible for a visa to Jerusalem. Medalia had thought of bringing Abigail and the crew to them, by using Mitri Raheb, a pastor of

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Figure 4.3

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Rachel Levy. Courtesy of Hilla Medalia.

the Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, to function as a mediator into the West Bank. The documentary shows the terrified and dismayed Abigail as she enters a completely new world. Eventually the Palestinian authorities detain the crew until darkness starts falling. A scared Abigail, who had been so confident about the purpose of her meeting and of overcoming cultural barriers, asks to be brought back to her home. The plan for a meeting failed. The alternative solution is to organize a satellite meeting between the two mothers, a far less enticing occasion, but one that better conveys the reality of the confl ict and the difficulties of the borderline between Israel and Palestine. After four years of negotiations, they manage to arrange a four-hour discussion (Ayat’s mother is accompanied by her husband, who at times intervenes in the conversation to the great irritation of Abigail), which does not generate the desired result or fi lmic effect. Though the fi lm has about fifty minutes of interesting and powerful introduction and exposition of the conflict, To Die in Jerusalem is mainly

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Figure 4.4

Ayat al-Akras. Courtesy of Hilla Medalia.

focused on getting to the last twenty-minute section, when the two mothers meet via satellite. The meeting comes four years after the bombing, due to bureaucratic and technical problems, and whatever answers Abigail was still looking for are not going to be found. Rachel’s mother plays the personal card above the political reasons for the confl ict, she says, ‘I don’t want to talk politics. You continue to blame the occupation for all your problems. You should learn to think differently.’ However, the different ways of framing the problem, and also Abigail’s paternalistic attitude in her attempt to practice peace in the face of hostility, emerge as a mismatch of intentions and expectations, showing a naïve and dominant Israeli mother versus an unremorseful Palestinian mother. The latter refuses to acknowledge the death of her daughter as “useless,” but sees it as something for the “cause” and “honor,” and proclaims the importance of her daughter’s sacrifice for a generation to come, making her a model to many other girls. Um Samir asks: ‘Should I resist occupation with a bouquet of roses? On a tray of gold?’ (To Die in Jerusalem 2007). Abigail continues to want to reframe the discussion from the general and political to the personal and individual, because there is nothing more important to her than life. Abigail wants Um Samir to admit that what Ayat did was wrong, and say this in public, in order to show a different way to peace. The renunciation of violence and the gesture of reconciliation that Abigail seeks never come, and she is never even close to them. They are supplanted instead by a rhetoric of grievances as Abigail, on the one hand, talks about the hate that goes back decades and should be abandoned in order to build a better future and Um Samir, on the other hand, details the hardships of Palestinian life that cannot be condoned. While Abigail

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continues to plead for a condemnation of this kind of violence from Ayat’s mother, asking her to go on TV to condemn this sort of action, Um Samir reacts fiercely, saying, ‘When we have regained our rights, our land, authority, government, when we see our children released from prison, our houses are rebuilt then I will go on television. . . . on all satellites.’ Un Samir says that this is to ask them for surrender, but the Palestinian people will never surrender. Abigail is demoralized by the tone of the dialogue and concludes by saying, ‘I am very disappointed. I am sorry we have had to end up like this.’ And Um Samir replies, ‘Do not be disappointed. . . . I only told you the reality’ (To Die in Jerusalem 2007). The rhetoric of confession clashes with the rhetoric of oppression, and whereas the two girls looked alike in their youth, their mothers’ worlds could not be more distant. The film makes us realize that some lives are more grievable than others. As Judith Butler (2009: 1) writes in Frames of War, ‘the “being” of life is itself constituted through selective means: as a result, we cannot refer to this being outside of the operation of power, and we must make more precise the specific mechanisms of power through which life is produced.’ Although mourning and violence might inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice against the instigation to perpetual war, it is the different positionalities toward the very idea of life, its precariousness, and its value not as just an individual property, but as a communal gift (as in the difference between the idea of suicide and sacrifice, individual death or national cause) that brings the idea of the dialogue between the two mothers to a complete impasse, frustration, and disillusion. To Die in Jerusalem ends with the pictures of the girls juxtaposed once again onscreen, a sobering reminder of the tragic consequences of the continuing struggle to fi nd peace.

REPRESENTING THE PALESTINIAN CONFLICT In addition to To Die in Jerusalem, there have been many artistic productions that have tried to visualize and interpret the question of suicide bombing, in Palestine but also elsewhere, in different ways. Natalie Assouline Terebilo shot Shahida—Brides of Allah (2008), a documentary about Palestinian female suicide bombers who landed in Israeli prisons, which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the FIPRESCI prize (the Award of the International Critics). The documentary tries to get close to the motivations and reasons of female suicide bombers by interviewing survivors, or women who failed their missions, in Israeli prisons. From these short interviews, we see many of the stereotypes on female suicide bombers being repeated and some undermined. The director confesses in an interview to Israeli television that she was surprised to fi nd the women she found. She thought they would be brutal and aggressive, and instead she met gentle women, well educated and with children (Meslet 2008). This

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confutes the myths that women who commit suicide are ugly, cannot get a husband, illiterate, infertile, handicapped or mentally ill, or in search of vengeance for a killed family member or to clear up their honor after an illicit love relationship. It is worthy of note that the interviewer insists on the term “suicide terrorists” and not “suicide bombers,” and that she questions whether they are ‘feminine.’ The fi lmmaker says explicitly that she does not focus on the political but on the individual, that she also isolated each of them ‘from everyone in general,’ in order to have a more intimate and truthful insight into their motivations (Shahida—Brides of Allah 2008). Although through the strategy of documentary fi lmmaking and the interview style we are prone to believe this piece brings us closer than other writings and speculations to the motives and hearts of the female suicide bombers, it reiterates many stereotypes and clichés without offering any further clues. The filmmaker’s focus remains on the individual as cut off from the political and on the psychological motives as cut off from the socioeconomic ones (which is also Abigail’s approach with Ayat’s mother). The fi lmmaker only briefly refers to these intricate combinations of factors and causes as hard to isolate and distill, making each individual case unique and specific in its own way. On that note, the documentary has an added importance as we are flooded by information and Western readings of the phenomena: trying to make sense of the situations by interviewing the survived attackers, mostly jailed family members and friends, yet always fi ltered through a specific form of interpretation that contributes to the kind of construction of knowledge often passed off as objective and scientific. Other perspectives are taken in fictional films such as Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002), which in a short scene shows a Palestinian woman trying to cross the Israeli checkpoint dressed in a skimpy pink dress, the scene somewhat referencing Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which shows Algerian women restyling themselves as French modern women, bleaching their hair and wearing miniskirts, in order to pass the Casbah checkpoints by fl irting with the French soldiers. Although in Divine Intervention the woman cannot obviously hide a suicide belt, she enervates the Israeli guard for the threat she poses by parading with the charge of her femininity in crossing the border. With a parody of the voyeuristic male gaze, she is literally kept in check by the Israeli soldier through the gun’s sightline as he contemplates her female body while dreading her passage. The short scene is an ironic take on the stereotyped idea of fundamentalist terrorists, or female suicide bombers, as the woman is dressed in Western style and is flaunting her dangerous nondiversity. In the short clip “Chic Point,” Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003), Sharif Waked shows a catwalk for attractive Palestinian men with their clothes torn, showing gaps and holes, presenting metrosexual bodies that challenge traditional patterns of masculinity and militarization. The description that goes with the video says: ‘Chic Point was shot in a fictional

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location: the occupied catwalk.  Employing all the elements of a fashion show, models reveal their  abdomens in outfits designed especially to suit Israeli checkpoints.  For Israelis in the present time, the individual Palestinian body is the most dangerous weapon there is, and it is therefore the subject of  ongoing and humiliating surveillance.’ 7 After the catwalk of fashionable men dressing in fishnet, transparent material, or stylish holes that reveal their nudity, the video shows black-and-white images of Palestinians having to strip at the Israeli checkpoints and suffer their lack of sovereignty and masculinity being undone by having to undress in front of the Israeli male gaze. In the story of Paradise Now (2005), by Hany Abu-Assad, two close friends, Palestinians Said and Khaled, are living in Nablus with precarious or no employment and no possibilities of leaving the city as the Israeli authorities hardly grant permits to young men. Through the fi lm we learn that the father of one was a collaborator with the Israeli forces and was eventually killed, and the other suffered from the occupiers’ abuses and humiliation, including having to select which one of his own legs the occupier would shoot. The two friends, Said and Khaled, are recruited by an extremist group to perpetrate a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv, blowing themselves up. However, things go wrong and both friends must separate at the border. Khaled maintains his purpose of carrying the attack to the end, while Said has his doubts about it and disappears. They eventually resume the operation together but after a turn of events Khaled renounces the operation, trying to convince Said to do the same. Yet Said unexpectedly goes on alone with the mission. The last scene portrays Said on a bus with Israeli people and the screen goes white, a symbol of his having carried out the explosion. While putting into question the harshness and motivation of suicide missions, the fi lm reflects on the political violence, humiliation, and economic disparity that lead these characters to doubts, distress, low self-esteem, and lack of prospective for the future; suicide becomes no less dramatic, but acquires a larger framework of analysis. More dramatic and fitting of the Bollywood formula is Dil Se (1998), by Mani Ratnam, which casts no less than the megastar Shah Rukh Khan as Amar, a news reporter who has an interview to carry out in the northern frontier and meets the enigmatic woman Meghna, played by Manisha Koirala. Amar is already attached to Preeti Nair, played by the famous Preity Zinta. He dramatically falls in love with Meghna without knowing that she is a “supposedly” Kashmiri separatist suicide terrorist who will disappear without a trace. The fi lm shows the clash between love and ideology, making the role of a female suicide bomber an excruciatingly painful path. More ironic is the art project by British artist Simon Tyszko called Suicide Bomber Barbie (2002), in which he creates a Barbie strapped with explosives. Suicide Bomber Barbie conflates Western commodification with Palestinian hopelessness and desperation. Religious and capitalist dogmas are here compounded, showing a Barbie with an idealized form of a blond top

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model, in a fashion that is strident and shocking, as a “fashionable” female suicide bomber. It is a work whose political stridency is accompanied by a sense of humor that takes the edge of both the drama around the Palestinian confl ict and the futility of consumer culture.8

COUNTERING OCCIDENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS Most of the analyses that are now brought forward by writers, artists, and filmmakers tend to focus on the motives and reasons that are behind the actions of suicide bombers. Most of the motivations are attributed to religious or psychological factors (often linked to various pathologies) and more rarely to civic and political motivations connected to historical and international dynamics. The analyses of the recent phenomenon of female suicide bombers not only suffer from mediatic exploitation and the rhetoric of the “War on Terror” that emphasizes the orientalist reading (othering of the terrorist) within an occidentalist frame (the West seen as enemy), but are also highly psychologized and psychologizing (trying to “read” the minds of female suicide bombers), detached from their geopolitical contexts (no comparative framework aside from the Muslim paradigm), and isolated from other historical precedents (no account of the role of women in the liberation movements from colonial time until today). Some credits should be given to self-determination and agency of the female suicide bombers, taken within their sociopolitical context. As Frances Hasso (2005) clearly highlights, these women have been venerated as heroes by Palestinian girls and women across religious and ideological lines, which expresses the generalized escalation and militarization of the confl ict, as well as the desire to be actively engaged: Indeed, the Palestinian women undertook their attacks in a context of eclipsed women’s political power and visibility. While the period between 1978 and 1991 in the territory was dominated by wide-ranging grassroots, non-violent mobilization of girls and women by the largely secular women’s committee (Hiltermann, 1991), after the 1993 signing of the Oslo accords, the focus and nature of most women’s organization shifted from mobilization to state building. (34) In her video testimony, twenty-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber Andaleeb Takatka says, ‘My body is a barrel of gunpowder that burns the enemy’ (cited in Hasso 2005: 29), clearly invoking the traditional narratives of female embodiment. However, she reverses the traditional understanding of woman as a subject who is vulnerable to danger into a warrior-like metaphor that transforms the body into a killing machine with specific purpose. Various metaphors used by Western media have referred to women whose wombs have been turned into bombs, but this testimonial left through the

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video incites a different reading of the suicide narrative that is reducible to the role of neither the victim nor the executioner, but subscribes to an interrelation of the self and the other being inextricably connected in death. As V.G. Julie Rajan writes: Women bombers directly and remarkably challenge those patriarchal ideologies in multiple ways. Instead of building and maintaining families and societies, they present the capacity to tear apart their enemies’ families and to wreak havoc in their societies. Instead of remaining within the home space and remaining silent and hidden from society, women bombers implode themselves in the most public of ways, attracting unprecedented level of local, national and international attention.  .  .  . Instead of being nurturing and an object of violence, women bombers reveal that, as women, they too can negotiate and affect the most excessive forms of violence, killing and injuring not only themselves but also others, and thereby objectifying others in the process. (2011: 25) It is not surprising that women bombers create male anxieties about their potential to subvert the patriarchal order. They do so by questioning many of the male prerogatives, such as that of going into war on the front lines and literally making international headlines. This can explain why female suicide bombers have been often represented in ways that reduce their impact and reconfigure them into a traditional patriarchal scheme: as mothers, daughters, sisters, wives of Allah or the nation, reassuring all those who witness these extreme acts that they are just women after all. Understanding the complex interaction among nationalism, religion, gender, and occupation is essential. As with other third world feminist issues, a comprehensive approach to the Palestinian female suicide bomber cannot be reduced to or even prioritize gender oppression over other (national and economic) circumstances, but rather needs to be accounted for in the particular predicament of the complex web of power and social relations in Palestinian society. But it is also necessary to provide a different reading of agency in the Palestinian context. Most feminist thinking continues to see agency as a model of subordination and subversion. Mahmood (2005) argues that this attachment of agency to progressive politics is problematic. There are different ways to change the world depending on social, political, and historical contexts. The meaning of agency should not be fi xed beforehand or taken out of its social, religious, and political relations. If we really wish to understand the lives, experiences, and strategies of these suicide bombers, we should not understand these actions under the notions of false consciousness, misguided feminism, or failed equality. By including the arguments, experiences, and strategies of women who fight alternative struggles for equality, as well as those of women who do not necessarily desire freedom in the way prescribed by Western liberal feminism, different

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contextualized readings and interpretations of these phenomena are made possible, offering ways to rethink the relationship between religion and agency. Nevertheless, this remains an irksome issue, as a nonproblematic reading of these events could be used to endanger feminist struggles instead of offering alternative readings of empowerment. By using their bodies as weapons, becoming shahida and therefore entering a mythological status that incites other women to follow, escaping the stricture of the gender regime in which they live, female suicide bombers subvert the symbolic order of the patriarchal system. Most feminist critics agree that nationalist movements, particularly in the postcolonial context, have for the most part betrayed women’s struggle for gender equality and blocked their participation in the newly established nations. The phenomenon of the female suicide bombers, however, recasts the question of female participation in armed struggles and nationalistic projects of liberation in highly problematic ways. Female suicide bombers get much more attention and analysis than other female combatants in history, acquiring an either mythical or terrorist status, suspended in time. The reason for this extra attention can be attributed not only to the violence through which they fi nd death and the challenge to the maternal and peaceful role attributed to women, but also to the threat they pose to the patriarchal order, as it goes beyond the control of their male leaders and political authorities. As Leila Khaled, the best-known Palestinian woman fighter of the 1970s, has commented about the reception of the Palestinian female suicide bombers by religious leaders, ‘When the religious leaders say that women who make those actions are fi nally equal to men, I have a problem. Everyone is equal in death—rich, poor, Arab, Jew, Christian, we are all equal. I would rather see women equal to men in life’ (Khaled, cited in Victor 2003: 63–64). NOTES 1. One of the authorities on the subject of suicide terrorism, Robert Pape, has created the fi rst comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. The database is linked to the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (see http://cpost.uchicago.edu/search.php, accessed on 24 September 2013). In his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005), Pape provides a comprehensive demographic profi le of modern suicide terrorist attackers, offering a counter-voice to dominant interpretations. The book also examines the early practitioners of this guerrilla tactic, including the ancient Jewish Zealots, who in AD 66 wished to liberate themselves from Roman occupation; the Ismaili Assassins, a Shi’ite Muslim sect in northern Iran in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War II, three thousand of whom crashed into US naval vessels; and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a secular, Marxist-Leninist organization responsible for more suicide terrorist attacks than any other group in history. 2. The second Intifada is the second Palestinian uprising, referring to the period of intensified Palestinian–Israeli violence, beginning in late September 2000

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

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and ending in 2005. The fi rst Palestinian Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, lasted from December 1987 until the Madrid Conference in 1991, although some date its conclusion in 1993, with the signing of the Oslo accords. The fictionalization of this event was created by Santosh Sivan with the fi lm The Terrorist (1999). Differently than Dhanu in reality, the female suicide bomber called Malli in the fi lm, does not go through with the mission. The fi lm portrays the nineteen-year-old Malli, sent to assassinate a leader in South Asia, in her days before the attack. The fi lm, which is replete with orientalizing and voyeuristic imageries, but with splendid camera work, successfully shows the psychological development of a woman turned into a killing machine who had to undergo a process of masculinization and disembodiment. However, her unexpected pregnancy, from a murdered partner, reawakens her bodily senses and passion for life. She eventually deserts the militaristic goals inculcated by her political leaders in the name of the Tamil cause, although no specific groups are mentioned in the fi lm. The fi lm won a number of awards at international fi lm festivals. The many publications that have appeared during the last decade on the topic tend to fall into unnuanced analyses. For example, all the books listed below, and published in the US, illuminate tropes of gendered othering: Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (2003); Joyce Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair the in the Middle East (2003); Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (2005); Rosemarie Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers (2006). In these texts, women and family are interviewed while the authors try to reinforce an orientalist reading that proposes the notion of a ‘misguided feminism’ (Bloom 2005) leading these women who were still in search of equality. Complex motivations are often reduced to catchy terms such as a ‘fatal cocktail’ for suicide bombing (Victor 2003). Bloom, for example, does not refrain from using strong sexualized metaphors: ‘the advent of women suicide bombers has transformed the revolutionary womb into an exploding one’ (2005: 143). See on this the work of Emile Durkheim, and his study on Suicide (1970). For more background information, see Hammer (2002). See the description under a short fragment of the clip at http://www.vdb.org/ titles/chic-point-fashion-israeli-checkpoints, accessed on 24 September 2013. For an image of Suicide Bomber Barbie, see http://www.theculture.net/barbie/, accessed on 24 September 2013.

REFERENCES Applebaum, Anne (2002) ‘Girl Suicide Bombers,’ Slate, 2 April 2002, available at: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2002/04/girl_suicide_bombers.html, accessed on 25 September 2013. Asad, Talal (2007) On Suicide Bombing, New York: Columbia University Press. Battle of Algiers, The (1966) Movie directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy and Algeria: Igor Film and Casbah Film. Berko, Anat (2007) The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers, trans. E. Yuval, Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Bloom, Mia (2005) Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, Katherine E. (2011) ‘Muriel’s Wedding: News Media Representations of Europe’s First Female Suicide Terrorist,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 705–26.

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Brunner, Claudia (2005) ‘Female Suicide Bombers—Male Suicide Bombing? Looking for Gender in Reporting the Suicide Bombings of the Israeli-Palestinian Confl ict,’ Global Society, vol. 19, issue 1, pp. 29–48. Brunner, Claudia (2007) ‘Occidentalism Meets the Female Suicide Bomber: A Critical Reflection on Recent Terrorism Debates; A Review Essay,’ Signs, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 957–71. Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. “Chic Point,” Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003) Clip directed by Sharif Waked, Israel/Palestine: independently produced, available at: http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/ArchiveVideo.asp?id=325, accessed on 24 September 2013. Davis, Joyce M. (2003) Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dil Se (1998) Movie directed by Mani Ratman, India: India Talkies. Divine Intervention (2002) Movie directed by Elia Suleiman, France, Morocco, Germany, Palestine: Pyramide Distributions. Durkheim, Emile (1970) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. trans. J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson, New York: Free Press. Hage, Ghassan (2003) ‘“Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm”: Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia,’ Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 65–89. Hammer, Joshua (2002) ‘How Two Lives Met In Death,’ Newsweek, 14 April 2002, available at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2002/04/14/howtwo-lives-met-in-death.html, accessed on 24 September 2013. Hasso, Frances S. (2005) ‘Discursive and Political Deployments by/of the 2002 Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers/Martyrs,’ Feminist Review, no. 81, pp. 23–51. Hiltermann, Joost R. (1991) Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McClintock, Anne (1997) ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race, and Nationalism,’ in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds.) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 89–112. Meslet, Efraim (2008) ‘From Berlin to Jerusalem—Interview with Israeli Producer, Natalie Assouline,’ Infolive.tv, 12 February 2008, available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLwUuScsiVQ, accessed on 24 September 2013. Naaman, Dorit (2007) ‘Brides of Palestine/Angels of Death: Media, Gender, and Performance in the Case of the Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers,’ Signs, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 933–55. Pape, Robert A. (2005) Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York: Random House. Paradise Now (2005) Movie directed by Hany Abu-Assad, Palestine, France, Germany, Netherlands, Israel: Warner Independent Pictures. Rajan, V.G. Julie (2011) Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence, Abingdon: Routledge. Rose, Jacqueline (2004) ‘Deadly Embrace,’ London Review of Books, vol. 26, no. 21, available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/jacqueline-rose/deadly-embrace, accessed on 24 September 2013. Shahida—Brides of Allah (2008) Documentary directed by Natalie Assouline Terebilo, Israel: First Hand Films. Skaine, Rosemarie (2006) Female Suicide Bombers, Jefferson: McFarland and Co. Smith, Craig S. (2005) ‘Raised as Catholic in Belgium, She Died as a Muslim Bomber,’ New York Times, 6 December 2005, available at: http://www.nytimes.

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com/2005/12/06/international/europe/06brussels.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, accessed on 25 September 2013. Speckhard, Anne (2009) ‘Female Suicide Bombers in Iraq,’ Democracy and Security, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 19–50. Terrorist, The (1999) Movie directed by Santosh Sivan, US: Fox Lober. To Die in Jerusalem (2007) Documentary directed by Hilla Medalia, US: HBO Documentary. Victor, Barbara (2003) Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers, Emmaus: Rodale.

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Part II

European Frictions Memories, Migration, and Citizenship

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5

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality Torture and the French-Algerian War Christine Quinan Ultimately, it was an unquestioning faith in the higher destiny of the French civilising mission, founded paradoxically on the universal Rights of Man of 1789, that provided the justification and dynamic for state violence against “others,” colonised peoples who were perceived to be at a primitive stage of historical evolution or racially inferior. —Neil MacMaster (2004) ‘Torture: from Algiers to Abu Ghraib,’ p. 5

The infant revolution was already burdened with the perverted tendencies of all the others. Aided and abetted by intellectuals with clean hands and “white” complexes. —Gisèle Halimi (1990) Milk for the Orange Tree, p. 301

In laying bare corporeal resistance strategies and bodies, wartime torture uncovers complicated power relationships, often structured around stereotypical ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and nationality. At times, the body of the tortured is constructed as hypersexual or perversely sexual (which itself becomes a convenient justification for more torture, or torture in the fi rst place), and at others the body becomes a passive site onto which the torturer may project anxieties about their own gender or sexuality. Intersecting with constructions (or deconstructions) of both masculinity and femininity may be a shoring-up of nationality and culture, particularly during “civilizing missions” that position the other as inferior. Taking the 1960 legal case of Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian woman who was brutally raped and tortured by the French military during the French-Algerian War (1954–1962), as my point of departure, this chapter investigates how gender, sexuality, and nationality figure in this physically and psychologically damaging act and in its subsequent representations. Although torture had been commonplace during this long war of decolonization, Boupacha’s case is unique in the attention it received, particularly from public intellectuals in France, prompting accusations such as that of Gisèle Halimi (1990), who stated that the interventions may have been less

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than pure. For some political activists and scholars, Boupacha’s story has functioned as proof of the existence of torture during the war, whereas for others it has been taken up as a convenient opportunity to oppose governmental policies, if only then to reaffi rm French nationality. Still others have made her into a symbol of the dangers of colonialism and unchecked militancy, and a select few have used the story in an attempt to give her a public voice. Here, I use Boupacha’s case to show how gender and sexuality figure in the torture scene, taken up by all sides to project an image of her that helped bolster national identities and fulfill political goals. Building on the notion that Muslim women’s bodies have been co-opted by all factions of the war to serve particular purposes, I look at feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s publicizing work on the case, focusing on her rhetoric of sexual purity and collective responsibility. I argue that narratives such as that of Boupacha have aided in the construction of a cohesive French nationality based on civility and human rights precisely because these were representations and accounts of Algerian women tortured by French men. Through this lens, I consider the complicated invocation of national pride and shame when discussing torture, asking what role such affects may play in the hands of those privileged enough to have a public voice. I also have a stake in uncovering critical parallels between this case and the US occupation of Iraq, particularly the highly publicized systematic abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Although the historical and political contexts are undoubtedly different (albeit with some similarities), the 2004 torture scandal again demonstrates how normative gendering and invoking of shame play a role in the reinforcement of national identity and further exposes the legacies of colonization that, as other chapters in this collection similarly show, continue to mold gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in global politics and cultural representations. The following questions will guide my analysis, even as they continue to elude clear answers. What do wartime representations of torture reveal about gender and sexuality? How do race and nationality intersect with gender in the accompanying rhetoric? And, more generally, how do we theorize the continued deployment of women as tools of war in both decolonial and neocolonial confl icts?

DJAMILA BOUPACHA, TORTURE, AND THE FRENCH-ALGERIAN WAR As art historian Tom McDonough (2005: 79) writes of late 1950s France, ‘The Algerian War was, in a sense, everywhere and nowhere, present daily in Parisians’ newspapers as bulletins from the Evian conference and stories of nighttime bombings against supporters of independence, but largely absent from their everyday lives.’ Whereas many civilians turned a blind eye to the abuses done in the name of France, a number of intellectuals

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality 113 experienced the war as a profound personal and philosophical watershed. In the wake of three international confl icts—World War I, World War II, and Indochina—French intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike were struggling to understand what went “wrong” in Algeria. Assumptions about French universality were turned upside down as France’s status as upholder of human rights appeared disputable, a fact that seemed to compel intellectuals to reevaluate understandings of, and engagements with, difference and otherness. Such reflection was central to the philosophical project of Simone de Beauvoir, whose existential ethics and adherence to theories of collective responsibility compelled her to fight for universal freedom for the self and for the other. Although she had earlier maintained a distance from the messy world of politics and war, she describes France’s controversial actions in Indochina and Algeria as fully awakening her political consciousness, sparking a commitment to anticolonial struggle. She saw the Algerian fight for independence as bound up with contemporary French leftist ideologies, yet recognized the paradoxical relationship at the heart of one confl ict in which the French were occupied and another in which they were the occupier. While France was attempting to shed any traces of fascism from the previous war, the military was forcefully oppressing its North African départements. Further emphasizing the historical irony that the French government would mirror the behavior of its own recent oppressors, Beauvoir (1964: 146) lamented: ‘Yes, I was living in an occupied city, and I loathed the occupiers even more fiercely than I had those in the 40s, because of all the ties that bound me to them.’ Indeed, in its paradoxical absence and presence, the war provoked an individual and collective crisis—French national identity, purportedly a beacon of culture and civility, was suddenly placed in question as a domestic and international public learned of the military’s violent tactics. Four years into the eight-year confl ict and following the collapse of France’s Fourth Republic in 1958, newly instated President Charles de Gaulle pledged to end the already ubiquitous practice of torture. Slowly but surely, stories began to emerge that proved his pledge to be in vain, as the French military continued to employ unwarranted violence in the face of growing calls for Algerian independence. One case that clearly proved the existing deployment of torture was that of Djamila Boupacha. French journalist and fellow torture victim Henri Alleg wrote: ‘Djamila Boupacha is proof personified that torture has not been brought to an end by the Gaullist régime, that torture can only end with the end of the colonial war whose poisonous fruit it is’ (cited in Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 207). Boupacha’s case garnered significant attention after Beauvoir became involved in the campaign to defend her against false accusations that carried the death penalty. Many critics have diminished Beauvoir’s commitment to the anticolonial movement by assuming her involvement was merely self-serving.1 She has, for example, been criticized for demonstrating a lack of emotion (a charge that

114 Christine Quinan itself can be read as gendered) and for engaging in intellectual solipsism (an accusation generally attributed to Frantz Fanon but taken up by others as well). 2 Although I keep in mind the very clear practical and theoretical problems that Beauvoir’s actions provoked, I believe that dismissing her as purely opportunistic misses the mark, falling short of an opportunity to examine the increasingly equivocal relationship between intellectualism, activism, and national identity at this historical moment and beyond. It is crucial to note how the figure of Djamila Boupacha became a tool in the war of decolonization, her physical body a prime site of contention and exchange, particularly through Beauvoir’s use of her story and participation as a white French woman in the Algerian independence movement. Boupacha’s involvement in the war began when she learned that Algerian girls would be prevented from earning certificates from the University of Algiers. In her words, ‘I made up my mind to fight for my country’s independence . . . because our cause is just . . . we shall achieve it’ (cited in Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 52–53). She decided to join the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the Algerian socialist party and face of the national liberation struggle, and to help the cause she stole medical supplies from a hospital in which she worked and hid FLN members in her home. On 10 February 1960, fifty troops raided the house that Boupacha shared with her parents, and she was taken into custody, along with her brother-in-law and her father. Eventually, after being held for a period without charges, Boupacha was falsely accused of having planted a bomb five months earlier (which, incidentally, was defused before it could explode). After being brought to Hussein Dey prison, Boupacha was given what was called the second degré. In the text of her civil indictment, Boupacha summarizes the treatment: I found out what this implied—fi rstly, torture by electricity. (Since the electrodes would not stay in place when affi xed to my nipples, one of my torturers fastened them on with Scotch tape.) I received similar electrical burns on my legs, face, anus, and vagina. This electrical torture was interspersed with cigarette burns, blows, and the ‘bath treatment’: I was trussed up and hung over a bath on a stick, and submerged till I nearly choked. (Cited in Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 218) At one point during her incarceration, her brother-in-law and her father, both visibly tortured, were presented to her. Not only did this allow her to see the further pain that may be inflicted on her own body were she not to cooperate, but it also served to break the men, as the sight of her destroyed body could function as psychological torture. The French military effectively positioned these men as powerless to save her, highlighting the power maintained by the colonial forces that held this woman’s life in their hands. After thirty-three days of torture, Boupacha “confessed” to having planted the bomb. A psychiatrist stated that she was not responsible for her criminal

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality 115 actions, and she was offered a plea bargain. Instead of accepting the offer, however, she retracted her earlier confession and, in a shocking move, pursued her own case against her torturers. Her brother contacted Gisèle Halimi, known for human rights work, and Halimi immediately began a case against General Ailleret, the commander-in-chief in Algeria, and Pierre Messmer, Minister of Armies, for wrongful detention and torture in violation of Article 344 of the Penal Code. Halimi approached Beauvoir in hopes that she would lend her support to the case. Together, they decided that Beauvoir would write an incendiary editorial piece for Le Monde with the goal being ‘to overcome the most scandalous aspect of the whole scandalous affair—the fact that people had gotten used to it’ (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 63). On 3 June 1960, the day Beauvoir’s editorial was published, there was uproar. The French military in Algeria immediately confiscated the newspaper issue in hopes of preventing a crisis in popular opinion. Soon after, Beauvoir and Halimi established the Djamila Boupacha Committee to garner the public’s support. Their fi rst task was to have the case moved to France, away from corruption in the Algerian court system. Before going to trial in 1962, Halimi and Beauvoir together published a chronicle of the case up until Boupacha’s hearing in a book entitled Djamila Boupacha. Their text includes a series of témoignages from contemporary intellectuals and activists, along with a portrait of Boupacha sketched by Picasso. The international press eventually took up the story, and demonstrations in support of Boupacha were staged in Paris, Tokyo, and Washington.

BOUPACHA’S BODY: A RHETORIC OF VIRGINITY In the introduction to Djamila Boupacha, Beauvoir makes clear both the element of sexual torture central to Boupacha’s case and the ubiquity of such practices: ‘An Algerian girl of twenty-three, an FLN liaison agent, illegally imprisoned by French military forces, who subjected her to torture and deflowered her with a bottle: it is a common enough story’ (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 12–13). Despite the unexceptional nature of the treatment, the supplice de la bouteille (torture by bottle) became one of the central points of debate and fascination during the trial. In her study of torture during the war, sociologist Marnia Lazreg (2008: 160) points to the central role of sexuality: ‘When a woman was taken prisoner, the sexual nature of torture was a matter of fact. It was borne by her gendered body.  .  .  . Her body, perceived as that of the generic female, was imbued with sexual desire.’ Although I would caution against the reduction of the inherent power structure to ‘sexual desire’ and would argue that a male prisoner’s body is equally gendered (and sexualized), it is important to recognize the roles that gender and sexuality play in Boupacha’s torture. Whereas the kind of torture Boupacha experienced was, indeed, rather common,

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her story becomes unique in its detailed exposure of the abuse infl icted on Algerian women (and undoubtedly men, as well). Boupacha endured torture of all kinds, sexual torture being one form, but most accounts of her story privilege this aspect of her abuse over all others. For example, in the limited number of scholarly accounts of the case, the most cited detail remains her rape—not “ordinary rape,” but rape with a bottle—underscoring the sexual aspect of her abuse and enabling thirty-three days of torture to be condensed into this act, which, as we will see, allowed for problematic assertions that she was not even tortured at all. Key to the gendered and sexualized dimensions of the abuse, Boupacha’s virginity became central to the case. Beauvoir’s choice to include the fact that Boupacha was a virgin in her editorial provoked a heated debate with the director of Le Monde, who, as Beauvoir herself recalls, ‘found it shocking . . . that I had written: “Djamila was a virgin”; would I not paraphrase this somehow? I wouldn’t. They printed these four words in parenthesis’ (Beauvoir 1964: 501). 3 Indeed, Beauvoir and Halimi were strategic about their deployment of this trope, for Beauvoir’s adamant inclusion of this detail positioned Boupacha as “innocent,” hence sympathetic, to the French public. As some have also pointed out, the self-exposure of her rape also carries particular weight given her status as a Muslim woman. Halimi summarizes: To questions about the meaning and value of virginity, Djamila gave absolute and uncompromising answers: virginity for her was a totemic symbol, with positively magical significance. Any girl who besmirched herself by having relations with a man before her marriage was dishonoured and accursed. . . . No Moslem of good family would ever marry a girl who had been previously deflowered. (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 126–27) Much like Jasbir Puar (2007: 100) writes of torture as ‘robbing the feminine of its symbolic and reproductive centrality to national-normative sexualities,’ by having her virginity taken from her (if it is even appropriate to interpret her rape in this way), Boupacha also risked losing access to a whole set of cultural privileges, including marriage and respect. Leading up to the trial, in fact, the most important debate involved not Boupacha’s guilt or innocence but her status as a virgin. Medical professionals poked and prodded her body in hopes of proving or debunking her assertion of sexual abuse and prior virginity, thereby enacting more violence unto her. Even though a team of doctors decided that Boupacha may have indeed suffered from ‘traumatic defloration’ (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 139), defi nitive proof of the manner in which this occurred remained inconclusive. Notably, however, in the psychiatric portion of her examination, Dr. Hélène Michel-Wolfron responded without hesitation that she had ‘a mentality corresponding with that of a virgin’: ‘Her awkwardness

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality 117 in personal relationships, her innocence, her atavistic pride and religious convictions—all these prompted reactions characteristics of a virgin’ (cited in Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 127). What exactly might constitute the mentality of a virgin, or what the “characteristics of a virgin” might be, remains unclear. Perhaps more problematic is another observation (and one on which Dr. Michel-Wolfron undoubtedly based her assessment of sexual abuse and prior virginity): Boupacha was incapable of lying. Halimi summarizes Dr. Michel-Wolfron’s opinion: ‘What struck her most was Djamila’s genuineness, her absolute sincerity. “I don’t think she knows how to tell a lie”’ (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 123–24). Although such statements certainly played a role in her defense, presenting Boupacha as unable to lie places her in another category of human being. In assigning this incapability to Boupacha, she was infantilized and framed as not yet developed, perhaps even too simpleminded to tell mistruths. In examining Boupacha’s legal case and its surrounding rhetoric, it becomes clear that her sexuality had been figured not only as a tool for the defense, but also as a weapon for the prosecution. Contrasted to Dr. MichelWolfron’s belief that Boupacha was ‘a most remarkable girl—extraordinary innocence and honesty’ are statements made by Maurice Patin, president of the Committee of Public Safety in Algeria: ‘You claim that she was a virgin. But, we have photos of her, taken in her bedroom: she’s between two FLN soldiers with guns in hand, and she’s holding a machine gun’ (cited in Beauvoir 1964: 504). Patin’s assumption that militancy (or even anticolonial resistance) and virginity are mutually exclusive is strategic, albeit problematic, as is the underlying notion that female sexuality is inherently dangerous and to be controlled. In his reluctance to give weight to Boupacha’s case and her assertion of prior virginity, he also states, ‘Your Djamila Boupacha, she’s really not a pleasant character, not a nice girl at all. . . . Girl thinks she’s Joan of Arc. . . . She wants independence for Algeria!’ (cited in Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 99). Patin’s logic seems to be that Boupacha wants freedom so she must not be ‘a nice girl.’ And the further corollary: she must not be a virgin, for only nice girls are virgins. Perhaps even more egregiously sexist were statements Patin made questioning the validity of Boupacha’s claim of having been tortured at all. After realizing that she was raped vaginally and not anally, he stated: ‘I feared at fi rst that she might have been violated per anum, as was done on occasion with the Viets in Indo-China: such treatment results in perforation of the intestines, and is fatal. But this, this was something quite different’ (cited in Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 9). Through further statements such as ‘We’re not concerned with real torture’ (cited in Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 97), the assumption is that being raped anally is inherently more serious than being raped vaginally. In Patin’s view, being forced to sit on a bottle (a form of anal rape) constitutes ‘real torture,’ whereas having a bottle inserted into one’s vagina does not. In her extensive study of torture during the FrenchAlgerian War, Rita Maran (1989: 163–64) comments on this scene: ‘As

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an adherent of French traditions of the “rights of man,” Patin appears to have made a distinction between “rights of man” and “rights of woman,” despite the fact that the constitution then in force had juridically erased that distinction.’ In questioning if female bodies could even be tortured if not raped anally (a form of rape and torture that of course both men and women could be subjected to), Patin effectively points to the gendered dimensions of the torture scene, uncovering, as Maran signals, a murky debate around gender and human rights beneath the surface.

SHAME, NATIONALITY, AND COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY Beauvoir writes in her memoirs that her participation in Boupacha’s case coincided with a personal crisis of sorts, a crisis that stemmed from her philosophical beliefs about collective responsibility and her own misgivings about her status as citizen of a colonizing nation. She writes of the existential feelings this provoked in her: This hypocrisy, this indifference, this country, my own self, were no longer bearable to me. All those people in the streets, in open agreement or battered into a stupid submission—they were all murderers, guilty. Myself as well. ‘I’m French’. . . . For millions of men and women, old men and children, I was just one of the people who were torturing them, burning them, machine-gunning them, slashing their throats, starving them; I deserved their hatred because I could still sleep, write, enjoy a walk or a book. The only moments of which I was not ashamed were those in which I couldn’t do any of those things. (1964: 384) This idea of being seen by others is central to Beauvoir’s notion of the ambiguity of human existence and to her philosophical project as a whole. In seeing herself being seen, Beauvoir places herself at a distance that then allows for both self-critique and critique of her fellow French citizens. But from this self-evaluation emerges a sense of shame, a point emphasized by Annabelle Golay (2007: 418, my translation): ‘Shame of the self, shame of others, shame of French colonialism, shame of being French, shame of her bourgeois origins, her privileges, her complicity in the war. Speaking her shame, writing her shame, constituted for Beauvoir the point of departure for an ethics of solidarity and relationship to the other.’ For Beauvoir, being seen as a French woman (i.e., a colonizer), and therefore reprehensible, evoked in her such shame and culpability, which then provoked collective responsibility, a motivating force for her involvement in the Algerian cause and one she hoped would carry over to her fellow French citizens. In maintaining an existential ethics predicated on a responsibility to others, Beauvoir was also invested in showing how freedom—in this case, freedom of the average French citizen—was

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality 119 necessarily bound up with freedom of the other—freedom of Algerians. Indeed, Beauvoir took up Boupacha’s case to put this philosophy into practice, as seen in the carefully chosen words of her Le Monde editorial: ‘When the government of a country allows crimes to be committed in its name, every citizen thereby becomes a member of a collectively criminal nation. Can we allow our country to be so described? The Djamila Boupacha affair is the concern of every person in France’ (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 223). Rita Maran (1989: 167) writes of Beauvoir’s rhetoric: ‘in a moment of urgency, she relied on the most direct appeal, one that required no explanation. . . . She called up benevolent aspects of France’s civilizing mission as expressed in national pride.’ In addition to forcing ordinary French citizens to look at the effects of their own complicity and lack of action by underscoring collective responsibility, Beauvoir also appeals to cultural pride and decency by drawing on the nation’s long history of human rights that was being threatened. French journalist Henri Alleg, who underwent one month of torture at the hands of the French military for supporting Algerian independence, was engaged in a similar protective task, beginning La Question, his account of being tortured, with the following epigraph: ‘In attacking the corrupt French, it is France that I defend’ (2006: 33), and concluding it with: ‘All this I have had to say for those Frenchmen who will read me. I want them to know that Algerians do not confuse their torturers with the great people of France, from whom they have learnt so much and whose friendship is so dear to them. But they must know what is done IN THEIR NAME’ (96). Although key aspects of Alleg’s and Boupacha’s cases were dramatically different (it is worth noting, they went to trial two days apart), his personal account may serve as a useful point of comparison in looking at how exposing torture activated a nationalistic response. Alleg’s use of phrases such as ‘the great people of France’ and his choice to capitalize ‘IN THEIR NAME’ highlights the importance that patriotism occupied in debates over torture (and also echoes Beauvoir’s above use of ‘in its name’ in her direct appeal to the French). Similarly, his epigraph clearly captures how critiques of French actions paradoxically became defenses of French culture. Despite such interventions, contemporaries of Beauvoir and Alleg signaled the ambiguous status of French intellectuals in the Algerian cause, questioning if they were in fact more concerned with protecting their nation’s reputation than bringing about justice for the victims of said crimes. Fanon (1967: 71), for example, wrote that ‘the gravity of the tortures, the horror of the rape of little Algerian girls, are perceived because their existence threatens a certain idea of French honor. . . . It belongs to that form of egocentric, sociocentric thinking which has become the characteristic of the French.’ It is not in the scope of this chapter to debate the rightfulness or wrongfulness of Beauvoir’s involvement; it is nevertheless important to recognize the ways in which the accompanying rhetoric of both sexuality and nationality objectified Boupacha.

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In this vein, it is worth noting how the story ends. Boupacha’s legal case concluded in March 1962 (four months prior to Algerian independence) when de Gaulle granted a blanket amnesty to French military personnel, forever preventing prosecution of crimes committed during the war. What often escapes analyses of Boupacha’s case is that just after being released, she was kidnapped by the FLN and brought back to Algeria, further serving as a pawn in the “masculine” fight for political control. In her memoir, Halimi (1990: 300) writes: ‘Kidnapped, kept by the “brothers” of the Federation under lock and key in a council flat in the Paris suburbs. Then put on a plane, well guarded. Destination: Algiers. For the FLN, mission accomplished.’ When Halimi relayed this news to Beauvoir, she received a surprising response: ‘You have been unwise, Gisèle, I had no right, we French had no right, to intervene on behalf of an independent Algerian woman’ (cited in Halimi 1990: 300). Whereas Beauvoir was willing and eager to critique French treatment of Boupacha, she did not see it as the place of ‘we French’ to intervene in FLN matters. As Sonia Kruks (2005: 193) states, ‘Beauvoir would not speak out for Boupacha against the FLN. She would speak out for another against her own government, but not against a Third World independence movement that she supported.’ Beauvoir’s stance fuels the critique that she was more concerned with the larger cause (ending torture and granting Algeria independence) than she was with Boupacha’s personal situation, furthering the idea that the case served the purpose of critiquing French culture, if only to then seek redemption. In representing these larger issues (which was not something Boupacha chose), we may actually view this strategy as having ‘appropriated the people of Algeria insofar as it deflected attention away from them and back to the needs of France’ (Kruks 2005: 194). Algerian female bodies were sites onto which anxieties over French national identity were being worked out at this decolonial moment, and critiquing the FLN could serve no such function.

WHY ARE THE TORTURED WOMEN? OR, WHERE ARE THE TORTURED MEN? Although Djamila Boupacha’s trial proved to be somewhat of a political watershed, there were other cases of torture that received public attention during the French-Algerian War. The case of Djamila Bouhired, who was caught carrying communication between FLN militants, also attracted a considerable amount of press coverage. Like Boupacha, after days of torture and sexual abuse, she signed a confession (which she later denied) and was condemned to death. Two French lawyers, Jacques Vergès and Georges Arnaud, took up her case and published a manuscript entitled Pour Djamila Bouhired (1957) in hopes of drawing public attention to her case (just as Beauvoir and Halimi would years later).4 In addition to Boupacha’s and

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality 121 Bouhired’s cases, other newspaper accounts of anonymous tortured women were circulating. Now that French-Algerian War archives are being relaxed and taboos surrounding the war are slowly being lifted, more and more individuals are speaking out about abuse suffered at the hands of French soldiers. For example, in June 2000 Le Monde published on its front page the account of Louisette Ighilahriz, a young Algerian woman who was also tortured during the war. Her story effectively pinpoints the different factions at play in the postcolonial landscape, as many (including some of her alleged torturers) would step in to state their case, often in the name of protecting France. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that it was the story of a tortured Algerian woman that fi nally provoked intellectuals to publically respond to France’s common practice of torture during the war, nor is it haphazard that the story of another Algerian woman reignited the debate four decades later. However, given the fact that there were just as many men tortured as women (if not more), why have accounts of women tortured attracted such attention? What is at stake in circulating representations of tortured women at this colonial moment and beyond? And how does talking about the horrors of one’s own “people” torturing actually shift the conversation away from the victim and larger systemic violence to some sort of national preservation? Before returning to these questions, I think it is worth veering slightly to briefly review one case of a tortured man—Henri Alleg—that did receive tremendous attention, perhaps because he was a French man. Through his graphic account of the torture he endured at the hands of the French military, he is often credited with exposing the truth of interrogatory practices. (He also wrote that the torture he was forced to undergo was not as bad as that infl icted on Algerian prisoners.) Alleg’s case exposes another set of gender-based dynamics and, in particular, highlights the ways in which masculinity plays a role in the torture scene. Whereas the intention of torture is often, as Marnia Lazreg (2008: 255) writes, ‘to rebuild the native “suspect” or combatant from the ground up in a psychological action based on sex, masculinity and femininity,’ there are also heavy stakes for the torturer, who is often equally demonstrating a level of masculinity through such violence. In his introduction to Alleg’s memoir, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: ‘the torturer pits himself against the tortured for his “manhood” and the duel is fought as if it were not possible for both sides to belong to the human race’ (Alleg 2006: 30). Ross Chambers also gestures toward the ways in which the torture calls up traditional notions of manliness: Alleg’s testimony . . . demonstrates the archaic dimension of the appalling experience he underwent, and underscores its significance as an up-to-date version of an age-old, hyper-masculine ordeal of pain. . . . His narrative explores the practice of modern torture as an unholy alliance of industrial rationality and ancient trial by ordeal, a man-to-man encounter mediated by pain. (2008: 209)

122 Christine Quinan Whereas the gender of the actors involved is certainly a key component in the scene that both Sartre and Chambers describe, curious is the absence of any implied hierarchy—or “right” to dominate—whence torture such as that of Boupacha originates. In their descriptions, torture becomes almost an affair of honor, a battle between equals, thereby erasing the racial, ethnic, and sexual component that is so central to the torture cases I have cited above. Returning to my earlier examples, it bears repeating that the French colonial project was reliant on the use of Algerian women in particular ways. Similar to Gayatri Spivak’s well-known formulation, it was under the guise of saving Algerian women (from Algerian men) that the French army and government were able to gain support for certain policies (similar to a recent rhetoric of “women’s emancipation” heard in the US government making its case for the invasion of both Iraq and Afghanistan). Furthermore, whereas drawing attention to cases of tortured Algerian women had the initial effect of creating a public outcry over French policies and even causing some to question France’s status as “civilized,” it had another effect, too. By reading between the lines of Beauvoir’s writing, these narratives may have actually allowed for maintaining a sense of national superiority over this colonized group because these publicized torture victims were female bodies, that is, to borrow from Adriana Cavarero (cited in Oliver 2007: 130–31), ‘bare’ or ‘real’ bodies who would be excluded from the political realm (in contrast to ‘abstract’ male bodies, which are seen as properly political bodies). In this way, the decision to circulate stories and images of ‘real’ tortured bodies (i.e., female bodies) can be simultaneously interpreted as an implicit privileging of masculinity, or, at the very least, an assumption that stories of tortured men would have no effect on the winning of the war, for ‘abstract’ bodies cannot really be tortured.

EPILOGUE: IRAQ In investigating what sorts of narratives of torture were circulating during the French-Algerian War, the war in Iraq may serve as a worthy comparison. Despite their significant historical, geographical, and political differences, some scholars have begun to signal the commonalities between the two confl icts. Neil MacMaster (2004: 5) summarizes one such similarity: ‘almost every feature of the US response to the [9/11] crisis had been prefigured in French counter-insurgency strategy during the Algerian war, a body of doctrine that had had a major influence on US “low intensity” warfare during the four decades after 1961.’ Indeed, I believe that examining the parallels and divergences in representations of torture at these two moments may yield productive discussions about gendering—that is, how torture always already draws upon a matrix of power relations between “men” and “women” built around ‘the oppressive binary scripts of masculine and

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality 123 feminine’ (Puar 2007: 100)—and racialization based on ignorant ideas of Muslim ideologies deeply engrained in the Western imaginary, all of which are consistently drawn on to justify oppressive treatment. The abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib may, at fi rst glance, pose a contrary example to my above emphasis on accounts of tortured Algerian women, for the scandalous photos that were leaked notably lacked representations of women—Iraqi women, that is. As anyone familiar with the photos knows, women were glaringly present; they were, however, serving as torturers, a fact that may explain, in part, the public fascination with the images, as they played with traditional notions of how “women” act and what they are capable (or incapable) of. What remains the same in both contexts, however, is that women were used as weapons of war, their bodies serving very calculated purposes, regardless of whether they were in the role of torturer or victim. Algerian women as weapons of war has been discussed at length, and, in the case of the American women at Abu Ghraib, we need only turn to any account of the scandal to see how the trope of humiliating Muslim men through feigned sex acts or forced nudity ordered by (or in the presence of) women was a strategic tool concocted by higher-ups. Women were used as tools to “break” these men. Of course, Iraqi women were also targeted, and according to the US military’s Taguba Report (Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff 2004), at least one woman was raped at Abu Ghraib, a figure we know must be higher, and others were forced to strip. Despite the fact that photos of these acts most certainly exist, American news outlets, perhaps from government pressure or restriction, chose not to release images of tortured Iraqi women. Returning to Iraq, operating alongside matrices of gender relations and the co-opting of female bodies is, like in Algeria, an invocation of national shame. To cite one example among many, on 7 May 2004, after the Abu Ghraib photos were exposed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated: I feel terrible about what happened to these Iraqi detainees. They are human beings. They were in US custody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn’t do that. That was wrong. To those Iraqis who were mistreated by members of US armed forces, I offer my deepest apology. It was un-American. And it was inconsistent with the values of our nation. (Rumsfeld 2004) Rumsfeld here distances himself and the American people as a whole from the random acts of “a few bad apples.” Indeed, such a statement could have been uttered by French officials during the earlier confl ict. Puar (2007: 113) comments: ‘the violence of the United States is an exceptional event, antithetical to Americanness, and thus by extension, US subjects emerge as morally, culturally, and politically exceptional through the production of the victims as repressed, barbaric, closed, uncouth.’ We need only think back to Alleg’s ‘IN OUR NAME’ or Beauvoir’s ‘Can we allow our country

124 Christine Quinan to be so described?’ to see the ways in which publicized torture allows for attempts at recuperating nationality. While alluding to shame (just as Beauvoir did), guilt is avoided through a distancing from the violence. And here gender plays a key role. Indeed, we might ask why photos of Iraqi women were not published by the American media. What is at stake in circulating stories of tortured Algerian women during the French-Algerian War but prohibiting dissemination of images of tortured Iraqi women? In Algeria, a distancing from torture could be achieved through intellectuals “saving” Algerian women (albeit from their fellow citizens), a semblance of French honor being maintained through critique, even while being rendered symbolically impotent in losing their most valuable former colony. And in Iraq, this was accomplished through a scapegoating of those highly exceptional women who tortured—exceptional because they were defying “femininity.” In both cases, the torturer’s culture remains relatively unscathed. Torture during the war in Iraq, which may on the surface look quite different than it did in the French-Algerian War, is equally notable in the deployment of gender, sexuality, and nationality, as is the collective work performed around shame and nationalism to bolster a national identity constructed as superior to “barbaric” bodies (even though the savagery is instead located in those doing the torturing). I have attempted to flesh out how gender, sexuality, race, and nationality intersect in both isolated incidents of torture and systemic (and often sanctioned) practices of such violence. Tortured Algerian female bodies (as well as torturing American female bodies) became prime sites for the projection of individual and collective anxieties around female sexuality and imperial power; at the same time, these stories paradoxically served to preserve notions of identity built on self-critique and civility. Boupacha’s story, taken together with other representations of torture, uncovers the complicated ways in which women became convenient tools to redeem a certain honor; meanwhile the state is given a free pass to pursue (neo) colonialist projects. Further, by framing these acts as exceptional, they are revelatory of the ways in which stories of female bodies are used to maintain, sustain, and privilege normative nationality, masculinity, and, as Halimi alludes to in the opening epigraph, whiteness. NOTES 1. For a summary of these charges and a well laid-out defense of Beauvoir’s work, see Mary Caputi (2006). 2. Writing decades later, Boupacha’s lawyer Gisèle Halimi commented on Beauvoir’s level of detachment, positioning her own level of involvement against that of Beauvoir: ‘I discovered her rejection of any emotional approach to the problem. For her, Djamila was one victim among thousands, a useful “case” in the battle against torture and the war. I on the other hand, wished to restore a little humanity to the ravages of politics, making the public see Djamila as I had seen her in prison’ (1990: 297). 3. Beauvoir (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 195) wrote: ‘A witness whose name and whereabouts are known actually saw her at Hussein Dey, bleeding and

Uses and Abuses of Gender and Nationality 125 unconscious, being dragged along by her gaolers. (She was a virgin.)’ The seemingly unrelated surrounding text and the addition of parentheses inadvertently (or not) seems to draw attention to this detail that Le Monde wanted to suppress. 4. Bouhired remained in prison during the war and later married Vergès, who would express his admiration for her by explicitly contrasting her to Boupacha: ‘she was in fact a revolutionary and was not claiming to be innocent, unlike Djamila Boupacha’ (cited in Le Sueur 2005: 363).

REFERENCES Alleg, Henri (2006) The Question, trans. J. Calder, Lincoln: Bison Books. Beauvoir, Simone de (1964) Force of Circumstance, trans. R. Howard, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Beauvoir, Simone de and Halimi, Gisèle (1962) Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl which Shocked Liberal French Opinion, trans. P. Green, New York: Macmillan. Caputi, Mary (2006) ‘Beauvoir and the Case of Djamila Boupacha,’ in Lori Jo Marso and Patricia Moynagh (eds.) Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 109–26. Chambers, Ross (2008) ‘Ordeals of Pain (Concerning Henri Alleg’s La question),’ in Todd W. Reeser and Lewis C. Seifert (eds.) Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and Theory, Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 207–23. Fanon, Frantz (1967) Toward the African Revolution, trans. H. Chevalier, New York: Grove Press. Golay, Annabelle (2007) ‘Féminisme et postcolonialisme: Beauvoir, Fanon et la guerre d’Algérie,’ International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 407–24. Halimi, Gisèle (1990) Milk for the Orange Tree, trans. D. Blair, London: Quartet Books. Kruks, Sonia (2005) ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Privilege,’ Hypatia, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 178–205. Lazreg, Marnia (2008) Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Le Sueur, James (2005) Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria, 2nd edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. MacMaster, Neil (2004) ‘Torture: from Algiers to Abu Ghraib,’ Race & Class, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 1–21. Maran, Rita (1989) Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-Algerian War, New York: Praeger Publishers. McDonough, Tom (2005) ‘Raymond Hains’s “France in Shreds” and the Politics of Décollage,’ Representations, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 75–97. Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff (2004) ‘Taguba Report,’ available at: http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Detainee/taguba/, accessed on 16 September 2013. Oliver, Kelly (2007) Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media, New York: Columbia University Press. Puar, Jasbir K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rumsfeld, Donald H. (2004) ‘Testimony of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld,’ 7 May 2004, available at: http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech. aspx?speechid=118, accessed on 13 September 2013. Vergès, Jacques and Arnaud, Georges (1957) Pour Djamila Bouhired, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

6

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States From Eritrea to L’Aquila Marguerite Waller The months . . . although hard, of wandering on the margins of civilization . . . seemed to us like a truce, a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate. —Primo Levi (2001) If This Is a Man/The Truce, p. 378

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF DISCIPLINES The path that has led to my analysis of connections between sovereignty and violence as they create and descend on postcolonial migrants winds through many landscapes: Italian, transnational, and postcolonial cinema; poststructuralist and postcolonial theory; personal engagements with transnational feminists and feminisms; and an attraction to non-Western and decolonizing feminist epistemologies. This path has been shaped by interactions across national, disciplinary, ideological, geographic, and linguistic borders. Through meeting and working with ex-Yugoslavian feminists, feminist artists active in the San Diego/Tijuana border region, transnational and grassroots organizers against gendered violence of all kinds (including the violence of development and globalization, the violence of militarism, and the violence of ecological devastation) in Africa and South Asia, I have developed a grassroots perspective on the complicities among academic disciplinary knowledge production, nation-state sovereignty, imperialism/ colonialism, and the hegemonizing effects of neoliberal market ideology. Many other postcolonial and transnational thinkers have called attention to this complicity, among them Kenyan novelist, playwright, and essayist Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986), Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1988), feminist postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (1993), Caribbean-French philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant (1997), and decolonial critic and theorist Walter Mignolo (1995, 2011). By 2011, transnational comparatists Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih took as axiomatic, in the introduction to their collection The Creolization of Theory, that ‘structures of knowledge are complicit with the politics of global inequality’ (2011: 32), whereas scores of feminist epistemologists, including Spivak, feminist philosophers María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman (1983), Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), transnational theorist Chandra Mohanty (1984),

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 127 Mexican activist and religious studies scholar Sylvia Marcos (2005), and feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding (2011), to name only a few, have anatomized the imperialisms of even feminist academic knowledge production (Waller 2005). I have come to realize, therefore, that it would be counterproductive for me to try to locate the kind of argument I pursue here in relation to particular academic debates. This is particularly so within such fields as international relations, critical security studies, or even feminist security studies, all of which tend to mirror the contemporary nation-state’s privileging of itself as the intelligibility principle of political discourse. Should we not reflect, instead, on the fact that these emerging disciplines—which have tasked themselves with addressing such pressing issues as the unprecedented violence unleashed on civilians in contemporary warfare, how to conceptualize peace and security (including the security of the environment), the militarization of the neoliberal market, and the pandemic deterioration of human rights—have so quickly adopted state-form patterns of knowledge production? What does it tell us that so much publication space and research time are devoted to self-mapping exercises, the composition of histories of the field (without reference to the problematics of historiography), and assessments of their own internal confl icts (without questioning the implications or the value of disciplinary hegemony)?1 This mirroring of nation-state formation has usurped the horizon to such an extent that the fi rst article that came up when I Googled ‘feminist security studies’ was an article entitled, apparently unironically, ‘Tensions in Feminist Security Studies’ (Sylvester 2010). I performed this Google search because of an intriguing response by an early reader of this chapter. This reader found my piece to have been written ‘from an original perspective,’ which, nevertheless, readily articulates with the work of leading scholars in the field of feminist security studies. It was disconcerting to discover the existence of a new field in which there were already experts who could both assess the ‘originality’ of my project, and, paradoxically, situate it unproblematically within their discipline. 2 I would like to take the occasion this comment offers to say as clearly as possible that the materials I use and the stories I tell here are drawn from the spaces between disciplines. I focus on what Indian theorist/ activist Corinne Kumar (2005: 167) calls ‘disqualified knowledges’: stories, memories, and practices that have been rendered invisible or incoherent by disciplinary and nation-state ontologies, and that, as Kumar puts it, dislocate ‘the new world order of globalization, [by] crossing lines, breaking new ground’ (190). Kumar’s project is the creation of a new ‘political imaginary’ that does not equate the products of epistemic and empirical violence with ‘order,’ ‘security,’ ‘progress’ or ‘truth’ (183). In this chapter I try to render the discourses I have inherited more porous. My methodological goal, whose epistemological justification I have given elsewhere (Waller 2005: 118), is to enable noncolonizing transcultural or transversal dialogue

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in desperately urgent attempts to address state violence, migration, and human rights. My hope for the outcome of such dialogues is modest: to make the unmarked intentions and contours of contemporary political imaginaries more obvious and perhaps less compulsory. The stories I have chosen, or that have chosen me, were accidental, disjunctive discoveries whose interrelatedness I could begin to see only as I followed various threads of the thousands of stories of migration and displacement involving Eritreans that interconnect them with Libyans, Italians, Egyptians, Israelis, Canadians, French, Somalis, Ethiopians, and many others. Collectively these threads form a ‘baroque’ tapestry, to borrow Glissant’s term, that confounds linear narrative and state-form logic (Glissant 1997: 77–79). They are stories being told in plain sight—particularly on the Internet—that remain, nevertheless, unseen, silenced, de-ontologized by mainstream media in Europe and the US because state-centric discourse is still unaccountably trusted as the tool and medium par excellence of sociopolitical analysis and because the profound solipsism of Western epistemologies is still not widely recognized (Mignolo 2011: 79, 189; Waller 2007: 229, 236). Even many feminists proceed as if questions of displacement could be addressed within the old frameworks. Kumar (2005: 167) ventures: Perhaps we must no longer be afraid to ask the non-questions, to analyze what is considered the non-data.  .  .  . Perhaps we must begin to search . . . beyond the established parameters of knowledge, discovering the disqualified knowledges . . . the social knowledges of those who are on the edges, the tribals, indigenous peoples, dalits, women. And this is so if we are to be able to address the violence of our times. Thus, although none of my stories revolves exclusively around women, they constitute an intervention in Western or “fi rst world” feminist epistemologies.

SOVEREIGNTY AND SOCIALITY Postcolonial theorists Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon (2006: 18) advise that ‘knowledge increases as a result of replacing the sovereignty of bodies of knowledge with the sociality of knowledgeable bodies.’ The term “sovereignty,” as Sakai and Solomon use it, connotes some version of patriarchal hegemony, and it lies at the heart of recent work by a number of theorists wrestling with the issues of confl ict and postconfl ict zones, mass immiseration, migration, asylum seeking, human trafficking, the indefi nite detention and torture of prisoners, the relocation of the battlefield to domestic spaces and relationships, and, underlying all of these, the ever-increasing encroachment of corporate profit making into previously noncorporate economies and ways of life. Giorgio Agamben (1998), Judith Butler (2004),

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 129 Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak (2007), Wendy Brown (2010), and others have recognized that state sovereignty works politically much as the idea of the referent operates linguistically within the Western episteme. Although the sovereignty of the state is produced relationally—requiring both other sovereign states from which to differentiate itself and citizen-subjects who accept and identify with its reality and who differentiate themselves from others whom they imagine do not—the nation-state emerges by violently denying its relational status and asserting its ontology. National histories come to be framed by an assumption of a nation’s transhistorical reality. They do not stress the status of nation-states as projections of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) or as temporary, social, historical constructions likely to collapse, mutate, or be conquered. Nor is it typical of national histories to explore alternative political paradigms that could address the collective rights of peoples, including ethnic and indigenous groups, that are threatened by the “development” of the nation-state. Aptly capturing the imagined ontological status of the nation-state within the European political imaginary, political theorist Wendy Brown (2010: 22) comments, ‘If nation-state sovereignty has always been something of a fiction in its aspiration . . . the fiction is a potent one and has suff used the internal and external relations of nation-states since its consecration by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.’ Although ontologically groundless, it comes to wield ontologizing power, making or unmaking political “realities,” visibilizing those who count and invisibilizing those who do not. As Sakai and Solomon (2006: 18) point out, such a fragile construction always feels itself under siege, and, as a consequence, it works overtime to inhibit the kind of sociality needed for the production of knowledges that are not simply reiterations of dominant discourses. Conversely, the defensive posture that sovereign bodies (disciplines or political entities) must assume in order to perpetuate themselves in this solipsistic state of “mastery” requires them to produce “others” that they can then xenophobically exclude (Butler 1993: 48).

SOVEREIGNTY AND MIGRATION Sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of ‘emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968/1976: 278). Since World War I, she observed, in a paradoxical and ultimately self-undermining effort to reassert the national sovereignties compromised in multiple ways by the Great War, European states had embarked on a frenzy of creating ‘rightless populations’ over which they gave their police forces ‘unrestricted and arbitrary domination’ (289). As a consequence, she suggests, when the Nazis invaded other countries during World War II, they had little trouble enlisting the help of local police in organizing arrests and deportations of minority populations (289). Extrapolating from Arendt’s analysis, we might expect that

130 Marguerite Waller in an age of accelerating corporate integration, which puts sovereignty to work almost entirely for the benefit of neoliberal capitalism, the demand for rights by and on behalf of people whom the market abjects as ‘waste’ (Bauman 2004) would both provoke and be used to legitimate state violence. If the nation-state currently has a greater need than ever for occasions and situations around which to materialize its sovereignty, then sovereignty— both political and epistemological—and human rights appear to be on a collision course (Waller 2014). The work of Imogen Tyler on immigrant detention centers in the UK and of Áine O’Healy on how immigration is being represented in Italian films confi rm this supposition. Tyler, in her essay ‘“Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum’ (2006), has persuasively argued that contemporary representations of abject asylum seekers, manufactured both by the media and by the British legal system, serve to shore up the illusion of a secure and comfortable British citizenship, destabilized by the same processes of neoliberal globalization that are driving undocumented immigrants to Britain’s shores. She notes acerbically, ‘As the abject thing, the asylum-seeker operates as something akin to a “security blanket” for the citizen’ (192). O’Healy notes, along similar lines, that the horrific images and stories of migrants desperately trying to cross the Mediterranean in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, many of them dying of starvation, dehydration, or exposure and many more drowning or murdered by traffickers, seem to leave anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy intact—perhaps even to feed it. ‘Images of human tragedy have in fact been served up, consumed, and forgotten by Italian television audiences,’ O’Healy observes, whereas ‘the dramatic potential of these televised reports has done little to stir compassion or to stem the surge of anti-immigrant sentiment that has swept through Italy in recent years’ (2010: 3). Feminist postcolonial theorist Radhika Mohanram draws a crucial connection between the present juncture in the history of capitalism and the intersection of colonial with gender politics in nineteenth-century Britain. In the nineteenth century, colonial subjects and female citizens, she notes, were analogously constructed. British women were, by law, without rights yet completely under the legal jurisdiction of imperial nationstates (Mohanram 2007: xxiii, 26–56). Mohanram, therefore, fi nds herself skeptical of the utopian prediction that flows of migrants and capital will subvert the fundamental mechanisms that have generated hegemonies such as those defi ned in the twentieth century in terms of race, class, and gender: ‘other discriminations will rush in to fi ll the gap after the shifting demographies and effects of global capital bring down white hegemony’ (Mohanram 2007: xv). That is, the skin color and social identities of those who have held positional authority can change without the dynamics of the system itself undergoing any fundamental alteration. In the context of corporate globalization, Wendy Brown warns that diffusion and proliferation, not diminution, describe what is happening with

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 131 materializations of sovereignty. By implication, violent abjection is metastasizing. She has used the metaphors of ‘interior outsides’ and ‘exterior insides’ to identify and connect multiple local performances of sovereignty across a spectrum of sites: refugee detention camps, extraterritorial border controls, all-inclusive resorts, export-processing zones, off shore prisons, and postconflict zones (Brown 2008). In all of these instances, territorial boundaries become highly involuted and the citizen–noncitizen distinction intimate and unstable. Like Mohanram, I emphasize the congruencies among subject positions that have not been thought of as related. What do women who may or may not be involved in the sex tourism business in the Dominican Republic and “terrorists” imprisoned in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, for example, have in common with one another? In both cases, police or guards—agents authorized by states—have unrestrained physical authority over a group of people who have been delegitimized, suddenly thrown from the position of citizen-subject to the position of rightless noncitizen and enemy of the state. As the Dominican police may detain, beat, fi ne, and force sex on any Dominican woman whom they deem possibly involved in sex tourism, so offshore torturers may humiliate, rape, and kill men, women, and children swept up arbitrarily in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (Cabezas 2009: 139–65; Kyriakidis 2012). The case of Mairead Maguire, the Irish Nobel Peace Laureate who was detained, questioned, and fi ngerprinted by US Homeland Security agents at the Houston airport as she returned home to Northern Ireland from a Nobel Women’s Conference in Guatemala, underscores the speed with which anyone can slip from one side of the inside–outside, rights–rightless binary to the other. Forced to miss her plane and coercively pressured to tick a box on her immigration form admitting to criminal activities (which she refused to do), she was released only through the intervention of the Nobel Women’s Initiative (Free Gaza Team 2009). When the fiction of sovereignty is migrating to new sites, or as Brown (2010: 23) puts it, when states and sovereignty are ‘coming apart’ from one another, the violent extrusions necessary to produce the illusion of sovereignty proliferate and become very visible. At this juncture, when sovereignty itself is in danger of knowing itself as inchoate, it grows increasingly vicious, like a wounded animal that cannot distinguish between friend and foe and lashes out at whatever enters its space (Waller 2006: 590).

ERITREA One of the most sensationalized images of rightless people that anyone engaged with human rights or migration will have seen over the past fi fteen years is the image of Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to the southern Italian coast. Even though far more people attempting to migrate to Italy enter by plane on tourist visas (which they then

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overstay) it is, tellingly, the Mediterranean boat people on whom both the media and politicians focus. When I was fi rst trying to understand these images, it emerged that a remarkable percentage of these people crammed onto unseaworthy boats, clinging to tuna fi shing nets or drowning at sea, were coming from the comparatively small (population five million), new nation-state of Eritrea. Paradoxically, though, the hypervisibility of these Eritreans was matched by the invisibility or unintelligibility of their story to Italian and European Union officials, and, to some extent, the public at large. Sovereignty’s power to de-ontologize people is perhaps nowhere more profoundly enacted than in the case of the Eritreans, described by one Eritrean journalist as ‘forgotten people’ (Tekie 1999). What has struck me about the accounts one fi nds on the web about Eritreans trying to flee their homeland since Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia in 1991 is the trans-ideological range of nation-states that routinely and as a matter of policy perform the most inhumane abjection of Eritrean citizens. This group of nation-states includes Italy, France, the UK, Malta, Egypt, Israel, Sudan, Libya, Canada, the US—and, most egregiously, Eritrea itself. This baroque history of abuse constantly morphs as it spirals through the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century and into the force fields of the “Arab Spring.” The details I offer here do not constitute a defi nitive account, nor are they necessarily more or less significant than other details that I do not have access to or do not have the space to include. But the patterns that I began to see in 2009, when a conference in Rome on women and Mediterranean migration focused my attention on this unfolding story, have persisted with fractal consistency through September of 2012. In 2009, Italy and Libya officially signed a Friendship Agreement that entailed an aggressive “push back” campaign against Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean from northern Libya to southern Italy. This agreement promised hundreds of millions of euros to defense contractors for the purchase and construction of anti-immigrant infrastructure (ships, radar systems, roads, detainment facilities, helicopters, trucks, etc.) and gave Italy access to Libyan oil (Human Rights Watch 2009; Nadeau 2011). After Silvio Berlusconi, then prime minister of Italy, and Libya’s late dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, signed the agreement in 2008, Italian and Libyan military personnel stepped up brutal interceptions of Eritreans, who made up a significant percentage of the refugees seeking to cross the Mediterranean to the southern Italian islands of Lampedusa and Sicily. In the course of these interceptions, passengers were severely beaten, their money and documents were confiscated, and no food or water were offered to them even though they had sometimes gone for days with nothing to eat or drink (Frelick 2009; World Tribune 2009). Neither Italian nor Libyan authorities gave the refugees the opportunity to request political asylum, even though Italy is a signatory to international non-refoulement or nonrepatriation and asylum agreements.

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 133 Libya, which is not a signatory to non-refoulement agreements, had already reversed an earlier open-door policy toward black Africans sometime during the spring of 2006 and began treating black migrants with increasing brutality—beating and torturing them, using them as forced labor, denying them medical treatment, adequate sanitation, food, and water, and, in the case of the Eritreans, allowing the very authorities whom the refugees were fleeing to have access to them and to information about their families (Human Rights Watch 2010d; A Sud di Lampedusa 2006). This information was used both to punish family members remaining in Eritrea and to target refugees for arrest if and when they were repatriated. Within Libya, Eritrean refugees, including women and children, were relocated, often in stifl ing shipping containers (paid for by the EU), without food or water, to remote desert forced labor and deportation camps where the Italian fascist state once confined more than 150,000 nomadic Bedouins during its conquest of Libya in the l930s (Frelick 2009; Human Rights Watch 2010b, 2010c; Labanca 2007: 27–36). The mirroring of colonial policy by immigration policy could hardly be more starkly imaged than in this repurposing of Italy’s colonial Libyan infrastructure. Going the Italian colonialists one better, the guards at these remote camps colluded with traffickers to offer prisoners a choice between deportation to Eritrea and paying hundreds of dollars to be returned to Tripoli (Global Detention Project 2009). The implementation of further agreements between Berlusconi and Gaddafi to militarize Libya’s southern border (involving more lucrative contracts for Italy’s Halliburton-like corporation Finmeccanica), ostensibly to prevent black Africans from getting even as far as Libya’s Mediterranean coast, instantiates Mohanram’s warning of new discriminations rushing in to fi ll the structural gap left by the likely demise of white hegemony (Defensetech 2011; A Sud di Lampedusa 2006). In Libya, it was the Bedouin Gaddafi who persecuted and imprisoned the new nomads from the Horn of Africa. But Italy and Libya have not been alone. The route via Egypt and Israel rather than through Libya has been no less fraught with danger for Eritreans and other African refugees from the Horn of Africa. Until the recent uprising, Egyptian border police had orders to shoot to kill migrants trying to cross the Egyptian–Israeli border (Gondwe 2010; Topol 2009). In 2008, twenty-eight Africans were shot and killed trying to cross that border (Wright 2008), and between January and March 2010 at least twelve (Human Rights Watch 2010a). Although both Egypt and Israel are, in fact, signatories of the 1951 Convention of non-refoulement, Egypt repatriated Eritreans en masse without offering them any opportunity to request asylum, whereas Israel deported as many of them as possible to Egypt while imprisoning others as “infi ltrators” who threatened national security (Christian Solidarity Worldwide 2008; Gondwe 2009; Johnston 2008; Wright 2008). In June 2010, Israel considered repatriating all thirteen thousand of the Eritrean refugees living there, a plan that would almost

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certainly have meant their imprisonment, torture, and even death (Christian Solidarity Worldwide 2010). Meanwhile, those refugees who have succeeded in reaching Malta, France, Italy, Spain, or the UK face indefi nite detention (which, by international agreement, is illegal in the case of refugees and asylum seekers) in internment centers, ranging from grim, squalid, and remote from legal resources to life-threatening (Doctors Without Borders 2009b; IPS News 2010; Tyler 2006). At one point the medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders withdrew from the facilities on Malta in order to protest their appalling conditions (Doctors Without Borders 2009a). French authorities created comparable conditions in an Eritrean squat in Calais by cutting off the building’s electricity and refuse collection (Woods 2009). French police in Calais also violently stormed and evicted the inhabitants of a shelter that had been legally rented and fully furnished by immigration rights activists (Zeitlin 2010). Increasingly, Eritreans face repatriation from the EU following these incarcerations, attacks, and humiliations (Arthur 2010; Fortress Europe 2009; Human Rights Watch 2011). In short, the circumstances they encounter in the “global north,” although perhaps less extreme, mirror those they have suffered in Libya. More recently, during the “Arab Spring” of 2011, as Eritreans sought to flee both anti-Gaddafi forces, which took them for pro-Gaddafi mercenaries, and pro-Gaddafi forces, which attempted, in fact, to press them into Gaddafi’s armed service, several boatloads, each with hundreds of Eritreans on board, were left by the EU, NATO (which had a large presence in the area to enforce the No Fly Zone [NFZ]), and North African authorities to founder in the Mediterranean, despite urgent SOS calls from satellite phones on board and from relatives and friends on land who had also received the distress calls (Bagnetto 2011; Caux 2011; Grey 2011; Shenker 2011; Wikileaks 2011). In the spring of 2012, Israel announced plans to build the world’s largest detention center, which will indefi nitely incarcerate eleven thousand refugees and asylum seekers. ‘It will be a prison for people from Africa’ (some 62 percent of whom are Eritreans), criticizes an Israeli civil rights lawyer (Greenwood 2012). Although Israel’s Amnesty International chapter points out that the prolonged detention of refugees is illegal, that detention should not be used as a deterrent, and that asylum seekers should not be treated as criminals, these charges are ignored by state and international authorities (Greenwood 2012). These physical and human rights abuses are overlaid with yet one more, and perhaps the most powerful, dimension of state-form de-ontologizing practices. Gayatri Spivak uses the term “epistemic violence” and Sandra Harding the term “epistemological underdevelopment” to characterize the colonial effacement or subjugation of the knowledges, logics, histories, languages, and subjectivities of those colonized (Harding 2011: 3; Spivak 1988). Over the course of three years of searching, and again as I have read articles about the current uprisings in North Africa and

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 135 the middle east, I have found only one mainstream journalist, Khataza Gondwe of The Guardian, who has in one article integrated an account of the desperate journeys of Eritreans with detailed information about the circumstances they are fleeing. Even when the highly accessible, English-speaking head of Consular Affairs at the Eritrean embassy in Washington, DC, requested political asylum in the spring of 2010, there was little, if any, coverage of the story outside the diasporic Eritrean press (Eritrea Daily 2010). Journalists have reported numerous attempts, and many successes, by Eritreans to commit suicide rather than be repatriated, yet the obvious question—what is it about returning to Eritrea that could be worse than death—goes unasked (Arthur 2010; Gondwe 2009). Huge allocations of state funds are made for armed military personnel, military hardware, detention camp construction, border fortifications, radar systems, and repatriation. In the context of the Libyan uprising, when Eritreans in Libya were persecuted by both government and rebel forces, those who made it to Tunis and, with Tunisians who also feared political reprisal, from Tunis to Lampedusa, occasioned a rush by European governments to rewrite the Schengen Agreement that allowed for freedom of movement within Europe (Zlateva and Gospodinov 2012). In April 2012, the new leaders in both Italy and Libya pledged to continue their collaboration in preventing the arrival of migrants from Libya and the death toll of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean continues to rise (Beger 2012). At a conference in Lampedusa in July 2012, the director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions office, Nicholas Beger, brought up the taboo parallel between Europe’s contemporary “push back” policies and the refusal of asylum to Europeans, especially Jews, during the twentieth century: ‘Why is our memory so short? Why did we forget the recent times when Europeans had to flee war, torture and hunger? People are dying at our doorstep. Will we go and help or just continue to fi nance their push back?’ (Beger 2012). Such voices, though, are drowned out by the discourse of sovereignty that dominates political campaigns and the media. European government officials speak of asylum seekers and refugees as opportunistic ‘dole scroungers’ living a dolce vita at the state’s expense (Kenyon 2010; Smoltczyk 2009) and conjure up images of those who aid the refugees, however tangentially, as a powerful organized crime network of modern-day ‘slavers’ (IPS News 2010). It does not seem to bother anti-immigrant rhetoricians that these two images of the immigrant—as criminal opportunist and as innocent victim—do not cohere. In fact, whether migrant refugees are stereotyped as crime victims or as parasites, they serve to consolidate and naturalize the image of the deserving and benevolent citizen. If O’Healy is correct, and I believe she is, then the abjection of the Eritrean migrant— even images of floating corpses and drowned babies—also serve to create the ‘security blanket’ effect that Imogen Tyler (2006) has described. What all of these images also accomplish is the obfuscation of conditions in

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Eritrea and the dark mirror that those conditions hold up to the sovereign nation-states that so concertedly try to abject or ignore them.

SOVEREIGNTY IN ERITREA When we turn to the situation in Eritrea itself, as well as it can be inferred from information in the public domain, we fi nd a startlingly literal image of the crisis of sovereignty. Domestic and foreign, inside and outside, nationalism and colonialism have imploded. Sovereign power appears to be the sole objective of President Isaias Afewerki, who has instrumentalized Eritreans themselves, at home and abroad, to shore up his position. In 2001, for example, Afewerki implemented a program of indefi nite national service, which puts most of the adult population at the disposal of the state, at starvation or no wages and in locations remote from kinship networks (Ghebrehiwet 2011; Rawlence 2009). According to recent Human Rights Watch reports, the families of draftees who refuse to serve are fi ned, and if they cannot pay the fi ne, they are jailed and their property confiscated: ‘This system has been used to keep a generation of Eritreans in bondage, extending for much of a citizen’s working life’ (Human Rights Watch 2012). Recruits are used as cheap labor for civil service jobs, development projects, and the ruling party’s commercial and agricultural enterprises, and females in these positions are subject to sexual abuse by higher-ranking officers (Human Rights Watch 2012). 3 No dissent is tolerated, all media are government controlled, many journalists have been arrested, and several are known to have died in prison. In Afewerki’s prisons, many composed of unlit shipping containers and underground bunkers, torture, and other forms of degrading treatment, inhumane heat and cold, severe crowding, solitary confi nement, starvation, and disease are ‘systematic and routine’ (Human Rights Watch 2012). Those who take refuge across the border in Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, and as far away as Canada are subject to both surveillance and taxation. Family members of those who refuse to pay or who engage in any action construed as against the Eritrean state are imprisoned and used as hostages to extort both money and cooperation from those abroad (Sanders 2012). Anti-immigrant rhetoric in Europe, North Africa, and North America obscures not only these compulsive performances of sovereignty vis-à-vis Eritreans themselves, but also those taking place between Eritrea and its neighboring states, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia, which constitute a larger mosaic of interior outsides and exterior insides. Each nation-state supports the militant opposition forces of the nation-states they border and each receives refugees from the resulting violence. The role of multinational corporate and superpower strategic military interests in these shifting but persistent oppositional relationships is too complex to narrate here, but they are part of the same mise-en-abyme of materializations of sovereignty that

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 137 is producing refugees and asylum seekers in such numbers. In other words, the rejection encountered at every turn by Eritrean migrants precisely mirrors the materializations of sovereignty that have led to their exile. A May 2009 Human Rights Watch report, ‘Slender Land, Giant Prison,’ points out, in fact, that the government of Eritrea has the same relation to both its perceived enemies, particularly Ethiopia, and its own citizens (Rawlence 2009). In short, a large proportion of the domestic population has been colonized, imprisoned, enslaved, and/or killed by its own government in a reductio ad absurdum of the process of materializing the sovereignty of the nation-state, which creates both intra- and extraterritorial categories of lesser, disposable people. Eritrea thus holds up a deeply disturbing mirror of the logic of sovereignty to the community of nationstates that is pushing Eritreans back or driving them to suicide. Denial of this dark side of sovereignty figures powerfully, I propose, in the relentless abjection and effacement of Eritrean asylum seekers.4

THE SOCIALITY OF KNOWLEDGEABLE BODIES An event on the other side of the Mediterranean looking glass, the earthquake on 6 April 2009 that destroyed the center of the Italian city of L’Aquila, killing 308 and leaving seventy thousand people homeless, confi rms this proposition. With astounding rapidity, the city’s deeply rooted community was repurposed by the Berlusconi government as a refugee population without rights, exploited both to spectacularize his sovereignty in photo opportunities and to funnel huge sums from the national treasury into the hands of cronies in the construction business. Berlusconi traveled to L’Aquila twenty-eight times in the months following the earthquake and even relocated the G8 meetings, at huge expense, to the damaged city’s outskirts, burnishing his image by linking it with the images of Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Nicolas Sarkozy. Lucrative construction contracts were given out not to restore the city’s artistically rich medieval center, but to build suburban housing developments at public expense and in violation of environmental protection regulations, opening the way for a bonanza of further road, school, post office, and shopping-mall construction. Meanwhile, half of the homeless Aquilans were consigned to 135 militarized tent cities, which severely restricted residents’ freedoms of movement, speech, and assembly, barred journalists, and further humiliated residents by prohibiting coffee, alcohol, and Coca-Cola on the grounds that these substances might “excite” them. The rest of those whose homes were destroyed were housed, at public expense, in coastal resorts from which they could not get to work or school or attend to their legal and business interests. No residents were allowed to reenter the city center, and no funds were allocated for its restoration. Residents were not permitted even to submit applications to make repairs, nor were they allowed to repair their dwellings

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themselves. In 2012, the center of L’Aquila remained a militarized “red zone.” The tent cities, by this time, had been dismantled and the resorts emptied, leaving the two-thirds of the population who were not rehoused in the suburban “new towns” with no restitution or resources (Draquila: l’Italia che trema 2010; L’Aquila 6 aprile 2012 2012; Witness. Return to L’Aquila: Broken Promises 2011). It is perhaps fitting that it was an earthquake, an upheaval of the ground itself, that provided the occasion for this European nation-state to reveal itself as Eritrea’s doppelganger. Despite Berlusconi’s control of the broadcast and print media, investigations by journalists, filmmakers, and citizens groups have established that the government, in league with corporate construction interests, deliberately set Aquilans up to experience maximum physical and emotional damage from an earthquake it expected but represented as highly unlikely (Draquila: l’Italia che trema 2010). Aquilans, suddenly abjected and disoriented by the loss of their livelihoods, homes, and belongings, like Eritrean citizens under Afewerki, became fodder for Berlusconi’s ostentatious materialization of sovereignty: his star turns as compassionate G8 leader and as construction guru. They also became, like the refugee Eritreans trying to cross the Mediterranean, the occasion for funneling hundreds of millions in public money into the hands of the Halliburton-like corporate and criminal construction interests that constitute Berlusconi’s power base (Draquila: l’Italia che trema 2010; see also Klein 2007). It is by putting the stories of these two apparently unrelated, or even antagonistic, populations into relation with one another and considering them as different aspects of the same baroque history of nation-state sovereignty that we can begin to get our bearings in the brave new world of what Wendy Brown (2010) calls ‘waning sovereignty’ and Naomi Klein (2007) calls ‘disaster capitalism.’ It is not an easy time for increasing numbers of people who fi nd themselves outside the fortifications being thrown up around the new fiefdoms of globalization. Those protected on the inside of these fortresses may be shrinking in number, but the violent exclusions performed in their name are proliferating. The academic disciplines that have tasked themselves with understanding how sovereignties relate to one another and that seek to parse the disparate meanings of “security,” “peace,” and “human rights” thus face a formidable task. These disciplines subvert their potential to disrupt the logic of sovereignty, to call attention to the collision course on which sovereignty and human rights are bent, when they try to work within inherited paradigms of knowledge production. When they privilege the “expertise” enabled by the construction of disciplinary boundaries, they obstruct the sociality of Sakai’s and Solomon’s knowledgeable bodies and foreclose the spatiality within which it can take place. A different paradigm is urgently needed. It is crucial that postcolonial and decolonial interrogations of human rights foreground the dynamic and intricate relations of stories such as those of the Eritreans and the Aquilans. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi ends his

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 139 meditation on violence, which is also his account of returning to Italy from Auschwitz, with a sense that the thirty-five days he spent ‘on the margins of civilization,’ in the space between the horrors of the camp and the warmth and security of home, will provide the sole, but inexhaustible, resource he will be able to draw on as he tries in years to come to make sense of both these realities. Implicitly acknowledging that both are sites of violence, he calls the time/space he spends between them ‘a truce, a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate’ (Levi 2001: 378). NOTES 1. See, for example, Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen’s ‘Beyond the Evolution of International Security Studies?’ (2010). 2. It was even more disconcerting to discover, upon reading a recent and very good book on feminist security studies, that the field labors under the long shadow of the Anglo-American field of international relations. Annick Wibben explains that the field of IR privileges and naturalizes the European nation-state as the telos of political evolution, and, until Ann Tickner embarked on the Herculean task of introducing a gender perspective into the discipline in the early 1990s (see Tickner 1992, 2001), it was oblivious to any difference between female and male subject positions. It has been equally oblivious to subalternity, indigeneity, and other inconvenient traces of the self-colonization required to form nation-states, mirroring the exclusions and methodologies of nation formation in the constitution of its own methodologies and objects of study (Wibben 2011). 3. Mirroring this aspect of Afewerki’s regime, sexual abuse is also endemic to the US military. See the documentary The Invisible War (2012), directed by Kirby Dick. 4. In an essay on a German documentary called The Peacekeepers and the Women, I make a parallel argument about attempts by officials to sweep under the rug the involvement of UN and other “peacekeeping” forces in trafficking and forced prostitution in Bosnia and Kosovo in the early 2000s (Waller 2010: 121).

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Human Rights Watch (2011) World Report 2011: European Union, available at: http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2011/european-union, accessed on 14 August 2013. Human Rights Watch (2012) ‘Amnesty International Asks EU to Save Migrants’ Lives,’ 19 July 2012, available at: http://theafricanews.com/immigrationnews/italy/4352–amnesty-international-asks-eu-to-save-migrants-lives.html, accessed on 14 August 2013. Invisible War, The (2012) Documentary directed by Kirby Dick, US: Ro-co Films International. IPS News (2010) ‘France Urges EU to Tighten Mediterranean Borders,’ 28 February 2010, available at: http://www.ipsnews.net/2010/02/migration-franceurges-eu-to-tighten-mediterranean-borders/, accessed on 14 August 2013. Johnston, Cynthia (2008) ‘Egypt Deports More Eritreans Despite UN Objections,’ Reuters, 18 July 2008, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refd aily?pass=463ef21123&id=4859fafd0, accessed on 14 August 2013. Kenyon, Paul (2010) ‘Tabloid Treatment of Asylum Seekers Under Fire,’ The Guardian, 7 June 2010, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/ jun/07/tabloids-treatment-asylum-seekers, accessed on 14 August 2013. Klein, Naomi (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Picador. Kumar, Corinne (2005) ‘South Wind: Towards a New Political Imaginary,’ in Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos (eds.) Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 165–99. Kyriakidis, Kleanthis (2012) ‘Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib Revisited,’ Open Democracy, 30 March 2012, available at: http://www.opendemocracy.net// kleanthis-kyriakidis/guantanamo-and-abu-ghraib-revisited, accessed on 20 September 2012. Labanca, Nicola (2007) ‘Italian Colonial Internment,’ in Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller (eds.) Italian Colonialism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 27–36. L’Aquila 6 aprile 2012 (2012) Reportage realized by Servizio Sollievo Sbt, available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMHap3fvNUg, accessed on 14 August 2013. Levi, Primo (2001) If This Is a Man/The Truce, trans. S. Woolf, London: Abacus Books. Lionnet, Françoise and Shih, Shu-mei (2011) ‘Introduction,’ in Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (eds.) The Creolization of Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–33. Lugones, María and Spelman, Elizabeth (1983) ‘Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for “The Woman’s Voice,”’ Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 573–81. Marcos, Sylvia (2005) ‘The Borders Within: The Indigenous Women’s Movement and Feminisms in Mexico,’ in Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos (eds.) Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 143–62. Mignolo, Walter D. (1995) The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mignolo, Walter D. (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mohanram, Radhika (2007) Imperial White: Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mohanty, Chandra (1984) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,’ Boundary 2, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 333–58. Nadeau, Barbie L. (2011) ‘Gaddafi’s Italian Connection,’ Daily Beast, 27 August 2011, available at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/27/

Migrating Sovereignties and Mirror States 143 gaddafi-s-connections-to-italy-and-berlusconi.html, accessed 11 September 2012. O’Healy, Áine (2010) ‘Mediterranean Passages: Abjection and Belonging in Contemporary Italian Cinema,’ California Italian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–17. Rawlence, Ben (2009) ‘Eritrea: Slender Land, Giant Prison,’ Human Rights Watch, 8 May 2009, available at: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/05/06/Eritreaslender-land-giant-prison, accessed on 10 June 2010. Sakai, Naoki and Solomon, Jon (2006) ‘Introduction: Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners, Echoing Foucault,’ in Naoki Sakai and John Solomon (eds.) Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 1–35. Sanders, Carol (2012) ‘UN Report Backs Eritrean Refugees’ Claims,’ 2 August 2012, available at: http://asmarino.com/news/1483–un-report-backs-eritreanrefugees-claims6, accessed on 14 August 2013. Shenker, Jack (2011) ‘Aircraft Carrier Left Us to Die, Say Migrants,’ The Guardian, 8 May 2011, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/08/ nato-ship-libyan-migrants, accessed on 14 August 2013. Smoltczyk, Alexander (2009) ‘Death in the Mediterranean: The Tragedy of Europe’s Boat People,’ Spiegel Online, 4 July 2009, available at: http://www. spiegel.de/international/europe/death-in-the-mediterranean-the-tragedy-ofeurope-s-boat-people-a-617870.html, accessed on 7 June 2011. Spivak, Gayatri C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Champagne/ Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–314. Spivak, Gayatri C. (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge. Sylvester, Christine (2010) ‘Tensions in Feminist Security Studies,’ Security Dialogue, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 607–14. Tekie, Alexander G.E. (1999) ‘The Forgotten People: Eritreans in the World’s Eyes,’ Agenda, May/June 1999, available at: http://www-personal.umich. edu/~lormand/agenda/9905/24.pdf, accessed on 14 August 2013. Tickner, J. Ann (1992) Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, New York: Columbia University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (2001) Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post–Cold War Era, New York: Columbia University Press. Topol, Sarah A. (2009) ‘Crossing into Israel, African Migrants Dodge Egyptian Bullets, Israeli Jail Threat,’ Christian Science Monitor, 14 November 2009, available at: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2009/1114/ p06s01–wome.html, accessed on 14 August 2013. Tyler, Imogen (2006) ‘“Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 185–202. Waller, Marguerite (2005) ‘One Voice Kills Both Our Voices: “First World” Feminism and Transcultural Feminist Engagement,’ in Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos (eds.) Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 113–42. Waller, Marguerite (2006) ‘Addicted to Virtue: The Globalization Policy-Maker,’ Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 575–94. Waller, Marguerite (2007) ‘The Abjection of Patriarchy: Ibolya Fekete’s Chico and the Transnational Feminist Imaginary,’ in Katarzyna Marciniak, Anikó Imre, and Áine O’Healy (eds.) Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 227–40. Waller, Marguerite (2010) ‘Vertigo in the Balkans: Karin Jurschick’s The Peacekeepers and the Women,’ in Flavia Laviosa (ed.) Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmaking in the Mediterranean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 105–26.

144 Marguerite Waller Waller, Marguerite (2014) ‘Immigrant Protest and the Courts of Women,’ in Katarzyna Marciniak and Imogen Tyler (eds.) Immigrant Protest, Albany: SUNY Press (forthcoming). wa Thiong’o, Ngugi (1986) Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Wibben, Annick T.R. (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, London: Routledge. Wikileaks (2011) ‘African Refugees Murdered, Drowned in the Mediterranean,’ 4 July 2011, available at: http://wlcentral.org/node/1629, accessed on 10 June 2011. Witness. Return to L’Aquila: Broken Promises (2011) Documentary directed by Stefano Strocchi, Al Jazeera English, broadcasted on 6 April 2011, available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2011/04/2011471431910753. html, accessed on 14 August 2013. Woods, Caroline (2009) ‘The House of Despair,’ The Guardian, 30 July 2009, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jul/30/calais-eritreans-asylum-seekers, accessed on 14 August 2013. World Tribune (2009) ‘Libyan Navy Helping Italy Turn away Boat People Headed for Europe,’ 23 September 2009, available at: http://www.worldtribune.com/ worldtribune/WTARC/2009/eu_libya0748_09_23.html, accessed on 14 August 2013. Wright, Jonathan (2008) ‘Egypt Repatriates 25 Eritreans, Ignoring Appeals,’ Reuters, 24 December 2008, available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/12/24/ egypt-eritreans-idAFLO35013020081224, accessed on 14 August 2013. Zeitlin, Myk (2010) ‘Police raid Calais Autonomous Migrant Space-Demo Tuesday,’ Hackney Refugee and Migrant Support Group, 7 February 2010, available at: http://hrmsg-online.ning.com/profi les/blogs/police-raid-calais-autonomous, accessed on 30 August 2013. Zlateva, Elitsa and Gospodinov, Bogomil (2012) ‘The Effects of the Arab Spring Unleash a Crisis of Mistrust in the EU,’ EUinside, 25 July 2012, available at: http://euinside.eu/en/analyses/eu-schengen-arab-spring-bulgaria-romania-solidarity, accessed on 23 September 2013.

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Doing “Integration” in Europe Postcolonial Frictions in the Making of Citizenship Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen After all this history, whose nation is any one nation, after all? Who, after all this history, owns modernity and its hallmarks, humanism and democracy? What groups do humanism, democracy, and the common law serve, protect, and maintain? —Elizabeth A. Povinelli (1998) ‘The State of Shame,’ p. 579

Madam Speaker, the Islamic incursion must be stopped. Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe. If we do not stop Islamification now, Eurabia and Netherabia will just be a matter of time. One century ago, there were approximately 50 Muslims in the Netherlands. Today, there are about 1 million Muslims in this country. Where will it end? We are heading for the end of European and Dutch civilization as we know it. —Geert Wilders (2007) ‘Debate over WRR rapport “Dynamiek van islamitisch activisme”’

INTRODUCTION Parallel to Europe expanding its borders and working toward a more flexible perception of citizenship within these boundaries, European nationstates are tightening their understanding of national membership for non-Europeans. In this chapter we argue that such developments are symptomatic for nation-states stuck between modern normative frameworks and postmodern realities. Paradoxical tensions evolve out of this situation and create a narrowing space between political commitment to cosmopolitanism and political complicity with new exclusionary regimes. Whereas civic duties and civic rights have always been at the core of shaping the citizen-subject, “integration” is now taking center stage. European nation-states increasingly expect incoming migrants to integrate to the assumed dominant culture of the host country. These demands of cultural loyalty are exemplified in many political and public debates but currently are particularly present in the rites and routines of citizenship requirements. In what follows, we examine the ways in which the state—via citizenship tests—is institutionalizing and shaping the “new migrant.” Taking the Dutch

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Civic Integration Exam Abroad (hereafter integration exam) and its accompanying film, Naar Nederland (Coming to the Netherlands) (2005), as a point of departure, we analyze how “integration” is defined on the level of representation and justified on the level of political legitimization. We approach the integration exam as a text and artifact of governance. As a genre, it combines elements of visual and textual narratives that— although using similar discursive techniques—are believed to follow stricter conventions of political neutrality. In light of Anne McClintock’s analysis of ‘making the barbarians visible’ (2009: 54) through the visual power of photography and its dissemination, we can see the weight of the Dutch government’s decision to accompany the exam with a film. It is in such a way that, rather than approaching such exams as impartial domains of governance, we scrutinize the texts under the same critical plane as we would with any media representations. Compared with the latter, however, these texts are directly linked to actual conditions of citizenship and should therefore be regarded as modes of governmentality. As we will demonstrate, these modes of governmentality inscribe a culturalization of secular liberalism that differentiates categories of assimilable subjects identified through and against two legal/ political frameworks: “family life” and “freedom of religion.” Central to this culturalization is the deployment of diversity—where axes of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity play an intricate role in the governing apparatus. In the end, it is not so much an emergence of a (neo)nationalism in Europe that we are laying claim to. Rather, we assert that (neo)nationalism is the effect of a greater process of secular liberalism that is being disciplined onto the globalizing flexible citizen. Although on the surface one can detect a process of renationalization by labeling contemporary citizenship requirements and restrictions (and its side effect of border control), the realization of parallel citizenship regimes in European nation-states—based on constructions of the postcolonial other—exemplifies a de-nationalizing and transnationalizing process of secular liberalization. We propose, then, to see the new integration discourse as a reaffirmation of the institution of secular liberalism that disciplines migrants to become “recognizable” and “tolerable” citizens. Here we define secular liberalism not only as a historical process (of the privatization of religion and the rise of individualism and market consumerism), but also as a complex social, political, economic, and cultural self-referential framework. The entanglement of migration and globalization is key to understanding current changes in thinking about integration and citizenship. Hence, instead of focusing solely on national models, we contend that, parallel to reviving national identity, European nation-states—in a truly globalized manner—are working together to revitalize secular liberalism.

TESTING “NEWCOMERS”: CULTURAL TROPES OF DUTCHNESS Since 15 March 2006 it is compulsory that particular groups of foreigners pass an integration exam before coming to the Netherlands in order for them to obtain a temporary residence permit.1 This new measure primarily

Doing “Integration” in Europe 147 targets foreigners who want to marry or be reunited with their partners or family and complements two other criteria: a minimum income and a minimum age of twenty-one years for both partners. It is also intended for religious clergy who want to work in the Netherlands. An important component of the exam is the film Naar Nederland.2 In this one and a half hour long video, seven themes are explored—ranging from Dutch history and its constitution to parenting and health care—that are meant to give a basic overview of Dutch society, values, and culture. The film is guided by a female presenter who seems to stand for both the image of the modern Dutch woman and, through her narrative, for the voice of the state that speaks to its new immigrants. She explains to them what they need to understand, learn, accept, and do before they attain the privilege of entering the Netherlands. The second character is a naïve “Wally”-like character, meant to represent the typical immigrant. “Newcomers” are expected to identify themselves with this character, who, in one of the excerpts, expresses total amazement at seeing a political debate on television. Through the sullenness of the “Wally” and the disciplining voice of the female presenter, the tone of the fi lm is somewhat infantilizing—as if it were crafted for elementary school children. The section entitled ‘Constitution, Democracy, and Legislation’ underscores the importance of Article 1 of the Dutch constitution and is narrated through stories of white Dutch citizens and well-articulated (well-integrated) migrant-citizens. They function as “testimonials,” giving evidence of how Dutch constitution gives you ‘the freedom and space to be yourself’ (Naar Nederland 2005). The female presenter and a male voice-over summarize the section as follows: So, everyone in Holland has equal rights, men and women are equal. They each make their own choice, and both are allowed to express their own opinions, women and men have the right to live with or marry the partner of their own choice, homosexual couples can also get married. The constitution states that the church and the state are separate, so, there is no state religion, there is freedom of religion, this means that everyone in Holland has the right to practice his or her own religion, which means that everyone needs to have respect for all the other religions. (Naar Nederland 2005) At the end of the section, the female presenter stands in front of an image of a landing strip at the airport. While looking straight into the camera, she tells the arriving “newcomers” in an imperative manner that there are also fi rm limits to freedom and that the Dutch constitution is very strict when it concerns honor killings, possession of arms, female circumcision, and domestic violence. She narrates the following newspaper accounts: A man kills a woman because she has behaved like a whore, she flees, but he fi nds her, honor killing he says, murder says the Dutch judge. . . . A girl’s clitoris and labia have been partially removed and then sewn

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Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen together. Female circumcision says the proud family, deliberate mutilation says the Dutch penal code. . . . A woman reports her husband to the police because he beats her at home. That’s private he says; that’s abuse says the police. (Naar Nederland 2005)

Newspaper headlines with the Dutch interpretation of these acts, backed up by dramatic sounds, appear from the back of the screen to the front, reading, for instance: ‘Woman Victim of Honor Killing’ and ‘Lifelong Mutilation by Circumcision.’ After every newspaper headline, the female presenter utters the verdict: ‘punishable by law.’ On a symbolic level, the fi lm suggests that the Netherlands is giving migrants a gift, namely, the gift of freedom. This gift of freedom emotionally appeals to a “common humanity” in which people mutually respect, accept, and value each other. But the gift of freedom is restricted to certain conditions defined through four cultural tropes, namely, gender equality, sexual freedom, freedom of speech, and individualism. These cultural tropes turn the right for citizenship into a demand for cultural loyalty. Although made to look generally accepted, the progress of women’s emancipation and gay sexuality is certainly more arbitrary than absolute in Dutch society. Besides persistent inequalities in the fields of labor, childcare, household, and the continuing experience of gender-based harassment and violence, institutional sexism is not absent in the Netherlands. 3 This is also true for the acceptance of gay sexuality and gay marriage. Moreover, by presenting violence against women as practices that “they” do (murder, domestic violence, bodily harm) and informing the viewer that they are punishable by law in “our” society, the fi lm suggests that these modes of gender-based violence are not similarly evident in the Netherlands. In other words, what the fi lm does is represent these virtues as absolute, while hiding their internally divided tensions in Dutch society.4 In implementing the exam, the Department of Justice expects a bigger “self-responsibility” and “more commitment” from “newcomers.” Rita Verdonk, the secretary for immigration and integration, explains that through the civic integration exam, “newcomers” can be tested if their choice to come to the Netherlands was a conscious one, if they understand what this choice really implies, and if they are sufficiently motivated to genuinely and consciously embrace Dutch values (Tweede Kamer 2005). The cultural trope of individualism is pivotal in the exam, and statements made by Verdonk are a classical example of the paradox at work in “repressive liberalism”: although you are locked in a collective culture with different values, at the same time you have the individual possibility of free choice. Here the notion of “free choice” implies a call for self-liberation by embracing Dutch values. At work is an (ethno) culturalist ontology in which the (disintegrated and overcultured, dangerous) migrant can simply make a (neoliberal) individualistic choice to be “like us.”5

Doing “Integration” in Europe 149 Similarly, the “freedom of speech” trope lends itself flawlessly to the disciplining nature of citizenship testing because it assumes that “we” must be intolerant in defense of tolerance; put differently, “we” can take away certain freedoms of cultural others in order to defend real freedom. Such a moral superiority, however, can only succeed if the violence implied in this position is made invisible. For instance, recent court cases in the Netherlands have defi ned hate-speech (or the right to insult) as freedom of speech. This justification can only work because the freedom of speech is disconnected from its actual content and used as a general, universal, and absolute symbol of Western modernity and civilization. The result is that any critique on the abuse of the freedom of speech—for instance, when it is used to structurally insult minorities or to practice hate-speech—is considered a critique on Western liberal values in general. The integration exam links cultural codes and assumptions with quasineutral historical narratives of Dutch culture and laws. Definitions of Dutch culture—such as shaking hands, kissing in public, dressing according to normalized professional standards at work, taking flowers if you go to your neighbor’s birthday—are not just used as ideological tools. Far more complex and subtle, culture is used as an appeal to an emotional wish of belonging, citizenship, and recognition. The message of the exam is this: the extent to which you will be recognized or excluded by Dutch society is entirely up to you—we tell you who “we” are and, simultaneously although not explicitly, we explain “our” cultural codes and what “you” need to do to be included in the Dutch “we.” The cultural tropes give “newcomers” the essence and parameters of hegemonic Dutch liberal culture and loyalty to this Dutchness becomes measured in terms of “our” women’s emancipation, “our” homosexuals, “our” individualism, and “our” freedom of speech. It seems that this construction of Dutchness (in which local and internal tensions regarding gay marriage, gender equality, freedom of speech, or individualism are willfully ignored) is a projection in order to contain and control the imaginary Dutch “we.” But who really is this Dutch “we”? To whom does this Dutch culture belong? This “we” seems a strong homogenization of what is in fact a plurality of voices. Embodying the enlightened liberal subject, the “we” disregards nonliberal subjects evident in many Dutch religious and secular, as well as ethnic/cultural, communities. For instance, whereas there are people in the Surinamese-Dutch community that are radically in favor of women’s rights and gay rights, there are people in secular white Dutch communities that reject these rights on the basis of biologism. Or, to refer to another example, Dutch Catholics and Dutch Muslims can very well uphold the very same merits of freedom of religion— even if it would impede the freedom of speech. Nevertheless, culturalization prevents us from seeing these commonalities while it emphasizes certain differences. Again, implicit and hidden is the ethno-cultural (and racial) dimension of Dutchness that is ontologized in much the same manner as is

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blackness or Muslimness. The integration exam is then not so much about what Dutchness really is, but, rather, what “we” want Dutchness not to be or not to become.

CIVILIZATION, CULTURE, DIVERSITY One of the testimonials in the integration video states: Accepting people as they are, that is important. That is, in fact, not just trying to shape a democracy, but, it is shaping a civilization. . . . It has taken us as a country—the Netherlands—five hundred years, if it is not more, to get this far and I would like to put in a plea to keep it like this for a very long time. (Naar Nederland 2005) The statement implies a normative position in terms of achievement within a progressive and evolutionary framework, namely, from a primitive to a civilized nation-state. The urge to reinvent or reaffi rm core values of Dutchness refers not only to a wish to compensate the loss of actual national borders, but also to a Dutch moral stance in claiming a Western civilization that omits the violence of its history, such as witch hunts, religious wars, colonialism, imperialism, two world wars, the holocaust and so on. Erasing the barbarism of this period, these events are treated as “evil incidents” that stand outside the systemic structures of Western modern civilization.6 The account also suggests a need for intervention: if we do not take measure now to “keep it like that,” civilization will deteriorate. This ‘civilizational pathos’ (de Leeuw and van Wichelen 2005) engages in a politics of fear by using apocalyptic metaphors. In this pathos, forms of self-pity, victimhood, and ressentiment merge.7 The effect of civilizational pathos is that it positions so-called autochthonous populations as victims of a social drama.8 With integration, we can contain this drama by forcing unwilling migrants (unwilling to learn Dutch, unwilling to accept our values, and unwilling to participate in public life) to follow our rules. The civilizational pathos provides a nation in crisis with a grand narrative, conveniently hiding the actual complexities of postmodern life and identities, and offering instead the warm sentiment of a cultural, universal, and moral superiority guised by a universal secular liberalism. The integration exam is designed in order to contain two integration problems related to the two target groups. The fi rst relates to the so-called radicalization of imams in Dutch mosques. In the mid-2000s incidents had been reported in the media about radical imams influencing Moroccan youth and contributing to extremism of young Muslims in the country. The anxiety about imams has also been produced by the media’s voracious coverage of their unwillingness to adopt Dutch norms and values (such as shaking hands with women).9 The second integration problem has

Doing “Integration” in Europe 151 been that of so-called “import-brides.” At that time, marriage migration, or migration based on family reunification, was reported as increasing tremendously. Media and politics presented marriage migration as involving primarily uneducated Moroccan and Turkish women from remote villages. The common assumption is that Moroccan and Turkish men in the Netherlands marry traditional women from their birth countries. These women are said to poorly integrate into Dutch society because they are uneducated, dependent, and submissive. Their children are said to run the risk of dropping out of school, of disturbing public safety, and, in the worst case, of becoming criminals. As Verdonk argues: They come to the Netherlands without preparation, do not speak the language, do not know our way of living with each other in the Netherlands and do not know anything about Dutch values. But yet they are the mothers of children. The influx of these newcomers will hamper the ongoing process of integration. (Tweede Kamer 2005) In 2008, around fifteen thousand men and women from 160 different countries came to the Netherlands to marry or to be reunited with their partners and/or families (Tweede Kamer 2009). In popular media and in remarks by politicians, the “massive” import of these “brides” by second-generation migrants (often depicted as the result of forced marriages and cousin-marriages) was presented as the main root of the current problems with integration and with the radicalization of “their children.” But actual figures gave a different picture. For instance, in 2008 only one in ten women who entered the Netherlands to marry their partner came from Morocco or Turkey (E-quality 2010). This is less than, for example, the amount of women that entered the country (from the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil, or Russia) to marry “autochthonous” Dutch men. Whereas the Dutch state is concerned with “emancipating” women from Morocco and Turkey who come to marry “allochtonous” men, they do not seem to care as much about emancipating women from other countries who come and marry “autochthonous” men. This latter example echoes the colonial redemption mentality of ‘saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1988). The statement by Verdonk—that these women are also ‘mothers of children’—complements this colonial structure by using classic racist stereotypes of non-Western women being governed by their (essentialized) culture and thus failing in their parenting to educate and prepare their (many) children for modern society. Hence, it is not so much the moral defense of secular liberalism that is problematic in the discourse of Dutch integration (and European integration in general), but the ways in which this defense is culturalized and thus depoliticized.10 Central to the culturalization of secular liberalism are liberal ideas of “diversity” in the broadest sense of the term. Foremost, we can detect a strong sexual politics—for we are not talking about certain

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values or norms as such, but explicitly and iconically involving sexualized bodies: bodies of abused women, bodies of homosexual men, and engaging issues related to kinship, sexual freedom, and law. Diversity is also deployed in differentiating between the new “us” and “them” by filtering victims of racial, ethnic, or religious intolerance. As such, the paradigm of Dutch tolerance is often referred to in order to highlight the nation’s commitment to embrace people in exile from “barbaric regimes.” By upholding values of tolerance and freedom, diversity is celebrated—but only within the confi nes of the liberal and secular framework. Whereas Islamism is seen as an ideological movement, threatening the moral fabric of Western civilization, secular liberalism is seen as neutral and universal. A moral superiority speaks from the ways in which secular liberals aim to educate or civilize non-Western migrants through means of integration. As Bhikhu Parekh argues: Liberals want to convince [Muslims] that these values are right, and think that this requires them to give transculturally compelling reasons. While such reasons are available in the case of some liberal values such as respect for human life, human dignity and equal human worth, they are not in the case of others such as individualism, personal autonomy, choice of spouses and minimum restraints on freedom of expression. There are good reasons for the latter, but they are internal to the liberal tradition and not transcultural. (2008: 25) The culturalization of secular liberalism functions also as a means to avoid confl ict with the principle of freedom of religion, and as such with secular liberalism’s separation of church and state. This is most evident in contemporary discourses of Dutch Christian parties. In their shift to an anti-Muslim populism, the Christian Democratic Party (CDA), for example, needs to justify their position without turning against religion. Instead, they strategically position themselves as defenders of “Western” or “democratic” values and defi ne Muslims as culturally opposed to Christians because they have not experienced enlightenment or critical reform.11 Rather than recognizing their sameness in terms of fellow religious citizens, Muslims are approached as cultural others that have religious practices incompatible with liberal democracy and could harbor a potential threat to the fabric of Western societies.12 We have argued elsewhere that a form of enlightenment-fundamentalism is at work in the Dutch and European discourses attacking Islam and its compatibility with Western liberal democracy (de Leeuw and van Wichelen 2005). Ideas of “enlightenment”—as well as “Dutchness” or “Europeanness,” for that matter—are used to uncover “the real face of Islam” in order to turn it into a more comfortable other. In this perspective, the use of the concept of “enlightenment” aptly resembles the superficial application of the term as described by the cultural theorist Ien Ang, who argues that

Doing “Integration” in Europe 153 ‘what matters in this context is not the philosophical debt or virtue of the legacy of the enlightenment (a topic sufficiently debated among philosophers themselves) but, rather, the more superficial impact of the instinctive cultural identification of Europeanness with the Enlightened modern which still informs contemporary, self-defi nitions, of European culture and identity’ (1998: 94). Hence, “enlightenment,” “Dutchness,” or “Europe” as the name for something we need to defend, refers not so much to the dangers of Islam, or to a conflict with migrant others, but rather to the actual identity crisis within Europe and European nations.

REFUSING TRANSITION—GLOBALIZING VALUES The integration exam in the Netherlands has proven to be a success and other countries soon began to follow its lead (Joppke 2007; Löwenheim and Gazit 2009; McCrea 2007: 36). Whereas the UK and Denmark have revisited their citizenship exam after being introduced to the Dutch model, Australia has modeled their testing regime after the Dutch following diplomatic visits to the Hague by Australian immigration officials in 2006 (Slade 2010: 125).13 Most interesting is the case of Germany (known to be most “generous” in terms of immigration flows), where the so-called Hesse Test—which was implemented in September 2008—includes all elements of sexual politics evident in the Dutch case.14 What are we to conclude about the popularity of the Dutch case? How do these new citizenship regimes inscribe new understandings of becoming members of a European society? Of great importance is the fact that not every foreigner is required to take the exam. People from the EU, the European Economic Community, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Japan, Monaco, New Zealand, South Korea, and the US are exempted. The secretary of justice legitimizes this discrimination in nationalities by pointing out that it concerns people from countries that are socially, economically, and politically comparable with European nations. From this respect, as the Justice Department has argued, the exemption does not lead to ‘undesirable immigration’ or ‘fundamental problems with integration in Dutch society’ (Tweede Kamer 2005). This measure, discriminating between nations that are and are not obligated to take the exam, is internally contradictory and normatively objectionable. The bill is intended to make sure that migrants have sufficient knowledge of the Dutch language and society before coming to the Netherlands. By excluding countries such as Australia or Japan, it is implied that Australian and Japanese “newcomers” do not need this knowledge. This goes against principles of justice as articulated in international conventions, specifically the convention on racial discrimination and the convention on civil and political rights. More precisely, this measure makes visible how the Justice Department imagines and projects only a certain group of “newcomers” as “newcomers” to be cultivated and who are not

154 Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen yet “enlightened,” and, often enough, these categories are conveniently conflated with the category of Muslims.15 Nevertheless, the bill was accepted and the measure is still in place today— even after the replacement of the populist and liberal-right government by a more labor-oriented government in 2007.16 This confirms our analytical position that the violence inflicted concerns not so much (state) ideology but forms of institutionalized governmentality. In several cases, the European Court of Justice and the European Treaty on Human Rights have rebuked the new Dutch policies on immigration and integration (NRC Handelsblad 2007). Rather than being affected by these rulings, however, Dutch politicians expect other European countries to follow their lead and overrule the position of the European Court and its conventions.17 Politicians and mainstream media are clearly irritated by the fact that there are still European countries that have more tolerant and liberal policies toward migrants. Tensions between nation-states and European conventions are not necessarily seen as actual ethical problems but as legal hurdles to be overcome. Besides the antidiscrimination problem there are other foundational issues at stake. The exam and its obligatory character have led to legal tensions with European treaties and basic rights of EU citizens, namely, the rights to freely choose a partner, to form a family, or to reunite with one’s family, but also the separation of church and state.18 The fi rst relates to the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Directive for Family Reunification. This directive states that member states can allow persons to reunify with a non-EU member when he or she is able to provide sufficient housing and health care and has a stable income (related to the national minimal income). The directive makes no mention of language or culture tests. But Article 7 further declares that member states can expect third-country citizens to abide by national integration requirements. It is this paragraph that the Dutch secretary Verdonk uses to establish a new Dutch immigration law, which extends the three preconditions with two new preconditions: a language test and a cultural knowledge test. The citizenship test challenges the foundational and constitutional principle of “family life” by imposing the criteria that newcomers “integrate” fi rst. The second tension involves the entry of religious clerks. Foreign clergy who come to work in the Netherlands usually come on temporary contracts. The separation of church and state gives religious institutions the sovereign right to appoint their own clergy.19 These clergy are not intended to become Dutch citizens and therefore have not been subjected to a civic integration course. But the Civic Integration Law has now made an exception for religious clergy. With this, the state actively intervenes in the fundamental division between state and religion. Ultimately, though, this intervention is aimed primarily at Islamic clerks. With the new law, the state sought to influence the appointment of imams by Muslim institutions by reorienting them to Dutch values. This corresponds to what McCrea has explained as Europe’s targeting of the “outsider religion”:

Doing “Integration” in Europe 155 The Union’s attempt to protect its liberal democratic values from religious threats coupled with its explicit reluctance to tamper with the evolving and sensitive arrangements surrounding Europe’s culturallyentrenched denominations has therefore led to a situation which is directly discriminatory in that ‘outsider’ religions such as Islam are held to more demanding standards of secularity than ‘insider’ religions such as mainstream Christianity. (2007: 2) The purposeful fi ltering of who ought and who ought not to be crossing Dutch/European borders does not so much exemplify the mechanisms of a bold inclusion and exclusion, but instead displays the differentiated ways in which borders operate today. Rather than contending that new citizenship regimes are strengthening fortress Europe, we argue instead that they demonstrate the contemporary inconsistencies of defi ning the citizen-subject. 20 In our case, the conditions of entry and civic belonging are set by the state in myriad (and confl icting) ways. They do so in their attempt to contain difference. However, the subject of difference is elusive and shifts in different contexts. Although the containment marks a refusal to acknowledge a profound crisis of national citizenship attributable to globalization processes, the messiness of migratory practices gives evidence of an ongoing transition period. This transition period challenges the power of Europe. Economically, it feels the stronghold of new economic powers in Asia, foremost countries such as China and India. Along with seeing the influx of non-European populations as a further threat to economic viability, Europe is also aware that it needs economic migrants to help sustain economic growth. So whereas some are welcomed in, others need to be halted. Rather than disentangling national belonging from formal citizenship, postcolonial European values (seen as morally superior) are now transnationalized via citizenship regimes onto the aspiring citizen-subject. These new regimes produce “reverse colonization processes” in which migrants remain othered as postcolonial subjects but now within internal borders of the empire.

CONCLUSION The tensions displayed above mirror a deeper dilemma in contemporary postmodern society between a politics of sovereignty and ethics of human rights. These developments are to be placed in a rapidly changing world in which forces of globalization are producing transnational migration flows and creating ‘flexible citizens’ (Ong 1999). There is an increasing discrepancy between flexible European laws grounded in the human rights tradition and national, more restrictive laws. The social philosopher Seyla Benhabib (2002: 152) rightly poses the following questions: ‘What kinds of immigration, naturalization, and citizenship practices, then, would be

156 Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen compatible with the commitments of liberal democracies to human rights? Can claims to sovereign self-determination be reconciled with the just and fair treatment of aliens and others in our midst?’ When Europe is a project that aims to transform democratic politics along globalizing processes, critical reflection on these new developments of an emerging culturalist citizenship in Europe is needed. This is only possible if Europe radically challenges postcolonial structures in its organization of globalization’s effects on the meaning and value of citizenship. To do this requires taking seriously the various elements of colonial capitalism inherent in global exchange. The normalization of economic globalization not only legitimizes the current immigration politics and policies that favor productive migrants, but also reinstates the complex configuration of European colonialism, imperialism, and racism embedded in European reinventions of the nonappropriable. The postcolonial friction is enhanced through paradoxical messages of upholding universal human rights. This principle—much applauded and embraced when it concerns people outside our borders—is increasingly made arbitrary when it concerns migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers that enter inside our borders.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This chapter contains revised material adapted from de Leeuw and van Wichelen (2012). We are grateful to Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley for comments on an earlier version. NOTES 1. The Civic Integration Exam Abroad is part of the larger Naturalization Test, which was introduced in 2003 and replaced by the Integration Test in 2007. The exam consists of two parts, knowledge of Dutch society and knowledge of Dutch language. The applicant takes the exam (computerized testing by means of a telephone) at the Dutch consulate in their respective country of residence. The exam takes about thirty minutes and the overall cost (including the practice package) is 420 euros. Having outsourced the logistics to private companies, these test fees are not state subsidized. For more information on the content and procedure of the integration exam, see www. naarnederland.nl. 2. This fi lm has a censored and uncensored version. The latter displays images of public nudity or sexuality, such as topless women on the beach or two men kissing each other in a public space. The censored version is made to accommodate countries in which the depiction of nudity and explicit sexuality in electronic or print material is forbidden by law. 3. For instance, until March 2013 (when the situation changed following a process involving also a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights) one of the three Christian parties in parliament, a small Calvinist party called the Reformed Political Party, did not accept women as active party members. How is it possible that we demand from outsiders a commitment to a

Doing “Integration” in Europe 157

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

particular form of women’s emancipation when members of parliament and the cabinet are not committed to these values themselves? See also Butler (2008) and Haritaworn, Erdem, and Tauqir (2008) for a discussion on the instrumentalization of sexual freedom in the West’s struggle against Islam. Thanks to Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley for this comment. This is also demonstrated in the guidelines for instructors that give religious clerks integration courses (see http://www.vrom.nl/docs/bijlage-10–art-3.7– regeling-inburgering-aanvullende-eindtermen-KNS-geestelijke-bedienaren. pdf, accessed on 24 June 2013). Here religious clerks who want to work in the Netherlands are expected to have knowledge about Dutch religious and secular history, events, and values. Unflattering histories are erased, such as three centuries of Dutch colonial rule over the biggest Muslim country, Indonesia. In 2000, the Dutch political commentator Paul Scheffer wrote the divisive article ‘The Multicultural Drama’ in a national daily. Ever since this publication, the drama has had a performative effect—but, in our opinion, especially in the opposite manner: not that multiculturalism suffers from a drama, but that the “autochthonous” (white) dominant population perceive themselves as victims of a social drama. The Dutch introduced the term allochtoon (literally meaning “originating from another country”) to defi ne the new migrant population and their descendants in differentiation to ethnic Dutch or the autochtoon population (literally meaning “originating from this country”). Concretely this meant that any citizen with one parent born outside the Netherlands was automatically marked as an “allochtonous” person. As recently as 2006, a new differentiation was introduced between allochtoon and non-Western allochtoon migrants. This category was clearly aimed at setting apart migrants from Turkey, Morocco, and the Dutch Antilles and stigmatized particular groups of the migrant community. This example refers to the much mediated “handshake incident” of 2004 in which an imam respectfully refused to shake hands with the immigration minister Verdonk. See also Schinkel (2007) and de Leeuw and van Wichelen (2014) for a discussion of how this produces a new cultural racism called culturalism. This rhetorical strategy is most clearly present in the “freedom of speech” discourse often pitted against Islam. It is from such a standpoint that the white Dutch legitimize insults being made to Islam in general and Muslims in particular: just like we mocked (insulted) Christians in the 1960s and 1970s and freed ourselves from the confi nes of religion, we should be able to mock (insult) Muslims in the present time (to help them free themselves from their religious restrictions). When Christian parties are criticized in the Netherlands, culture or cultural difference is never used in the political discussions; instead they talk about the politics of paternalism or palling of Christian parties (vertrutting van de politiek). Moreover, the appropriation of secularism is an important difference between Europe and the US. The US would seldom proclaim secularism as one of their national foundations. Similar to the situation in the Netherlands, even though the rightist government of Prime Minister Howard has been replaced by a cabinet consisting of the labor party, this exam has not been revoked. This proves that the citizenship tests are not so much the product of rightist politicking, but normalized. Germany has assigned the citizenship requirements separately to all its regions. Hesse is one of those regions. Known to have been one of the most

158 Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

“generous” European countries with respect to immigration, they have now become more restrictive, especially with respect to Muslims. The “Hesse Test” is also known as the “Muslim Test” (Stalinski 2007). The law also affects Dutch citizens. If a Dutch citizen marries a partner from, for example, Morocco or Argentina, this partner is forced to take and pass the test in the homeland before she/he is able to join her/his partner in the Netherlands. But if an American living in the Netherlands marries a woman from Morocco, there is no examination and she can enter immediately. The same counts for Dutch citizens who live in other EU member states. This legal loophole has created so-called Europe-routes. These emerge from the combination of the European law that permits the free flow of persons and traffic within the European territory, and the ruling in the so-called “Metock case” (Blaise Baheten Metock and Others v. Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform 2008), which states that non EU-partners of European citizens cannot be forced into an immigration examination or language test when EU citizens move to a different EU country. The consequence of this ruling is that Dutch citizens who go to live, for example, in Belgium and marry a Turkish or Argentinean woman or man while there can, once they return to the Netherlands, not have their partners be forced to take the citizenship test. The cabinet before 2007 consisted of the CDA, the liberal-right party VVD, and the liberal-left party D66. After 2007 the labor party PvdA and the Christian party CU replaced the latter two. New elections in June 2010 gave the anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders a substantial twenty-four-seat presence in parliament. A “hung” parliament situation was created in which the CDA and the liberal-right party VVD had sought Wilders’s support to form a government. With twenty-four of the seventy-six votes necessary for a majority, Wilders’s party has a substantial political influence without having to carry any political responsibility. Besides the rise of Islamophobic populism among the electorate, this situation shows the normalization or quasi acceptance (in the name of strategic political necessity) of a racist position within democratic institutions. It is remarkable that in the current West European political landscape, three nations known for their successful social-welfare “model” democracies—Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands—have “hung-governments” that heavily lean on the support of anti-Islam parties. See also the discussion of European anti-discrimination laws and its tension with national legislations in Joppke (2007). See Art. 12 ECHR (European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms). This did not mean that the church, in particular the parochial and papal authority over Catholics, has not intervened in lawmaking processes relating to issues of life and death (abortion, euthanasia) and sexuality (opposition to divorce, homosexuality, contraception). Although, because of ongoing secularization, these interventions are often criticized, the critiques have not lead to a reeducation program for Catholic priests or a forced demand for cultural loyalty to secular liberalism. See also Mezzadra and Neilson (2012) for an elaboration of such an approach.

REFERENCES Ang, Ien (1998) ‘Eurocentric Reluctance: Notes for a Cultural Studies of “The New Europe,”’ in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.) Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 87–108.

Doing “Integration” in Europe 159 Benhabib, Seyla (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blaise Baheten Metock and Others v. Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform (2008) Case C-127/08. Butler, Judith (2008) ‘Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,’ British Journal of Sociology, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 1–23. de Leeuw, Marc and van Wichelen, Sonja (2005) ‘“Please, Go Wake Up!” Submission, Hirsi Ali, and the “War on Terror” in the Netherlands,’ Feminist Media Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–40. de Leeuw, Marc and van Wichelen, Sonja (2012) ‘Civilizing Migrants: Integration, Culture, and Citizenship,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 195–210. de Leeuw, Marc and van Wichelen, Sonja (2014) ‘Institutionalizing the Muslim Other: Naar Nederland and the Violence of Culturalism,’ in Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving (eds.) Dutch Racism, Amsterdam: Rodopi. E-quality (2010) ‘Beeldvorming en feiten,’ Themadossiers, Migratie en integratie, Huwelijksmigrantes, 14 May 2010, available at: http://www.e-quality.nl/equality/pagina.asp?pagkey=140635, accessed on 16 June 2013. Haritaworn, Jin, Erdem, Esra and Tauqir, Tamsila (2008) ‘Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the “War on Terror,”’ in Esperanza Miyake and Adi Kuntsman (eds.) Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, York: Raw Nerve Books, pp. 71–95. Joppke, Christian (2007) ‘Transformation of Immigrant Integration: Civic Integration and Antidiscrimination in the Netherlands, France, and Germany,’ World Politics, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 243–73. Löwenheim, Oded and Gazit, Orit (2009) ‘Power and Examination: A Critique of Citizenship Tests,’ Security Dialogue, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 145–67. McClintock, Anne (2009) ‘Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,’ Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 50–74. McCrea, Ronan (2007) ‘Limitations on Religion in a Liberal Democratic Polity: Christianity and Islam in the Public Order of the European Union,’ LSE Legal Studies Working Paper no. 18, London School of Economics and Political Science, available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1033332, accessed on 16 June 2013. Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett (2012) ‘Between Inclusion and Exclusion: On the Topology of Global Space and Borders,’ Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 29, nos. 4–5, pp. 58–75. Naar Nederland (2005) Documentary for the preparation of the Dutch integration test abroad, Netherlands: Ministry of Justice, CINOP and Odyssee Productions. NRC Handelsblad (2007) ‘Hof Europa dwingt ander asielbeleid af,’ NRC Handelsblad, 12 January 2007, available at: http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/ article1800486.ece/Hof_Europa_dwingt_ander_asielbeleid_af, accessed on 16 June 2013. Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parekh, Bhikhu (2008) European Liberalism and “The Muslim Question,” Isim Paper 9, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (1998) ‘The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 575–610. Scheffer, Paul (2000) ‘Het Multiculturele Drama,’ NRC Handelsblad, 29 January 2000, available at: http://retro.nrc.nl/W2/Lab/Multicultureel/scheffer.html, accessed on 16 June 2013. Schinkel, Willem (2007) Denken in een tijd van sociale hypochondrie, Kampen: Klement.

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Slade, Christina (2010) ‘Civic Integration in the Netherlands,’ in Christina Slade and Martina Mollering (eds.) From Migrant to Citizen: Testing Language, Testing Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125–42. Spivak, Gayatri C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Champagne/ Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–314. Stalinski, Sandra (2007) ‘Hier geboren dennoch immer Fremd,’ Der Tagesspiegel, 2 May 2007, available at: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/hier-geboren-unddennoch-immer-fremd/841406.html, accessed on 16 June 2013. Tweede Kamer (Lower House of the Dutch Parliament) (2005) ‘Wetsvoorstel Wijziging van de Vreemdelingenwet 2000 in verband met het stellen van een inburgeringsvereiste bij het toelaten van bepaalde categorieen vreemdelingen’ (Wet inburgering in het buitenland), 29700, 16 March 2005. Tweede Kamer (Lower House of the Dutch Parliament) (2009) ‘Brief van de minister voor wonen, wijken en integratie, de minister van justitie en de staatssecretaris van justitie,’ 32 175, Huwelijks- en gezinsmigratie, nr. 1, 2 October 2009. Wilders, Geert (2007) ‘Debat over kabinetsstandpunt t.a.v. het WRR-rapport ‘Dynamiek in islamitisch activisme,’’ Kamerstukken 2006–2007, (30800 VI, nr. 115), pp. 5261–5265.

8

Coffin Exchange Paulo de Medeiros No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs. —Hannah Arendt (1970) On Violence, p. 8

The question is never about violence in fi lm, or about how violence affects the viewing experience, because all fi lms are, in one way or another, violent. Rather, the question is how fi lm, and in particular postcolonial fi lm, can deploy violence so as to reflect on and problematize it.1 Surely questioning the aestheticization of violence and how to manage our pleasure in fi lmic violence are important topics in themselves. However, even though I do not intend to push the point that all forms of representation are, by their very nature, essentially violent, my driving question at the moment has much more to do with the ways in which some postcolonial fi lms critique violence without falling into the trap of mere avoidance. After all, as Slavoj Žižek remarks at the conclusion of his incisive, if at times seemingly fl ippant, study of violence, ‘sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do’ (Žižek 2008: 183). The study of violence in fi lm has long been an important topic with overt political goals, claims, and consequences. Clearly irreverent, although on the reverse political side, are Quentin Tarantino’s remarks on how violence in the movies is good, because of its entertainment value. 2 And yet, as objectionable as such a view might be, its applicability can be sobering. My interest is neither with such opinions and their possible media value as outrageous nor with the continuous cries of moral decadence brought on by the seemingly ever-increasing use of violence in popular spectacle, but rather with the ways in which fi lm can address and problematize the systemic violence characteristic of colonial and imperial relations, which is still largely operative in contemporary society. In order to do so, I have chosen to focus on two fi lms: Margarida Cardoso’s A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast) from 2004 and Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) from 2007. Both fi lms to a great extent eschew direct visualizations of physical violence, yet both are permeated with an intense kind of violence that can, arguably, be much more disturbing. This representation forces viewers to confront the ways in which our

162

Paulo de Medeiros

present society is suff used by a pervasive and inescapable violence that conditions who we are as subjects—individually and collectively. The two films diverge considerably: Cardoso’s focuses on the end of the Portuguese colonial war in Mozambique at the beginning of the 1970s; Akin’s explores the convoluted German–Turkish relations in a present marked by a continuous ambivalence concerning Turkey’s possible membership in the European Union, and the quasi-imperial relation fostered by the massive importing of Turkish workers into Germany since 1961. To say that they are postcolonial fi lms thus requires some explanation. By considering them postcolonial obviously I am not referring to them as cultural productions issued out of former colonized nations after independence. As complicated as the label “postcolonial” might be, my usage of it tends more toward its theoretical rather than chronological connotations, as indicative of a stand that is both anticolonial and self-reflective. Certainly, Cardoso grew up in Mozambique and Akin is a descendant of Turkish migrants to Germany, but that is not what makes their fi lms postcolonial. If anything, it is the critical stance that the fi lms take toward colonialism and its related forms of subjugation and domination, the exposure of the structural violence on which such relations are built, and the refusal to accept a hegemonic, Western-based perspective on transnational issues that marks them as postcolonial. Cardoso’s fi lm is ostensibly about the Portuguese colonial wars, and as such might seem closer to a postcolonial perspective. But, like Akin’s, it is directed at a present audience: at first a Portuguese one (and this is much in need as doing such has remained an unspoken taboo in the public sphere until recently), but also a European one as the concerns of the fi lm in terms of gender relations and the deconstruction of any facile dichotomy between memory and history are not confi ned to the Portuguese situation by any means. And if Akin’s fi lm seems primarily concerned with the complexity of modern German–Turkish relations, its exposure of gendered violence—even if done very differently than in Cardoso’s film— and its questioning of the efficacy of European Union democratic norms, Enlightenment ideals, and religious traditions, it becomes applicable on a much wider scale. Indeed, one could well say that both fi lms, even though they are particular case studies, anchored on specific historical circumstances, transcend their national base and operate on a transnational register. As such they question the premises of a European polity reluctant to accept or even recognize its postimperial condition. Both films are complex transnational productions that not only rely on a crossing of national borders, from Germany to Turkey and back several times, from Portugal to Mozambique or the implied return of dead or alive soldiers and colonizers to Europe, but also play on a crossing of temporal borders, as well. Akin’s film starts almost at the end of its diegetic narrative. And, indeed, close to the end of the fi lm those same opening images of a young man, Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak) stopping at a petrol station on his way to Trabzon and the Black Sea coastal village where he hopes to find his

Coffi n Exchange 163 father, are repeated. As for Cardoso’s fi lm, even if it has straightened out the chronological unfolding of events in relation to the eponymous novel by Lídia Jorge (1988), it constantly questions it through the use of a narrative voice-over of an older Eva (Beatriz Batarda) recollecting the times shown. Both films play with the interlocking and confl icting relations between two or three domestic sets. In the case of Cardoso’s film, one domestic unit is formed by Evita (the younger Eva) and her husband, Luis (Filipe Duarte), the other by the husband’s commanding officer, Forza Leal (Adriano Luz), and his wife, Helena (Mónica Calle). To complicate matters a bit, there is also a journalist called Álvaro (Luis Sarmento), who shows Evita around in her attempts to grasp the colonial predicament of Mozambique and whom her husband suspects is her lover. In Akin’s film we have, on the one hand, Ali Aksu (Tunçel Kurtiz), an old Turkish immigrant in Bremen who decides to pay prostitute Yeter Öztürk (Nursel Köse) to leave her old life and move in with him only to drunkenly beat her out of jealousy, causing her to fall, hit her head, and subsequently die; and his son Nejat Aksu, a university literature lecturer in Hamburg who renounces his father after the murder and even gives up his lectureship to move to Istanbul in search of Yeter’s daughter. On the other hand, we have Yeter and her daughter Ayten Öztürk (Nurgúl Yesilçay), who is a student involved in radical protest groups and forced to flee to Germany under the pseudonym Gul, and who starts a relationship with a German student named Lotte Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska). Lotte and her mother, Susanne Staub (Hanna Schygulla), form another domestic constellation. Yet Akin wraps the different characters’ lives in each other so well that one could have the feeling that instead of a tripartite set we are dealing mostly with two pairs, especially when Susanne goes to Istanbul after her daughter has been killed there by a young boy and she meets Nejat without ever realizing that the woman Nejat was searching for was her daughter’s lover. As Thomas Elsaesser (2008: 37) acutely and wittily remarks, ‘the fi lm’s parallels, coincidences, improbabilities, and dramatic ironies are inescapable, and enough to make a Hollywood script doctor tear his hair out.’ One of the most striking scenes in The Edge of Heaven is the unloading of a coffi n from an airplane arriving from Germany at Istanbul Ataturk Airport. This is duplicated, sort of, when another coffi n is loaded into another plane leaving Turkey for Germany. This coffi n exchange is but one of the many incidents of duplication, strange coincidences, and missed opportunities that characterize the structure of Akin’s fi lm. At the same time, the scene emblematically points out the fi lm’s treatment of violence and gender relations, which is my primary concern. For in the coffi ns lay the bodies of two murdered women: the Turkish Yeter Öztürk, who, having worked as a prostitute in Bremen to allow her daughter to fi nish her studies, is killed by the man who had paid her to live with him in an attempt to escape his own solitude, and the other, Lotte Staub, a young German student who goes to Istanbul in a futile attempt to help her lover—in fact, although the

164 Paulo de Medeiros characters are not aware of this, actually Yeter’s daughter—and is accidentally killed by a boy who had stolen a gun from her purse. Whereas The Murmuring Coast does not have such an exchange of coffins (indeed one never even sees anyone being murdered, just corpses lying on the streets, floating ashore, or stranded), it is also rich in missed chances and doublings. To begin with, there is the doubling of the main protagonist— Eva/Evita: the young woman, Evita as she was known, whom we accompany on a move to Africa to wed her student sweetheart conscripted into the colonial army, and the older woman, Eva, who recollects the events of her past. And, although few viewers might realize—or remember—those coffins are never too distant, because every boat that departed from Lisbon with a fresh contingent of infantry also carried a corresponding number of coffins anticipated to repatriate the fallen soldiers. The death of Evita’s husband, not as a result of combat but rather as part of a foolish chance duel to avenge what he thought was her betrayal of him with a local reporter, had already also been announced. Its futility, and its unconnectedness to the war efforts are related to the other casualties: both the bodies of poor black people poisoned by methyl alcohol disguised as free wine, that lie on the streets and at the shore, and the death of another officer, whose widow and orphan child we see at dawn, surreptitiously leaving the hotel Stella Maris—where the Portuguese officers resided—in an effort not to be noticed by the other officer families. In both films death is linked to chance as much as it is dislocated from the reigning state violence that permeates society into a more private sphere. This does not lead to any form of domestication of death. Quite the contrary, what the films provoke is a problematization of the ways in which state violence seeps into and overtakes everything so that the domestic realm is not only not immune to it, but partakes in, and, as it were, executes it: Luis is not killed in combat but in a duel about the supposed infidelity of his wife. Lotte is not a victim of any terrorist attack but is gunned down by a child unaware of the consequences of pulling a trigger in real life, and Yeter is not killed by the fundamentalists who had threatened to harm her if she did not stop prostituting but by the man who had “married” her. And yet, of course, all three deaths do not make sense except in the context of the state or religious violence that suffuses society. Both films engage specifically with national issues but in a transnational manner. Whereas Cardoso directly engages Portuguese memories of the colonial wars and their suppression in the wake of decolonization and a return to parliamentary democracy after close to five decades of dictatorship, Akin involves his audiences with the contested relations between Germans and Turks that are postimperial even if not postcolonial. At stake is also a particular reflection on Europe, its relation to others and evolving concepts of multicultural confrontation. At the same time, both fi lms showcase the multilayered failings of justice. In the case of Cardoso’s film, it is the very state that can be considered as criminal, as engaged in a destructive war to prevent autonomy of the dominated population. And yet, as the

Coffi n Exchange 165 film makes very clear, the colonialist civilian population is equally involved in the repression, blatantly blaming the army for not squashing what they perceive as racially inferior minions. In Akin’s film, one is confronted with several takes on justice, the legal systems of both Germany and Turkey, and state repression. In both films the notion of a recent past of state violence, whose ghosts are still largely not confronted, is never absent. Yet, neither film engages with issues of transitional justice directly. In the case of Akin’s film, this can be explained by the fact that the issues surrounding political contestation in Turkey are really still ongoing. In the case of Cardoso’s fi lm, however, the events narrated refer to a period in Portugal’s history dating back three decades. If immediately after the military-led revolution of April 1974, which both ended the colonial war and allowed a return to democracy, there were extreme cases of transitional justice attempting to purge the country of fascist elements, a proper process of memory and working out national traumas never really took place.3 As such, the fi lm clearly serves the function of allowing subjects considered more or less taboo to be discussed more openly and in social media. An important similarity between the two fi lms is the relatively scarce representation of direct violence. This is noted especially by critics with reference to Akin’s film, which has departed from the confronting, violent scenes of his previous ones, especially Gegen die Wand (Head-On) from 2004.4 This view is perhaps best encapsulated by Catherine Wheatley when reviewing The Edge of Heaven for the British Film Institute’s journal Sight and Sound, remarking that ‘such changes are consistent with a general shift in tone between the two features: where the violence of Head-On was a shocking assault on its spectator, The Edge of Heaven is a softer, more haunting film’ (2008). As for Cardoso’s fi lm, one could say that even though it is a film that presents an almost oppressive sense of unabated violence, it eschews any direct representation of it. This has been a subject that the film director and Lídia Jorge, the writer of the novel the fi lm is based on, have discussed. One could easily say that in many ways the novel is more “graphically” violent than the fi lm. And yet it is the fi lm, perhaps, that makes more of an insistent link between state violence (the colonial war), attempted genocide (the wine bottles with methyl alcohol mysteriously left to be found), and domestic violence (the almost immediate dissolution of Evita’s marriage, her confrontation with the sadist her husband had become, his fi nal death). Still, in some ways Akin’s film stays closer to more conventional depictions of violence and gender questions than Cardoso’s. And although both films were critically acclaimed in their respective countries, Akin’s garnered international accolades, including the prize for best screenwriting and a nomination for the Palme d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Festival besides other prizes and nominations in Germany, Canada, the US, and Turkey, that eluded Cardoso’s production. Consider, for instance, both fi lms’ divergent perspective on the issue of the gaze and the use of the camera to focus on violence. Whereas The

166 Paulo de Medeiros Edge of Heaven does show the two murders as they are committed—both Ali’s slapping of Yeter that causes her to fall and hit her head, as well as the boy who, perhaps in imitation of so many fi lms, pulls the trigger on Lotte—in The Murmuring Coast we only see corpses but never the actual killings, neither the convulsions of those who inadvertently drank the methyl alcohol in the wine bottles nor the duel between Evita’s husband and the man he supposed to have been her lover, and of course not a single scene of combat. Tellingly, one of the most violent scenes in the entire fi lm takes place as the two couples, Evita and Luis and Helena and Forza Leal, out of boredom and because the bars have not yet open, go to a beach and the men decide to shoot randomly at a flock of flamingos. Even before the shooting starts, the intensity of the violence is evident in the way that Forza Leal shouts at his wife and humiliates her into recognizing the gun he had used to kill a man she had loved. Even though much of the fi lm could be said to be realistic, this scene is staged in a clearly theatrical fashion: the characters are arranged as if on a stage, their body movements exaggerated, even the gust of wind that sweeps through in spite of the calmness of the day. There can be no doubt that the scene is one of intense violence, yet it is a violence that is more felt than shown. Indeed, later on at night, one does see Forza Leal being physically violent toward Helena and throwing her to the ground in front of their house as if she were some sort of prey, but that event appears, in the context of the previous scene, to be far less violent. What is most striking about the scene, though, is the way in which it makes it impossible for the viewer not to relate it to gender violence. As the men prepare to start shooting at the birds, the camera focuses alternatively on them and on the women. Helena still tries unsuccessfully to halt the slaughter by placing herself in front of the gun held by Luis but is cowed into submission by yet another round of shouts from her husband and steps aside. Evita, however, who is significantly wearing a dress stamped with large figures of birds, moves away from the beginning and seeks a sort of refuge in the beach hut normally used as a bar. Every time that one hears a shot being fi red it is her startled, pained, and frightened face that the camera shows, so that there can be no doubt as to who is being killed that afternoon, even if only symbolically. That oblique, more direct because indirect, focus on violence can also be found in Akin’s fi lm, even if not as forcefully. For instance, one of the earliest scenes in the fi lm, when Ali fi rst meets Yeter as a prostitute in her cage, employs a similar technique. The dialogue between the two is tense, to the point of violence, as Ali forces her to reveal her Turkish identity besides telling her which sexual acts he wants her to perform and for which he will pay, not far off from the exchanges between Forza Leal and Helena, as in both cases the men dominate and subjugate the women verbally, forcing them into a position of subalternity. But where I fi nd Akin’s scene comparable to Cardoso’s is in the decision to avoid showing the sex, letting the camera roam instead through the room and slowly focusing on the

Coffi n Exchange 167 varied objects pertinent to the trade that it contains. Meanwhile the sound track leaves no doubt as to the nature of the action taking place, much as the sound of the shots in Cardoso’s film also left no doubt about the killing of flamingos. Akin’s camera work does not shy away from the sex, but instead, by decentering and frustrating the audience’s voyeuristic instinct, forces a reflection on the simulated nature of the act, just as everything in the room, down to Yeter’s blond wig and even her working name, ‘Jessy,’ are also all simulations of a different reality. Nonetheless, not all of The Edge of Heaven manages to escape the voyeuristic gaze. This is most obvious in the decision to have a love affair blossom between Lotte, the young, somewhat naively idealistic German student, and Ayten, the brash radical who flees Turkey and ends up back there in jail. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Akin is quick to explain his choice as a desire to avoid clichés and yet his answer to the reporter’s question already indicates the very problem he thought he could avoid: ‘Why two women? Because everything else felt like a cliché. A young, dark-haired Turk comes to Hamburg, where he falls in love with an innocent blonde? No, that’s too much like King Kong and the white woman. The story only became sexy once two women were involved’ (Der Spiegel 2007). In the end, even though Akin’s fi lm skillfully steers away from many possible stereotypes about Turks and Germans and their relations, the infatuation between the two young women is not so far from the “King Kong” scenario he said he wanted to avoid. Lotte is certainly as much ‘the innocent blonde’ as can be, so that one wonders how does turning King Kong into another woman really help the fi lm escape from the stereotypical, and whether it is not just another form of audience titillation. Certainly, this is not a simple issue, but Akin’s self-congratulatory response to the reporter’s question on how his parents had reacted to it, that ‘oh, they know what sort of a son they have by now’ (Der Spiegel 2007), further adds to the sinking feeling that rather than trying to explore what is still difficult territory concerning life options for members of traditional societies, Akin is more intent on being a bit of a bad boy and enjoying it. And, yet, the use of the two young women as foils for a patriarchal society that oppresses them and others could have had great potential. As it is, at least it does allow for some counterbalance in the exploration of the father–son relationship that is such an intense part of the fi lm and sketches what could be a different perspective on inheriting tradition. It should be said that in Cardoso’s fi lm similar issues are also far from being resolved. The relationship between men and women is characterized by constant violence, oppression, and manipulation, whether one has in mind the two couples already mentioned or the journalist, Álvaro (Luis Sarmento), who also keeps two separate families and, at least initially, tries to manipulate Evita, who in the end lets herself be manipulated and used by another journalist instead. The relations between women are anything but peaceful, either. This is perhaps most visible in the relationship

168

Paulo de Medeiros

between Helena and her maid, who is treated, for all purposes, as if she is a slave—this based on class even more than race. The relationship between Helena and Evita is also one of constant tension. Such a situation reaches its peak when their husbands are away for an indeterminate time on a military operation in the north of Mozambique and Helena decides to seduce Evita. Her fi rst step is based on a violent attempt to gain Evita’s confidence by destroying any trust she might still have had in her husband. As the two women are talking to each other in Helena’s house, Helena decides to show Evita a series of photographs taken during military operations in which Evita’s husband can be clearly seen, including one where he holds the severed head of a black man impaled on a stick. As Helena watches Evita’s ground sink in, she proposes that they have a sexual relationship so as to avenge themselves on their husbands, something that Evita refuses, to which Helena violently shouts for her to disappear and for the maid to come to see her out. Perhaps Helena’s move issues out of a desperate attempt at (negative) resistance, as she has come to see her complete subjugation to her husband’s wish that she remain locked up in the house while he is away, perhaps in line with Žižek’s view of not doing anything as the biggest violence. But if so, it is a violence that consumes her and renders her as manipulative as her oppressor. In this light, perhaps Akin’s voyeuristic use of the relationship between the two students, manipulative of the audience as he knows it is, ends up permitting a slight, even if naïve, glimmer of hope for relations between two human beings that are not based on violence—as those between Ali and Nejat, even if not strictly violent are always confrontational and those between Lotte and her mother, even if for different reasons, equally so. Cardoso, and Jorge before her, did not allow such a wishful view to emerge from either the novel or the film; the reality they had presented to the reader and viewer is definitely a harsher one but without risk of merely pandering to wishful thinking or our desire for, in Akin’s terms, a ‘sexy’ story. In terms of the principal gaze that informs the fi lms, there is a noticeable difference between the two fi lms, as well. In The Edge of Heaven the narrative is presented as a sort of puzzle, which viewers put together as the film scrolls on the screen, and as such it is perhaps abusive, or merely reductive, to try to pinpoint any one single perspective to it, especially as sometimes the focus is only on a couple of characters; if anything, only the director and the audience have access to how all the parts might fit together. Until the end the characters do not realize how enmeshed their various lives are and how the continuous series of mischances is in part responsible for the predicaments they face. And yet, allowing for all those constraints, I would still like to argue that the perspective of Nejat particularly informs the film as he is made to serve as a frame for the entire narrative, as both the beginning and end of the fi lm come full circle, or rather are revealed to be the same; at the very end the audience remains with his solitary figure gazing into the calm waters of the Black Sea, waiting for his father to return from

Coffi n Exchange 169 a fishing trip. Even though it would clearly be excessive to claim that we see what Nejat sees, as we also see more than what he could possibly see, his own gaze and the film’s tend to coalesce several times. In The Murmuring Coast, this is much clearer. For one, we do have the voice-over provided by Eva, the older Evita, which inevitably serves to explain and problematize that which the fi lm lets us see. Although this effect diverges from the novel, where one fi rst has a very conventional narrative, taking no more than some twenty pages, and then the “other” narrative of the comments by Eva on the previous “realist” account of events, in a sense it is successfully translated to the medium of fi lm. That is, rather than start with a seemingly innocent and realist scene and then present a whole other series of scenes, so as to fi nally revert to the initial scene which becomes in its second presenting a very different, laden one, as Akin did, Cardoso has decided to intersperse the narrating voice-over as a way of continuously questioning and problematizing the events shown by the camera. The result is that it becomes much more difficult not to transfer the perspective of the narrating voice over to the events shown. However, that effect is not actually what prompts me to note that there is an overwhelming gaze in Cardoso’s film and that it is a very different, even opposed, perspective in relation to Akin’s and Nejat’s. Rather, what I have in mind is a self-contained scene, a veritable mise-en-scène of the gaze, that opens as the film reaches its fi rst quarter (minute thirty-four in a fi lm that lasts just short of two hours). Preceding it we have an almost static image of Evita kneeling on the floor, looking like a battered woman after Luis has left on a mission without reconciling himself to the fact that she will not, unlike Helena, agree to be locked up in her room until his return. This fades to black and almost immediately we see a street night scene. Then for the next three minutes we follow Evita’s gaze through several rooms in the hotel, briefly listen in on the African storyteller entertaining women and children with his tales, then the back of the hotel’s kitchen, where other women are busy straightening their hair with hot irons. Finally we see Evita alone at the beach, drying herself off. As she dries her head, the camera pans around her face; she becomes the very center around which our view turns, until she turns her face in a given direction and the camera follows her gaze to the window of a house behind whose pane we can only just distinguish the figure of another woman, Helena. Whereas the gaze has been traditionally construed as male and oppressive, following on Laura Mulvey’s (1975) seminal, if controversial, elaboration of the concept in her well-known study on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ the way in which Cardoso constructs Evita’s gaze is as its opposite. It is a feminine gaze that does not seek to possess or objectify, but rather looks for a possibility of companionship and solidarity. As I have argued previously (Medeiros 2008), it is also a sort of a border gaze inasmuch as it not only subverts traditional uses of the gaze (and the camera work by focusing on Evita’s face rather than on her body also already subverts traditional male-oriented

170 Paulo de Medeiros representations of women in fi lm), but also suggests the possibility of transgressing the dominant violence of the state and the patriarchal order that it both enforces and depends on. Another element that distinguishes that short but crucial scene is its sound track; a French version of a song popular in the mid–1960s, ‘La nuit n’en fi nit plus’ or ‘The Night Will Never End,’ also recorded by Petula Clark as ‘Needles and Pins.’ 5 The use of the sound track helps reinforce the closed-in nature of the scene at the same time as it prevents the audience from ever just seeing the scene as if it were a realistic depiction of events. Indeed, as we follow Evita’s gaze—and that, too, is in itself a form of double gaze, ours and Evita’s, coalescing—into the house whose window she looks at, we see inside the figure of Helena reflected on the dial of an old-fashioned radio, out of which the song is coming. As such, there can be no mistaking the scene for anything but a complex reflection on the very process of fi lming, watching, and being watched in turn. Evita’s gaze would, even for a moment, seem to undo the violence she has become immersed in, and yet, not much later, that promise for an alternative way of being in the world marked by solidarity is smashed when Helena, unable to draw Evita into her form of revenge, explodes at Evita and expels her from the house. One might wish for a different outcome, but Cardoso remains consistent in her denunciation of the pervasiveness and violence characteristic of colonial societies. To offer the audience the possibility of a spontaneous love affair as Akin does in his fi lm would have been gratifying perhaps, but false. There are still two important scenes that I would like to contrast in regard to how both fi lms explore the issue of violence. Toward the end of Cardoso’s film, the soldiers return from their extended combat operation in complete frustration (there was no combat, the independence fighters continuously eluded them, the army was forced to stage skirmishes). We join Evita as she listens to part of a speech proffered by a blind captain on the greatness of the Portuguese nation. This scene is significant in a number of ways, but I want to focus on how it stages the blindness of state violence understood as its claims to sovereignty. And the scene I would like to compare it with in Akin’s film is one in which Lotte desperately tries to fi nd out how she might have access to her lover, who is captive in a Turkish prison for women. Also a very complex scene, I will limit myself to focus on how it exposes how violence in authoritarian societies is never just exclusive to the state but permeates all levels of society, including those that might be said to present a form of check to state power, if not directly oppose it. The speech by the blind captain would have been ridiculous even under different circumstances, but as it is proffered after a failed combat mission, and amid an escalation in violence in the streets of the capital—white residents have grown impatient with what they perceive as the metropolitan inability to solve the insurgency “problem” and have decided to indiscriminately assault black people, all of whom they view as connected to officially deemed “terrorists”—the speech assumes pathetic qualities. Indeed, having

Coffi n Exchange 171 a blind officer declare in stilted rhetoric the greatness of the nation and its teleological civilizing mission, with a large mural depicting the “Invincible Armada” in the background, is perhaps slightly overdone.6 But it effectively shows how decrepit Portugal’s vision of empire had become by the 1970s, how anachronistic, irrational, and violent it was. What that scene also does is demonstrate how perverted the state’s claim to sovereignty has been— something Evita at the very beginning also openly does during a lunch with Luis, Helena, and Forza Leal. And how questionable its designation of “terrorism” to classify the actions of the independence movements also has been. Furthermore, the officer’s blindness is indicative of an overall blindness to both the actual events taking place and the historical ones. Just as the “Invincible Armada” had been proof of the delusion of power enjoyed by the joint crowns of Castile and Portugal in the sixteenth century, so the blind officer’s speech can be seen as indicative of the delusional propaganda of Portugal’s Estado Novo. Akin’s scene is important because it not only shows the ineffectiveness of the rule of law in authoritarian regimes, thereby also questioning, even if lightly, the legitimacy of the state’s sovereign use of violence; it also lets us consider how violence gets duplicated at different levels. As Lotte seeks help from an organization engaged in prisoner’s rights, she is confronted with the fact that as she has no kin or legal relation to Ayten, she has no right to see her. But the scene is especially important in showing how the man Lotte addresses via an interpreter also assumes a position of superiority toward Lotte, confi rmed furthermore by his fi nal yielding to help her once she starts crying. Indeed, in that scene Akin succeeds in merging the issue of state-based violence with that of gendered violence in a way that suggests inextricable interconnections. One way in which Akin goes further than Cardoso is by not only letting the audience observe the way Lotte and her female interpreter are forced into a position of subalternity and submission by the contemptuous stance of the man who has the power to help her, but by actually forcing the original German audience to experience a similar impotence as not all that he says is translated.7 And in yet another scene depicting a violent altercation between Lotte’s mother, Susan, and Ayten, viewers are also confronted with the view, expressed by Ayten, that Europe’s belief in its own superiority is misplaced and that perhaps what Turkey wants is not to join the European Union but rather to be allowed to evolve its own future. One can be tempted to dismiss such a view as mere rant. However, the film does make quite visible how present-day Germany, in spite of the rule of law, still is unable to protect those who seek asylum but cannot demonstrate to the state’s satisfaction their urgent need. In spite of a prolonged and costly juridical process paid for by Lotte’s mother, Ayten still gets deported back to Turkey, where she is quickly imprisoned on the grounds of terrorism. Both films are highly political. The intertwined chance encounters and missed chances of Akin’s characters and the wrecked lives of the characters

172 Paulo de Medeiros of Cardoso’s film all attest to a violence of colonial origin that persists in the present. Cardoso’s film might be a means to allow the Portuguese to rethink Portugal’s involvement in the atrocities of the colonial war and how its state violently disrupted the lives of not only those who were killed under the claims of sovereignty, but many others, as well, yet it too is directed at the present. Mark Sabine (2009) lucidly reflects on how, besides focusing on the past, Cardoso’s fi lm also very much allows for a reflection on Portugal’s current positioning in Europe and especially on its US-led engagement in the “War on Terror.” His insistence that the fi lm works against the current wave of nostalgia in Portugal that would tend to frame the period of dictatorial rule as a benign one, is very much to the point.8 In the case of Akin’s film, there is no reason to tackle nostalgia as the current position of Germany or Turkey does not warrant it. Indeed, if anything, one could say that at times, even if not nostalgic, Akin’s film still slips into a sort of wellintentioned privileging of Turkey as the other of Europe, which, although clearly not orientalist, is perhaps more romantic than anything else. But The Edge of Heaven does confront viewers with the immediate conflicts afflicting both Turkey and Germany, as both must confront their internal tensions and the confl icts arising from migration. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of this chapter was written while I enjoyed the hospitality of Wadham College, Oxford, as Keeley Fellow. I express my thanks to the warden and other colleagues for their support and lively exchanges. The views expressed here on Margarida Cardoso’s film, especially on the question of the gaze, were fi rst presented at a meeting of the American Portuguese Studies Association at the University of Minnesota in 2006 and later expanded into a lecture broadcast as part of the series on ‘New Approaches to Film Studies’ of the University of Leeds Centre for World Cinema on 23 April 2008. My thanks to Prof. Lucia Nagib, its director, for her invitation to participate in that forum. NOTES 1. For a detailed critical take on the question of violence and how it is constitutive of cinema, see J. David Slocum’s essay on ‘Film Violence and the Institutionalization of the Cinema’ (2000). 2. For instance, in a recent article by Alistair Foster and Ed Black (2010), Tarantino is quoted as saying: ‘That’s why Thomas Edison created the motion picture camera—because violence is so good. It affects audiences in a big way. You know you’re watching a movie.’ 3. For a concise yet detailed overview of the processes involving transitional justice in the aftermath of 25 April 1974 in Portugal, see the article by António Costa Pinto on ‘Authoritarian Legacies, Transitional Justice and State Crisis in Portugal’s Democratization’ (2006).

Coffi n Exchange 173 4. See Victoria Fincham’s essay (2008) on German-Turkish cinema, violence, and the domestic sphere, with special relevance to Akin’s Gegen die Wand. 5. For a complementary reading of this scene that analyzes the use of color and its importance in the fi lm, see Mark Sabine’s essay on ‘Putting Violence back in the Picture: Margarida Cardoso’s A Costa dos Murmúrios and PostColonial War Anamnesis’ (2010). 6. The supposedly invincible fleet sent by Phillip II to invade England was defeated in 1588, ushering in the end of Spanish and Portuguese naval superiority and their then imperial hegemony. 7. I owe this insight to a lecture given by Birgit Kaiser on Auf der anderen Seite in the introduction to the fi lm held during the PCI (Postcolonial Studies Initiative) fi lm series held at Utrecht University in 2011. 8. Sabine (2009: 249) makes these two points clear when he writes: The strategies Cardoso’s fi lm adopts in translating Jorge’s novel—and in particular, its palimpsestic testimonial format—respond to contemporary reassessments both of Portugal’s relationship with Africa before and after the ignominious end to the country’s 500-year-long colonial presence on the continent, and of the role of Portugal in a North Atlantic alliance that is post–Cold War but perhaps only nominally post-colonial. This article focuses fi rst on how Cardoso’s fi lm alludes to recently resurgent nostalgia for the last decades of empire, and how it challenges photographic and cinematic depictions of empire as a benign civilising project by counterposing troubling images that expose the systemic violence of the Estado Novo’s colonialism. It also, however, remarks how Cardoso’s fi lm, released in 2005 in a country being reluctantly mustered by its centre-right government to a purportedly pivotal role in the US-led “War on Terror,” warns of how the memories and forgetting of colonial violence mould Portuguese attitudes to present and future confl ict.

REFERENCES A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast) (2004) Movie directed by Margarida Cardoso, Portugal: Atalanta Filmes. Arendt, Hannah (1970) On Violence, New York: Harcourt. Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) (2007) Movie directed by Fatih Akin, Germany: The Match Factory. Der Spiegel (2007) ‘Spiegel Interview with Director Fatih Akin: From Istanbul to New York,’ 28 September 2007, available at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,508521,00.html, accessed on 18 December 2011. Elsaesser, Thomas (2008) ‘Ethical Calculus: The Cross-Cultural Dilemmas and Moral Burdens of Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven,’ Film Comment, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 34–37, available at: http://www.fi lmcomment.com/article/the-edgeof-heaven-review, accessed on 15 August 2013. Fincham, Victoria (2008) ‘Violence, Sexuality and the Family: Identity “Within and Beyond Turkish-German Parameters” in Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand, Kutluğ Ataman’s Lola + Bilidikid and Anno Saul’s Kebab Connection,’ German as a Foreign Language, no. 1, pp. 39–72, available at: http://www.gfl-journal. de/1–2008/fi ncham.pdf, accessed on 18 December 2011. Foster, Alistair and Black, Ed (2010) ‘Quentin Tarantino: Violence Is What Makes Movies Good,’ London Evening Standard, 12 January 2010, available at: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23793981–quentin-tarantinoviolence-is-what-makes-movies-good.do, accessed on 18 December 2011.

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Gegen die Wand (Head-On) (2004) Movie directed by Fatih Akin, Germany: Universal. Jorge, Lídia (1988) A Costa dos Murmúrios, Lisbon: Dom Quixote. Medeiros, Paulo de (2008) ‘Double Takes: Violence, Representation, and the Border Gaze,’ Lecture at University of Leeds Centre for World Cinema, 23 April 2008. Mulvey, Laura (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 6–18. Pinto, António Costa (2006) ‘Authoritarian Legacies, Transitional Justice and State Crisis in Portugal’s Democratization,’ Democratization, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 173–204. Sabine, Mark (2009) ‘Killing (and) Nostalgia: Testimony and the Image of Empire in Margarida Cardoso’s A Costa dos Murmúrios,’ in Cristina DeMaria and Daly Macdonald (eds.) The Genres of Post-Conflict Testimony, Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, pp. 248–76. Sabine, Mark (2010) ‘Putting Violence back in the Picture: Margarida Cardoso’s A Costa dos Murmúrios and Post-Colonial War Anamnesis,’ in Helena Gonçalves da Silva, Adriana Alves de Paula Martin, Filomena Viana Guarda, and José Miguel Sardica (eds.) Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 291–303. Slocum, J. David (2000) ‘Film Violence and the Institutionalization of the Cinema,’ Social Research, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 649–81. Wheatley, Catherine (2008) ‘Review of The Edge of Heaven,’ Sight and Sound, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 62–64, available at: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ review/4221, accessed on 15 August 2013. Žižek, Slavoj (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Refl ections, New York: Picador.

Part III

Contact Zones Transitional Justice, Reconciliation, and Cosmopolitanism

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9

“Invisible Wars” Gendered Terrorism in the US Military and the Juárez Feminicidio Alicia Arrizón As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fi ll President Bush’s unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can’t help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don’t mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear. I mean from their own comrades—the men. —Helen Benedict (2007) ‘The Private War of Women Soldiers,’ p. 1

With this, Helen Benedict unveils her exposé of sexual abuse and rape culture in the US military as well as the revictimization of those who report such violence. Her book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (2009), is the inspiration to Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War (2012).1 Like the investigative and testimonial style used in Benedict’s research, The Invisible War focuses on the victims’ narratives about the motivations behind their military enlistment, their experience in the military, the horrors of the sexual assault, and the challenges they braved after reporting the rape. Both Dick’s documentary and Benedict’s writing give voice to women who have been sexually terrorized by their commanding officers and/or fellow soldiers. They also problematize the double standard applied by the US armed forces in its protection of men versus its lack of protection of women. I start from Benedict’s book and The Invisible War as primary sources for my analysis of the institutional gendered violence in the US military. By considering the military as an obvious site in which hypermasculinity, male hegemony, and the culture of violence pervade, my argument explicitly suggests that the gendered relations of power embedded in this particular institution produce and enable widespread and yet “invisible” terrorism aimed at its female soldiers.2 I examine rape as an act of terror exercised “collaterally”—a symptomatic tool of the “gendered war” or “gendered terrorism” ingrained in the military culture. How has the military failed its female soldiers so miserably? What is behind its failure to combat sex crimes and rape within its confi nes? Whereas I intend mainly to

178 Alicia Arrizón respond to these issues, I will also look at another documentary, Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Women) (2001), which focuses on the ongoing feminicidio (femicide) in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as another form of gendered terrorism—violence unleashed from within, against its own women. 3 I will examine the conditions that have prevented the Mexican government from stopping the hundreds of rapes, mutilations, tortures, and killings of women in the border city of the Juárez-El Paso metropolitan area. Connections between the subjects of the two documentaries, The Invisible War and Señorita extraviada, will be explored as I join the call of victims and survivors globally to count rape and feminicidio as forms of terrorism that violate basic human rights and to hold the perpetrators accountable.4

THE US MILITARY POST-9/11: WOMEN AT WAR The US waged a “War on Terror” in the Middle East after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, leading to the invasion and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A defi nite surge in patriotism followed 9/11. Enlistment of men and women in the US military soared to its highest levels since the Pearl Harbor attacks (Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee 2010). Since the beginning of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, military recruitment in low-income communities and/or in high schools populated by poor or immigrant populations increased substantially.5 The military recruitment system was cleared by the ‘No Child Left Behind’ education law of 2002, which guarantees that any school allowing college or job recruiters on campus must make the same provision for the military. This policy also allowed recruiters to have access to students’ home addresses and phone numbers. In a 2008 study, ‘Who Joins the Military?: A Look at Race, Class, and Immigration Status,’ Amy Lutz found that those with lower family income are more likely to join the military than those with higher family income and that a large percentage of minorities who have served in the armed forces are children of immigrants. Lutz’s study looked at the history of participation of the three largest racial and ethnic groups in the military—whites, blacks, and Latinos—and examined ethnicity, immigration status, and socioeconomic status in relation to military service. It concludes that significant disparities exist only by socioeconomic status, fi nding ‘the all-volunteer force continues to see overrepresentation of the working and middle classes, with fewer incentives for upper class participation’ (Lutz 2008: 185). Although comparisons in the context of racial-ethnic composition across armed services are made, Lutz’s study ultimately suggests that military recruiters continue to be more active targeting black and Latino youth, the working class, and poor communities. In general, the implication of the “poverty draft” is in some way marked in her analysis. Obviously, the US military has a long history of being the only “way out” for disfranchised communities, in particular during hard economic times and during war. As it was

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demonstrated during Operation Desert Storm, poor and racial minorities were being overly recruited, and thus died in war disproportionately. Likewise, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have redefi ned the role of women in the military. Benedict (2009: 3) points out in her book that more than ’206,000 women have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq, which is nearly five times more than in the 1991 Gulf War and twenty six times more than in the Vietnam.’ 6 US policy has previously excluded women from ground combat units although the prohibition against women serving in combat units was lifted in 1994. However, in Afghanistan and Iraq, women have served as foot soldiers during doorto-door operations and have participated in convoy escort assignments. Female soldiers have faced direct fi re in Iraq while serving in support roles, such as military police, helicopter pilots, and truck drivers (Benedict 2009; Holmstedt 2007; Oliver 2007; Solaro 2006). Consequently, they have fought and died in the Iraq war more than in any war since World War II. Drawing on the experiences of Iraq war veterans, The Lonely Soldier focuses on five women who served from 2003 to 2006: Mickiela Montoya, Jennifer Spranger, Abbie Pickett, Terris Dewalt-Johnson, and Eli PaintedCrow. Their stories are chronicled in three parts—before, during, and after their military stints. Benedict integrates her voice with the voice of her interviewees to show ‘what is like to be a woman at war’ (Benedict 2009: 3).7 As the book’s title suggests, Benedict claims that women in the military are lonely because of their isolation—often serving in platoons with few other women or none at all. She points out that their physical solitude is intensified by a blatant hostility toward women inherent in the military. This resentment, she says, ‘can cause problems that many female soldiers fi nd as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation and sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival’ (3). Interested in women’s increased role in the military, Benedict started interviewing female soldiers who mainly served in Iraq.8 ‘From the very fi rst woman soldier I met, I began to hear stories of abuse,’ she said (cited in Brown 2013). Her fi ndings expose the challenges faced by women in the military, depicting not only the dangers of enemy battle, but also the perils of rape by their fellow soldiers. According to Benedict, women are not respected by their male comrades: ‘despite the equal risks women are taking, they are still being treated as inferior soldiers and sex toys by many of their male colleagues’ (2007: 1). She points out that every woman she interviewed has said that the dangers of being raped by other soldiers had been so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers regularly told them not to go to the latrines or showers alone. As one of her interviewees told her, ‘it’s like sending three women to live in a frat house’ (2007: 1). According to Benedict (2009: 4), the idea of ‘women as sexual prey rather than responsible adults has always been part of the military, making it hard for female soldiers to win acceptance, let alone respect.’

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MILITARY RAPE CULTURE Carole Sheffield’s (1995) earlier work on sexual terrorism expands the notions of both gender violence and terrorism. As she puts it: The word terrorism invokes images of furtive organizations of the far right or left, whose members blow up buildings and cars, hijack airplanes, and murder innocent people in some country other than ours. But there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of things. Its target is females—of all ages, races, and classes. (1995: 409) Debates about what constitutes terrorism have significantly evolved in the Western and non-Western worlds: from the notion of “terror cimbricus,” which was used by ancient Romans to describe the terror felt as they prepared for an attack by fierce enemies, to the “Reign of Terror” of Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution and the horrendous accounts of colonization suffered by the indigenous populations in the Americas to the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Whereas many understand terrorism as the intentional use of violence against civilians in order to attain political aims, others believe that its power ‘lies precisely in its pervasive ambiguity, its invasion in our minds’ (Kimmel and Stout 2006: ix). In the context of the US “War on Terror,” “terrorism” had become a political construct skillfully, albeit deceptively, used on the American people to reelect President George W. Bush in 2004. By repeatedly connecting 9/11 and the Iraq war during his presidential campaign, regardless of the available evidence that has never confi rmed any link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush exploited the concept of “terrorism” and the fear it evokes to justify the destruction of Hussein and his regime, while ‘wag[ing] what he calls his godly “crusade” against terror in Iraq and around the world’ (Oliver 2007: 102). The discourse on terrorism in public media is generally devoid of any consideration and analysis of sexual violence or rape as terrorist acts. As counterdiscourse, the significance and urgency of treating rape and sexual abuse as forms of terrorism has been continually validated in feminist/ gender theory. Since the early 1970s, radical feminist perspectives have differentiated sexual violence and rape as forms of terrorism pervading “our” culture.9 Radical feminism has exercised considerable influence in the development of a discourse that considers rape as a deeply ingrained social practice that confers and reinforces the oppression of women (Card 1991; Griffin 1977; MacKinnon 1989; Peterson 1977). These articulations have distinguished rape and other forms of sexual violence as terrorist acts, which we, unfortunately, have learned to live with as simply societal problems. It is the blanket exclusion of the terrorism of sexual politics in

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the public sphere that has ‘maintain[ed] the invisibility of routine violence against women, underlying visible sexist stereotypes’ (Card 1996: 98). As shown in The Invisible War, there is an ongoing problem with sexual terrorism in the US military, which has resulted in a series of scandals. In the 1991 Tailhook scandal, more than a hundred navy and marine corps aviation officers were accused of having sexually assaulted at least eightythree women and seven men at the Thirty-Fifth Annual Tailhook Association Symposium in Las Vegas. In the 1996 Aberdeen Proving Ground sexual abuse scandal, thirty women fi led complaints of sexual assault and harassment against drill instructors. Additionally, the film refers to the 2003 US Air Force Academy sexual assault scandal, which involved not only claims of rape and sexual harassment, but also charges that the incidents had been ignored by the academy’s leadership. As the fi lm reveals, rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment continue to occur in the military at alarming rates year after year. It shows that more than 20 percent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted during their service—meaning one in five women in military service has been the victim of sexual assault. Brigadier General Loree Sutton suggests ‘witch hunting’ as an allegory to women’s abuse in the US armed forces, ‘particularly for a savvy perpetrator to work within a relatively close system like the military, it becomes a prime targetrich environment for a predator’ (The Invisible War 2012). This rampant sexual terrorism in the military clearly demonstrates that the enemy is not only “out there,” but is also within us. The fi lm features moving stories of several soldiers—a majority of women and a couple of men—in the US armed forces who have been subjected to sexual harassment, torture, sexual assault, and revictimization by a dysfunctional system that fails to protect their basic human rights. In their narratives, the female soldiers express many reasons for serving their country: to be the best they could be, to be a part of something they fi nd dignified, or just simply to see the world. Navy recruit Hannah Sewell wanted to continue a long family tradition of military. Her father, Sergeant Major Jerry Sewell, had to resign his position and give up his military career in order to speak freely in the fi lm. He tearfully recalls telling his daughter that ‘they [the navy] will take care of her.’ Instead, she was raped and beaten by a fellow recruit in 2008, ‘taking her virginity’ and leaving her with a severe back injury. Sewell remembers that her rapist demonstrated a sense of ownership and entitlement over her: ‘once he was done, he rubbed his hand all over [her] entire body and told [her] I own all this’ (The Invisible War 2012). This terrorist act was to frighten her even more, as a means of control and domination. Then Sewell was victimized again when the military conducted three bogus investigations and “lost” Sewell’s rape kit, the nurse’s examining report, and the photos of her injuries. That this gendered-rape-terrorism against female soldiers in the US military has continued unchecked for so long is underlined dramatically in The Invisible War. Also shown in the documentary is a military culture

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and judicial system that protect the perpetrators and punish the survivors by “blaming the victims.”10 Such a culture insists that a woman’s seduction leads a man on (i.e., by wearing sexy clothes or by not responding to sexual overtures), and when spurned, justifies his attack on her. Examples of behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, sexual objectification, and rape justifications. It routinely minimizes sexual violence, subjecting any woman willing to speak up about it to further violence and humiliation. Such were the experiences reported in The Invisible War of marine lieutenants Elle Helmer and Ariana Klay, who both served at the prestigious Marine Barracks Washington. In 2006, when Helmer reported to her commander that a superior officer had assaulted and raped her the night before, her colonel discouraged her from getting a rape kit. Against his objections, she sought and received a thorough medical examination, but her rapist’s supervisor still refused to press charges or punish her assailant. When she appealed this decision, Helmer became the subject of investigation and prosecution instead. She was ultimately forced to leave the marine corps, whereas her rapist remained in good standing. Likewise, Ariana Klay’s horrifying experience shows the military’s (over) protection of men and its lack of protection of women. Klay was assaulted by a senior officer and her civilian boss. When she fi led charges, the marine corps said she must have welcomed the attacks because she wore makeup and skirts. Her husband, US Marine Corps Captain Ben Klay, recounts his wife’s ordeal, her junior marines calling her ‘slut,’ ‘whore,’ and ‘walking mattress.’ 11 According to Klay, a senior officer in her command told her, ‘female Marines here are nothing but objects for marines to fuck’ (The Invisible War 2012), thereby virtually relegating them as “comfort women.” Klay and Helmer represent two of five cases (reported in the fi lm) of sexual assault at Marine Corps Barracks; four of the victims were investigated or punished by the military, but none of their attackers were courtmartialed. This victim-blaming system even charged a female soldier of adultery after she was raped by a married senior officer, despite the fact that she was single. This victim blaming misses the point that rape is not about sex; it is about power. According to Catharine MacKinnon (2005: 248), sexual assault is enforced by gender/sex hierarchic inequalities that can only be reduced when legally recognized as such. She insists on a rape law that recognizes sexual assault as a result of social inequalities between dominants and subordinates and therefore provides a judicial system that punishes rapists. The statistics and survivors’ stories shown in the fi lm indicate that most military sex offenders and rapists can and do get away with their crimes. A big part of the problem is the military justice system, which mandates that charges such as rape and sexual harassment are heard not by an independent judiciary but by one’s immediate commanding officer. In many situations, the perpetrator himself or a close friend would take on that role. Thus, the power inequality follows the survivor even as she attempts to fi nd

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relief through the military “justice” system. As statistics reveal, 25 percent of the service women did not report their rape because the person to report to was the rapist (The Invisible War 2012).12 The conflict of interests problem partially explains why 80 percent of sexual assaults in the military are never reported. These coercive conditions, reinforced by systems of inequality, are inherent in the military. It begins in the basic training camp, which is ‘designed to undermine all the past concepts and beliefs of the new recruit, to undermine his civilian values, to change his self concept—subjugating him entirely to the military system’ (Shalit 1988: 317). Through the implementation of the “drill,” the military culture reinforces a hierarchical system in which the relationship between the instructor and the trainee creates an abusive environment. With the increasing numbers of women joining the military, ‘the great differential in power between trainers and trainees, and with the lack of mediation or effective oversight, abuse can assume a sexist form’ (Burke 2004: 20). Among the most obvious gendered governmental institution, the military is an established entity where “boys will be boys.” This system, according to Benedict (2009: 5), ‘is still permeated with stereotypes of women as weak, passive sex objects who have no business fighting and cannot be relied upon in battle.’ Men dominate the military, both numerically and practically. As an institution that permits training ‘to operate as a male rite of passage’ (Burke 2004: 20), the impact of the military on those outside this frame is catastrophic. It creates a hostile culture for women. Because women are categorically left out of masculinity, the effects of military culture seem structured indirectly to encourage sexual assault. Therefore, although in The Invisible War and the media in general, the notion of “rape epidemic” is commonly used, describing a system in which rape and sexual violence against women are common, I prefer to use “rape culture” or “culture of rape.” In the words of Mickiela Montoya, a veteran interviewee in Benedict’s book, ‘there are only three things the guys let you be if you are girl in the military—a bitch, a ho, or a dyke’ (Benedict 2009: 5). The terrorist act perpetrated on Kori Cioca by her commanding officer in the US Coast Guard demonstrates such power inequality. Cioca testified that her commanding officer stalked and harassed her for weeks prior to the attack: ‘I’d walk in from training and he’d be sleeping in my bed.’ Although she tried to report the officer to those in charge, ‘they were all his drinking buddies’ (The Invisible War 2012). They minimized her concerns, telling her that it was weak to complain just because she did not like him. Ultimately, the officer beat and raped her in 2005, violently crushing her jaw in the process. After reporting the rape to her senior chief, he nonchalantly told Cioca that they needed the offending officer for training duty and that she would be fi ne. The documentary follows her ordeal: Cioca is in constant pain because of the jaw injury, unable to eat anything but soft food, and experiencing extreme difficulties in convincing the Veterans Affairs office to approve the jaw surgery she urgently needs.13

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Whereas combat trauma is still the leading cause of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among men, rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are the leading causes of PTSD among women veterans. As demonstrated in The Invisible War, sexual violence is often a risk factor for homelessness among women veterans. In addition to depression and other mental health issues associated with surviving military sexual violence, victims experience high rates of substance abuse and have difficulty finding work after discharge from the military. Veteran Trina McDonald, who was drugged and raped repeatedly by military policemen in her naval station in Alaska, suffers from PTSD and went through a period of homelessness and addiction before finally finding a stable life with marriage and children. Although she found love and a supportive partner, her sexual abuse trauma continues to affect McDonald and her relationships. Like McDonald, Regina Vasquez was also drugged and raped. She was nineteen when she joined the marine corps; she served four years. She reveals that she was gang-raped: ‘I still remember them. I remember the sounds, the smells and not being able to move. Watching my own horror flick: wanting to scream and I couldn’t. I wanted to die. I lost my smile. I lost my laughter’ (The Invisible War 2012).14 As expected, hypermasculine values and hegemonic masculinity are eminently marked in the military. Whereas hypermasculinity has been psychologically linked with the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior, and thus associated with sexual and physical aggression against women, hegemonic masculinity is established through one group’s power over another, conceived of as controlled through domination. A number of studies have linked military culture to hypermasculinity and tendencies toward sexual coercion against females (Burke 2004; Hunter 2007; Morris 1996; Solaro 2006). One of the fi rst studies of hypermasculinity developed an “inventory” to measure a “macho” personality constellation consisting of three components: calloused sex attitudes toward women, violence as a manly trait, and danger situations as exciting (Mosher and Sirkin 1984). Developed almost thirty years ago, the study provides the basis to comprehend some of the characteristics attached to the understanding of hypermasculine norms. Aside from this generalization, the “code” of hypermasculinity in the military fosters rampant misogyny and homophobia. Through the former discriminatory policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ (repealed in 2011), institutionalized homophobia in the military requires the exclusion of homosexuality and the compulsiveness of heterosexuality. Accusations of lesbianism, according to Benedict (2009: 169), ‘have been used to silence gay and straight women who report sexual abuse or other misdoings, to punish those who rebuff sexual advances or excel in their jobs, and to drum such women out of the military altogether.’ Conceptually, hegemonic masculinity stands for men’s dominant social power over women and subordinated identities perceived as “feminine,” “inferior,” and “weak” in a given cultural frame or society (Connell 1995, 2005; Donaldson 1993). The conceptualization of hegemonic

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masculinity derives from the theory of cultural hegemony influenced by Antonio Gramsci, which is meant to critique power relations among social classes. The word “hegemony,” in this case, suggests the triumph of the dominant classes in developing their defi nition of reality in such a way that it is accepted by other classes as common view. Thus, it refers to the cultural dynamics in which a social organization or institution claims and maintains a dominant position in a hierarchy of opposites. In this context, military masculinities are established within a system that maintains male domination by denigrating women while reinforcing the hypermasculine “real” domain. On a larger scale, the hegemonic masculine threat can be perceived within the historic sanctions of women’s patriarchal narrative of domination: in what settings were men allowed to beat their wives, or fathers to legally dictate who their daughters married; in what circumstance was rape justified or overlooked (e.g., a master could rape his slaves, a husband could rape his wife); how long did it take for women to have the right to vote, hold property, or to have reproductive rights? These inquiries are boundless and relentless. According to Sheila Jeffreys, the “required” military hypermasculinity as the basis of warfare contributes to the legitimization of violence, which puts women in double jeopardy. In her article ‘Double Jeopardy: Women, the US Military and the War in Iraq’ (2007), Jeff reys argues that women not only face the dangers of being killed and wounded by the enemy (when in combat), but also are confronted with the dangers of rape and sexual abuse from their fellow soldiers. She suggests that the characterization of the military as ‘an inflated coercive masculinity’ (20) helps to elucidate the pervasiveness of sexual violence exercised by male soldiers against their female comrades. The Invisible War exhibits the pain and consequences of such sexual terrorism, demonstrates the strength and resilience of the survivors in rebuilding their lives, and illustrates their courage and hardships in fighting for justice. The fi lmmaker’s use of testimony as a crucial source of empowerment provides agency to the interviewees. Their compelling narratives of experienced terror produce an alternative means for confronting not only their perpetrator and victimizer (figuratively speaking), but also their inner traumatized self. Together, their testimonies represent the realities of individual and collective suffering in a culture largely defi ned by hegemonic masculinity and hypermasculinity, sexual coercion, and inequality.

BORDERLESS GENDERED TERRORISM Radical feminist discourses have linked rape culture or the effects of institutionalized rape to “feminicide” (some use femicide), which is also motivated by the sense of ownership and entitlement over women (Caputi and Russell 1992; Fregoso and Bejarano 2010; Gaspar de Alba and Guzmán 2010; Pineda-Madrid 2011; Wright 2006). Although the notion of feminicide

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epitomizes the most extreme forms of misogynistic violence, it stems from the violation of human rights of women in the public and private sphere. In Mexico, the term has been widely used by activists and scholars to describe the murders of women and girls and the impunity that surrounds them. In the introduction to their edited volume Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas (2010), Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano argue in favor of the term “feminicide” as they consider the competing perspectives regarding the terms “femicide” and “feminicide.” Fregoso and Bejarano defi ne femicide as the gendered counterpoint to homicide, or as a way of characterizing the murder of women. According to them, femicide does not capture the complexity of gender-based violence and the notion of feminicide offers an alternative perspective to understanding its implicit terrorism. They explain their ‘cartography’ of feminicide by proposing ‘a reconfiguration of knowledge hierarchies that contests the notion of seamless translation—that is, the idea that Latin American feminists have merely appropriated theories from feminists of the global north without modifying or advancing new meaning in response to local contexts’ (5). The two authors consider that feminicide not only describes the phenomenon of widespread gender-based violence, but also provides a new framework for terrorist violence studies. Significantly, their use of feminicide functions as cognate of the Spanish feminicidio. Here, I use the Spanish feminicidio to refer to the Juárez rapes and killings of women. Since 1993, the number of feminicidios continues to rise despite international pressure and government-led initiatives. For more than two decades, hundreds of women and girls have been murdered in the Mexican city of Juárez (Chihuahua State) across the border from El Paso, Texas. Although the exact numbers are difficult to confirm, the body count is anywhere from four hundred to as high as one thousand or more. In 2005, Amnesty International reported that since 1993 more than 370 young women and girls have been murdered in Juárez and Chihuahua—‘at least a third suffering sexual violence—without the authorities taking proper measures to investigate and address the problem’ (Amnesty International 2005). The Juárez feminicidio targets a specific group of women and girls: young women from impoverished backgrounds, who work either as waitresses or in the maquiladora industry (manufacturing operation) or are students. Independent filmmaker Lourdes Portillo reports in her 2001 documentary, Señorita extraviada, that more than 270 young women have been raped and murdered in shocking and gruesome ways at the border of Juarez and El Paso, Texas.15 Similar to The Invisible War, Señorita extraviada uses the testimonial mode to provide agency to parents and families of the victims and the disappeared. They express their frustration and distrust of the Mexican authorities investigating their daughters’ disappearance and/or murder. The Mexican polic
a have seemed to follow bizarre leads unsuccessfully while ignoring or failing to investigate evidence of police complicity. With evidence destroyed, crime scenes contaminated, fi les lost, information

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ignored, and disinformation spread, the “investigation” brings neither answer nor relief to the people of Juárez. Suspects ranged from a man with a history of sexual harassment to gang members working with others or on their own. Portillo asks pointed questions in the fi lm. Is it a conspiracy of bus drivers or the work of drug traffickers? Are the police involved? After years of investigation, no one has been prosecuted for these crimes and the feminicidio continues.16 The police have routinely dismissed the parents when they report their daughters missing, claiming that the missing girls are probably working as prostitutes or strippers or have run off with boyfriends. The discourse of the “prostitute-victim” is a common reaction of state officials. They have used this as justification of the Juárez feminicidio: blaming the victims for somehow bringing the violence on themselves, and, thus, the victims have no right to justice because they are not “innocent.” The discourse of the “prostitute-victim” is rooted in the gender power relationships entrenched in Mexico’s (and elsewhere) machismo and marianismo. Both have contributed to demarcate the virgin–whore dichotomy. As a form of hypermasculinity, machismo leads to aggression and domination; marianismo constitutes the compulsive normative feminine role forced on women. Women are expected to be pure and passive like the Virgin Mary and should fulfill only domestic roles (as wives and mothers) and not take part in paid labor outside the domestic sphere. The dichotomy simply implies that women must assume subservient roles, either as virgins to be protected or, when they disobey, as whores to be punished by men. One of the most disturbing stories in Señorita extraviada is the interview with Maria, the victim of a sexual attack by police officers. She and her husband had called the police when someone attempted to attack her husband. Instead of arresting the attacker, Maria and her husband were detained and imprisoned. Maria was assaulted by police officers in prison and was told that it was common for women to be raped and beaten while in prison. According to Maria’s testimony, one of the officers showed her an album with photos of several young women taken to the desert and surrounded by guards who apparently had raped and tortured them. In the film, Maria describes the terror and hopelessness of the women in the photos. Maria did not fi le a complaint about her attackers because of threats made while she was in jail and her fear that perhaps all officials were like the ones who abused her. In the end, she decided to report her abusers, who were supposedly prosecuted but were set free soon after. The movie suggests that the authorities may be involved in the deaths and disappearance of women. The media and investigations following the feminicidio over the years have often implicated state police officers, drug traffickers, and the upperclass “juniors” (sons of the wealthy), among many others. In 2004, the arrests of several state police officers suspected of involvement in the drug cartel and in the feminicidio, led to a confession of an unidentified suspect who claimed that each time a major drug shipment crossed the border into

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the US, members of the cartel would celebrate by killing women. Some cartel members were even found wearing chains around their neck with the nipples of their victims. From 2004 to 2006, about 130 state officials were implicated in the feminicidio through the work of federal special prosecutors, but the majority of suspects were not convicted (Pineda-Madrid 2011; Rodriguez, Montané, and Pulitzer 2007). In the summer of 2013, a report announced the arrest of twelve people in connection to the killings of eleven women. According to the prosecutors’ office for the northern state of Chihuahua, alleged drug dealers, pimps, and small store owners were among the suspects. They allegedly belonged to a cartel that forced young women into prostitution and drug dealing and then killed them when they are ‘no longer of use’ (Fox News Latino 2013). Whereas Señorita extraviada represents a cry for justice for the young women of Juárez, whose deaths have been ignored for two centuries, the documentary’s powerful footage also shows a disturbing portrait of Juárez, ‘the city of the future,’ as Portillo calls it in the fi lm’s description. The irony implicit in her remark alludes to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which has resulted in the expansion of the maquiladora industry, creating a labor force mainly for women.17 The availability of cheap labor has been a great motivator for owners to open factories in Mexico, and the abundance of employment has motivated many women to migrate from southern regions of Mexico to border towns such as Juárez. Statistics of the gender representation in the maquiladoras show that for every three male workers, there are seven women between the ages of fi fteen and twenty-five. Studies have shown a significant correlation between economic and political issues and violence against women along the border (Herrera et al. 2010). The maquiladora labor force has grown to nearly a quarter million workers in more than three hundred plants in the city, most of them owned by US businesses. In the midst of capital expansion on the border, economic and political structures fluctuate ‘between the formal and the informal, the legal and the illegal’ (González Rodríguez 2012: 8). Between paradoxes and contradictions, the perverse effects of institutional corruption and impunity consume the city’s inhabitants. In his book, The Femicide Machine (2012), journalist Sergio González Rodríguez sees the implementation of the maquiladora industry as a transborder, ultracapitalist scheme that contributes to the transformation of Juárez into what he calls the ‘femicide-machine.’ He uses the machine allegory to explain what seems to be an almost incomprehensible level of misogynistic violence and systematic failure of the Mexican authorities to address the feminicidio effectively. I read his ‘femicide machine’ as a neocolonial, patriarchal contact zone where the abstract terror of capitalism and globalization intersects with entrenched machismo and male hegemony in a judicially corrupt state (Chihuahua) plagued by drug trafficking. Thus the Juárez victims become everyday victims of this capitalist/criminal machine, to

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use González’s allegory, the casualties of what MacKinnon (2006) calls ‘male reality.’ Although women are needed in the labor force, and therefore indispensable as a group, they are undervalued and invisible as individuals (and thus easy to disappear) in this highly volatile contact zone. Similarly, although female soldiers have become a significant force in the US military, they are made “invisible” or less than by the military’s double standard of protecting the men and not protecting the women. The military’s continued failure to recognize that rape is enforced by its coercive conditions of gender/sex hierarchic inequalities is itself an act of terror against women.

CONCLUSION: PERFORMING ACTIVISM AND EMPOWERMENT Although the documentaries The Invisible War and Señorita extraviada were made eleven years apart, the filmmakers have the same goal of representing the forces of misogynistic violence while raising public awareness. Both fi lms not only inform, but represent calls for action in their own contexts. Señorita extraviada follows the grassroots tradition of feminist activism; the release of The Invisible War initiated a campaign run by FitzGibbon Media in partnership with the fi lmmakers, turning the documentary into a project for change. The fi lm has effected a policy change in the Pentagon: after watching the fi lm, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ordered that sexual assault investigations be conducted by a higher ranking colonel instead of the unit’s immediate commanding officer, and that each branch of the armed forces establish its own Special Victims Unit. Through the campaign, a petition was launched to urge the US Senate to move the decision to prosecute military sexual assault out of the chain of command. Another petition has persuaded the Department of Defense to use the fi lm as a training tool and it has become part of the Pentagon’s curriculum. It is also apparent that the fi lm and its campaign have made the “invisible” visible by placing the US military and its handling of sexual abuse scandals under heightened public scrutiny. In the 2011 Lackland Air Force sexual abuse scandal, the air force investigated twenty-five military training instructors for allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from unprofessional relationships to rape, against forty-nine victims. Five of those instructors have been court-martialed and convicted, two more scheduled for court-martial, and one has received nonjudicial punishment as of November 2012. Significantly, the air force is also investigating the environment at Lackland that allowed this misconduct to occur. According to a public affairs officer at the Pentagon, ‘this swift response would not have happened without the fi lm’s influence’ (FitzGibbon Media 2013). On the other front, since the release of Señorita extraviada in 2001, Portillo has distributed copies of the film among grassroots groups throughout the southwest, the US–Mexico border, and Mexico City. The movie is used as a

190 Alicia Arrizón tool to raise public awareness and to fund-raise for the families of the murdered and the disappeared. As Fregoso (2003: 26) notes, this process of ‘radicalization’ empowers the agency of the mothers of the victims and activists on the border, ‘women who affirm the continuity of life while acting as politically motivated citizens demanding the rights of women within the nationstate.’ Señorita extraviada marks a critical juncture for Portillo as a human rights activist: she becomes involved in all aspects of seeking social change, as director, narrator, feminicide detective, and interviewer. She affirms her role in her website: ‘as I traveled with it throughout Latin America and to other continents, presenting it in festivals, on college campuses, and to civil liberties groups, I understood for the first time that this is my job as a filmmaker: to teach, mentor and inspire others to be fiercely courageous and endlessly creative in making documentaries that confront oppression.’ 18 The rape culture in the US military and the feminicidio in Ciudad Juárez are but two examples of the gender-based terrorism occurring globally, which calls for the envisioning of effective borderless projects to reevaluate human rights violations against women as symptomatic of gender/sex hierarchic inequalities that extend beyond geopolitical borders.19 NOTES 1. The Invisible War premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, receiving the US Documentary Audience Award and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Eighty-Fifth Oscar Academy Awards. 2. Although statistics report that also men are sexually assaulted by other men, most sexual assault victims are women. According to Benedict (2009: 6), ’27–30 percent of military men say they received “unwanted sexual attention” from other men, including rape.’ 3. Since 1993, the border city of Juárez (bordering El Paso, Texas) has been a killing field of young women—the site of hundreds of unsolved murders and many abductions. According to the Amnesty International report Mexico: Intolerable Killings (2003), one-third of the women murdered since 1993 were in their early teens. The young women were raped and mutilated and their bodies dumped in the desert periphery or on city streets. 4. The Global Partnership to End Violence against Women was launched in March 2010 by the Avon Foundation, Vital Voices Global Partnership, and the US State Department. Since then, international multidisciplinary experts and nongovernmental organizations gather annually to develop and create global action plans to end gender-based violence. The last meeting was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the Summer of 2013. 5. The US armed forces has five military branches: army, air force, navy, marine corps, and coast guard. 6. An official report by David F. Burrelli, Women in Combat: Issues for Congress (2013), indicates that from September 2001 to 28 February 2013, 299,548 female service members have been deployed for ‘contingency operations’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. In approximately twelve years of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than eight hundred women have been wounded and more than 130 have died. According to the Department of Defense, 16,407 female members were deployed in ‘contingency operation’ as of 29 February 2013.

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7. Benedict points out that all but one of the soldiers interviewed did not allow her to use their real names. In cases where real names were used, the participants had already separated from the military. 8. Although Benedict notes that a few interviewees had also served in the Afghanistan war or elsewhere, the majority who participated in her study served in Iraq. 9. Since the early 1970s, radical feminists have linked terror to women’s oppression. For example, in ‘Rape: An Act of Terror’ (1973: 233), Barbara Mehrhof and Pamela Kearon argue that the ideology of sexism justifies rape as a political act which is embedded in the praxis of subordination by ‘members of a dominant class on members of the powerless class.’ 10. William Ryan coined the phrase ‘blaming the victim’ in his 1971 book Blaming the Victim, describing victim blaming as an ideology used to justify racism and social injustice against black people in the US. The phrase ‘blaming the victim’ was adopted later by advocates for crime victims, in particular rape victims accused of fostering their victimization. 11. The use of “walking mattress” implies that a woman receives a promotion by having sex with superiors. The abbreviation WM in the military is used for both woman marine and walking mattress. Other misogynist terms used against women in the military culture are “fresh fi sh,” “wookie monster,” “waste money,” and “target practice” (Wilson 2011). 12. The statistics reported in The Invisible War are from studies by the US government. These are some statistics revealed in the fi lm: an estimated five hundred thousand men and women in the military have been sexually assaulted since World War II; and in 2009, an estimated twenty thousand men were victims of military sexual assault. An estimated 15 percent of recruits attempted or committed rape before entering service—which is double the rate in civilian society. 13. As shown in the documentary, the Veterans Affairs office denied Kori Cioca’s request for jaw surgery. In a recent interview, Cioca revealed that anonymous donors who had seen the fi lm contributed to help pay for her jaw surgery (Kiesewetter 2013). 14. Regina Vasquez’s testimony is briefly featured in the fi lm. An extended version of her testimony is included in the fi lm’s ‘Extras,’ wherein her husband John Vasquez is also interviewed. He describes Vasquez’s journey to recovery: she did not disclose the military rape to him for years, making it difficult for him to understand her deep-seated anger. Apparently, it took her eleven years to work through the sexual trauma. In part, her “recovery” took form through her creativity and activism. Vasquez’s art, called Fatigues Clothesline, was part of an exhibit ‘Overlooked/Looked Over’ at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago (February–September 2012). After the exhibit, she founded the organization Fatigues Clothesline, described on its website as ‘a vehicle which bridges a gap between survivors and their family, their therapists and the advocates who are advocating for us in Washington DC by providing communication, symbolism, awareness and change regarding military sexual trauma.’ On the website Vasquez also introduces herself: ‘My name is Regina Vasquez. I am a United States Marine Corps Veteran, survivor of military rape, military sexual harassment and gender discrimination.’ See http://www.fatiguesclothesline.com/default.html, accessed on 24 September 2013. 15. The fi lm was awarded the Special Jury Award (2002) at the Sundance Film Festival; the Nestor Almendros Prize at the Human Rights Watch New York Film Festival (2002); the Distinguished Achievement Award and the IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards, Feature Competition by

192 Alicia Arrizón

16.

17.

18. 19.

the International Documentary Association (2002 and 2003); Best Documentary Award at the Havana International Film Festival (2002); El Ariel Award, Best Mexican Documentary at the La Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematograficas (2002); and the Official Selection at the International Public Television INPUT Conference (2003). According to statistics provided by Casa Amiga, a nonprofit organization that shelters many victims of sexual crimes and other types of violence, between 1993 and 2007 (before Mexican President Felipe Calderón escalated the war against the cartels in Juárez), there were a total of 385 women reported murdered. From 2008 to 2011, Casa Amiga reported that there were 789 women officially reported murdered, a more than 100 percent increase despite a saturation of military and federal police in the city. Through June of 2012, another sixty women have been killed, reports show (see Kolb 2012). Several organizations such as Casa Amiga have been formed as a response to the feminicidio: Amigos de Mujeres (Friends of Women), Justica Para Nuestra Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters), Mujeres de Negro (Women in Black), Mujeres Por Juárez (Women for Juárez), and Nuestras Hijas de Regreso A Casa (May Our Daughters Come Home). Susana Chávez Castillo, a wellrespected activist who was an active member in Nuestras Hijas de Regreso A Casa, was herself murdered and mutilated in Juárez in early January 2011. Her body was found strangled with a bag over her head and her left hand cut off. Sadly, and ironically, she coined and popularized the slogan ‘not one more death’ (Ni una muerte más). Maquiladoras originated in Mexico in the 1960s along the US–Mexico border. However, the number of maquiladoras has increased exponentially after NAFTA. Maquiladoras are factories created to reduce production costs for capitalist investors by employing cheaper Mexican labor: they produce electronic equipment, clothing, plastics, furniture, appliances, and auto parts. A majority of the maquiladoras are owned by US companies; some are owned by investors from Japan and European countries. The maquiladoras are also considered sweatshops where mainly young women work for as little as fi fty cents per hour. In Juárez, maquiladoras are known for providing free buses to transport their workers from work to home and vice versa. However, reports exist that many women who get on those buses do not make it home. As suggested by Portillo in Señorita extraviada, the bus drivers may be implicated in the feminicidio. See Portillo’s personal website: http://www.lourdesportillo.com/index.php, accessed on 30 July 2013. Rape has become another instrument of war and genocide at the end of the twentieth century. From the confl icts in Bosnia and Herzegovina to Rwanda, girls and women have been raped, tortured, imprisoned, and executed. The UN has reported that in Rwanda between 100,000 and 250,000 women were raped during the three months of genocide in 1994 and estimates that up to 60,000 women were raped in the former Yugoslavia (1992–1995). As reported in 1998 by the UN, sexual violence during wartimes is tacitly accepted as inevitable (see UN Department of Public Information 2013).

REFERENCES Amnesty International (2003) Mexico: Intolerable Killings: Ten Years of Abductions and Murders in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, 11 August 2003, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3f4dcd7d0.html, accessed on 24 September 2013.

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Amnesty International (2005) ‘Mexico: Justice Fails in Ciudad Juarez and the City of Chihuahua,’ 27 February 2005, available at: http://www.amnestyusa.org/ node/55339, accessed on 15 July 2013. Benedict, Helen (2007) ‘The Private War of Women Soldiers,’ Salon, 7 March 2007, available at: http://www.salon.com/2007/03/07/women_in_military/, accessed on 3 July 2013. Benedict, Helen (2009) The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, Boston: Bacon Press. Brown, Kristen V. (2013) ‘The Woman behind “The Invisible War,”’ TimesUnion, 17 April 2013, available at: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Thewoman-behind-The-Invisible-War-4442924.php, accessed on 4 July 2013. Burke, Carol (2004) Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture, Boston: Beacon Press. Burrelli, David F. (2013) Women in Combat: Issues for Congress, report for Congressional Research Service, 9 May 2013, available at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/ crs/natsec/R42075.pdf, accessed on 24 September 2013. Card, Claudia (1991) ‘Rape as a Terrorist Institution,’ in Raymond G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris (eds.) Violence, Terrorism, and Justice, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 296–319. Card, Claudia (1996) The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Caputi, Jane and Russell, Diana E. H. (1992) ‘Femicide: Sexist Terrorism against Women,’ in Jill Radford and Diana E.H. Russell (eds.) Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, New York: Twayne Publishers, pp. 13–24. Connell, Raewyn W. (1995) Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press. Connell, Raewyn W. (2005) Masculinities, 2nd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Donaldson, Mike (1993) ‘What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?’ Theory and Society, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 643–57. FitzGibbon Media (2013) ‘The Invisible War. Exposing a Shameful Secret: The Epidemic of Rape within the US Military,’ available at: http://www.fitzgibbonmedia.com/casestudies/the-invisible-war/, accessed on 13 August 2013. Fox News Latino (2013) ‘Mexico Arrests 12 in Connection to Ciudad Juárez Femicides,’ 12 June 2013, available at: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/ news/2013/06/12/mexico-arrests-12–in-connection-to-ciudad-juarez-femicides/, accessed on 10 August 2013. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda (2003) MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda and Bejarano, Cynthia (eds.) (2010) Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia and Guzmán, Georgina (2010) Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera, Austin: University of Texas Press. González Rodríguez, Sergio (2012) The Femicide Machine, trans. M. ParkerStainback, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Griffi n, Susan (1977) ‘Rape: The All-American Crime,’ in Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A. Elliston, and Jane English (eds.) Feminism and Philosophy, Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, pp. 313–32. Herrera, Sonia, Farrera, Laia, Muixí, Marta, Sierra, Dolors and Giró, Xavier (2010) Documentaries on Femicide in Ciudad Juárez, Barcelona: Government of Catalonia, Ministry of Home Affairs, Institutional Relations and Participations, available at: http://lalentevioleta.fi les.wordpress.com/2012/06/ mpdh_18cat_englishversion.pdf, accessed on 24 September 2013. Holmstedt, Kirsten (2007) Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq, Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.

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Hunter, Mic (2007) Honor Betrayed: Sexual Abuse in America’s Military, Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade. Jeff reys, Sheila (2007) ‘Double Jeopardy: Women, the US Military, and the War in Iraq,’ Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 30, pp. 16–25. Kiesewetter, John (2013) ‘Woman at Film’s Center Fights her own “Invisible War”,’ USA Today, 21 February 2013, available at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/ news/nation/2013/02/21/invisible-war-cioca/1937479/, accessed on 24 September 2013. Kimmel, Paul R. and Stout, Chris E. (eds.) (2006) Collateral Damage: The Psychological Consequences of America’s War on Terrorism, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Kolb, Joseph (2012) ‘Violence against Women Worse Than Ever in Juarez, Experts Say,’ Fox News Latino, 5 July 2012, available at: http://latino.foxnews.com/ latino/news/2012/07/05/violence-against-women-worse-than-ever-in-juarezexperts-say/, accessed on 24 September 2013. Lutz, Amy (2008) ‘Who Joins the Military?: A Look at Race, Class, and Immigration Status,’ Journal of Political and Military Sociology, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 167–88. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (2005) Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (2006) Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mehrhof, Barbara and Kearon, Pamela (1973) ‘Rape: An Act of Terror,’ in Anne Koedt, Ellen Lavine, and Anita Rapone (eds.) Radical Feminism, New York: Quadrangle Books, pp. 228–33. Monahan, Evelyn M. and Neidel-Greenlee, Rosemary (2010) A Few Good Women: America’s Military Women from World War I to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morris, Madeline (1996) ‘By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture,’ Duke Law Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 651–781. Mosher, Donald L. and Sirkin, Mark (1984) ‘Measuring a Macho Personality Constellation,’ Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 150–63. Oliver, Kelly (2007) Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media, New York: Columbia University Press. Peterson, Susan R. (1977) ‘Coercion and Rape: The State as a Male Protection Racket,’ in Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A. Elliston, and Jane English (eds.) Feminism and Philosophy, Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, pp. 360–71. Pineda-Madrid, Nancy (2011) Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Rodriguez, Teresa, Montané, Diana and Pulitzer, Liza (2007) The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border, New York: Atria Books. Ryan, William J. (1971) Blaming the Victim, New York: Pantheon Books. Señorita extraviada (2001) Documentary directed by Lourdes Portillo, US: Xochitl Productions. Shalit, Ben (1988) The Psychology of Conflict and Combat, New York: Praeger Publishers. Sheffield, Carole J. (1995) ‘Sexual Terrorism,’ in Jo Freeman (ed.) Women: A Feminist Perspective, 5th edition, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., pp. 409–23.

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Solaro, Erin (2006) Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know about Women in the Military, Emeryville, CA: Seal Press. The Invisible War (2012) Documentary directed by Kirby Dick, US: Ro-co Films International. UN Department of Public Information (2013) ‘Background Information on Sexual Violence Used as a Tool of War,’ Outreach Programme on the Rwanda Genocide and the United Nations, available at: http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/about/bgsexualviolence.shtml, accessed on 24 September 2013. Wilson, Natalie (2011) ‘Culture of Rape,’ Ms. Magazine Blog, 15 February 2011, available at: http://msmagazine.com/blog/2011/02/15/culture-of-rape/, accessed on 28 June 2013. Wright, Melissa W. (2006) ‘Public Women, Profit, and Femicide in Northern Mexico,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 105, no. 4, pp. 681–98.

10 Political Transitions and the Arts The Performance of (Post)Colonial Leadership in Philip Miller’s Cantata REwind and in Wim Botha’s Portrait Busts Rosemarie Buikema

The phenomenon of making states appear before universal authorities is singular and new in the recent history of mankind (see Derrida 2001: 57). In this chapter I will pull a strand from the comprehensive study I am engaged in on the role that arts can play in processes of political transition. I will here address the relationship between art and politics more particularly by means of a case study of two different works of art, namely, the cantata REwind (2006) by Philip Miller and a series of sculptures by the sculptor Wim Botha—among them Portraits (2009), Portrait Busts (2010), and Witness series I–V (2011). These artifacts, specifically from transitioning postapartheid South Africa, will be discussed in the context of the late twentieth-century phenomenon in which political leaders and/or nation-states are called to account for political or ethnic minority groups. In doing so, I shall address a number of ethical and pragmatic issues having to do with the maxim of “never again” that, since the Holocaust, marks all recent political transitions. Drawing from feminist theory concerning the conceptualization of revolution and revolt, I mean to explore how the arts have the medium-specific potential to transcend the mandates of tribunals and truth commissions as instruments of transitional justice.

TRUTH AND JUSTICE In recent periods of political transition, coming to terms with the legacies of repression usually has involved establishing a tribunal and/or a truth commission. As Shoshana Felman has pointed out in The Juridical Unconscious (2002), her seminal work on trials and traumas, it is only in the second half of the twentieth century that a transnational shift to conceive of justice not simply as punishment, but as a marked symbolic exit from the injuries of traumatic history can be observed. According to Felman, in reaction to the recurrent devastations of war that have culminated in two world wars, justice has gradually come to mean liberation from violence

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itself. Nevertheless, as she claims and demonstrates, trials and truth commissions risk reenacting the traumas they try to end in subtle and invisible ways. The law inevitably has to respond to processes that are unavailable to consciousness or to which consciousness is purposely blind. Felman points out that the twentieth-century idea that the law provides the means for dealing with trauma is directly related to the rise of psychoanalysis, but, as she argues, this relationship between law and trauma has not been fully thought through nor has it been adequately implemented in the practice of transitional justice. Art, in contrast, can do justice to trauma in ways that truth commissions or trials cannot. The option offered by psychoanalysis of understanding historical causality and temporality within a new conceptual framework (that of working through trauma), opens up new pathways for dialogue between not only justice and trauma, but also justice and art. This line of thought, the process of a thorough working-through as an instrument of structural change, has also been set out by Julia Kristeva (2002), who asserts that we should not so much think in terms of revolution, the sudden break with a past, but in terms of revolt, the slowly and thorough working-through of the locatedness of the individual in relation to its history as well as to its geopolitical circumstances. It is from this perspective that I will address the possible contribution of the arts to “never again.” That is to say, I will address art’s particular ability to perform and work through destabilizing encounters. As such, I hope to demonstrate that art is able to unveil the differences within the categories of victims and perpetrators and has the capacity to function as the producer of differentiated theories of change. Let me fi rst pause to set out the parameters of my argument. My case study is concerned with the ways in which this encounter between trauma, arts, and justice has evolved in South Africa, where artists reflect on the successes and failures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the process of creating a postapartheid state. A truth commission is a quasi-juridical body designed to establish the truth about an era in which gross human rights violations have taken place, with the intent to foster peace, democracy, and a culture of human rights (Coetzee and Nuttall 1998; Sanders 2007). Truth commissions serving as instruments of political transitions from less to more democratic regimes crucially delve into the engineering of trauma and memory and the construction of multilayered historical truths, less so for vindicating the crimes committed under totalitarian rule than for counteracting the old regime’s legacies of repression, deception, and lying (Mamdani 2002). Ruti Teitel, professor of comparative law at the New York Law School, cites Milan Kundera to underline this dynamic link between democratization and accountability policies, in particular the connection between transitional justice and memory: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ (2000: 92). Because truth commissions concentrate on truth fi nding through individual testimony of those oppressed as a means to overcome individual

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and collective trauma, they serve as the producers and containers of ongoing counternarratives that nurture transitional modalities. Truth commissions thus are considered to be important and sustainable instruments for processes of political transitions and transitional justice. Even more so than tribunals, which are supposed to vindicate committed crimes within the framework and norms of legal justice, truth commissions, as instruments of transitional justice, have specific possibilities to express the complexity, contextuality, and ongoing effects of traumatic historical events. Nevertheless, as TRC members have always been well aware, the richness of the gathered material and the complexity of individual accounts obviously require a great deal more attention than a truth commission can ever give if the process is to have any structural impact. As chairman Desmond Tutu claims in the introduction to the TRC report delivered to President Mandela in 1998: ‘Everyone involved in producing this TRC report would have loved to have the time to capture the many nuances and unspoken truths encapsulated in the evidence that came before us. This, however, is a task which others must take up and pursue’ (TRC 1998: 4). The document mentions similar reservations by the TRC members, who, having recorded an endless chain of atrocities, express the hope that their endeavors shall provide the foundations for the identity-constituting labors of future generations: It is impossible to capture the detail and complexity of all this in a report. The transcripts of the hearings, individual statements, a mountain of press clippings and videomaterial are all part of an invaluable record which the commission handed over to the national archives for public access. This record will form a part of the national memory for generations yet to come. (TRC 1998: 113) Here we have two exhortations telling the people of South Africa to deepen as well as implement the TRC’s fi ndings, which therefore frame a report that describes numerous examples of human rights violations which happened behind the scenes of the National Party’s legal system. Even when scanning the TRC report’s thirty-five hundred pages superficially and casting a glance at the million words it counts, it becomes clear that detention without trial, torture in detention, and death in detention have constituted the means by which the state maintained power in apartheid South Africa. During interrogations by South Africa’s security forces, detainees were habitually subjected to unchecked beatings, electric shock, suffocation, sexual violence, and mental abuse. The report even uncovers evidence of secret biological, chemical, and weapons experiments, such as attempts to create infertility drugs to be administered to blacks only. Eventually, the TRC report’s five volumes name four hundred perpetrators, many of whom have confessed to apartheid era violations, and list twenty-two thousand historically marginalized South African voices, now made part

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of the official history of the country. In that sense, the report functions as a founding document. As Richard Wilson (2001: 212) puts it, ‘It unequivocally incorporates into national history the view that the apartheid system was based on a vicious ideology justifying economic and social privilege, which had enormous and unjustifiable human costs.’ Now that a never-ending series of testimonies of gross human rights violations has been witnessed on stage, broadcast on radio and TV, and eventually documented in the report, it should no longer be possible to claim that one just did not know. Nor can it ever be denied that the predominant portion of these gross violations was perpetrated by the state and its agents. Still, this does not mean that in all individual cases an agreement has been reached on what exactly happened and who is responsible for what. In this sense, the TRC hearings mark not only the end of a totalitarian regime, but, above all, the beginning of a new debate about past, present, and future (see also Cole 2010; Coombes 2003; Nuttall 2009). And part of that debate is whether it must be conducted at all. What is implied by “never again”? Isn’t the trauma wedged too deep? Isn’t it better to leave the past behind and set one’s eyes on the future? Shouldn’t South Africa focus on gaining a prominent and integrated position within a globalizing world instead?

REWIND In 2006, ten years after the staging of the TRC’s fi rst hearings, many commemoration events and academic conferences were organized to evaluate the new democracy’s state of being and the role of the construction of a collective memory therein. That time span saw the gradual unfolding of a process in which the new democracy once again threatens to degenerate into a one-party system; consequently the TRC commemorations do not just involve the balancing act between the pull of memory and the push of forgetting, but above all question whether we should be concerned with the past at all, and what this might imply for our views on the future. One of those commemorative events that thematized such issues consisted of the performance of REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony composed by Philip Miller. Miller is known as the composer who collaborated with William Kentridge in the monumental Black box/Chambre Noir installation. He also authored the installation titled The Refusal of Time at the Kassel Documenta of 2012 and wrote the musical score for the fi lm Forgiveness. The material for this cantata for voice, tape, and testimony is wholly derived from audiovisual recordings of the TRC, according to an idea from TRC reporter and poet Antjie Krog, who, having heard the score of Forgiveness, had proposed that Miller compose a work of music by way of commemorating the TRC.1 Miller’s musical reuse of historical material a decade after the start of TRC inevitably spotlights the fundamental questions imparted by the TRC concerning not just the political transition

200 Rosemarie Buikema in South Africa, but also, more generally, ways of dealing with the memories of a past of gross human rights violations. Antjie Krog’s poetic report on the TRC process, Country of my Skull (1998), calls attention to similar questions. Is telling cathartic or is it a way of retraumatizing? How to restore consciousness, dignity, and speech to a traumatized nation? Does the act of retelling enable us to reconcile? What does it mean to listen? What does it mean to acknowledge what has been said? Thematizing the pull of memory and the push of forgetting in a series of destabilizing encounters occurs in the cantata by means of using the literal and multilayered metaphorical effects of sound and voice. The voice, as Philip Miller emphasizes, is South Africa’s fi rst and foremost musical and political instrument. A cultural determinant and indigenous means of expression of old, the singing voice has remained throughout the struggle as the inalienable instrument of human bonds and dignity. Singing enables people to connect across the barriers of language and confi nement. Next to this, the voice has been part of the well-known toyi-toyi, a combination of spontaneous chanting and foot stomping, from left to right foot, resulting into a militaristic dance of sorts that had been an integral part of the protest culture of the late apartheid era. For a politically engaged composer, the voice thus seems appropriate material with which to work, both in terms of substance and in terms of concept, because it simultaneously stages the micro and the macro level of national history. For example, although in Miller’s reworking of the archives the potent sound bite is favored over extended narrative, the selected sound bites or rewindings of exemplary sounds and images inevitably are connected to crucial and exemplary moments in the TRC. Voice and narrative are naturally always linked in a cantata, but in REwind the sound bites act as bridges that unite those who have participated in the process to those who observe the cantata with little background knowledge. Listening to the cantata encourages the acknowledgment of the facts as constitutive parts of a collective imagery, while also inviting the verification and further examination of those facts, an incitement to learn or more fully comprehend the different but simultaneously unfolding stories behind those sound bites. The political and narrative force of Miller’s cantata therefore resides in its ability to evoke a range of questions, events, and experiences by means of condensation and simultaneity as well as by working both selectively and exemplarily. The title song of the REwind cantata illustrates this principle of motivated selection as the instrument of inclusiveness and the exemplary. The song begins with the sound of a woman crying. It was common during the Human Rights Violations Committee hearings that victims were overcome by emotions while giving testimony. 2 This was the case in the testimony of Eunice Mya, who was one of the mothers of the so-called Guguleto Seven, seven boys caught and killed by the national security forces. The mothers of these boys had to learn about the death of their sons on a television

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news report. Mya tells the TRC how, while watching her son’s body on the screen, she wished the news could just rewind. The sound of her voice recorded during the TRC process thus became a musical motif in the opera, and the wish that the news could be rewound became loaded with the metaphorical meaning of the idea of going back, of rewinding memory, of the presence of the past, of telling the untold stories of lost ones. The power and importance of works of art such as REwind is that, in response to the “never again” mantra, they do not just revisit the archives and in that sense work to establish truth. They really join forces, in a medium-specific manner, in the fight against social amnesia, an amnesia that could lead to the repetition of a past not fully worked through. It is the agency as such that is allowed through this medium-specificity that I am interested in here. Not tied to the endeavor of completeness nor having the obligation to document forensic truths as is the case with the TRC, or might be the case with a tribunal, artists can take the route of an artistic approach in contributing to the ongoing construction of a postapartheid dialogical truth, a truth in process, to be established through interaction, dialogue, and debate.3 Elsewhere I have argued that in contemporary South African art this dialogue with and working through the past is embodied both in the choice of themes and in the deployment of medium-specific material. Contemporary, politically committed art in South Africa, as I have argued, reflects the axiom of “never again” mainly by exhausting the possibilities of the material used (Buikema 2012). In that sense, REwind can easily be placed in a genre that I have called the poetics of scrap: a concept that refers to a practice in which the working-through of the past literally means working through meaningful historical material, which, not uncommonly, leads to the creation of beauty from substances charged with the burdens of the past.4 The repetition, the working-through, becomes an artistic and politically transformative act. The new results from reforming and rearranging the old. Or rather, the new is inextricably intertwined with working through the old. The old is structurally reframed in such a way that it changes, it can no longer be conceived of as separate from the process of working-through. Aspects of the material become visible in medium-specific repetitions, as if the unconscious of matter comes to speak. And because this matter is constituted out of historical data, what comes to speak is a translated and mediated past, a past that initially could not be seen. Trauma is repeated but while doing so reframed. It acquires a different perspective, is put in motion, is rewritten. This is a strategy of structural change that conducts the practice of “never again.” In line with Shoshanna Felman and Julia Kristeva, change here is a process of workingthrough (revolvere). REwind reflects this principle of transformative repetition, not just by the insertion of historical records as such, but above all because of music’s medium-specificity, that is, the deployment of musical strategies. For example, the political imagery of univocality versus polyphony is

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superbly orchestrated and made complex in the song ‘Who’s Laughing.’ Working through and repeating both the solo voice and the choir elicits new political overtones that are discharged in a confrontation that sheds new light on the issues of guilt and innocence. This particular episode in the cantata is based on an interview with P.W. Botha, prime minister during the peak of apartheid in the early 1980s. This interview had been conducted at Botha’s house after he had refused to appear before the TRC. Botha states in the interview that “apartheid” is an Afrikaans word that admittedly has acquired a negative connotation, but is actually a synonym for a more positive word, namely, good neighborliness. Someone at the press conference bursts out laughing at this ludicrous defense of a totalitarian regime, whereupon Botha wags his fi nger and pronounces the words “who’s laughing?” These words are repeated in the cantata and thus form the motif of the song. Just as with the title song REwind, the repeat of a short sound bite acquires metaphorical value and is subsequently combined with another sound bite, at which point it metamorphizes into something new. Who’s laughing? Who’s laughing? There is really nothing here to laugh about. Here is a man who, through thick and thin, has defended the state of apartheid and who just won’t be accountable. However, precisely because of the repeats, the reframing, the play, and counterplay, this episode ends up as one of the most nimble as well as ironic moments of the cantata. The song begins with the baritone Fikile Mvinjelwa, who sings in the toyi-toyi rhythm: ‘U left, U right, Nyamazan.’ He calls out to the choir: ‘Come guerilla!’ While the black singer, by way of metronome—and of course in a reference to Botha’s pedantic and imploring gesture—wags his fi nger, we hear an archival recording of Botha saying, ‘I’m a believer, and I’m blessed by my creator.’ The choir’s singing of the militaristic toyi-toyi and Botha’s preposterous attempt to justify his actions meet in part-song, while continuously expressing mutual violence and mutual patriotism. It all culminates in the choir’s ‘hahahahaha.’ The violence of the state that provoked so much violence within the resistance—because in the ANC training camps human rights were violated too—eventually leads the listener to the question: Who’s laughing, in the end, and for what reason? REwind is not so much about articulating answers as it is about formulating questions. Fixed boundaries are destabilized. White opera singers are singing the song of Hamba Kahle, the Umkhonto Siswe’s (ANC’s military wings) battle song. Elsewhere, Christian hymns are disrupted, becoming dissonant and asymmetrical, while the accompanying visual, aural, and textual clues do not clarify particular identities or narratives, but force the audience to listen, watch, and formulate questions. So, what happened, and what impact did it have, and for whom? How to restore humanness to society, how to reestablish human relationships in such a manner that victims and perpetrators are able to engage in a new way? REwind is essentially a question indeed, Miller says so in an interview with Catherine M. Cole.

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For him, the cantata is about the lack of resolution, both musically and metaphorically, that counters our desire to erase differences in order to hear resolution (Cole 2010: 146). The operatic mode of the cantata bears unique possibilities for connecting a new generation to the nation’s past, while it performs political questions that must be posed but that are not so easily resolved. Does the new unity imply harmony only, or can it also accommodate dissonance? And what is meant by peace? Should it be univocal, or can it tolerate polyphony? And what is the meaning of time or of cause and effect when the different voices in history are simultaneously staged and listened to? Giving voice, performing polyphony, valuing the dialogical process of truth fi nding in the deepest sense of the word, and dealing therefore simultaneously with the violations of human rights on the part of both the oppressor and the oppressed, have been the ambitious targets of the TRC’s amnesty commission and have marked the process’s strength as well as its weakness, its lack of resolution, as Miller puts it. Indeed, on the one hand, such an approach steers clear from an all too easy and homogenizing victim–perpetrator dichotomy, from the start enabling a differentiated image of the texture of living under and fighting against apartheid. On the other hand, when the two sorts of violence are conjoined, there is a risk of relativizing the state’s wrongdoings, or a seeming equation of the official repressive apparatus with the abuses of the liberation movements (Greenawalt 2000; James and van de Vijver 2001; Mamdani 2002; Minow 1998, 2000). It is important to note that this risk, which is brought to an explosion in Who’s Laughing, touches on the TRC’s insight that forgiveness never necessarily means impunity, nor does it necessarily put emphasis on the victims’ agency alone. As Nelson Mandela phrased it in his opening address to the third session of parliament in 1996: We can neither heal nor build, if such healing and building are perceived as one-way processes, with the victims of past injustices forgiving and the beneficiaries merely content in gratitude. Together we must set out to correct the defects of the past. (Mandela 1996) Therefore, the creation of the possibility of reconciliation and thereby the creation of a collective community as a means to transcend a deeply polarized society in the aftermath of the process has come to mean not so much the readiness to forgive on the part of the victims, but more significantly that both perpetrators and victims should continue to record the stratification of their history, to share information, and tell their stories. Today, sharing the facts rather than forgiveness seems to have become the legacy of the TRC. Indeed, only then can a collective consciousness arise regarding the various ways in which the reported facts have affected individuals all experiencing the same historical period from different angles. The TRC fi red the starting shot and now the arts are part of a sociocultural process

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that reflects on the process and tries to bring it further along. Artists processing the past, in particular, manage to elicit a further-reaching perspective than that from individual incidents, as Miller’s work shows. By raking up trauma and transforming it in a medium-specific way, art creates a practice of going back to the archives as a means of looking ahead, attempting to articulate human relationships beyond the old dichotomies of perpetrator and victim, white and black, wrong and right. In this respect, working through historical material simultaneously involves an exploration of the gaps in the system, the exit doors, and the way out driven by the idea that any system contains the conditions for its own transition. Working-through thus is an instrument of change. In that sense, the cantata is also a reflection on traumas rekindled by the TRC in its attempt to stop the bleeding. P.W. Botha’s refusal to appear before the TRC, recalled in ‘Who’s Laughing,’ and de Klerk’s later refusal to be accountable for the existence of death farms (places where the security forces killed the opponents of the apartheid system) and for his knowledge of the Khotso House bombing, formed the nadir of the TRC process. Those low points in turn came to be part of the new traumas generated in the process of unsuccessfully working-through certain aspects of the trauma of the past.5

PORTRAITS AND WITNESS The refusal of apartheid leaders to be accountable for the past is an aspect of postapartheid South Africa’s recent history which the sculptor Wim Botha, among other contemporary artists, sets out to address specifically. What does it mean for the possibility of structural reform that the leaders of the apartheid movement have declined to take responsibility for their acts? What does this mean for “never again”? Here I will discuss a particular series of sculptures by Botha titled Portraits (2009), Portrait Busts (2010), and Witness Series I–V (2011), a set of archetypal busts hanging down from the ceiling in a room. The busts in some ways look familiar and evoke the genre of the stately portrait and its concomitant connotations of autonomy and power. At the same time there is something undeniably uncanny in these works. The uncanny here has not to do with the form as such, but rather with the combination of matter and form. The complacency of the bust acquires a certain tension when contrasted with the fragile-looking material from which the image is crafted. The busts are sculpted from compressed paper publications. Sometimes it is possible to recognize the covers that hold the texts together, and at closer inspection it can be seen that these busts are hewn from government documents, Bibles, African dictionaries, and encyclopedias. In fact, without exception, the sculptures are metonymically related to the institutions that have supported the apartheid regime.

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Figure 10.1 Portrait II (Patriot), 2009, Afrikaans dictionaries and vocabulary books, wood, stainless steel, 34x15x27 cm. ©Wim Botha. Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.

To put it differently, the original function of the material used for carving the busts invariably involved propping up institutionalized inclusion and exclusion devices. So, the stately portraits are not simply stately portraits and the books are not just books. Even aside from the specific content, the link between icons of the nation-state and the book, or rather the invention of the printing

206 Rosemarie Buikema

Figure 10.2 Portrait bust (Mother), 2010, Afrikaans Bibles, wood, stainless steel, approx. 118x35x38 cm. ©Wim Botha. Courtesy of Gallery, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.

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press, is telling. As McLuhan has claimed, the formation of the nation-state has been significantly enhanced by the invention of the printing press and the rise of national languages and grammars (McLuhan and Fiore 2003). And since Benedict Anderson’s (1991) seminal reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, the book and national consciousness are forever intertwined. Therefore, the choice of the book, and specifically books and texts endorsing religion, the government, the monitoring of canonical knowledge, censorship, and apartheid’s language politics, as the preferred material for sculpting heroic busts interferes, in no uncertain terms, with the tradition of the stately portrait. The genre of the heroic trophy of male power is supported as well as undermined by the substance: ephemeral, fragile yet politically incriminating paper works. The busts carved from the documents that sustained questionable institutions inevitably call into memory numerous quotes of P.W. Botha (‘I am a believer and I am blessed by my creator’) while at the same time playing with the weight of the tradition. The carved busts thus are the means for Wim Botha to visualize a reconsideration of male white power and Afrikaner heroism. Removed from the pedestals used to create distance from the viewer and integral to the convention of the bust portrait, the icons of colonial history are adequately dethroned and held accountable. The autonomous white male subject is thereby drawn into conflict. He must reconsider his history, his current position, and his possible future. Again the exemplary case here has wider implications, and again the literal working-through of historical material provides the substance of the art. As Wim Botha claims in an interview in a Michael Stevenson (2005) catalogue: ‘In my work there is seldom a distinction to be drawn between the prominence of the concept and that of the medium. I work with materials that are central to massconsumerist applications, that are subsequently transformed in essence and meaning to a point at which material and concept become integrally interdependent.’ Where REwind uses the voice to complicate and differentiate the relation between victim and perpetrator, the busts of Botha mobilize the contemplative glance. The spectator cannot remain untouched, cannot escape the unfolding of history and the changing present while being confronted with these enigmatic creatures emerging out of familiar matter. White South Africans thus are addressed not only because of the recent political developments in which the white population has become a political minority, but mainly because of the chronicling of human rights violations that have been committed formally in their name and interests under colonial rule and apartheid.6 The conception of political transition and transitional justice as a process that is gradually taking place both at the macro level of institutions and at the micro level of individuals, and as changing representations of citizenship, here again is remodeled in a way that makes concrete how each system contains the conditions for its own transformation, how revolt as the working-through of the legacy of repression might open up new worlds.

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Figure 10.3 Untitled (Witness Series I), 2011, African encyclopedias, wood, stainless steel, 45x21x22 cm. ©Wim Botha. Courtesy of Gallery, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.

But this contemplative glance provoked by Botha’s busts also leads to the pitfalls of not entirely working through the implied conditions of change. As Liese van der Watt (2005: 9) also mentions in the Michael Stevenson catalogue on Botha, it might be argued that while working on the disjuncture between surface and depth, the private and the public, Botha’s work

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turns more explicitly to an interrogation of masculinity. The male white South African seeing these images cannot but realize that his position is radically at stake because Botha is linking power to masculinity and the law—most notably to the laws and rules that simultaneously create and destroy particular communities in this world. As the series of busts progresses in time, a different kind of meeting between institution and individual imposes itself. White as they are, these busts, carved from institutional documents, increasingly seem to incorporate traditionally recognized features of black men. The geopolitical and historical backdrop to these, possibly black, white busts seems to suggest that the clear opposition between colonial white leaders and the postcolonial black Mandela is giving way to a more diff use duality, implied by the vicious succession battle between Mbeki en Zuma from 2005 to 2008. The two recent black postcolonial leaders turn out to crave power no less than their white colonial forebears, nor do they appear to have any scruples, so far, with using state institutions to sustain that power. Botha’s sculptures, however, provoke the thought that the relationship between black leaders and colonial institutions obviously differs from that which white leaders had, and that the faltering of this new kind of postcolonial leadership is fundamentally caused by a confl ict relating to the male black subject’s identity. In his speeches, Mbeki repeatedly refers to the white theologians who, with the Bible in their hands, systematically have humiliated the black man and institutionalized segregation. In the end, as Rosemary Jolly (2010) convincingly argues, the strife of Mbeki and Zuma does indeed pivot on the question of how postcolonial, postapartheid black masculinity can be performed. Mbeki seeks to perform a masculinity that rejects racist and colonialist stereotypes of blacks as promiscuous, and of black leaders as corrupt and power drunk. His postcolonial politics have resulted in the rejection of modern Western knowledge about HIV/AIDS as adhering to the Western solution (the prescription of ARVs) would implicitly involve endorsing the colonial stereotype of excessive black sexuality.7 Zuma, on the other hand, enacts a hypermasculine performance of Zulu manhood, which he believes brings political gain.

CODA Drawing up the balance for this moment, we can state that more than a decade after the presentation of the revolutionary and contested TRC of South Africa reports, the general feeling is that the implementation of the truth, of the different kinds of truth (i.e., the coming into being of a postapartheid state based on the accountability of its political leaders and citizens) concerns a process that has indeed only been kindled by the work of the TRC. The TRC has been the messenger, and now it is up to the institutions that must shape the new South Africa to carry on the message, establish the

210 Rosemarie Buikema new rule of law in a democratizing context, and work on reparations. Social and economic equality is still a dream far off. Violence and segregation are still omnipresent. The black leaders, instead of repeating the capital- and power-driven forms of leadership, now must work through the legacies of a history of colonialism and apartheid and must take the implied gendered aspects of fathering a nation into account. However, no matter the amount of criticism the TRC receives and no matter the number of occasions that call attention to the limitations of its mandates, as empirical studies have pointed out, the nonwhite majority does not perceive the TRC as a terminal destination offering full solutions to all problems, but rather as a catalyst, a necessary instrument for clearing the path to a new way of living together (Cole 2010: 126; see also Grunebaum 2011). That is why some South African intellectuals now refer to the present condition as “the becoming” postapartheid of South Africa, as if to underline the processual character of the transition (Lalu 2009). It is in this process of becoming that the analysis of the relationship between colonialism and hegemonic masculinities will have to play an essential role. And it is in that analysis of sexual politics that the arts already prove to be an essential player. NOTES 1. William Kentridge earlier used the testimonies of the TRC in his animation Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997). See Bennet (2005) for an elaborate analysis of this performance of the witness testimony. 2. See Lisa Key’s excellent short documentary on the making of REwind to get a taste of the material I am talking about here (REwind 2009, to be found on Youtube). In 2013 the cantata was transformed into an audiovisual installation with monitors and headsets. The installation was part of the exhibition presented in the South African Pavilion at the 55th Biennale di Venezia and focuses on the acts of translation and transcription. For one of the goals of the TRC was to carry testimony across languages, cultures and time. As Miller states in the exhibition catalogue: ‘To this extend the TRC was a visual spectacle made of microphones, headsets, translator’s booths and enless jumble of cables’ (Maart 2013: 75). 3. A revolutionary aspect of the TRC process and the TRC report is the distinction that has been made between different kinds of truth and different kinds of justice. The commission discerns forensic (factual), narrative (personal and emotional), dialogical (social truth established through interaction, discussion, and debate), and restorative truth (acknowledgment of accountability) next to retributive and restorative justice (Boraine 2000; see also Sachs 2002). Restorative justice seeks to restore dignity and voice to victims of injustice, to hold perpetrators accountable for the harms they have inflicted on people, but also to adopt the creation of conditions in which both victims and perpetrators are treated with respect as an overriding goal (Graham 2009; Soyinka 1999; Teitel 2002). 4. For the specific materiality of South African art, see also Skotnes (1996); Coombes et al. (2001); Nuttall (2006); Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu (2009); Peffer (2009); Williamson (2009); Maart (2013). 5. De Klerk’s refusal to be accountable for the Khotso House bombing literally resulted in a black page in the TRC report (see TRC 2003: 59).

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6. Although individual guilt perhaps is not at stake, many whites have unmistakably benefited from the crimes of others, if only because of the fact that socioeconomically white South Africans knew no barriers as long as they did not maintain too close of ties with the black community. 7. For similar reasons, Mbeki backed Mugabe, despite Mugabe’s infringements on human rights, to avoid having to play the colonial card of the banana republic dictator. See Rosemary Jolly (2010), who analyzes the strife of Mbeki and Zuma in terms of sexuality and gender.

REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities. Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bennet, Jill (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Boraine, Alex (2000) ‘Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: The Third Way,’ in Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (eds.) Truth v. Justice. The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 141–57. Buikema, Rosemarie (2012) ‘Performing Dialogical Truth and Transitional Justice: The Role of Art in the Becoming Post-Apartheid of South Africa,’ Journal of Memory Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 282–92. Coetzee, Carli and Nuttall, Sarah (eds.) (1998) Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cole, Catherine M. (2010) Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Coombes, Annie E. (2003) History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coombes, Annie E., Doepel, Rory, Enwezor, Okwui, Hassan, Salah and Oguibe, Olu (2001) Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art, Ithaca, NY: Forum for African Arts. Derrida, Jacques (2001) ‘On Forgiveness,’ in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. M. Dooley and M. Hughes, London: Routledge, pp. 27–60. Enwezor, Okwui and Okeke-Agulu, Chika (eds.) (2009) Contemporary African Art since 1980, Bologna: Damiani. Felman, Shoshana (2002) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Graham, Shane (2009) South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Greenawalt, Kent (2000) ‘Amnesty’s Justice,’ in Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (eds.) Truth v. Justice. The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 189–210. Grunebaum, Heidi P. (2011) Memorializing the Past. Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. James, Wilmot and van de Vijver, Linda (eds.) (2001) After the TRC: Refl ections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press. Jolly, Rosemary (2010) Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kristeva, Julia (2002) Revolt, She Said, New York: Semiotext(e). Krog, Antjie (1998) Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, New York: Times Books/Random House.

212 Rosemarie Buikema Lalu, Premesh (2009) The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts, Cape Town: HSRC Press. Maart, Brenton (2013) Imaginary Fact. Contemporary South African Art and the Archive, Grahamstown: National Arts Festival. Mamdani, Mahmood (2002) ‘Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa,’ in Carlos Basualdo, Okwui Enwezor, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Ute Meta Bauer, and Octavio Zaya (eds.) Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation: Documenta11_Platform2, Ostfi ldern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, pp. 21–42. Mandela, Nelson (1996) ‘Opening Address to the Third Session of Parliament,’ Cape Town, 9 February 1996, available at: http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/1996/ f120r355.htm, accessed on 8 August 2013. McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin (2003) The Medium and the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Toronto: Penguin Books. Minow, Martha (1998) Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, Boston: Beacon Press. Minow, Martha (2000) ‘The Hope for Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?’ in Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (eds.) Truth v. Justice. The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 235–60. Nuttall, Sarah (ed.) (2006) Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nuttall, Sarah (2009) Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Refl ections on PostApartheid, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Peffer, John (2009) Art and the End of Apartheid, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (2006) Cantata by Philip Miller, December 2006, Saint George’s Cathedral, Cape Town. REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (2009) Documentary by Liza Key, South Africa: Key Films. Sachs, Albie (2002) ‘Different Kinds of Truth: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ in Carlos Basualdo, Okwui Enwezor, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Ute Meta Bauer, and Octavio Zaya (eds.) Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation: Documenta11_Platform2, Ostfi ldern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, pp. 43–60. Sanders, Mark (2007) Ambiguities of Witnessing. Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Skotnes, Pippa (ed.) (1996) Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Soyinka, Wole (1999) The Burden of Memory: The Muse of Forgiveness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Michael (2005) Wim Botha: Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2005, Cape Town: Stevenson Gallery. Teitel, Ruti G. (2000) Transitional Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Teitel, Ruti G. (2002) ‘Transitional Justice as Liberal Narrative,’ in Carlos Basualdo, Okwui Enwezor, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Ute Meta Bauer, and Octavio Zaya (eds.) Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation: Documenta11_Platform2, Ostfi ldern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, pp. 241–57. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1998) Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vols. 1–5, Cape Town: TRC. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2003) Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 6, Cape Town: TRC.

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Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997) Play by William Kentridge, South Africa: Handspring Puppet Company. van der Watt, Liese (2005) ‘The Opposite of Everyday: Wim Botha’s Acts of Translation,’ in Michael Stevenson, Wim Botha: Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2005, Cape Town: Stevenson Gallery, pp. 5–13. Williamson, Sue (2009) South African Art Now, New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Wilson, Richard A. (2001) ‘Justice and Legitimacy in the South African Transition,’ in Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen Gonzaléz-Enríquez, and Paloma Aguilar (eds.) The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 190–217.

11 Justice by Any Means Necessary Vigilantism among Indian Women Aaronette White and Shagun Rastogi

Recently, media sources have reported on a group of several hundred women in India as ‘Pink Vigilantes’ (Biswas 2007; Dhillon 2007; Prasad 2008). These women proudly call themselves the Gulabi Gang—gulabi in Hindi means pink. The gang members wear pink nylon saris for easy recognition as they publicize the plight of poor women. According to one report, the major targets of the Gulabi Gang’s “vigilante activity” are corrupt officials and violent, immoral husbands: ‘their activities range from beating up men who abuse their wives to shaming officials with whatever weapons are available including walking sticks, iron rods, axes, and even cricket bats’ (Dhillon 2007). Another report states the gang has stopped child marriages, forced police officers to register domestic violence cases— by slapping them—and forced roads to be built ‘by dragging the official responsible from his desk to the dust track in question’ (Prasad 2008: 5). No report, however, suggests they have murdered anyone. Sampat Pal Devi, who founded the Gulabi Gang, states in a news interview, ‘we are not a gang in the usual sense of the term; we are a gang for justice’ (Biswas 2007). It took her more than a decade to organize the gang, traveling from village to village singing her repertoire of protest songs. She justifies the gang’s use of force as being necessary: ‘“To face down men in this part of the world, you have to use force,” Sampat Pal Devi says’ (Prasad 2008: 5). Another group of women associated with vigilante activity in India is the Mahila Aghadi. According to anthropologist Atreyee Sen (2008), the Mahila Aghadi is recreating a moral order that is flexible regarding what is “acceptable” womanhood. The new norms include a woman’s right to raw justice when she has been dishonoured. The group uses the discourse of ethnic-religious struggle to shift blame away from women who have been sexually exploited by men inside and outside the movement and to publicize violence against women in the broader cultural context. Although the Mahila Aghadi is the women’s wing of a conservative and reactionary, violent, ethno-nationalist religious movement, the Shiv Sena, it offers women a space to articulate a different strain of justice relevant to the plight of lower-caste Hindu women that simultaneously challenges gender norms espoused by the Shiv Sena (Sen 2008).

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Social scientists who study vigilante groups internationally predict that the chances of vigilante group activity arise when: (a) overwhelming structural conditions of injustice exist; (b) individual experiences of criminal victimization are experienced collectively; and (c) an atmosphere of everyday violence pervades society (Sen and Pratten 2008). However, media reports of vigilante groups obscure the sociohistorical and political complexities that underlie vigilante behavior, instead emphasizing only the violent acts, particularly the most extreme cases. In this chapter, we argue that some so-called vigilante groups represent women with grassroots feminist sensibilities, offering psychological, social, and justice-related assistance to poor women who have been failed by the local state’s judiciary system. We show how the reasons women cite for engaging in violent activities reveal their decisions to be rational, community-oriented, informed choices, despite the media’s inclination to portray them as irrational, spontaneous mob violence. Through a review of news reports on the Gulabi Gang (including documentary footage recorded by the second author) and published comprehensive ethnographic reports on the Mahila Aghadi, we combine grassroots Indian feminist perspectives with psychological theories on moral convictions and perceptions of justice to illuminate how feminist psychologists can better analyze and publicize these cases. We bring our own different perspectives and locations to bear on our analysis: the fi rst author is an African American feminist psychologist and women’s rights activist living in the US; the second an Indian feminist and independent filmmaker living in New Delhi.

VIGILANTISM, JUSTICE, AND GRASSROOTS INDIAN FEMINISM

Vigilantism Most scholars agree that vigilantes often work in groups (Sen and Pratten 2008). However, scholars disagree as to whether vigilantism is a social movement or mere social reaction, and whether it is always violent, extralegal, organized, conservative, directed only toward crime, or a subcategory of political violence (Johnston 1996). We use sociologist Les Johnston’s (1996) defi nition of vigilantism as a guide here to challenge media sensationalized representations. Johnston’s (1996) defi nition of vigilantism involves: (a) premeditation by participants; (b) private citizens whose engagement is voluntary; (c) a social movement acting without the state’s authority or support; (d) the use or threat of force; (e) an established order under threat from the transgression, the potential transgression or the imputed transgression of institutionalized norms; and (f) an aim to control crime or other infractions by offering assurances of security to participants and others. For the most part, the Gulabi Gang and the Mahila Aghadi of India satisfy this defi nition. However, violence, and its legitimacy, as well as

216 Aaronette White and Shagun Rastogi notions of justice, can be defi ned in a variety of ways (e.g., see Bufacchi 2005; Hutchings 2007). Therefore, in addition to Johnston’s defi nition of vigilantism, we adopt a feminist defi nition of violence to distinguish ethical practices of violence—that involve proportionate punishment in the context of failed or grossly compromised judiciaries that deny due process— from unethical practices of violence that involve murder (Hutchings 2007). We also adopt a feminist defi nition of justice that includes retributive and restorative components. We argue what is deemed ethical and unethical violence must be judged on a case-by-case basis. Thus, conclusions we draw from these two cases may not apply to others.

Ethical and Unethical Violence Hutchings distinguishes between ethical and unethical uses of violence: Theoretically, the ideal of ethical violence relies on the plausibility of a model of ethical subjectivity and action in which the ethical subject is able to identify certain ends as ethical, undertake an accurate cost/ benefit analysis of means in relation to ethical ends, control the means she is using (violence) in the service of those ends only, and keep herself and her ends uncontaminated by the means of violence. Unethical violence, therefore, is violence in which the ends are unethical or the assessment of ends in relation to means is inaccurate, or where violence is not controlled by its ethical purpose, or where the user of or the ends of violence become corrupted by the means. (2007: 100) Our feminist defi nition stresses the ethical legitimacy of violence in the pursuit of collective political ends, when imbalances of power exist between men and women in the context of ineffective and otherwise unresponsive local judiciaries (Hutchings 2007). Postcolonial feminist ethics recognize both the ethical value of specific cultural and social contexts and the importance of the self-determination of feminist goals within those contexts (Hutchings 2007; Kalpagam 2004; Mohanty 2003). Thus, we argue that some forms of women’s vigilantism are legitimate acts of violence in specific political contexts where local judiciaries fail to protect women against gross human rights abuses. Given the multiple, patriarchal injustices poor women face in India because of their gender, caste, ethnicity, and the ineffective implementation and interpretation of national and international laws designed to protect lower-caste women (Gangoli 2007), we argue that these women’s “vigilante” violence can fall under “ethical” use of violence.

Models of Justice Using ethical forms of violence against wrongdoers reflects a retributive model of justice. Retributive justice models emphasize “proportionate”

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punishment (retribution) as a morally acceptable response to crime, with the satisfaction of the victim as its priority (Hampton 1998). They can be contrasted with restorative models of justice, which emphasize approaches to crime that engage and balance the needs of the victim, wrongdoer, and community in ways that attempt to preserve the safety and dignity of all parties (Hampton 1998). Much depends on the model used in carrying out restorative justice because of the huge variation in contexts (e.g., models of face-to-face victim and offender encounters, models that emphasize mediations between victims and offenders) and seriousness of different offenses (e.g., nonviolent or violent crimes) as restorative practices. However, restorative models of justice have become popular among feminist scholars and feminist organizations internationally because they emphasize cooperation, community building, and healing relations between perpetrators and victims rather than isolation, separation, and stigmatizing members of the community (Daly and Stubbs 2006; Hampton 1998). In the present analysis, rather than interpret the two models of justice as dichotomous and oppositional, we argue that the two women’s groups discussed here implement both retributive and restorative processes in their justice-related activities. We distinguish vengeance—a wish to destroy and degrade the wrongdoer—from retribution—a wish to vindicate the value of the victim and the community as a whole, drawing on feminist theories of punishment that some scholars have examined in criminal cases (Daly and Stubbs 2006; Hampton 1998). We also propose a grassroots Indian feminist psychological perspective from which to understand the targets of women’s retributive and restorative activities.

The Psychology of Grassroots Indian Feminism Feminism, as a political ideology, acknowledges the existence of societal and personal power imbalances between women and men and often asserts that such power imbalances should be corrected through power sharing— minimizing dominance or ‘power over’ another (Miller 1982; Okin 1989; Young 1990). However, feminist strategies for correcting existing power imbalances vary, reflecting the differences among women and the various contexts that grant women variable access to power. Feminist psychology analyses women’s lives and experiences, focusing on their attempts at creative agency despite systemic societal injustices that devalue and undermine their efforts (Unger 1998). Liberation psychology focuses on processes that motivate people to transform oppressive social structures through collective action in the interest of positive social change (Moane 1999). Both feminist and liberation psychological approaches can assist us in understanding the real and symbolic power that women wield when daunting circumstances in their lives propel them to violent action. One Indian feminist scholar, Uma Kalpagam (2004), emphasizes how women must integrate broad structural injustices and local everyday injustices

218 Aaronette White and Shagun Rastogi in their efforts at social change. Kalpagam also makes clear that by privileging the “local” context, women reconstruct international human rights violations in ways that strengthen broader liberation movements against state repression. Thus, the question is not whether feminist or liberation psychology is the best framework for studying women’s vigilante activities, but how both frameworks explain the complexities of Indian women’s lives. Both perspectives shape a psychology of grassroots Indian feminism that underscores the intersections of caste and class in women’s daily lives as well as the historical and sociopolitical contexts that shape structural injustices (Kalpagam 2004). The oppression of women in India is shaped, in part, by their caste, class, ethnicity, and religion, as well as by the state, men outside their caste, and men within their caste who abuse their authority (Kalpagam 2004; Rao 2003; Rege 2004). A thorough discussion of caste is beyond the scope of this article (see Rao 2003 for additional information), but of particular relevance here are customary practices of caste in India that complicate levels of vulnerability among women, particularly those of the lower castes, creating multiple and overlapping experiences of patriarchy and multiple practices and interpretations of feminism (Chaudhuri 2005; Gangoli 2007; Rao 2003). Comprehensive legislation to protect members of the lower castes against discrimination, the 1989 Prevention of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Atrocities Act, exists on paper. However, social, political, and economic pressures ensure that it remains ineffective (Gangoli 2007). Only a small number of victims deemed lower caste lodge police reports. An even smaller number are actually fi led by the police, and actual conviction is unlikely in most court cases. The problem lies not with the law as much as with the context in which it exists. Indian feminists recognize these judiciary inadequacies and the difficulty women deemed lower caste face, but disagree on the best strategies for addressing them (Gangoli 2007). We argue that women’s movements, like most social movements, should make use of diverse tactics including reformist, radical, nonviolent, and, yes, even violent tactics depending on the sociopolitical context. The majority of the women discussed in the following cases are already excluded from the barely functioning aspects of the judicial systems in their localities. Men’s rights, in practice, supersede the rights of lower-caste women regardless of national and international laws, because of social norms that permit continued discrimination against poor women (Gangoli 2007). Women presented here live under violent circumstances whether they fight back or not; multiple patriarchies inadvertently and repeatedly condone men’s violence against women. As a result, some women disrupt this power dynamic by relearning their propensity for violence. Although women reclaiming the ability and right to use force will not by itself end patriarchy, it may be a useful form of empowerment and protection in the short term when accompanied by a long-term liberatory vision. Below we describe two cases of women’s violent retributive activities in greater detail than can be found in sensationalized media reports.

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CASE ONE: THE GULABI GANG Banda is one of the poorest parts of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s states. More than 20 percent of its 1.6 million people are considered lower caste. The Gulabi Gang was founded in this region, and its members denounce government corruption in the distribution of resources as discriminatory against people considered lower caste (The Pink Women of India 2008).1 Gulabi members also have beaten men with sticks who have abandoned or physically abused their wives. The founder, Sampat Pal Devi, expressed her concerns about poor women in a newspaper interview: Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials . . . are corrupt and anti-poor. Sometimes we have to take the law in our hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers.  .  .  . Village society in India is loaded against women. It refuses to educate them, marries them off too early, and barters them for money. Women need to study and become independent to sort it out. (Biswas 2007) Eventually, women were turning out to hear Sampat and to tell her about their problems, which included land grabbing by powerful thugs that left whole families homeless, violent husbands’ alcoholism and drug abuse, and officials demanding bribes and sex for payment of widows’ pensions (Prasad 2008). Sampat told one reporter, ‘To make sure we have the upper hand, we always go with sticks and axes to deal with someone’ (Dhillon 2007). Although news reports highlight the practical issues the women face locally as their primary concerns, such local interests do not negate their concern for broader gender issues, which involves targeting structures that oppress women and their communities at the state level. For example, Gulabi Gang members ambushed the electricity office when for more than two weeks their families had no electricity and they were forced to continue their chores in darkness after sunset. Despite the cutoff, the electric company sent everyone bills demanding payment for power never received. The women knew that their electricity supply had been disconnected by corrupt officials, in order to extract bribes and sexual favors from them in exchange for restoring it. With no functioning law to fall back on, the members of the Gulabi Gang, on behalf of the local community, took matters into their own hands. With various weapons, mainly long sticks, the women surrounded the electricity company’s headquarters. Prasad, a reporter, writes: They wanted to confront the officer in charge but met instead his cowering juniors, at whom they bawled to telephone the boss. When the man refused to come to the office, the women became incensed. They snatched the office key, roughed up the terrified staff and, after herding them outside, locked the door and ran away, vowing to return the

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Aaronette White and Shagun Rastogi key only when they had electricity again. . . . Within an hour of their absconding with the key, the electricity was restored. (2008: 5)

The group’s vision of justice continues to expand, and its members are increasingly called on by men to support direct action protests (Dhillon 2007; Prasad 2008). When seven thousand Banda farmers decided to take to the streets to demand compensation for failed crops, the men asked the Gulabi Gang to attend (Prasad 2008). Even a few men have joined the gang, such as Jai Prakash Shivhari, who told a reporter that men join because of their deep concerns about child marriages, dowry deaths, and government corruption. Sampat acknowledges that she has a separate agenda for women. ‘I wanted to lift them out of the black hole they’d been pushed into’ (Prasad 2008: 5). Women are at the bottom of society with no help from anyone. We can’t keep waiting forever. That’s why I formed the group so that the moment a woman calls me to say she’s in trouble, we’re on the spot fast. A woman on her own would be ineffective. Men would just laugh at her. But when we’re in a group, men get nervous. (Dhillon 2007) In a short documentary on the Gulabi Gang, the second author revealed the depth of concern Sampat Pal Devi and her members have for each other, and the range of services they offer, often ignored by sensationalized news reports (The Pink Women of India 2008). In addition to their retributive activities, the Gulabi Gang provides social services for poor women, particularly widows, who need food, jobs, shelter, and emotional support when domestic problems arise. The 2008 film The Pink Women of India by Rastogi documents how the Gulabi Gang teaches women self-defense tactics, as well as how to be economically self-sufficient in their rural localities. Currently, membership fees are used to fund its activities. Sampat has taught women how to empower themselves by teaching them to grow vegetables, to use cow dung as fertilizer, to make plates from leaves, to embroider, and to use herbs to treat various illnesses. The documentary also shows local people who applauded the Gulabi Gang for pressuring a distributor, who had been selling grain illegally, to provide the grain to the poor as arranged by the government. Rastogi in The Pink Women of India (2008) documents how Sampat tries to hold a dialogue with the wrongdoer before retributive violence is used to protect poor women. With the decline of the democratic function of governmental political processes, poor women’s faith in the capacity of state institutions to provide protection has also declined.

CASE TWO: THE MAHILA AGHADI When women reinterpret gender and their lower-caste status according to religious and ethno-nationalist beliefs, they may also act as political agents for their own versions of social justice through violent retributive activity.

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Such is the case for the Mahila Aghadi, located in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The Mahila Aghadi is the women’s wing of the conservative Hindu Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva).2 They support the goals of the broader Shiv Sena movement and have participated in water riots, sit-in demonstrations against municipal authorities for trying to evict illegal tenants from government-owned land, and the infamous Bombay rail riots (Sen 2008). The fi rst generation of Aghadi women relocated from villages in Maharashtra into the Bombay slums in the 1970s, accompanying their migrant husbands who worked for the textile mills. When their husbands lost their jobs following a textile strike and the closure of the mills, the women were forced to seek employment as domestic servants for upper-caste families, as homemade food vendors and caterers, as collectors of certain kinds of refuse for recycling, and as low-wage workers performing other tasks reserved for lower-caste women (Sen 2006). This left them vulnerable to economic exploitation. Shiv Sena emerged in this context. Over time, Shiv Sena organizers made inroads into the local trade unions. They became a powerful force of men who had developed connections with key figures in mainstream and alternative (organized crime) markets. The women’s wing of Shiv Sena was formally inaugurated in 1985 as the Mahila Aghadi (Sen 2006).3 Within this women-centered space, women began to share their stories of economic and sexual exploitation by male supervisors and government officials. One member disclosed: Some of us became domestic helpers in other people’s homes. The male employers knew that we had no choice but to sleep with them, since we had to keep gruel before our men and children. . . . You think our husbands did not know about it? They . . . showed their frustration by beating us. (Sen 2006: 13) The Mahila Aghadi originally focused on protection and retribution for women members against male (Muslim and non-Hindu and also uppercaste Hindu) supervisors and officials who sexually harassed, terminated, and cheated them. For instance, Sudhati worked at a factory whose owner ‘called on her every night before payday.’ After she joined the Mahila Aghadi, the owner stopped his regular ‘visits’ (Sen 2006: 6). Another woman reported: ‘Once I slapped this man who was trying to pinch my bottom. . . . By the time he recovered from the shock and tried to rush at me, the warrior women from other shanties came out with their rolling pins’ (Sen 2006: 5). Eventually, the members expanded their activities to protect women from exploitation by Shiv Sena men who were perpetrators of domestic violence and sexual harassment (Sen 2006). Anthropologist Atreyee Sen (2008) has conducted ethnographic research on the Mahila Aghadi. Although not a member, she was allowed by Rita, a senior Aghadi member, to accompany the group to a school where a male clerk had been harassing a female teacher. Sen later wrote in her notes:

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Aaronette White and Shagun Rastogi I saw this clerk kneeling on the floor, with Rita, perched on his desk, occasionally poking a measuring scale into his testicles. The man flinched in pain. He was made to apologize to the teacher, several times, and then had to say ‘this teacher is my sister’ and ‘all women are my sisters.’. . . . Before she sailed out of the room, Rita yelled: ‘Make sure you are not a sister-fucker’! And slammed the desk into the man’s chest. (2008: 74)

The Aghadi, like the Gulabi Gang, base their retributive activities on women’s formal and informal complaints, which are circulated within their localities (Sen 2008). They also engage in a range of activities that they refer to as “social work,” from fi nding jobs for poor members and their families to providing safety against rape and sexual harassment in their localities. They direct special attention to the grievances of poor women and use temple meetings, grocery shopping chores, time spent before singing devotional songs together, and other everyday gatherings to make plans for and carry out grassroots justice (Sen 2008). When the Mahila Aghadi retributive activities are criticized by upper-caste individuals as immoral, senior cadres such as Ramati scoff: ‘Where did people’s morality go when we were [felt forced to; authors’ clarification] sleeping with employers just to get food? When we forcefully tried to get our due by using violence, suddenly people were lecturing us about women and morality’ (Sen 2006: 5). In the fi nal section of this chapter, we situate both the Gulabi Gang and Mahila Aghadi cases in psychological literatures that investigate how moral convictions shape perceptions of justice, collective victimization, and punishment.

COLLECTIVE VICTIMIZATION, MORAL CONVICTIONS, AND PERCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE Moral convictions tend to be “gut-level” reactions, fundamentally held and nonnegotiable beliefs that can facilitate pro-social as well as antisocial behaviors (Skitka 2002; Skitka, Bauman, and Sargis 2005). Psychologists Skitka and Houston (2001), using laboratory studies, found that certain moral convictions are associated with a disregard for procedural protections and due process. Research participants read about a police investigation and arrest of a man who allegedly killed a young couple in the course of a burglary. Half of the participants were told that the defendant received a fair trial, was convicted, sentenced to death, and subsequently died in the electric chair. The other half were told the same details of the investigation and arrest but learned that the defendant had been shot and killed on his way to trial by a vigilante. In both groups, participants who expressed a moral conviction that the defendant should be punished reported that the outcome and the procedure that led to it were fair, regardless of whether

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it was achieved by way of a fair trial or through vigilantism. Only participants who did not express a moral conviction about the defendant’s guilt or punishment saw vigilantism as significantly less fair than a trial (Skitka and Houston 2001). Subsequent psychological research suggests when moral convictions are threatened or transgressed by others, people respond with righteous indignation (moral outrage) and a desire to see the transgressor(s) punished (Mullen and Skitka 2006), regardless of whether they consider themselves politically liberal or conservative (Skitka and Bauman 2008). Consistent with psychological studies on moral conviction, anthropologists and sociologists have found that vigilante groups obey moral imperatives and defi ne who the legitimate targets are and what should be the appropriate punishments (Sen and Pratten 2008). Retaliatory aggression is seen as a form of self-defense and is viewed as justifiable and necessary in order to preserve one’s image and honor (Miller 2001). Moreover, moral convictions (and the emotions that accompany them) are central to people’s sense of identity and their perception of justice (Clayton and Opotow 2003; Miller 2001; Sen 2008). People affi rm their sense of self by possessing moral convictions consistent with their personal and group values, and when one is identifying oneself as part of a collective, the overall sense of justice in that collective is more important than one’s individual perception (Clayton and Opotow 2003). The violation of a community member represents an insult to the integrity of the entire community and can provoke both moralistic anger (righteous indignation) and the urge to punish the offender (Miller 2001). Thus, a personal insult that is labeled an injustice becomes a collective injustice, and punishing the wrongdoer becomes a defense of honor and integrity of the entire moral community (Miller 2001). Retaliation against the offender serves to restore the group’s collective image as well as the victim’s individual self-image: it communicates that the offender—not the victim—deserves contempt, and it aims to educate the offender about the general unacceptability of his/her behavior, not merely its unacceptability vis-à-vis the victim (Miller 2001). The Gulabi Gang and the Mahila Aghadi are, in our opinion, best described as women’s movements whose participants are expressing their moral and political convictions and protecting their collective sense of integrity by striking back at criminal perpetrators. However, striking similarities and differences across the groups merit further analysis.

Retributive Justice, Restorative Processes: Comparative Analysis In our analysis, when their moral convictions regarding norms for husbands and government officials are violated, the women of the Gulabi Gang and the Mahila Aghadi view their violence as a form of self-defense against disrespect for an individual woman, the entire moral community of poor women, and, by extension, poor people. Local citizens often trust

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the Gulabi Gang and the Mahila Aghadi because both groups assist those who do not receive the same legal protection as upper-caste citizens (The Pink Women of India 2008; Sen 2008). Situating women vigilante group activities within a grassroots feminist psychological perspective, and a broader liberation psychological framework, highlights how each group openly endorses collective violence as both a practical exercise of women’s autonomy and as a broader attempt at liberation of the poor from repressive state practices. At fi rst glance, practical local gender interests appear to be the only priorities of both groups. However, both groups have participated in community organizing beyond gender interests, in an attempt to expose crimes of the state that affect the poor in general. Both groups demonstrate how restorative and retributive justice are not necessarily mutually exclusive and how ethical practices of violence can be carried out in a context of discrimination, a failed judiciary and government corruption. Both groups take into consideration cultural factors such as the role of the family and attachment to one’s roots. Feminist scholars have argued that when women act within their prescribed roles as mothers and wives who are concerned for their families, they can sometimes be more effective than feminist activists attempting to dismantle oppressive regimes more directly (e.g., see Kandiyoti 1991; Staunton 1990). Both groups try to reunite women with their families and to work out problems between employers and workers, for the betterment of the community. Therefore, destroying or murdering the wrongdoer would be counterproductive to larger local community goals. However, both groups are willing to use violence to set limits on how customs are practiced, and they support outside employment for women, married or single. We hold that the grassroots assistance these groups provide is valuable in women’s struggle for liberation in particular and poor people’s liberation movements in general. However, the connections we make between women’s violent retributive acts and feminist psychological conceptions of justice are not without concerns. To understand the women’s moral convictions, and who is included and excluded from their vision of a restored moral order, requires a closer look at differences between the groups. The Mahila Aghadi’s goal, as part of the larger Shiv Sena movement, is to create a militaristic Hindu society where women have freedom of mobility, yet they exclude Muslim women and other religious communities from their visions of freedom. These right-wing values violate feminist principles and ethics and cannot be condoned. Aghadi women’s commitment to an ethno-religious, nationalist movement led by men creates a space for them to transgress within the women’s wing of the movement, but this commitment also undermines their autonomy. Moreover, the Aghadi’s connection to the men of the broader Shiv Sena movement provides them with additional power (and the threat of power) that the Gulabi Gang as a secular movement does not (and cannot) wield. We do not believe feminists

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should support the unethical nationalistic forms of violence that discriminate against women and men of other ethnic and religious backgrounds. However, when Aghadi women are raped and abused by men, both outside and within the Shiv Sena movement, we, the authors, support their right to defend themselves by ethically violent retributive means, using proportionate punishment. As feminists we do not believe any woman should be raped or abused, regardless of how misguided we perceive her ethnic, religious, or political beliefs. In contrast, the Gulabi Gang’s founder, Sampat Pal Devi, makes clear that the interest of poor women was and remains her initial priority, despite broader local community interests that involve the lower-caste poor in surrounding villages. Clearly, their interests are more in line with feminist politics and the autonomy that feminists encourage among women, compared with the Aghadi women’s interests. Their agenda dovetails most strategically with the goals of feminist and liberation psychologists in ways that demand our attention, reflection, and action, within and outside the academy. Nonetheless, lingering concerns for both groups include the fact that grassroots politics, like all politics, have their limitations; violent retributive activities do not challenge fundamental structures of domination in society over the long term. Despite short-term instances of justice and the valiant attempts of both groups at empowerment, mainstream Indian feminists are correct when they warn (Sen 2008) that these women risk being criminalized and dangerously attacked themselves when violent retributive definitions of justice are carried out. Sampat (Gulabi Gang) has various criminal charges pending, and Rita (Mahila Aghadi) has been arrested and had to go into hiding at one point (The Pink Women of India 2008; Sen 2008). We also have concerns regarding the level of democratic processes used in both groups when decisions to punish and the type of “proportionate punishment” are made. Sampat makes these decisions for the Gulabi Gang; only a few senior members make these decisions for the Mahila Aghadi. We believe democratic decision-making processes and guidelines would assist in keeping group members accountable and well within the range of what is ethical, proportionate violence. Also, the lack of literacy among members and loose organizational structures may negatively affect their ability to attract legitimate long-term funding for their community activities and long-range liberation goals. Concerns notwithstanding, we believe the women in these specific contexts must make the decisions that are in their best short-term and longterm interests, after weighing the costs. Joining the Gulabi Gang or the Mahila Aghadi may demonstrate their own brand of feminist self-determination within a complex patriarchal context. Despite the risks entailed, some acts of vigilantism by women’s groups may be useful in addition to reformist institutional strategies and appeals to government institutions by formal feminist social movement organizations. As feminists, we have a

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responsibility to respond to media reports beyond superficial representations that sensationalize, distort, and trivialize their fight for justice. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The chapter ‘Justice by Any Means Necessary: Vigilantism among Indian Women’ by Aaronette White and Shagun Rastogi was originally published as White and Rastogi (2009). I thank Sage Publications for granting permission to reprint the article, and would like to do this in memory of Aaronette White, who unfortunately passed away on August 13, 2012. NOTES 1. Women become members of the Gulabi Gang by paying a registration fee of 100 rupees (approximate equivalent of US$2). They are given a receipt, a pink sari, and protection. 2. Shiv Sena, a regional party (named after a Hindu martial king Shivaji) for several decades was content with regionalism, asserting the cultural superiority of native people in the Indian state of Maharashtra and claiming economic and political power for them. However, it later turned towards Hinduvta, a movement that fervently upholds Hindu nationalism in India (Sen 2006). 3. Shiv Sena unapologetically describes itself as ‘a righteous vigilante organization’ of men and women on the alert to protect Hindu communities from ‘the Muslim menace’ (Sen 2006: 25). They want to oust Muslims and lowercaste members of non-Hindu religious communities (e.g., Christians and Buddhists) from the Bombay slums in order to reduce competition for land, jobs, and shrinking local business markets. These tensions culminated in the Bombay riots of 1992–1993. The women’s wing of the Shiv Sena movement emerged as an autonomous vigilante group during the riots after their wellpublicized violence (Sen 2008).

REFERENCES Biswas, Soutik (2007) ‘India’s “Pink” Vigilante Women,’ BBC News, 26 November 2007, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7068875.stm, accessed on 24 September 2013. Bufacchi, Vittorio (2005) ‘Two Concepts of Violence,’ Political Studies Review, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 193–204. Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (ed.) (2005) Feminism in India, London: Zed Books. Clayton, Susan and Opotow, Susan (2003) ‘Justice and Identity: Changing Perspectives on What Is Fair,’ Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 298–310. Daly, Kathleen and Stubbs, Julie (2006) ‘Feminist Engagement with Restorative Justice,’ Theoretical Criminology, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 9–28. Dhillon, Amrit (2007) ‘Pretty in Pink, Female Vigilantes Also Handy with an Axe,’ The Age, 15 December 2007, available at: http://www.theage. com.au/news/world/pretty-in-pink-female-vigilantes-also-handy-with-anaxe/2007/12/14/1197568262475.html, accessed on 27 December 2007. Gangoli, Geetanjali (2007) Indian Feminisms: Law, Patriarchies and Violence in India, London: Ashgate.

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Hampton, Jean (1998) ‘Punishment, Feminism, and Political Identity: A Case Study in the Expressive Meaning of the Law,’ Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 23–45. Hutchings, Kimberly (2007) ‘Feminist Ethics and Political Violence,’ International Politics, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 90–106. Johnston, Les (1996) ‘What Is Vigilantism?,’ British Journal of Criminology, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 220–36. Kalpagam, Uma (2004) ‘Perspectives for a Grassroots Feminist Theory,’ in Maitrayee Chaudhuri (ed.) Feminism in India, London: Zed Books, pp. 334–48. Kandiyoti, Deniz (ed.) (1991) Women, Islam and the State, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Miller, Dale T. (2001) ‘Disrespect and the Experience of Injustice,’ Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 52, pp. 527–53. Miller, Jean B. (1982) Women and Power, Wellesley, MA: Wellesley’s Centers for Women. Moane, Geraldine (1999) Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mohanty, Chandra T. (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mullen, Elizabeth and Skitka, Linda J. (2006) ‘Exploring the Psychological Underpinnings of the Moral Mandate Effect: Motivated Reasoning, Group Differentiation, or Anger?’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 90, no. 4, pp. 629–43. Okin, Susan M. (1989) Justice, Gender, and the Family, New York: Basic Books. Pink Women of India, The (2008) Documentary directed by Shagun Rastogi, available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN4nbpcPElM&feature=c4–overvi ew&list=UU5IbMo3KO1vK8E4DcNVnyRQ, accessed on 24 September 2013. Prasad, Raekha (2008) ‘Banda Sisters: In One of India’s Poorest Regions, Hundreds of Pink-Clad Female Vigilantes are Challenging Male Violence and Corruption— Raekha Prasad Meets the Gulabi Gang,’ The Guardian, 15 February 2008, p. 5. Rao, Anupama (ed.) (2003) Gender and Caste, London: Zed Books. Rege, Sharmila (2004) ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of Difference and towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position,’ in Maitrayee Chaudhuri (ed.) Feminism in India, London: Zed Books, pp. 211–25. Sen, Atreyee (2006) ‘Reflecting on Resistance: Hindu Women “Soldiers” and the Birth of Female Militancy,’ Indian Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–35. Sen, Atreyee (2008) ‘Everyday and Extraordinary Violence: Women Vigilantes and Raw Justice in the Bombay Slums,’ in David Pratten and Atreyee Sen (eds.) Global Vigilantes, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 69–92. Sen, Atreyee and Pratten, David (2008) ‘Global Vigilantes: Perspectives on Justice and Violence,’ in David Pratten and Atreyee Sen (eds.) Global Vigilantes, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–21. Skitka, Linda J. (2002) ‘Do the Means Always Justify the Ends, or Do the Ends Sometimes Justify the Means? A Value Protection Model of Justice Reasoning,’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 588–97. Skitka, Linda J. and Bauman, Christopher W. (2008) ‘Moral Conviction and Political Engagement,’ Political Psychology, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 29–54. Skitka, Linda J., Bauman, Christopher W. and Sargis, Edward G. (2005) ‘Moral Conviction: Another Contributor to Attitude Strength or Something More?’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 88, no. 6, pp. 895–917. Skitka, Linda J. and Houston, David A. (2001) ‘When Due Process Is of No Consequence: Moral Mandates and Presumed Defendant Guilt or Innocence,’ Social Justice Research, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 305–26.

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Staunton, Irene (1990) Mothers of the Revolution: Zimbabwean Women in the Aftermath of War, Harare: Baobab Books. Unger, Rhoda K. (1998) Resisting Gender: Twenty-Five Years of Feminist Psychology, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. White, Aaronette and Rastogi, Shagun (2009) ‘Justice by Any Means Necessary: Vigilantism among Indian Women,’ Feminism & Psychology, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 313–27. Young, Iris M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

12 On Love and Shame Two Photographs of Female Protesters Marta Zarzycka

INTRODUCTION The relationship between gender and citizenship has been a complex and sensitive one—cultural theorists of citizenship and the nation-state (e.g., Benhabib 2002) argue that the universal body imagined in connection to the state and the nation refers predominantly to a white, male, and heterosexual body. Because female bodies play a fundamental role in current conflicts— women are frequently represented as the primary victims of physical and systemic violence (Mohanty 2002) and, more recently, as warriors, soldiers, or terrorists (e.g. Alexander and Hawkesworth 2008; Berger and Naaman 2011; Conway and McInerney 2012; Ponzanesi, this volume)—the poetics and politics of women’s resistance calls for a renewed analysis through feminist theory.1 Challenging traditional division between private and public space, this chapter, in line with the whole volume, explores opportunities of communication, reconciliation, and restoration from a gendered perspective. This chapter does so through its focus on the medium of photography and its deployment in the context of war and confl ict. I examine here two photographs of female protesters, both taken in 2011 in Cairo, and underline a link between civil protest and the politics of gendered representations in order to shed new light on the rhetorical processes of recognition of sovereign subjects.2 I further point to how the affective powers of such an imagery influence the conditions that individuate, immobilize, and isolate the figure of the protester in contemporary confl ict reporting.3 Bearing in mind the long tradition connecting femininity with feelings and emotions (Berlant 2008), I reflect on the gendered rhetoric that mediates the reception of such photographs. As the modern state has become increasingly resourceful in appropriating the medium, photography theory has moved beyond debates about indexicality, ethics, and aesthetics (Baer 2002; Barthes 1981; Boltanski 1999; Sontag 1989). Contemporary photography scholars have engaged with concepts of sovereignty, nationalism, and postcolonial and postimperial space (Azoulay 2008, 2012; Butler 2009), and with the claim that photographic images are constitutive of political and social divisions. Political regimes

230 Marta Zarzycka deploy photographs for purposes of representing social groups and communities, grounded on cultural binaries of inside–outside, citizen–noncitizen, governed–sovereign. Photographs, although increasingly giving way to biometrics and fingerprinting, are part of ID cards: the ultimate tokens of citizenship. Strategies of state surveillance and citizen reporting rely on cameras as tools of classification, control, or testimony to crimes. Like no other image-making technology to date, photography both unveils and upholds the systemic or physical violence exercised on individuals and communities. But photography also asserts dissent and resistance to oppression: scenes of demonstrations, protests, and rallies are a common visual trope among images we find in newspapers and online, as well as among the photographs awarded prizes in photography competitions (Zarzycka 2012) and among images on the walls of art galleries. The mobility of photographs capturing clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement bodies, characterized by dramatic form and captivating composition, has made them ubiquitous. Offering memorable coverage of social injustice and human rights violations, they are available for recognition, association, contemplation, and affective engagement. Whereas the modern state’s hegemony is said to operate through citizens’ acceptance, consent, and endurance (Gramsci 2007), footage of civilian resistance— whether produced by professional photojournalists or fellow citizens—has potential to make us rethink the notion of obedient citizenship. In 2011, a year of political upheaval that ranks alongside 1968 or 1989, “The Protester” became Time’s person of the year.4 Images showing riots and demonstrations employ dramatic features and rely on familiar structures grounded in people’s cultural and ideological belief systems. The individuals captured in these photographs often become romanticized figures of social protest, caught in the discourse of emotions and feelings. 5 Western audiences—read as: media-savvy audiences worldwide who read and comment on journalism published in the centers of European and North American powers—in their reading of the structural and institutional dynamics driving political resistance have rarely moved beyond “good guys” (civilian, young, secular) versus “bad guys” (military, older, Islamic) (See Midden in this volume) and the notion that the rage and hope of the resistant subject are positive forces of political transition. This chapter brings together theories of gender and photography that have often been isolated from one another within scholarly debates. Photography, its history and its philosophy belong to the study of visual culture, media, and art history; gender, particularly in the context of war, has been at the heart of political theory, sociology, and law. Whereas gender scholarship has provided important discourses and practices relating to the representation of women in the context of armed violence—pointing out that alternative figurations may create new spaces for identity and culture (Zarkov 2007)—it has not systematically addressed photography. Conversely, confl ict photography has received considerable attention in the field of media studies (e.g., Perlmutter 1998); in-depth engagement with

On Love and Shame 231 gender theories is rare. This chapter looks at single moments caught by cameras; these moments stand for conditions that are hardly random or spontaneous, but rather systematically regulated. Photographs capture, create, rehearse, and enact human relationships within these conditions; they operate as ‘relations between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them’ (Rancière 2007: 3). A critical approach to the photographic practices is crucial in today’s globalized world of systemic oppression, where questions of democratic citizenship, belonging, sovereignty, and resistance loom large. Rather than rage (toward aggressors) and hope (for a better future), which are frequently at the core of the interpretations of images of protesters (Greenwood 2012), other collective emotions—shame and love— emerge as central in my reading of two specific photographs of protest. Seeing these emotions—conventionally connected with women—not as psychological states, but rather as social and cultural practices, I point out how shame and love allow us to address the question of particular political and social structures, carried out by means of photography. First, I take as my object the process of shaming produced through a multifaceted nexus of gendered relationships which enters the discourse on human rights. Second, I follow how love as an affective force has the potential to both blunt the political value of such images and to transform the political sphere. I argue that both love and shame, understood as forms of social presence which have shaped and are shaping us in our contact with (photographed) others, call for rethinking the concept and practice of political resistance and its visual testimonies.

SHAME The fi rst image I analyze is a still from a video taken by a civilian from a balcony overlooking Tahrir Square in Cairo, on 17 December 2011 (Figure 12.1).6 The square had been the center of antigovernment demonstrations against former president Hosni Mubarak and his successor, Premier Kamal Ganzouri. The Egyptian military, although it initially safeguarded the revolution by protecting protesters from state security forces, eventually turned to violence against civilians. Extensive coverage through news sites and social media from a corps of international photojournalists, participants, and bystanders laid bare the violence that led to many injuries and deaths. This particular image shows the police beating a woman protester with truncheons; one of them is stomping on her stomach. Pulling her abaya, a loose black robe, over her head, they are exposing her blue bra and bare midriff.7 The vulnerability of the revealed skin against bodies covered by uniforms pulls us in, inviting empathy, indignation, disbelief, and voyeuristic fascination.

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Figure 12.1 Egyptian army soldiers beat a young woman during a protest at Tahrir Square in Cairo on 17 December 2011. Still from a citizen-made video, as found on CNN’s website.

Although the Egyptian authorities have described the scene as an isolated incident, the video still, widely reproduced as a photograph, has been seen by global audiences as encapsulating the country’s difficult political transition. After being cropped in various ways and featured on the front pages of newspapers and across social media networks, it has appeared to draw even more pro-democracy activists into battle with the Egyptian police and army. On 20 December, a large Egyptian women’s demonstration took place in response to the photograph.8 A witness to the scene was quoted as saying he wants to ‘retrieve the honour of this woman and those martyrs killed for the sake of Egypt’s future’ (CNN 2011). The image has also had an impact on the international level: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has urged Egyptian security forces ‘to respect and protect the universal rights of all Egyptians, including the rights to peaceful free expression and assembly,’ 9 and she has remarked that the systematic degradation of Egyptian women ‘dishonours the revolution and disgraces the state and its uniform’ (see BBC News 2011).10 As one can gather from these quotes, the interpretive frame of the photograph strongly engages ideas of discredit, disgrace, and shame. These responses often continue by pointing out the hypocrisy of regimes that praise modesty and respect for women but systematically abuse them, especially those who seek political agency. The photograph, like many others, serves the function of ‘mobilizing shame’ (Keenan 2004): the exposure of agents, governments, or armies to the public opinion managed by public media, foreign governments, international organizations, and human

On Love and Shame 233 rights NGOs. The relevance of this exposure relies strongly on the connection between photographic revelation of acts of violence and consequent social (counter)action.11 However, in the case of this image, an interesting shift in the mobilization of shame takes place. Even though the footage was produced to disgrace the perpetrators (and possibly the passive community of Western spectators), it is the exposed stomach of the woman, not the covered faces of the policemen, that resonates with the idea of shame as a need to seek coverage (Webster’s dictionary links the word “shame” with the word “to cover” and “shirt”). The anonymous woman, whose skin in media coverage becomes acutely uncovered, contributes to the reinforcement of the female body not only as a token of war, but also the locus of shame; an object of not only physical abuse, but also of defamation. Reinforcing this notion, the captions accompanying the photograph identify the figure in the image simply as a ‘modest young woman,’ a ‘defenceless woman’ (The Atlantic 2011) or an ‘activist who does not want her name revealed because of her shame at the way she was treated’ (The Guardian 2011; see also Ynetnews 2011).12 The act of political activism is replaced in this discourse by the ethical/moral ideal of dignified femininity: the woman becomes an object whose honor needs to be redeemed by others. Rather than seen as an agent challenging the state, she appears as a victim violated by it. The figure of the citizen as conceived in the eighteenth century, understood both as a legal member in a political community and an active participant in political affairs, is replaced here by the subject subjugated to disgrace. The idea of the Western modern state that is often projected on peoples in the Middle East by their spectators (as having come into being as parliamentary democracy offering protection, order, justice, social welfare, and the maintenance of order and happiness of its citizens), dissipates into the visual realm where bodies are not caught on camera anymore to control and discipline, but to cater to public feelings. Conflating the woman’s identity with shame, Western and Egyptian media paradoxically continue the techniques used by the Egyptian antiprotest forces in which tearing off clothes and touching have become a form of political shaming of women protesters by the militia. So at the same time, the patriarchal moral imperative of un-shaming of an underprivileged non-Western woman becomes incorporated into the dominant imaginary of the visual global market. The responses focusing on shame and disgrace reproduce and codify the “third world woman” as a singular monolithic subject (Mohanty 2002), translated into a visual vernacular for Western consumption. Like countless times before, the female body in the photograph has been used as a token of war and violence, a metaphor for colonization where non-Western women de facto stand for the relationship between non-Western and Western patriarchy. The woman’s blue jeans, her trainers, and a policeman’s sneaker hovering over her stomach—all insignia of the West as a dominating locus of symbolic and grounded power relations—remain in stark contrast with the torn off

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abaya, and constitute a part of the audiences’ attraction. Consequently, the photograph is caught in two viewing frames: the patriarchal one that refers back to the protection of female dignity, and the neocolonial one, which appeals to liberation of women from “traditional” (Islamic) forms of sovereignty. The politics of connecting femininity to shame has been present both in the colonial past and the present postcolonial moment (think of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman exhibited as a freak show attraction in nineteenth-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, and of current heated debates on the veil in Arab and Western countries). In a time of increasingly frequent systematic human rights violations by nation-states, encounters with the suffering registered by the camera lens is frequently embedded in human rights discourse. Human rights campaigns (e.g., Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Red Cross) rely strongly on the power of the framed and contextualized photographic image to further their causes. However, the relationship between human rights and the spectatorship of images of resistance can go astray. The public reception of the photograph of the Egyptian protester shifted away from establishing the civil identity of a protester as the bearer of rights and toward the individual subject who, while denied these rights, pays a supposedly bigger price—that of visual exposure and the resulting loss of dignity. Instead of being viewed as a political act, the violation of human rights is rather understood as the breaking of cultural taboo: public contempt focuses on the act of disrobing as an assault on female modesty and piety. Appearing in the image as a victim of a violation of dignity, the woman’s civic personhood is established on the basis of this violation. Consequently, whereas the comments on the scene I quoted above deploy a familiar dream of redemption and liberation, the notion of human rights is depoliticized here through the broader moral rhetorics of gender-specific dignity and honor.13 The regime responsible for the threat to physical integrity, rather than cultural dignity, remains outside the framework of legibility. The photograph is an example of how the notion of citizenship, understood as freedom and autonomy, does not simply adhere directly to one’s body, but rather must be granted through recognition as a member of a political community. Whereas shame can act as a tool of nation building (e.g., through public apologies for war crimes, official acknowledgment of wrongdoings, or granting reparation to certain communities) (Ahmed 2004), the reverse can be observed here: through the shaming of a single woman, the idea of the active community of citizens disintegrates. The spectacle-like appeal of the image fi xes an isolated cultural category of “dishonoured” as a defi ning feature of the population on which it is infl icted. The visual testimony of the acts of aggression perpetrated in Tahrir Square, with its potential work of shaming the militia, turns into overexposure of bare flesh captured in stark contrast to the bodies of policemen.

On Love and Shame 235 The use of the female body romanticizes people’s struggle and the drama of political transition, underlining clashes between regression and progress, tyranny and freedom, subjugation and equity, regime and democracy, top-down domination and rebellion against it. Through the graphicness of the violence depicted, the photograph has resonated strongly with its spectators, immediately aligning the audiences with the protester. However, there is a price to pay for this affective transaction: rather than an individual endowed with self-evident rights who can effect military, political, and historical change, the woman becomes a shamed victim in need of saving and avenging, someone who needs her dignity restored. As a result, while exposed, she remains literally and symbolically faceless, just like her perpetrators in the image.

LOVE The photograph by Lefteris Pitarakis (Associated Press) shows a female Egyptian activist kissing a riot police officer during antigovernment clashes in Cairo on 28 January 2011 (Figure 12.2). That day, tens of thousands of antigovernment protesters poured into the streets and confronted the police, who fi red back with rubber bullets and tear gas. However, rather than an image of enraged crowds, wounded activists, or political banners, the photograph is a portrait: providing a close-up of two faces, it offers psychological insight into the subjects represented. The woman grabs the head of a much younger man wearing a helmet and a uniform; a fragment of a plastic shield is visible in the lower corner of the picture. It is not just the cultural/ideological frames, but the content of the photo built on oppositions that is guiding our responses: a woman’s headscarf versus a man’s helmet, her softness versus the compactness of his uniform, her embracing gesture versus his clear discomfort, her half-closed eyes versus his piercing gaze directed straight at us. In the background we see the blurred silhouettes of other policemen. Acting through these oppositions, the image might reference certain Biblical iconographical motifs (David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, the Kiss of Judas). At the same time, it belongs to the increasingly popular genre showing civilians, usually women, hugging or attempting to hug representatives of the state (see, for instance, Christian Science Monitor 2011). This genre portrays a confrontation between a civilian protester and a representative of state power (soldier, police officer), reducing a social, cultural, or economic condition (war, regime, oppression) into an ‘individuated aggregate’ of a human body (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 21), frequently casting the vulnerability of an unarmed protester against the solid frame of a uniformed authority. The act of embrace, a token of love and affection, becomes here a staged performance, involving gendered bodies as ‘performatively constituted’ aspects of identification and power (Butler

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Figure 12.2 Lefteris Pitarakis, Egyptian activist kissing a riot police officer during antigovernment clashes in Cairo on 28 January 2011. Copyright Associated Press.

1990: 25). Although its popularity can be traced back to “Make Love Not War” slogans from the 1960s, the genre is particularly suited to the neoliberal regimes of today.14 Whereas the picture in this chapter has been made by a professional photographer, many citizen-produced images showing the same scene are widely circulated across social media and shared enthusiastically by online communities as an uplifting reminder that “love conquers all.” Uploaded and forwarded much like the funny cat photos that circulate online, they attract trivializing comments calling them “cute” or “sweet.” Creating affective connections, they provide more or less momentary intensities and interventions. Similar images can also be found in anonymous leaflets circulating in Cairo, one of them showing a visor-helmeted riot policeman holding a sign saying ‘The Police and the People Stand Together against Oppression,’ flanked by an elderly woman in traditional peasant dress with her head covered and a younger woman in modern clothes, making a peace sign (Figure 12.3).15 These leaflets advise demonstrators to begin with peaceful protests, carrying roses to symbolize their peaceful intentions, and to use positive language while persuading policemen and soldiers to join their ranks. I trace here the potential of such imagery as well as ontological traps it might fall into. I also demonstrate how the concept of love, similarly to that of shame, can be essential to the critical discussion of representations of political struggle. Although the concept of love has been central

On Love and Shame 237 to Christianity and has had a long psychoanalytic provenance (Benjamin 1988), it is the social theories connected to the concept that interest me here; namely, how love, conveyed by the photographs of resistance, designates both transformative and sustained power, granting possibilities for cohesion among broken postconflict societies. Women have traditionally been seen as possessing higher emotional capacities than men; they are ‘not only expected to be compassionate and understanding, but to act both as teachers of compassion and surrogates for others’ refusals or incapacities to feel appropriately and intelligently’ (Berlant 2008: 170). The mass-marketed intimate sphere—the sphere concerned with feelings and emotions—has been predominantly connected to femininity. Romantic novels and fi lms, organized by fantasies of transcending or dissolving the hardships of life, are targeted at female audiences and have women as their subjects.16 Various components of love—‘projection, displacement, attachment, and belonging’ (Berlant 2008: 11)—are a part of the dynamics within the couple, the family, the nation, and the regime.17 In times of war, women’s love (assigned to and creating affective communities of widows, mothers, or wives of soldiers and militants) has become a particularly expedient concept, informing both pro- and antiwar initiatives. The predominant belief that can be traced in the responses to this kind of imagery is that love is able to effortlessly transcend political identities. Indeed, images of women embracing representatives of the nation-state

Some examples of sign

Figure 12.3 tic.com.

Illustration from an Egypt protest leaflet, as found on www.theatlan-

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frequently direct the viewer’s gaze away from the confl ict, repositioning the women in civil and heteronormative realms as caring, loving, and available for affective reciprocity. The all-encompassing quality of love tends to crowd out the politicized and the activist, erasing indigenous social structures, historical contexts, and local actors. In this particular photograph, the age difference between the subjects allows for an interpretation of the image within the frame of maternal love, the love that supposedly forgives anything. Rather than an agent of state-directed violence, the policeman becomes a scolded boy, reluctant yet ready to succumb to the workings of filial feelings. The loving gesture remains fi xed in the space where ‘romantic conventions of individual historical acts of compassion and transcendence are adapted to imagine a nonhierarchical social world . . . because good intentions and love flourish in it’ (Berlant 2008: 6). Love as a protest strategy is contagious—the perpetrator in this image is no longer faceless (like the violent policemen in the previous picture), but humanized; the woman’s affective work is bearing fruit, mobilizing a fantasy: of collective desire, instruction, and identification that endures within the contingencies of the everyday. The politico-sentimental . . . seeks out the monumental time of emotional recognition, a sphere of dreaming and memory, and translates that sense into an imaginary realm of possible acting, where agency is somehow unconstrained by the normative conventions of the real as it presents itself; and it holds the real accountable to what affective justice fantasy has constructed. (Berlant 2008: 21) However, the idea of a world where everyone loves each other is a neoliberal illusion that fuels the discourse of charity and of multicultural and postconfl ict societies, informing the narcissistic tendencies of privileged groups (Chouliaraki 2010). Despite its seemingly neutralizing structure, love, whether within the sphere of intimacy (the couple, the family) or in its public form (i.e., patriotism), remains implicated in power relations; it can be deployed among the culturally and politically privileged to assimilate and neutralize subordinate subjects. Love often abides by normative and patriarchal values, employed by many as a solution to the problem of social antagonism or a community fractured by violence and trauma. Ahmed (2004) points out how it has become common for hate groups (mostly rightwing fascist groups) to rename themselves as organizations of love; in these, the reproduction of national/racial/religious identity through love is frequently tied to femininity through processes of caring and sharing.18 How to then interpret the kiss and embrace in this image as creating bonds that are both intimate and social, that challenge conventional divisions between public and private, and that consequently liberate the feminine from the sentimental rhetorics to which it has traditionally been relegated? How to see the performative gesture of love itself and its photographic record as a positive political force? The concept of love as

On Love and Shame 239 establishing political grounds for recognition, dialogue, and consequently reconciliation has been the focus of social theorists. Hardt (2011) proposes that substituting love for money or property as the means for organizing contemporary social relations can open up new political projects. Ahmed (2004) examines how love is crucial to the promise of cohesion within a community, as it becomes a way of bonding with others in relation to an ideal that takes shape as an effect of such bonding, albeit also designating the others who have failed that ideal. Finally, Berlant (2008, 2011) sees love as a generative intensity that can be used to disrupt dominant political discourse and inform alternate social imaginaries, bringing social change. Adapting these approaches in relation to the visual, I read this image of a woman protester embracing the policeman as an affective encounter between people that is neither closed nor completely defined at the time that the photograph is taken, and that can hopefully mobilize sustainable social change (Azoulay 2012). The concept of love allows us to rethink a progression from acquiescence to resistance: it is an affective strategy deployed by women as a form of protest, overcoming their role of helpless victims and ascending to a much more active part in the political realm.19 The action of kissing and hugging captured in these photographs employs love as a political project: the construction of affective coexistence between two human bodies, rather than a relationship defi ned by violence or the threat of violence. Rather than transcend the conditions of geopolitical tensions, love has the potential of functioning through the encounter and interaction of these bodies, moving toward each other through emotions (emotion comes from the Latin emovere, meaning to “move through or out”). Affective recognition is at the center of what binds strangers who meet at the opposite sides of the political spectrum. Whereas the photograph makes central the role of love within the political sphere, the displacement of politics to the realm of love may both enable the analysis of the operations of power and neutralize these operations. Employing affective gestures as social codes of gendered femininity under war and conflict, women protesters call for wider resistance to structural oppression and ease the gradual transition from subservience to equal power relations, advancing political, economic, and affective agendas. Although it could easily pull us into sentimental rhetorics where women are perceived as apolitical caregivers (mothers, lovers, sisters), a critical understanding of the relation between the feelings and social gender orders allows us to see this image as articulating alternative and novel modes of encountering the visual testimony of resistance.

CONCLUSION Revisiting Walter Benjamin’s (1968) signature claim that photography is fundamentally a practice of politics, I have demonstrated that the medium

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constitutes a privileged site for the generation of discourse about civil participation in political resistance and its visual mediations across national and geopolitical contexts. I have pointed to how two photographs of female protesters, either subjected to violence or in an act of embrace, provoke continuous inquiries into the process of civil subjectivity, founded on gendered difference, subordination, oppression, endurance, and resistance, as well as the affective work of love and shame. Whereas photography, because of its relatively low time/resources demands, has been praised as a tool of plurality, democracy, egalitarianism, and decentralization (Hariman and Lucaites 2007), photographic capturing of the effects of imperialism, oppression, and social inequalities lays bare their ‘profoundly undemocratic’ visuality (Mirzoeff 2006: 23): the homogenous, state-driven selection of the images that we are allowed to see. Photographs of protesters, often made by nonprofessional bystanders and disseminated widely in social media, defy the dominant visual discourse. Yet their various recontextualizations run the danger of codifying and prescribing the normative realm of citizenship, exclusive of certain groups and contingent with the discourse that distances others. As shown, the trope of a protester, prominent within the visual sphere of Westerncentric (that is, staged by and for Western audiences) epistemologies, has been largely commodified and appropriated by the discourses of Western neoliberalism; to quote one example, it appears more and more frequently among images awarded in important Western photographic contests (Zarzycka 2013; Zarzycka and Kleppe 2013). Both unsettling images, that of the protester normalized and reduced to her gender and the one assuming the traditional function of love in time of war, have been and will countlessly be mobilized in different geopolitical locations and historical settings. The images of rebelliousness have become a form of social containment. I have focused here on the costs of such appropriation: although often produced and circulated as calls to empathy and condemnation of perpetrators by means of photographic exposure, photographs of resistance run the risk of exposing and universalizing the victims of state-directed violence. As the act of resistance threatens traditional notions of femininity as well as the masculine order of the military establishment, the dominant discourse around these images resorts to the process of shaming the female body or to accepting the woman’s role as a universalized loving presence. Nevertheless, I have also pointed to the potentialities offered by critically reading these images as staging the spectacle of emotion, citizenship, and their social recognition. Although love and shame might easily become propaganda for sustaining (neoliberal) hegemony, they might also help contest state power.  As the number of cameras in the world is eternally growing, whereas the number of people not exposed to their presence is systematically diminishing, representations of resistance to an authoritative discourse enacted on bodies, cultures, and communities can become pervasive sites of cultural and political engagement. This chapter, through its investigation of

On Love and Shame 241 photographic practices, focuses on how representations of political resistance are structured on emotions they contain and may evoke in their viewers, and how these emotions are grounded in gendered societal roles. Love and shame as organizers of our gaze, understood as a form of social presence, shaped and shaping us in our contact with others, call for rethinking the concept and practice of political resistance and its visual testimonies. NOTES 1. The trope of a woman protester, brought to Western audiences’ attention because of abundant coverage of rallies during the Arab Spring, is not new. There is much visual documentation of women in history who have fought to secure their political rights: militant suffragists, female factory workers, civil rights women activists. Iconic examples include, among others, the photograph by Marc Riboud of a woman confronting the American National Guard outside the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-Vietnam protest with a flower in her hand; or the 1987 World Press Photo winner by Anthony Suau, showing a mother clinging to a riot policeman’s shield after her son—a demonstrator against a rigged presidential election in South Korea—had been arrested. 2. Both of my case studies pertain to the Egyptian revolution, as coverage of this event was widely connected to affective layers through worldwide spectatorship. The general sentiment of excitement and hope directly linked to political possibility among Egyptian protesters was globally transmitted to and through the online communities of Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter, and has consequently been described as contagiously affective (Dean 2010). 3. I analyze here images showing non-Western protesters. The figure of the Western activist (i.e., in widely circulated photographs of Occupy protests in the US) is beyond the scope of this chapter as it entails a different notion of civil identity. 4. Significantly, despite enormous coverage of the so-called “Arab Spring” protests, the drawing on the cover of Time was based on a photograph of a female protester at Occupy in New York, in the style of President Obama’s HOPE campaign poster. 5. I use here the term “feelings” as experienced personally, “emotions” as the social display of a feeling, and “affective” as a rather unstructured intensity experienced by both individuals and communities (Massumi 1987). 6. The fi lm can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/ egypt-unrest/index.html, accessed on 27 February 2014. 7. The video also shows policemen beating a couple of bystanders. 8. Egyptian artist Nermine Hammam includes this image in her series Unfolding, combining the digitally explicit footage, downloaded from the web, of police brutality in the year following Egypt’s 2011 uprising with stylized Japanese landscapes. The result is an uncomfortable tension between photographic capturing of violence and decorative ornaments, prompting reflection about the beauty of violence. The inspiration for this series was the artist’s own experience of watching a young protester die from asphyxiation in Tahrir Square, while the lives of others in the same city continued undisturbed (see also: www.nerminehammam.com, accessed on 27 February 2014). 9. The statement can be found on the website of US embassy in Egypt: http:// egypt.usembassy.gov/, accessed on 27 February 2014. 10. Clinton’s speech at Georgetown University two days after the photograph was taken.

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11. Keenan further challenges the general structure of the shaming strategy by pointing to the videotapes made by terrorist groups to record and claim atrocities they commit. 12. The Israeli site Ynetnews has identified the woman as Rada Kamal Abdel Khalek, a member of the 6 April opposition movement, who has called the widely disseminated image ‘highly immoral.’ 13. Hesford (2011) pays attention to how “dignity,” particularly linked to femininity, has replaced human rights as the policy term of choice after 9/11. 14. Other examples include photographs of students hugging riot policemen during a protest against an education reform bill in Bogota, Colombia, in November 2012. 15. The leaflet has been translated and published by The Atlantic and The Guardian UK on 27 January 2011. See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ jan/27/egypt-protest-leaflets-mass-action, accessed on 27 February 2014. 16. The same sentimental rhetoric is used by NGOs and the mass media to frame modes of visual testimony to violence and suffering. 17. How women’s (and other subaltern populations’) emotional expertise shapes the social and the political can be seen in current US presidential election campaigns, appealing to feelings of care, coresponsibility, protection. 18. Conversely, one of the frames routinely employed by the media in coverage of women terrorists involves portraying women’s involvement in terrorism as a search for love or as a gift to her lover (Nacos 2005). 19. Mourning is another affective tool used as political protest, as in the case of Women in Black or Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Athanasiou 2005). An entirely different means of political contestation, framing resistance through female sexuality rather than love or its loss, is seen in the photographs of the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN, portrayed with naked torsos. These images, hoping to subvert the misogyny and objectification inherent in the exposure of the naked female body, were criticized by the online and off line collectives alike who protested against FEMEN’s neocolonial rhetorics. Interestingly, Egyptian blogger Alia al-Mahdi sparked heated debates among the online Middle Eastern community after she uploaded a naked picture of herself to challenge Egyptian patriarchal structures and later on posed naked with members of FEMEN, under the title ‘Apocalypse of Muhammad.’ In one of these photos, al-Mahdi is standing with an Egyptian flag, with the words “Sharia is not a constitution” written on her body next to two nude FEMEN activists. The photos were shared widely on Twitter and Facebook.

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Alexander, Karen and Hawkesworth, Mary (eds.) (2008) War & Terror: Feminist Perspectives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Atlantic, The (2011) ‘A Photo That Encapsulates the Horror of Egypt’s Crackdown,’ 18 December 2011, available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2011/12/a-photo-that-encapsulates-the-horror-ofegypts-crackdown/250147/, accessed on 4 July 2013. Athanasiou, Athena (2005) ‘Reflections of the Politics of Mourning: Feminist Ethics and Politics in the Age of Empire,’ Historein, vol. 5, pp. 40–57. Azoulay, Ariella (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books. Azoulay, Ariella (2012) Civil Imagination, London: Verso.

On Love and Shame 243 Baer, Ulrich (2002) Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, Michigan: MIT Press. Barthes, Roland (1981) Camera Lucida: Refl ections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang. BBC News (2011) ‘Egypt Unrest: Women Protest against Army Violence,’ 20 December 2011, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/world-middle-east-16267436, accessed on 4 July 2013. Benhabib, Seyla (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, Jessica (1988) The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, New York: Pantheon. Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations: Essays and Refl ections, New York: Schocken Books. Berger, Eva and Naaman, Dorit (2011) ‘Combat Cuties: Photographs of Israeli Women Soldiers in the Press since the 2006 Lebanon War,’ Media, War & Conflict, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 269–86. Berlant, Lauren (2008) The Female Complaint: The Unfi nished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, New York: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren (2011) ‘A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages,’ Cultural Anthropology, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 683–91. Boltanski, Luc (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Chouliaraki, Lilie (2010) ‘Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication beyond a Politics of Pity,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 107–26. Christian Science Monitor, The (2011) ‘Protests in Egypt: Hugs and Kisses,’ 28 January 2011, available at: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/EditorialBoard-Blog/2011/0128/Protests-in-Egypt-Hugs-and-kisses, accessed on 4 July 2013. CNN (2011) ‘Outrage over Woman’s Beating Fuels New Egypt Protests,’ 19 December 2011, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/ egypt-unrest/index.html, accessed on 4 July 2013. Conway, Maura and McInerney, Lisa (2012) ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It? Framing “JihadJane” in the US Press,’ Media, War & Conflict, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 6–21. Dean, Jodi (2010) ‘Affective Networks,’ MediaTropes, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 19–44. Gramsci, Antonio (2007) Prison Notebooks, New York: Columbia University Press. Greenwood, Keith (2012) ‘Picturing Defiance: Visions of Democracy in Iran,’ International Communication Gazette, vol. 74, no. 7, pp. 619–35. Guardian, The (2011) ‘Young Woman Beaten and Dragged by Egyptian Soldiers Wants Anonymity,’ 18 December 2011, available at: http://www.guardian. co.uk/world/2011/dec/18/egpyt-military-tahrir-square-woman?newsfeed=true, accessed on 4 July 2013. Hardt, Michael (2011) ‘For Love Or Money,’ Cultural Anthropology, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 676–82. Hariman, Robert and Lucaites, John L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hesford, Wendy (2011) Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

244 Marta Zarzycka Keenan, Thomas (2004) ‘Mobilizing Shame,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2/3, pp. 435–49. Massumi, Brian (1987) ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements,’ in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (eds.) A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xvi–xix. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2006) ‘Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib,’ Radical History Review, n. 95, pp. 21–44. Mohanty, Chandra T. (2002) ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,’ Signs, vol. 2, no. 28, pp. 17–53. Nacos, Brigitte L. (2005) ‘The Portrayal of Female Terrorists in the Media: Similar Framing Patterns in the News Coverage of Women in Politics and Terrorism,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 435–51. Perlmutter, Daniel D. (1998) Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises, Westport, CT: Praeger. Rancière, Jacques (2007) The Future of the Image, London: Verso. Sontag, Susan (1989) On Photography, New York: Anchor. Ynetnews (2011) ‘Egyptian Protester: I Thought I Was Going to Die,’ 19 December 2011, available at: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4164039,00. html, accessed on 4 July 2013. Zarkov, Dubravka (2007) The Body of War. Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zarzycka, Marta (2012) ‘Madonnas of Warfare, Angels of Poverty,’ Photographies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 71–85. Zarzycka, Marta (2013) ‘Feelings as Facts: The World Press Photo Contest and Visual Tropes,’ Photographies, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 177–84. Zarzycka, Marta and Kleppe, Martijn (2013) ‘Awards, Archives, and Affects: Tropes in the World Press Photo Contest 2009–2011,’ Media Culture and Society, vol. 35, no. 8, pp. 977–99.

13 Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular Gender Entanglements, Social Media, and the Religion–Secular Divide Eva Midden INTRODUCTION On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian man, set himself on fi re after police confiscated his unlicensed cart and wares (BBC News 2012). His death led to a series of revolts in Tunisia, but also in other areas of the Middle East. In January, protestors took control of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt. One of the main demands of the demonstrators was the resignation of President Mubarak. Initially the president refused to leave, but on 12 February 2011, after weeks of protest, he fi nally pulled back. Western media has extensively covered these events, generally described as the “Arab Spring.” The (supposed) roles of new media, women, and the Muslim Brotherhood have been especially important topics of discussion. Particularly after the election of the presidential candidate Muhammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was believed that Egypt would not get the positive changes it had been fighting for.1 Even though there are still revolts and changes happening in the Middle East at this moment, most Western media attention has faded away. This chapter focuses on the uprisings in Egypt mainly at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. The aim is not to fully understand the so-called “Arab Spring” itself, but to investigate the consequences of the way these events have been discussed, fi rst of all in popular media. The argument is that exactly the combined focus on gender, new media, and secularism/ democracy has created a specific narrative of the “Arab Spring” and has made other narratives of the possibilities, background, and aims invisible. In this context, it is proposed that an alternative view could benefit from a postsecular critique that includes a critical perspective on exactly the combination of secularism, gender, and new media. In providing such a postsecular critique of the popular Western media representation of the “Arab Spring,” I am following Hamid Dashabi, who writes in The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism: The task of becoming attentive students of the uprisings and seeing to it that they generate their own knowledge are tasks no less urgent than the revolutions themselves. (2012: 241)

246 Eva Midden According to the author, the “Arab Spring” is ‘in urgent need of theorizations—multiple, varied, contested and critical’ (2012: 251). He links the uprisings to the end of postcolonialism, which, according to him, can be connected to an exhaustion of all ideologies. During colonialism, a colonial modernity was forced on the Egyptians, against which they could only assert in the way of an anticolonial modernity. Overcoming this condition of postcoloniality, he argues, ‘announces the end of “the West” that had conditioned it and of the “Rest” that was narrated in opposition to that “West”’ (251). According to Dashabi, the dominant regime of knowledge production about Muslims and the Muslim world must be overthrown as much as the regime of Mubarak. This chapter aims to contribute to this by bringing postsecular critique into the analysis and discussion of the “Arab Spring” and its representations. Please note that any critical account of the uprisings should first of all question the name “Arab Spring” itself. It implies an essential “Arab” characteristic that all revolts in the Middle East during the last few years share. Hence the different contexts, contents, and approaches of the revolts seem to be ignored. Above this, the term “spring” suggests an awakening, as if it were asleep (read: lagging behind) before the uprisings (El-Mahdi 2011b). It is often argued that Western media presented this specific narrative of the uprisings in Egypt and the role of religion, gender, and new media in them in order to make these events more comprehensible for their audiences. However, as I said above, the choices in coverage made only specific aspects of the revolts visible. The chapter will combine a literary overview of these themes with a reflection on rethinking the events through a postsecular critique. The focus is particularly on Egypt as the revolts there have received much attention by popular media in “Arab Spring” coverage and because new media, religion and/or gender have been at the center of much of this coverage.

POLITICS OF NAMING Events in Egypt and surrounding countries in 2011 have been described, among other things, as the “Arab Spring,” “Arab uprisings,” “revolutions,” “pro-democracy uprisings,” and so forth. People participating in these uprisings have been “Islamist,” “predominantly male,” “many active females,” “youth,” “from all backgrounds and ages,” and “privileged.” These people have called for “rights,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “the end of the Mubarak regime,” “an Islamist state,” and so forth. Who they are, what they want, where they are located, and the legitimacy of their goals all tie in with the names they have been called. In other words, the “Arab Spring” might not be “Arab” or “Spring”; this is just the discourse through which the unfolding events have been explained. Bhatia (2005) argues that the ‘politics of naming’ entails a competition for legitimacy of the subject: ‘to name is to identify an object, remove it

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 247 from the unknown, and then assign to it a set of characteristics, motives, values and behaviors’ (6). Names can fulfi ll roles similar to those of narratives, images, euphemisms, and analogies. One could say that for ‘the recipient or audience, names, much like analogies, help defi ne the nature of the situation confronting the individual, help assess the stakes, and provide prescriptions which are then evaluated in terms of their chances of success and their moral rightness’ (Bhatia 2005: 9). However, whereas a name might provide truth to an extent, it is in most cases very selectively true. This also means it probably does not constitute a balanced account of the available truth and thus leaves some (essential) aspects out of the picture. Besides that, names are most often given or defi ned by the dominant position, thus ‘groups that have a marginal status are denied the vocabulary to defi ne (and express) their own experiences’ (Bhatia 2005: 8). Media plays an important role because by framing the confl ict, it functions both as a ‘name-giver’ and as a ‘primary mechanism’ through which names and narratives are transmitted to the public (Bhatia 2005: 10). At the same time, media outlets are not neutral vehicles, they often take their cues from governments and institutions, which have a vested interest in transmitting a certain narrative. Some media, notably the BBC, have shown awareness of the power of naming (Bhatia 2005: 10–11). Later in this chapter, I will show what the reflection by the BBC has actually entailed and what has remained excluded. First I will point out the most important issues in regard to the “Arab Spring”: gender, new media, and democracy/secularism.

TWEETING THE REVOLUTION Digital media is often considered to be Western media, and is generally connected to concepts such as freedom and democracy. In practice, however, the Internet seems to polarize many debates and hence even restrict certain positions. For example, the many heated debates about Muslim women in Western media have actually served to prevent the women from participating in these debates themselves online (Midden 2014). Moreover, digital media are supposed to create more possibilities and freedoms for people, but they also restrict those who have less access or experience with these techniques. Since the beginning of the revolts in Egypt, they have been connected to the use of digital media or even labeled as ‘social media revolutions.’ These are not innocent or neutral descriptions; how the roles of both old and new media are described has considerable consequences for the images people have of the uprisings themselves. Hence, the question is how the Egyptian demonstrations have been mediated in different ways. As I have already mentioned, the Internet is often described as a utopian space, where everyone can speak up and voice their opinions openly and equally (see also Knight 2012: 61). Consequently, the referral of the journalists to digital

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media in relation to the uprisings, has given the impression of a real-time, realistic, and truthful account of the uprisings, instead of an account heavily mediated through different processes of selection (Fandy 1999: 125). One of the consequences of emphasizing the importance of digital media in the uprisings is that a particular group is recognized as the core of the revolts: well-educated, middle-class youth. Whereas this group might indeed represent the largest part of the social media activists, this does not mean that they also exemplify the revolts in general. Moreover, the connection between well-educated youth and digital media also seems to suggest that they share Western and/or modern values (Howard and Hussain 2011: 38). It is in this context that the uprisings are described as modernist and the Arab world as ‘finally awakening’ and ‘becoming democratic.’ The facts that not all protestors were young and well-educated and that not all young people share the same ideologies are ignored. Hence, by portraying the uprisings as young and middle class, other Egyptians are excluded from the picture or even delegitimized because they are different or aim for different things. Moreover, access remains an important issue when discussing the role of digital media. The Internet access rate in Egypt is about 16.8 percent, among the highest in the region. However, this number shows that stories on the Internet can only speak for a minority of the Egyptians (Dunn and Wilson 2011: 1270). Limiting the digital core of the uprisings even further is the fact that to be heard, one has to be technologically adept enough to circumvent possible state repressive measures (Howard and Hussain 2011: 44). Hence, one could argue that the emphasis on the role of digital media in the uprisings in Egypt is actually an invention of Western media. First of all, because the majority of Egyptian people have had ample access to digital media, and, second, because it has actually been Western media that have used these media to make the uprisings more recognizable to their Western audiences. This also means that the messages that did reach Western media were generally translated into English and adapted to make them more relevant for Western audiences (Newsom, Lengel, and Cassara 2011: 1308). Saba Mahmood (2011) makes a more pragmatic argument showing that indeed digital media played a role during the demonstrations, as activists had used it for years already. At the same time, she emphasizes that it was activists of various backgrounds that came together against Mubarak, and not digital media. In that context it is important to recognize that the focus on digital media does not necessarily create more space for diverse voices, but actually restricts them. For example, activists themselves adapt their narratives, and sometimes based on the results given by search engines which push certain stories to the foreground (Ray 2011: 192). Furthermore, once stories get picked up by traditional Western media, it is rather likely they will be repeated by other news agencies: media outlets still use each other as important sources, limiting diversity even further (Lotan et al. 2011: 1378).

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 249 WHERE WERE THE WOMEN? As narratives of the role of digital media in the uprisings can be largely connected to a discourse in Western media that links the revolts explicitly to Western youth and ideals, the “women’s issue” seems to also be closely related to this. Nadine Naber (2011), for example, argues that geopolitics play a large role in only asking ‘where the women are.’ Hence, in her view, it is more useful to ask ‘why does much of the US public discourse frame the revolution through Islamophobic logics and why has the corporate media focused mostly on the images of Egyptian men?’ (Naber 2011). But there are various issues at stake concerning gender in the uprisings in Egypt. Firstly, the question itself ignores the existence of an Egyptian women’s movement before the so-called revolution. Secondly, it assumes that only particular kinds of activities can be counted as being part of the uprisings. Thirdly, speaking about “the women” implies that all women in Egypt, or even all “Arab” women, are the same and share similar interests. Finally, asking the question of ‘where the women are’ is strongly connected to the interests of Western powers that aim to interfere in the Arab world, as they often use the position of women as an argument for this. Although there were women active during the uprisings, when they were calling for rights, those rights did not necessarily fit the Western/feminist framework, but, rather, took place within a different conception of agency and gender (and consequently “gendered” rights). ‘The rights of women’ seem of lesser importance to Egyptian women, because they are too narrowly defi ned, and almost always put in terms of body politics (Abu-Lughod and El-Mahdi 2011: 686). Consequently, in the West, these women’s voices were often either reframed or ignored. In that context Arab women’s efforts tend to only be globally recognized when they fit within global and Western narrative norms. Hence, to come to a more nuanced location of women in the Arab uprisings, ‘transnational and Western feminist scholars must interrogate their own role in contributing to essentialism and the importance of local knowledge’ (Newsom and Lengel 2012: 34–36). Moreover, an analysis of participants of the uprisings by Mark Beissinger, Jamal, and Mazur (2012) shows that only approximately 23 percent of the Egyptian demonstrators were women. They argue furthermore that the women participating were most often employed rather than housewives, even though the latter group is much larger in general society (Beissinger, Jamal, and Mazur 2012: 24). As Jessica Winegar (2012: 67) points out, the stereotypical ‘revolutionary is defiant, at times angry, and at times exuberant,’ but not ‘at home getting the children dressed, for example, or sitting both bored and anxious watching the news on television, or hobbling with a cane over to the phone to place a call checking up on the grandchildren.’ In other words, the women who were supporting the uprisings by taking care of the children and/or household were not considered as part of the revolution. Only certain activities were

250 Eva Midden recognized as activist or revolutionary and others remained invisible. In general, most tasks generally performed by women were not recognized as politically engaged. This prevailing image of the revolutionary, Winegar continues, ‘not only occludes other experiences of the uprising in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East but also affects understanding of the links between political agency, space, and affect more broadly’ (67). Consequently, being a revolutionary is tied in with privilege; in cases of bad health, being old, having children, having to provide for a family, and so forth, it is difficult, if not impossible, to join the uprisings (Winegar 2012: 68). That does not mean, however, that those people who could not go to Tahrir Square are antirevolutionary. According to Naber, the uprisings in the Middle East are defi ned as women-unfriendly in order to justify interference under the guise of combating Islamic fundamentalists. Because ‘Islamophobia legitimizes itself through the disappearance of Egyptian women as active agents in the revolution’ it is necessary for the “Arab woman” to be nothing more than ‘an abject being, an invisible sister, wife, or mother of the “real revolutionaries”’ (Naber 2011). Rabab El-Mahdi (2011a: 396) argues that, ‘as long as feminism and women’s struggles continue to be colonized and represented in terms of a global feminism that is predominantly white-liberal, questions need to be asked about the role of gender and feminisms in the Arab uprisings.’ However, rather than just asking where the women were, other questions might be much more relevant. ‘Is liberation even a goal for which all women or people strive?; Are emancipation, equality and rights part of a universal language we must use?; Might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way?’ (El-Mahdi 2011a: 395). A gendered lens remains relevant to assessing the Arab uprisings; however, it also means moving beyond the ‘woman question’ (Al-Ali 2012: 31). A postsecular critique on the uprisings can be a starting point for this. First, I will pay attention to the role of secularism and democracy in the representations of the revolts.

SECULARISM, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRACY In the previous two sections it has become clear how Western ideas of equality, freedom, and youth are intertwined with reports on the uprisings in Egypt. When one focuses on religion and democracy during these events, this becomes even more apparent. The framing of the role of Islam in the revolution and the place of Islam in relation to democracy thus tie in with the legitimation of the revolution and its revolutionaries and the balance of power on a global level. According to Rabab El-Mahdi (2011b), orientalist representations are important starting points for most media’s coverage of the “Arab Spring.” She argues that contrary to traditionally violent uprisings, these

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 251 Facebook-based revolts ought to be in line with Western preconceptions of this particular medium and hence be “modern” and “peaceful.” In that context, the demonstrations are also automatically connected to “youth” and “democratization.” El-Mahdi (2011b) herself criticizes these associations and argues that the emphasis on Westernized youth, nonviolence, and social media thus functions as ‘a reverse mirror image of the terrorist: a fetishization and exotization.’ Who participates in the uprisings, and connected to that, the role of religion and democracy during the revolts, all tie in with questions of legitimacy and the future of Egypt. Beissinger, Jamal, and Mazur (2012) study protesters in Egypt and Tunisia in an attempt to fi nd out who has participated in the revolutions and what their primary motives have been. They have found that: protesters both in Egypt and Tunisia were predominantly males of middle class occupational and income profiles, and at least as religious as other members of their societies: most participants were motivated primarily by economic demands (and to a lesser extent, corruption), not by desires for civil and political freedoms. Those most likely to champion democratic values within these revolutions were not youth, the educated, or the middle class, but those involved in civil society associations. (2) ‘Democratic revolutions are not necessarily about democratic values, but about other values,’ they argue, and consequently ‘democracy is not the deterministic result—but the by-product of a struggle between societal actors’ (5). The Internet has helped mobilize large numbers but did not seem instrumental in making such mobilization more democratic (38). Moreover, as Mahmood (2011) argues: although a new democratic regime might ensure civil and political rights within the framework of a liberal democracy, it is unclear whether the reforms necessary for addressing economic injustice and inequality can be implemented within this framework. In other words, even though the West is very much focused on interpreting the “Arab Spring” as a revolution toward democracy, it might well be that the Egyptian population in general, or the protesters specifically, has had and do have different priorities. Besides democracy, secularism has played an essential role in the interpretation and representation of the “Arab Spring” by Western media; in the fi rst place because secularism is often considered to be a requisite for democracy. Mahmood (2012: 419) argues that whereas the right to religious freedom is ‘widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secularliberal democracies,’ it is not a neutral good but rather a technology of international relations that ‘makes specific notions of freedom and unfreedom possible and imaginable.’ Consequently, secularism does not necessarily entail an unproblematic democracy, even if pro-democracy activists are

252 Eva Midden often constructed to be secular. The problem with this depiction is twofold. First of all, these ‘secular/democratic’ activists are contrasted with ‘Islamists’ who ‘are not known for their attachment to democracy’ and who ‘put religion at the heart of their agenda’ (Roy 2012: 6). Second, secularism is automatically seen as an aspect of democracy, which means that both undemocratic secularists and democratic nonsecularists are ignored. According to Jeffrey Kenney (2012: 433), it is important to recognize that so-called Islamists do not necessarily have a ‘fi xed identity’ and, maybe more importantly, can adapt to ‘modern times.’ The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, for example, has become the ‘representative of nonviolence, of social activism in whatever limited space the state permitted’ under the previous repressive regimes in Egypt (Kenney 2012: 446). Kenney argues that the Muslim Brotherhood, in light of global capitalism, industrialization, and social differentiation—in short, the structural impact of modernity—has ‘integrated two fundamental realities that it had originally deemed incompatible: the cultural importance of Islam to modern Egyptian collective identity and second, modern forms of political and economic organization associated with secularization (such as political parties, pluralism, democracy, a free market economy)’ (449). Consequently, he argues, ‘Islamists [have] helped make structural modernization more compatible by infusing it with Islamic values and discourses; they framed them in Islamic terms but at the same time rejected secularism’s cultural universality’ (449). Hence, Islamism changes and adapts to secular forms and is not necessarily incompatible with democracy. This is a process that is still unfolding and different outcomes are possible.

THINKING THROUGH POSTSECULAR CRITIQUE In the above, I have shown that there has been a particular focus on women, new media, and secularism/democracy in the narratives about the “Arab Spring.” As I explained in the introduction, this is problematic. Such a particular focus makes other narratives invisible or even impossible. I argue that an alternative perspective on the uprisings in Egypt would benefit from a postsecular perspective. Postsecular theories are relevant in relation to the “Arab Spring” as they aim to develop a better understanding of current issues related to religion by moving beyond the strict divide between religion and secularism. They criticize religious fundamentalism as well as strict secularism and argue that both approaches essentialize religion, either by affi rming or negating the concept. In this context, William Connolly (1999) argues that we should acknowledge the instances in which secularism becomes too narrow and intolerant, and explore new possibilities to accommodate a wider variety of claims and to imagine pluralism on that basis. In ‘Postsecular Feminist Ethics,’ Rosi Braidotti (2007: 2–3) states that the revival of religion in Western

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 253 societies is not a linear but a multilayered process that requires nonlinear and intersectional methods. Hence, she argues that: ‘because the clash of civilisations is Islamophobic in character and it contains an explicit message about the status of women and gays and about the degrees of tolerable emancipation, feminists cannot be simply secular, or be secular in a simple or self-evident sense’ (6). In my view, this can also be used to reflect on the representations of the uprisings in the Middle East, where secularism and democracy have been unreflectively used as standards to evaluate change. Moreover, it has often been ignored how narrow and sometimes intolerant these secular and democratic standards actually are. Sarah Bracke and Maggie Schmitt (2006: 5–7) recognize three important concerns that have influenced the rethinking of religion and secularism through postsecular critique: knowledge, subjectivities, and modernity. First of all, criticism on the rational notion on knowledge (and its production) has consequences for views on religion and secularism. Enlightenment’s rationalism has been central to secularism, and rethinking the latter means that the former has to be reconsidered, too. Second, the new definition of knowledge also has consequences for our view on subjects. Just like knowledge, the universal idea of subjects is replaced by a ‘landscape of new subjectivities.’ The work of Mahmood in Politics of Piety (2005) is an important example of this, as she questions the idea that everyone wants freedom and political liberty. Finally, Bracke and Schmitt (2006) also mention new accounts of modernity. Following Said’s (1978) critique on orientalism, various scholars point out that the defi nition of modernity as secular and liberal, as opposed to a traditional and religious “East,” is problematic. As an alternative, the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ is introduced, which provides a more dynamic understanding of the contemporary world, taking complexity, contradictions, and the history of the concept. An example of critically rethinking the relationship between religion and secularism can be found in Braidotti’s (2008a, 2008b) work on the postsecular and affi rmative ethics. Her ‘ethics of affi rmation’ for example, is not tied to the present by negation, but is instead affi rmative and geared to creating possible futures. Thus, instead of trying to deconstruct or criticize certain identities or subjectivities, we should affi rm them, think about the possibilities they create and the alternatives they can offer to current views on these issues. This means that difference is regarded as positive (instead of negative) and can form the basis of transformation or ‘creative becoming’ (Braidotti 2008a). In my reading, Mahmood’s reconceptualization of agency can be seen as an example of this kind of affi rmative thinking. She claims Western liberal feminists should reconsider the concept of agency and leave open the possibility that other lives and choices taken by women can possibly teach something to feminism at large. Braidotti would call this ‘affirmative otherness’ (Braidotti 2008a). According to Braidotti, affi rmative ethics are capable of a universalistic reach, although they are critical of moral universality; they express a grounded, partial form of accountability,

254 Eva Midden based on a strong sense of collectivity (Braidotti 2008a). Central to her approach is the affi rmation of otherness, rather than sameness. We can do this by changing our view on pain and suffering. Instead of dealing with pain by denying it, or trying to go against it, we should fi nd ways to work through pain and not fall in the trap of the eternal return of revenge and negative affects (Braidotti 2008a, 2008b; see also the contribution by Rosemarie Buikema in this volume). William Connolly proposes ‘deep pluralism’ as an alternative to secularism: In such a culture, participants are called upon neither to leave their metaphysical baggage at home when they participate in various publics nor to adopt an overarching faith acknowledged by all parties who strive to promote the common good. Rather a deep plurality of religious/metaphysical perspectives is incorporated into public discourses. (1999: 185) Just like Mahmood and Braidotti, Connolly emphasizes the importance of leaving the option open to learn from another. Deep pluralism is essential for democracies where people have different assumptions and moral sources. We need to negotiate, Connolly argues, on a public ethos and the success of this negotiation is dependent on various factors, most importantly, an open attitude of people involved considering the outcomes. Furthermore, he argues that these discussions are not a threat to democracy, but a necessity. This might sound unrealistic to some, but, Connolly rightly claims, there is nothing more unrealistic than the insistence on the incontrovertibility of a particular faith or the bypass of politics altogether. Following these authors, I would like to argue that a postsecular perspective on the relationship between religion and secularism provides us with essential tools to rethink important developments in the current world, such as the uprisings in Egypt. The binary relation between religion and secularism is highly problematic and only enhances polarization in our societies. And in such a context, also any feminist project is doomed to fail. We cannot and should not deny or ignore histories of colonization and we have to take into account power differences, racism, and Islamophobia in our analyses. Finally, Western feminists should let go of the idea that there is only one way to be feminist or achieve gender equality. We have to open ourselves to the struggles, experiences, and strategies of women who deal with these issues differently. In the next section, I will look at a report written by the BBC evaluating their own representation of the “Arab Spring” on TV, radio, and the website. I fi nd it relevant to analyze this report as it shows the willingness of one of the most important news producers to critically evaluate their coverage. On the other hand, I believe the report shows that exactly a critical perspective on gender, new media, and democracy/secularism is still missing from the side of popular media.

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 255 BBC COVERAGE OF THE “ARAB SPRING” In 2012, the BBC published the ‘BBC Trust Report on the Impartiality and Accuracy of the BBC’s Coverage of the Events Known as the “Arab Spring”’ (BBC Trust 2012). The rationale for this report is described as follows: ‘The BBC has set itself the challenge of providing the best journalism in the world. One of the ways the BBC tests whether its journalism lives up to this high ideal is by reviews, commissioned by the BBC Trust, of the impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s output’ (1). The review examines coverage on BBC national TV and radio, online content, and BBC World News (the BBC’s commercial international news service) beginning with events in Tunisia in December 2010 and then following most notably events in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen (BBC Trust 2012: 2). It also includes content analysis and audience research in January 2012 (BBC Trust 2012: 2). The BBC states that there have been little to no complaints about the coverage of the “Arab Spring,” so the Trust’s decision for this review is more of a general desire to examine how the BBC covers conflicts (BBC Trust 2012: 12). It is important to take into account that a medium such as the BBC also reflects on their own coverage of events like the “Arab Spring.” The question is, however, whether this reflection contributes to the change of perspective I would like to bring in here. For that reason, I will discuss this report in the following section and investigate whether their own analyses lead to more critical coverage of the events compared to their original approaches. Just as in the rest of the article, the focus will remain on the role of gender, new media, and secularism/democracy during the “Arab Spring.”

MEDIA AND FRAMING The Trust report has dedicated a whole section on the framing of conflicts. This is also the part of the BBC coverage that has received most critique. The report defends the use of the term “Arab Spring,” but is critical about the regular references to “regimes.” But it also argues that it is the job of a journalist to make events understandable to their audience: This cannot be done without some sort of framework—if you will, a “narrative”—and therefore the construction of such a narrative should not be treated as if it were a sin in itself. The right questions to ask are (a) whether the narrative offered is on the whole plausible and compatible with the facts, and (b) whether the audience is enabled at least to glimpse the possibility of alternative ways of framing the story. (18) This remark is central to the coverage of the “Arab Spring” by the BBC and at the same time leads the chapter on that coverage. The Trust report is right to argue that framing is an important aspect of journalistic work, but the

256 Eva Midden question is: what are the consequences of the frames used and can we imagine other frames that might be more affirmative or less one-dimensional? A recurrent criticism of Western media coverage of the “Arab Spring,” particularly in Egypt, is that Western journalists spent time only with those parts of the society with which they had most in common—essentially young, Western-educated, middle-class people, adept at using mobile phones and other new media—and that, as a result, they have exaggerated the importance of such people and their ideas while neglecting other social groups that have different views and interests. The role of religion and democracy are very important in this context, but also gender plays role. I will go into both themes in the next sections.

GENDER As we saw above, the question of women in the “Arab Spring” is a highly contested and normative one. It has functioned as a tool to delegitimize the revolts and their outcomes, and it ignores the multiple aspects of revolutionary activism. Moreover, it assumes that all women in Egypt share the same interests that they want to see defended. When we look at the BBC Trust report with gendered glasses, it is highly remarkable that there is hardly any mention of the concept. In a section on ‘diversity and representativeness of groups and voices covered,’ the author of the report argues: I have been struck by the diversity of voices heard. They included not only young Westernized activists, but also pro-Mubarak spokesmen (ministers, and members of the ruling National Democratic Party) as well as representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, which did not play a leading role in the early stages of the Egyptian revolt, but soon swung behind it, and emerged at the end of the year as the main winner of the parliamentary elections. (20) Hence, in this section one clearly sees a reflection on diversity in the sense of pro- and anti- Mubarak, various religious groups and age, but gender is completely ignored. The fi rst mention of women in the report comes from right before the quote above and says: ‘The biggest challenge is getting the point of view of those in power—not so much the public line as how they justify what they’re doing to their wives’ (20). In this quote, women are only referred to in relation to those in power and how they (men) defend their policies toward those in their own private sphere (women). There is no attention for the activities or agency of the women involved, neither any critical perspective on their perspectives on power relations. The next time women are mentioned in the report is more related to the revolts themselves, and refers to the gap between the coverage in February and November:

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 257 Viewers and listeners, especially on the BBC’s main domestic news bulletins, had not been fully alerted to the continuing dominance of the army during the intervening period, or to the numerous acts of repression and attacks on women, which arguably went beyond what had been common under Mubarak. (24) Here women are at least recognized as those with interest in the goals of the revolution, at the same time no agency is attributed to them, and again they are only portrayed as victims. Their possible role as activists or support to other activists is not recognized throughout the report. Only in the part on Saudi Arabia, more attention is paid to gender and women. For example, a reporter who talked to a woman from a poor district, is quoted: ‘her husband is out of work, there’s a hole in the roof, and she has to beg for baby-milk and nappies’—but the social worker who introduced her said that ‘the government is doing the best they can’ (59). The Trust report mentions a few other articles specifically on the situation of women in Saudi Arabia, such as the king’s announcement to appoint women to the Shura council (a sort of parliament) and to allow them both to vote and to run in the next municipal elections. Moreover, there is a short note on ‘several pieces devoted to the vexed question of Saudi women’s rights to drive cars,’ followed by the statement that ‘one expert interviewed on Today complained that this was distracting attention from the more serious political issues’ (59). Hence, gender issues are seen as a consequence of political developments, but not as political in itself. Moreover, the report shows no sign of active women taking part in the revolution, but only depicts them as possible victims. Even in a section on missing themes in the coverage, gender is not mentioned: The BBC could devote more attention to issues such as corruption, the crime rate, a growing difference between rich and poor, poor public services and numerous royal family scandals. (60) Besides the possible critique one can have on the above quotes and the representation of gender in them, it is remarkable that in a eighty-nine-page-long report in which the BBC have their coverage of the “Arab Spring” evaluated, gender plays such a little role. Not only are women hardly mentioned, but when they are they are often not considered as having any agency or position in the revolutions. It seems that even in this critical self-review, gender is not enough on the forefront to receive the attention it should have had. This is different for the issue of democracy.

SECULARISM AND DEMOCRACY In connection to the critique of impartiality, especially when it comes to the various goals of the revolts, the BBC Trust report argues that this concept

258 Eva Midden should not be confused with balance or neutrality: ‘impartiality does not require absolute neutrality . . . or detachment from fundamental democratic principles’ (12). According to the report, the guidelines ‘allow journalists to display some degree of attachment to democratic principles, but not to exempt any person or group from skeptical scrutiny simply because they advocate democracy or claim to practice it’ (13). It is argued that because democracy had been such as an important aspect of the uprisings, the BBC was not required to distance itself from this goal. The report shows that the question of democracy and impartiality has divided the audience of the BBC: the “general” groups indeed wanted the news to tell them what effects the events covered might have on the UK and what role the UK and the West were playing. In these groups, there was also broad support for the BBC’s approach of explicitly describing the move away from dictatorship toward democracy as a positive development. However, the audiences interviewed for the report also put forward critical notes on the BBC’s coverage and argued that it was important not to conflate this pro-democracy position with a pro-UK position. Furthermore, they asked broadcasters for a more critical reflection on their own governments and to show more awareness and acknowledgment of how the Western position on the regime might have changed over time (13). Finally, some of the people in the BBC’s audience research mentioned that they felt a pro-democratic stance from the BBC and tended to be less supportive of this position. They argued that such support for democracy was too close to a ‘pro-Western interests’ position, which they perceived to be a form of bias (12). Hence, the BBC Trust report is critical and reflective about their coverage of the uprisings in Egypt as a move toward democracy, and it also mentions some of the audience’s critique on this. However, they do see it as their task to frame the events in a manner that are comprehensible and relevant for their audiences. The question is, though, whether their choice to frame the uprisings in relations to democracy is the only way to achieve this. Moreover, one could ask whether it could not have been emphasized more that what democracy is and who benefits from it, in this context, is still rather unclear. I would argue that if they had paid more attention to the latter issues, the situation after the resignation of Mubarak and the election of Muslim Brotherhood member Morsi would have been easier to understand. As Mahmood explains, most Egyptians were motivated to participate in the uprisings because of economic reasons. One might ask whether a move toward democracy actually improves their life circumstances: While a new democratic regime might ensure civil and political rights within the framework of a liberal democracy, it is unclear whether the reforms necessary for addressing economic injustice and inequality can be implemented within this framework. Since the 1970s, the Egyptian economy has been increasingly subject to neoliberal economic reforms by the World Bank, the IMF and USAID at the behest of the United

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 259 States government. Egyptian elites have been beneficiaries of, and partners in, these American-driven reforms. (Mahmood 2011) So, even though the BBC focused mainly on the goal of democratic change, this left a considerable aspect of the revolts invisible. Moreover, Mahmood (2011) mentions the political reasons for Egyptians to support the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the elections: Asked if he would oppose an alliance with the Brotherhood, Bahgat responded that while he continues to disagree with their stance on a number of issues (including women’s and minority rights), as a civil rights activist he cannot in good conscience oppose their full participation in the political process. They are, just as much as he and his comrades, an integral part of the revolution unfolding in Egypt, committed to the same set of goals. Hence, even though the BBC is right that they have the responsibility to frame news events in a manner that is understandable for their audiences, and that most of them appreciated the democratic framework, the coverage of the uprisings in Egypt could have benefited from a more open view. This does not mean that they should not frame at all, but rather that they reflect on the assumptions of their framework and dare to ask questions such as what changes are most beneficial to the Egyptians, and what changes are most discussed by the West? What could/should democracy in Egypt look like, and in what ways is this concept connected to religion and secularism? And, fi nally, how could the revolts influence the position of specific groups (e.g., women) in Egyptian society? In the next section, I will bring my critique on the coverage of the “Arab Spring” together with postsecular critique and provide a starting point for an alternative perspective on the so-called “Arab Spring,” and the connections between social media, the “women’s issue,” and secularism/ democracy.

RETHINKING THE “ARAB SPRING” THROUGH A POSTSECULAR CRITIQUE In the previous sections I have described the role of and connections between gender, social media, and secularism/democracy during the “Arab Spring.” Moreover, I have presented the postsecular critique that I believe could be an important starting point for rethinking the uprisings in a different and more affi rmative manner. As Dashabi (2012: 239) argues: ‘The renewed worldliness of these uprisings demands fresh minds that are willing to abandon their instrumental reasoning and learn from—rather than trying to teach—these revolutions.’ I would like to argue that by disentangling

260 Eva Midden the role of new media, gender, and democracy/secularism in the uprisings we can make a good start. Moreover, postsecular theorists provide us with some tools to do this in an affi rmative way. Saba Mahmood (2011), for example, argues we should first of all move beyond the ‘techno-centric view that characterizes most commentaries that present the Egyptian uprisings as “a Facebook Revolution.”’ Moreover, just as the link between the demonstrations and social media is more complex than often considered, also its link to young, middle-class, and most of all secular activists is unjust. As Mahmood (2011) says: Initially the activist bloggers were secular, but they were soon joined by those sympathetic to the Islamists. These Islamic-minded bloggers were, like their secular compatriots, equally disillusioned with the aged leadership of the political parties that purported to represent them. They too were tired of the inertia, fear and claustrophobia that characterized these older formations. Hence they broke with the geriatric wing of the groups they had belonged to and joined hands with those Egyptians who in the political language of the 1990s would have been deemed their enemy. According to Mahmood, the blog and Facebook formats, with their personal profile pages, make it possible for individual bloggers to fashion a political persona that transcends the Islamist versus secular divide, allowing young women and men to write critically about hot political issues. Hence, by moving beyond typical associations (such as between digital media and secularism) we can deconstruct all kinds of binaries and see a more nuanced picture of the “Arab Spring.” Complexifying the representation of the uprisings in Egypt also means including a critical perspective on the role of gender in them. As I explained in the beginning of this chapter, gender was important during the uprisings but has been mainly framed in a particular and limited way. A more critical method would take into account the accomplishments and approaches of the Egyptian movement before the uprisings, defi ne activism in a much broader sense than has been done by most commentaries until now, and, fi nally, take into account the power relations between the “West” and the “Middle East.” The section on the BBC Trust report already shows that popular media often has not gone beyond the ‘where were the women’ question and has not taken any accountability for this. Postsecular critics teach us about the possibilities of multiple subjectivities. As I said in the above, Mahmood (2005) argues that feminists have to rethink their conceptualization of agency, by removing it from its connection to liberalism and freedom and considering forms of agency that happen outside the traditional framework of subordination and subversion (see also Bracke 2008). Such a defi nition makes it possible to also think about change in different ways, depending on social, political, and historical contexts. Braidotti (2008b), on the other hand, pleads for a defi nition of subjectivity that

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 261 remains “political,” without letting it become negative or fi xed. This means that her interpretation of subjectivity is not about producing radical countersubjectivities, but rather about daily practices and negotiations within dominant norms (Braidotti 2008b: 16). As issues of agency and emancipation cannot be so easily connected to secularism and its frameworks of freedom and agency, also the goals of the Egyptian uprisings should be evaluated outside the typical democratic perspective. In the discussion of the BBC Trust report, I have shown that the media showed some accountability in their framing of the “Arab Spring” this way, but they still hold on to a rather unreflective presentation of democracy and democratic goals. This left unanswered questions about the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in democratic processes and did not question whether democracy really benefited the large population in Egypt that now lives in poverty. Hence, I would argue that our understanding of the “Arab Spring” would enhance considerably if we let go of the binary perspective of “good, progressive, and liberal” secularism versus “problematic, backward, and oppressive” religion. The uprisings in the Arab countries have not only led to change in the countries where people were on the streets; they have also created space for change in other ways. In this context it is highly important that we think critically about our own locations, binaries, such as the one between religion and secularism, and the way we interpret the events and the possibilities for change. As Dashabi (2012: 240) argues: ‘The open-ended nature of the revolutions also accommodates the historic necessity of a sustained and systematic production of knowledge about the events that will fi rst and foremost dismantle the regime du savoir we have inherited from both colonial and the postcolonial history.’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Janneke Koers for her research on this topic. She has conducted an extensive literature review on digitla media and the Arab Spring, and I could not have written this chapter without access to her research. I would also like to thank Sandra Ponzanesi for inviting me to write this chapter and Gianmaria Colpani for editing the text. NOTES 1. Please note that at the time of writing the new protests in Egypt had not yet emerged. At this moment it is still unclear what the effects of these uprisings will be.

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Al-Ali, Nadje (2012) ‘Gendering the Arab Spring,’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 26–31. BBC News (2012) ‘Arab Uprisings: 10 Key Moments,’ 10 December 2012, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20626645, accessed on 11 August 2013. BBC Trust (2012) ‘A BBC Trust Report on the Impartiality and Accuracy of the BBC’s Coverage of the Events Known as the “Arab Spring,”’ 25 June 2012, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/editorial_standards/ impartiality/arab_spring.html, accessed on 10 August 2013. Beissinger, Mark, Jamal, Amaney and Mazur, Kevin (2012) ‘Who Participates in Democratic Revolutions? A Comparison of the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions,’ APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper, available at: http://ssrn.com/ abstract=2108773, accessed on 10 August 2013. Bhatia, Michael V. (2005) ‘Fighting Words: Naming Terrorists, Bandits, Rebels and Other Violent Actors,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 5–22. Bracke, Sarah (2008) ‘Conjugating the Modern/ Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a `Post-secular’ Conjuncture’. Theory, Culture, & Society, vol. 25, no. 6 , pp. 51-67. Bracke, Sarah and Schmitt, Maggie (2006) ‘The Post-Secular and the Battle over Transcendence,’ Paper presented at ‘Restating Religion: A Conference Reconsidering the Rules,’ Columbia University, 23–24 March 2006. Braidotti, Rosi (2008a) ‘Affi rmation, Pain and Empowerment,’ Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 7–36. Braidotti, Rosi (2008b) ‘In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism,’ Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1–24. Connolly, William E. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dashabi, Hamid (2012) The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, London: Zed Books. Dunn, Alexandra and Wilson, Christopher (2011) ‘Digital Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Descriptive Analysis from the Tahrir Data Sets,’ International Journal of Communication, vol. 5, pp. 1248–72. El-Mahdi, Rabab (2011a) ‘Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt,’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, vol. 11, nos. 3–4, pp. 379–96. El-Mahdi, Rabab (2011b) ‘Orientalising the Egyptian Uprising,’ Jadaliyya, 11 April 2011, available at: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising, accessed on 11 August 2013. Fandy, Mamoun (1999) ‘CyberResistance: Saudi Opposition  between Globalization and Localization,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 124–47. Howard, Philip N. and Hussain, Muzammil M. (2011) ‘The Role of Digital Media,’ Journal of Democracy, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 35–48. Kenney, Jeff rey T. (2012) ‘Millennial Politics in Modern Egypt: Islamism and Secular Nationalism in Context and Contest,’ Numen, vol. 59, nos. 5–6, pp. 427–55. Knight, Megan (2012) ‘Journalism as Usual: The Use of Social Media as a News Gathering Tool in the Coverage of the Iranian Elections in 2009,’ Journal of Media Practice, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 61–74. Lotan, Gilad, Graeff, Erhardt, Ananny, Mike, Gaff ney, Davin, Pearce, Ian and Boyd, Danah (2011) ‘The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions,’ International Journal of Communication, vol. 5, pp. 1375–1405. Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rethinking the “Arab Spring” through the Postsecular 263 Mahmood, Saba (2011) ‘Architects of the Egyptian Revolution,’ The Nation, 14 February 2011, available at: http://www.thenation.com/article/158581/architects-egyptian-revolution#, accessed on 10 August 2013. Mahmood, Saba (2012) ‘Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 418–46. Midden, Eva (2014) ‘Agency through Faith. (Re-)Writing Religious and Gender Identities in the Netherlands,’ in Marcel Cornis Pope (ed.) Literature and Multimedia in Late 20th and 21st Century Europe, Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Press (forthcoming). Naber, Nadine (2011) ‘Imperial Feminism, Islamophobia, and the Egyptian Revolution,’ Jadaliyya, 4 December 2012, available at: http://www.jadaliyya. com/pages/index/616/imperial-feminism-islamophobia-and-the-egyptian-re, accessed on 11 August 2013. Newsom, Victoria A. and Lengel, Lara (2012) ‘Arab Women, Social Media, and the Arab Spring: Applying the Framework of Digital Reflexivity to Analyze Gender and Online Activism,’ Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 31–45. Newsom, Victoria A., Lengel, Lara and Cassara, Catherine (2011) ‘Local Knowledge and the Revolutions: A Framework for Social Media Information Flow,’ International Journal of Communication, vol. 5, pp. 1303–12. Ray, Tapas (2011) ‘The “Story” of Digital Excess in Revolutions of the Arab Spring,’ Journal of Media Practice, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 189–96. Roy, Olivier (2012) ‘The Transformation of the Arab World,’ Journal of Democracy, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 5–18. Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Winegar, Jessica (2012) ‘The Privilege of Revolution: Gender, Class, Space, and Affect in Egypt,’ American Ethnologist, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 67–70.

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Contributors

Alicia Arrizón is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2006); Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Indiana University Press, 1999); and editor with Lillian Manzor of Latinas on Stage (Third Woman Press, 2000). She has also edited with Deborah R. Vargas Sensualidades, a special issue of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (vol. 18, no. 3, 2008). Some of her articles have appeared in The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies, Ollantay, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Research International. Currently, she is working on a book-length project that aims to recontextualize and reconceptualize feminist and queer discourses in borderlands studies and border theory. Rosemarie Buikema is Professor of Art, Culture, and Diversity at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, and Scientific Director of the Graduate Gender Program, both at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has published widely in the field of comparative literature, visual studies, transnational justice, gender studies, and postcolonial critique. Her publications include, among others: with Nina Lykke and Gabriele Griffin, Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research: Researching Differently (Routledge, 2011); with Iris van der Tuin, Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (Routledge, 2009); with Tamara Shefer, Kopano Ratele, Anna Strebel, and Nokuthla Shabalala, From Boys to Men: Social Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Society (University of Cape Town Press, 2007); with Lies Wesseling, Het heilige Huis (Amsterdam University Press, 2006); with Anneke Smelik, Women’s Studies and Culture: A Feminist Introduction (Zed Books, 1995). Currently she is working on a book-length project on the role of the arts in political transitions. Jolle Demmers is Associate Professor and cofounder of the Centre for Confl ict Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She lectures and writes on conflict theory, the role of diaspora in violent conflict, and on

266 Contributors ethnographies of neoliberalism. She is currently engaged in writing projects on war games, representations of borderland violence, neoliberal panopticism, and perpetual peace. She is a fellow of the Centre for the Humanities (Utrecht University) and is running the Politics of Portrayal research program. Her latest book, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction (Routledge, 2012), has been nominated for the ENMISA 2013 Distinguished Book Award. Inderpal Grewal is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author of, among others, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press, 1996) and has written and edited with Caren Kaplan An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGraw-Hill, 2001 and 2005) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Currently she is working on a book-length project on the relation between feminist practices and security discourses. Marc de Leeuw is Lecturer in legal theory at the Law School at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. Before coming to UNSW, he lectured philosophy at Macquarie University (2011–2012) and was a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (2008–2010). His work engages both with the socalled continental and analytical traditions of philosophy while focusing on questions of human agency, epistemological practices, and ethics. His projects are often interdisciplinary and examine the intersection between the ethico-political and moral-legal fields. Paulo de Medeiros is Professor of Modern and Contemporary World Literatures at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Previously he held the Chair of Portuguese Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He has published widely on issues of literary theory and contemporary Portuguese authors. Some of his articles relating to postcolonial studies include ‘Postcolonial Memories and Lusophone Literatures’ in European Review (vol. 13, no. 1, 2005) and ‘(Re-)Constructing, (Re-)Membering Postcolonial Selves’ in Stories and Portraits of the Self. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft (vol. 115, 2007). He also edited a volume of essays on Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures (Utrecht University, 2007). He is currently writing on cruelty and inheritance in relation to a Postcolonial Europe. Eva Midden is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the Media and Culture Studies Department (Graduate Gender Program) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has a master’s degree in political science from

Contributors

267

the University of Leiden (the Netherlands) and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Central Lancashire (UK). Her thesis is entitled: ‘Feminism in Multicultural Societies. An Analysis of Dutch Multicultural and Postsecular Developments and their Implications for Feminist Debates.’ She was recently involved in the European Research Project MIGNET for which she conducted research on migration, gender, and religious practices in new media. Her research interests include feminist theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, (post)secular(ism), whiteness, and media analysis. One of her latest articles is ‘Feminism and Cultural and Religious Diversity in Opzij: An analysis of the Discourse of a Dutch Feminist Magazine’ in European Journal Women’s Studies (vol. 19, no. 2, 2012). Sandra Ponzanesi is Associate Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Critique at the Media and Culture Studies Department (Graduate Gender Program) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Head of Humanities at Utrecht University College. She has been visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and visiting scholar at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Paradoxes of PostColonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora (SUNY, 2004); with Daniela Merolla, Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (Lexington Books, 2005); with Marguerite Waller, Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2011); with Bolette Blaagaard, Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (Routledge, 2011) and of The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014). Christine Quinan is Lecturer at the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She also recently served as a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Studies Department at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is currently at work on a comparative project that investigates the relationship between torture and gender/sexuality in both the French-Algerian War and the war in Iraq. She has also published on the fictional and autobiographical writings of feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and on the fictional work of Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar. Christine’s teaching and research interests include gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century European and American literature and film. Shagun Rastogi is an Indian feminist, writer, and fi lmmaker based in New Delhi, India, and a recent graduate from the film program at the National Institute of Design. Marguerite Waller is Professor of Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. She has published widely in the areas of Italian, transnational, and postcolonial cinema,

268

Contributors

new media, border art, feminist theory, and militarized gender violence. Her books include Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (University of Massachusetts Press, l980); with Jennifer Rycenga, Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance (Routledge, 2001); with Frank Burke, Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Toronto Press, 2002); with Sylvia Marcos, Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (Palgrave, 2005); with Amalia L. Cabezas and Ellen Reese, The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policy, Repression, and Women’s Poverty (Paradigm, 2007); with Sandra Ponzanesi, Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2011). She also coedited with Amalia L. Cabezas and Ellen Reese a special issue of Social Identities entitled Emerging Subjects of Neoliberal Globalization (vol. 12, no. 5, 2006). Vron Ware lives in London and is currently a Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the Open University, UK. Her books include Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (Verso, 1992); with Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2002); Who Cares about Britishness? A Global View of the National Identity Debate (Arcadia Books, 2007); and Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR Country (Palgrave, 2012). Aaronette M. White (†2012) was Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California–Santa Cruz, US. Her projects included studying the intersections of race, gender, class, and ethnicity among former African women guerrilla soldiers who are currently peace builders in various African countries. Using African feminist perspectives on war and peace, she analyzed turning points in the women’s lives that led them to join the armed struggle and remain politically active after such confl icts in peace-building efforts. Among her publications is Ain’t I a Feminist?: African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom (SUNY, 2008). Sonja van Wichelen is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She received her PhD in social sciences at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has held positions at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and at the Pembroke Center at Brown University, US. Her research projects broadly engage with moral economies in the age of globalization and their effects on our understanding of citizenship. Among her publications are Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (Routledge, 2010); with Begum O. Firat and Sarah de Mul, Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave, 2009). She is currently writing a book entitled The Justification Work of Globalization: Moral Economies of Transnational Adoption Practice.

Contributors

269

Marta Zarzycka is Assistant Professor at the Media and Culture Studies Department (Graduate Gender Program) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She teaches and publishes in the fields of visual studies and feminist theory. She has received numerous international fellowships, among others at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona; the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas; and the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, Florida. In addition to book chapters, articles, and reviews, she has edited with Bettina Papenburg, and written for, Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (I.B.Tauris, 2012). Her current book-length project is entitled Gendered Tropes in War Photography: Mothers, Mourners, Soldiers (forthcoming from Routledge) and is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. She is currently editor for the photography journal The Depth of Field.

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Index

A Abu-Assad, Hany, 101 see Paradise Now, Abu Aysheh, Dareen, 84 see also female suicide bombers Abu Ghraib, 12, 14, 18, 21, 112, 123, 131 abuse of Iraqi detainees at, 18, 112, 123 photographs of, 12, 123 see also torture: sexua Abu Salem, Zayneb, 85 see also female suicide bombers A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast), 19, 161–164, 166–167, 169–172 see Margarida Cardoso activism, 2, 74, 114, 189, 233, 252, 256–261 see also female: activist Afewerki, Isaias, 136, 138 affect, 65, 76, 229–231. 235–240 see also emotion, love, shame affi rmative ethics, 253 Afghanistan, 16, 28, 29, 31, 38, 46, 48, 53, 55, 57, 59, 72–73, 122, 131, 178–179 Africa, 4, 29, 33–36, 38, 40, 66, 71, 73–74, 126, 134, 164 African National Congress (ANC), 4, 8, 12, 202 see also South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Ahmed, Sara, 234, 238–239 al-Akhras, Ayat, 85, 92–100 see also female suicide bombers Akin, Fatih, 19, 161 see Auf der anderen Seite

aid, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 64, 66–68, 71, 75, 76 humanitarian, 3 industry, 28, 30, 33, 42 organizations, 32, 134 see also humanitarianism Algeria, 3–6, 111–124 “Algeria Unveiled”, 3–5 see also French-Algerian War Alleg, Henri, 113, 119, 121 Amrane-Minne, Danièle Djamila, 6 anticolonial, 162, 246 movements, 3, 4, 13–14, 84, 113 resistance, 117 struggles and wars, 7, 113 anti-immigrant, infrastructure, 132 policy, 18 rhetoric, 135, 136 sentiment, 130 apartheid, 8, 21n, 196–210 al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, 10, 84–87 Arab Spring, 21, 132, 134, 241n, 245–261 art, 101, 191n, 196–197, 201, 203– 209, 230 and political transition, 20, 196– 197 and politics, 20, 196 artworks, 20, 101, 196, 201 medium-specificity of the, 20, 196, 204 Arendt, Hannah, 129, 161 Asia, 34, 38, 66, 72–73, 126, 155 Assouline Terebilo, Natalie, 99 see Shahida—Brides of Allah A Sud di Lampedusa, 133 see Andrea Segre

272

Index

asylum seeker, 3, 19, 91, 128, 130, 134–137, 156 Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven), 19, 161–163, 165–168, 170–172 see Fatih Akin

B Baader-Meinhof, 10 barbaric, 27, 29, 30, 41, 123–124, 152 Battle of Algiers, The, 5, 6, 100 see Gillo Pontecorvo BBC Trust Report, 255–259 gender and, 256–257 media and, 260–261 secularism, democracy and, 257–259 Beauvoir, Simone de, 6, 18, 113–120, 124n Beharry, Johnson, 53–54, 60 Bejarano, Cynthia, 185–186 belonging, 34, 49, 149, 155, 231, 237 Benedict, Helen, 11–12, 177, 179, 183–184, 190n, 191n Benjamin, Walter, 239 Berlant, Lauren, 237–239 Berlusconi, Silvio, 132–133, 137–138 Bethlehem, 92, 96–97 biopolitics, 38, 39, 65, 67 Black Fatima, 87 black men, 27, 168, 209 representations of, 30 as corrupt, 37 as oversexed, 27 as savage, 42 see also barbaric Black Widows, 87 border, control, 131, 133, 135, 146 Egyptian-Israeli, 133 national, 150, 162 Palestinian-Israeli, 97 police, 133 US-Mexico, 19, 189 borderland, 27, 30, 37–42 Bosnia, 13, 139n, 192n Botha, P. W., 202, 204, 207 Botha, Wim, 20, 196, 204–209 Bouhired, Djamila, 6, 120–121, 125n Boupacha, Djamila, 6, 18, 111–120, 122, 124n, 125n British Army, 47, 51, 53–55 British Ministry of Defence (MoD), 52, 55 inclusion of minorities in the, 48

see also military Brown, Wendy, 129–131, 138 Bush, George W., 68, 95, 180 Butler, Judith, 99, 128–129, 229, 235

C Cairo, 20, 229, 231–232, 235–236, 245 capitalism, 3, 33, 130, 138, 156, 188, 252 see also global: market, neoliberalism, transnational: capital Cardoso, Margarida, 19, 161–173 see A Costa dos Murmúrios change, 7, 9, 76, 189–190, 197, 201, 204, 208, 217–218, 235, 239, 253, 259–261 see also revolt, revolution charity, 64, 66–67, 69–71, 238 see also aid, humanitarianism checkpoint, 85, 100 “Chic Point,” Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints, 100–101 see Sharif Waked Christian, 65, 66, 68, 69, 152, 202 missionary work, 69 party, 152, 156n, 157n, 158n cinema, 19, 52, 65 African, 8 documentary, 19, 92, 99–101, 138, 177–178 fi lm, 5, 8, 19, 92, 101, 165, 177 Italian, 126, 130 postcolonial, 126, 162 transnational, 126 video, 231 citizenship, exceptional, 64, 68 humanitarian, 64, 65, 68, 70, 71, 74 military work and, 17, 48–49 neoliberal, 17, 64–66, 69 tests, 19, 145, 148, 154, 157n, 158n transnational, 19, 65–68, 74 Civic Integration Law, 154 see also Dutch Civic Integration Exam civilization, 40, 68, 69, 91, 126, 139, 145, 149, 150, 152 clash of, 253 civilizational pathos, 150 civilizing mission, 111, 119, 171 class, 11, 33, 70, 168, 178, 191n, 218 middle, 68, 74, 178, 248, 251, 256, 260

Index race, class and gender, 15, 51, 59, 69, 112, 130 working, 178 Clinton, Hillary, 27, 232 Cold War, 27–28, 38, 40 collective responsibility, 112–113, 118–119 colonial, 2–7, 12, 17–21, 33, 40, 65, 69, 73, 102, 114, 121–122, 130, 133–134, 151, 156, 157n, 161–165, 170, 172,173n, 207, 209, 211n, 234, 246, 261 dynamics, 3, 16 fantasies, 27 legacies, 3, 17, 19 war, 113, 162, 165, 172, 173n, colonialism, 8–9, 19, 37, 65, 69, 70, 112, 118, 126, 136, 150, 156, 162, 173n, 210, 246 Committee of Public Safety in Algeria, 117 confl ict, 1–4, 7, 10, 14, 16, 19, 27–30, 33, 36–38, 51, 55, 68, 82, 84–87, 90, 93, 96–98, 102, 112, 113, 122–123, 127, 128, 152–153, 172, 192n, 207, 229, 238–239, 247, 255 global, 1, 17, 18 international, 3, 38, 113 studies, 1, 17, 21, 28 zones, 3, 6, 13, 17, 18, 27, 30, 84, 88–89, 91–92 Congo, 17, 27, 32, 40 Contact zones, 2, 19, 188–189 corruption, 35–37, 41, 68, 77, 78, 115, 188, 214, 219–220, 224, 251, 257 culturalization, 146, 149, 151–152

D Daraghmah, Hiba, 85 see also female suicide bombers Dashabi, Hamid, 245–246, 259, 261 Debique, Tilern, 55–58 decolonization, 6, 111, 114, 164 see also independence Degauque, Muriel, 87–88 Deheisheh refugee camp, 84–85, 92, 96 see also To Die in Jerusalem democracy, 21, 67, 145, 147, 150, 152, 164–165, 197, 199, 233, 235, 240, 245–247, 250–261 Islam and, 250, 252

273

religion and, 250–252, 256 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 17, 27–28, 31–32, 40–42 as “rape capital of the world”, 27 detention camps, 131, 135 see also indefi nite detention, refugee: camps development, 33–34, 35–36, 38, 39 developing countries, 33–34, 36, 77 discourse, 68–69 securitization of, 39 sustainable, 39 Devi, Sampat Pal, 214, 219–220, 225 Dick, Kirby, 177 see The Invisible War Dil Se, 101 see Mani Ratnam disciplines, 1, 127, 129, spaces between, 127 discrimination, 7, 13, 130, 133, 153, 218, 224 racial, 55, 153 sexual, 56, 57 see also women diversity, 17, 48, 55, 146, 150–152, 248, 256 Divine Intervention, 100 see Elia Suleiman Djebar, Assia, 21n Draquila: l’Italia che trema, 138 see Sabina Guzzanti drones, 29, 49, 72 Dudette 07, 53 Dutch, 145–155 constitution, 147 culture, 149 Dutchness, 19, 146, 149–150, 153 government, 154, 157n, 158n mosques, 150 society, 147–149, 151, 153, 156n values, 148, 151, 154 Dutch Civic Integration Exam (integration exam), 146–153, 156n see also citizenship: tests, integration

E Egypt, 21, 132, 133, 229, 245–261 El Paso, 178, 186, 190n see also border: US-Mexico, Juárez emancipation, 2–6, 9, 13, 83, 90, 250, 253 agency, 83, 261 women’s, 122, 148, 149, 157n

274

Index

see also women emotion, 20, 65, 74, 93, 95, 113, 138, 200, 223, 229–231, 237–241 see also affect, love, shame empire, 4, 15, 17, 69, 71, 78, 155, 171 see also imperialism, United States employment tribunal, 54–57, 59 England, Lynndie, 12 enlightenment, 152–153, 162, 253 Enloe, Cynthia, 1–2, 9, 31, 47, 51, 59 Equality Act 2010, 55 Eritrea, 7, 18, 128, 131–138 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), 7 ETA, 10 ethics, 78, 113, 118, 155, 216, 224, 229, 252–253 Ethiopia, 132, 136–137 ethnicity, 13, 19, 48, 56, 59, 85, 146, 178, 216, 218 ethnic and racial minority, 20, 48, 58, 70, 179, 196 see also race ethnologizing, 27 see also race: racialization Europe, 18–19, 33, 87–88, 128, 135– 136, 145–146, 153, 155–156, 162, 164, 172, 234 European Convention on Human Rights, 154 European Court of Justice, 154 European Directive for Family Reunification, 154 European Union (EU), 18, 57, 132– 134, 153–154, 162, 171 exceptionalism, 64–65

F family life, 9, 146, 154 Fanon, Frantz, 3–5, 7, 21n, 27, 114, 119 Farc, 10 Fatah, 10, 87 Felman, Shoshana, 196–197, 201 female, 12, 14–15, 27, 37, 41–42, 47, 76, 88, 102, 118, 120–124, 130, 147–148, 171, 229, 233–235, 237, 246 activists, 6, 8, 235 combatants, 3–7, 10, 12, 104, 115–117 circumcision, 147–148 protester, 20, 229, 240 soldiers, 46–47, 52–59, 177, 179, 181–185, 189

female suicide bombers, 11, 17, 82–104 feminicide, 185–196, 190 see also feminicidio feminicidio, 20, 178, 186–190 involvement of police officers in the, 186–187 organizations against, 192n femininity, 1, 10, 13, 17, 20, 46–47, 88, 100, 111, 121, 124, 229, 233–234, 237–240 militarization of, 17, 47 feminism, grassroots, 11, 20, 102, 126, 189, 215, 217, 218, 224 humanitarianism and, 51, 68–69 Indian, 215, 217, 218 liberal, 13, 103 postcolonial, 7, 14, 217 radical, 13, 180, 185 traditional, 13, 16 transnational, 17, 28, 126 Western, 13, 249, 254 Flame, 8 see Ingrid Sinclair Foucault, Michel, 39, 69 frame, analysis, 28, 29 discursive, 29 resonance, 31 France, 1, 4–6, 11, 18, 111–124, 126, 128, 132, 134 French identity, 113, 120 French military, 5, 18, 65, 100, 111, 113–115, 119–121 French nationality, 18, 112 freedom, 2, 11, 103, 113, 117, 118, 119, 135, 147–149, 152, 224, 234–235, 246, 247, 250, 251, 253, 260, 261 fighter, 3, 91 of religion, 146, 147, 152 of speech, 19, 148, 149, 157 sexual, 19, 148, 152 Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, 185–186, 190 FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front), 4, 12 French-Algerian War, 11, 18, 111–112, 117, 120–124 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 4–6, 114–115, 117, 120

G Gaddafi , Muammar, 132–134 gay, 184, 253

Index marriage, 148, 149 rights, 149 sexuality, 148 see also homosexuality gender, 3, 19, 48, 57, 59, 104, 148–149, 254 see also women genocide, 3, 165, 192n geopolitics, 14–16, 38, 39, 69, 249 Germany, 2, 10, 60n, 153, 157n, 162–165, 171–172 global, 3, 12, 14, 17, 21, 30, 33, 35, 37–40, 42, 51, 67, 70, 75, 90, 99, 126, 130, 156, 232, 249–250, 252 market, 33, 36–37, 49, 233 north, 17, 134, 186 politics, 1, 18, 32, 34, 78, 112 south, 17, 28, 33–34, 38, 65, 67, 77 globalization, 1, 21, 33, 50, 126–127, 130, 138, 146, 155–156, 188 Goma, 27 Gonzales-Perez, Margaret, 2–3 “Good Governance” campaign, 35–36 governmentality, 15, 146, 154 neoliberal, 30, 32, 33 transnational, 37, 42 see also neoliberalism Gramsci, Antonio, 185, 230 “greed theory”, 36–37 see also World Bank Guguleto Seven, 200 Gulabi Gang, 20, 214–215, 219–220, 222–225, 226n Guzzanti, Sabina, see Draquila: l’Italia che trema

H Hage, Ghassan, 82, 83, 91–92, 95 “homoio-exighophobic culture”, 91 Halimi, Gisèle, 111, 113–120, 124 see also Beauvoir, Simone de Hamas, 10, 85, 87 hegemony, 88, 127, 128, 185, 230 male, 177, 188 neoliberal, 30, 42, 240 white, 130, 133 Hezbollah, 10, 82, 86 HIV/AIDS, 9, 209 homophobia, 184 homosexuality, 56, 158n see also gay honor killing, 147–148

275

humanitarianism, 3, 17, 39, 42, 47, 51, 52, 64–79 see also aid, citizenship: humanitarian human rights, 18, 41, 42, 55, 67, 69, 112, 113, 115, 118, 119, 127–131, 181 abuses, 7–8, 134, 216 discourse, 19, 49, 68, 138, 155–156, 231, 234 legislation, 20, 57, 58, 60, 178 violations, 93, 186, 190, 197–203, 207, 218, 230, 234 Human Rights Watch, 67, 132–137 Hussein, Saddam, 180 Hutchings, Kimberly, 216 hypermasculinity, 177, 184–185, 187

I Idris, Wafa, 82, 84, 86, 87 see also female suicide bombers imams, 154 radicalization of, 150 immigrant, 15, 130, 135, 147. 178 as “newcomer”, 146–149, 151, 153 see also migrants, migration immigration laws and policies, 56, 133 Dutch, 154 see also citizenship: tests, integration imperialism, 3, 21, 67, 74, 126–127, 150, 156, 240 humanitarian, 67 see also colonialism, humanitarianism, neoliberalism import-brides, 151 indefi nite detention, 128, 134 see also migration, refugee independence, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 40, 83, 93, 120, 132, 162 Algerian, 112–114, 117, 119–120 see also decolonization individualism, 146, 148–149, 152 Indochina, 113 integration, 19, 145–157n International Monetary Fund (IMF), 34, 35, 258 intersectionality, 1, 3, 14, 40, 48, 59, 130, 253 Intifada, 11, 82, 104n Invisible War, The, 19, 177, 181–185, 189–190 see Kirby Dick Iraq, 10–12, 16, 28, 46, 87–89, 122–124, 131

276

Index

occupation of, 14, 18, 53, 112 War, 32, 178–180, 185 see also Abu Ghraib Islam, 58, 83, 88, 90, 145, 152–153, 155, 250, 252 Islamophobia, 249–250, 254 Israel, 92, 96–97, 132–134 Israeli Defence Force (IDF), 93 Italy, 68, 130–135, 139 Friendship Agreement between Libya and, 132 Iyob, Ruth, 7

J Jaradat, Hanadi Tayseer, 85 see also female suicide bombers Jerusalem, 84–85, 92, 95, 96 Jihad, 10, 85, 87, 88 Johnston, Les, 215–216 Jorge, Lidia, 163, 165, 168, 173n journalism, 49, 65, 69, 71, 72, 113, 135–138, 230, 247, 255 see also media Juárez, 19–20, 178, 186–190, 192n see also feminicidio justice, 20–21, 65, 75, 99, 119, 153, 164, 165, 182–183, 185, 187, 196–198 restorative, 20, 210n, 217, 224 retributive, 20, 210n, 216, 224–225 transitional, 19, 20, 196–198, 207

K Kaplan, Caren, 14, 71 Khaled, Leila, 86, 101, 104 Kiva, 74–78 Kristeva, Julia, 197, 201 see also revolt Krog, Antjie, 199–200 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), 10, 86

L Lampedusa, 132, 135 see also Mediterranean, migration L’Aquila, 18–19, earthquake of, 137–138 L’Aquila, 6 Aprile 2012, 138 Latinos, 178 Levi, Primo, 126, 138–139 Levy, Rachel, 92, 97 mother of (Abigail Levy), 94, 100 Lotta Continua, 10 love, 20, 231, 235–240

M machismo and marianismo, 187–188 Mahmood, Saba, 89, 103, 248, 251, 253–254, 258–260 Mahila Aghadi, 20, 214–215, 220–225 Malinche, 2 Mama, Amina, 9, 27 Mandela, Nelson, 21n, 198, 203, 209 maquiladora industry, 186, 188 martyrdom and martyrs, 17, 83, 85, 87–91 see also female suicide bombers masculinity, 1, 7, 11, 13–14, 16, 30, 47, 54, 59–60, 71, 100–101, 111, 121–122, 124, 177, 183–185, 209 hegemonic, 184–185 see also hegemony: male, hypermasculinity Mbeki, Thabo, 209, 211n McClintock, Anne, 4–5, 9, 12, 21, 89, 146 Medalia, Hilla, 92–94, 96 see To Die in Jerusalem media, access to, 248 and the Arab Spring, 20–21, 229–241 and humanitarism, 65–74, 77–78 and migration, 128, 130, 132, 135, 150–151, 154 and the military, 17, 42, 47, 49–50, 52–53, 57–58 and terrorism, 10, 17–18, 83–88, 92–93, 102–103, 180 and violence, 12, 42, 123, 124, 161, 183, 187–189 and war, 27–28, 36–37, 68 and women, 20, 42, 47, 49, 53, 57–58, 83–88, 92–93, 103, 124, 187–189, 214–218, 231, 235 digital, 77, 247–249, 260 Facebook, 241n, 242n, 251, 260 international, 83, 86 internet, 77, 128, 247, 248, 251 mainstream, 128, 154 mobile phones, 77, 256 new, 21, 75, 77, 245–247, 254–256, 260, 267–268 popular, 17, 21, 66, 78, 151, 245–246, 260 reports, 215, 218, 226 representation, 28, 57,68, 130, 146, 165, 215, 245

Index social, 21, 52, 165, 231–232, 236, 240, 247–248, 251, 259–260 television (TV), 49–50, 53–54, 60, 65, 69, 87, 93, 95, 99, 130, 147, 199, 200, 254 Twitter, 53, 54, 72, 241n, 242n Youtube, 73, 210n see also cinema, photography Mediterranean, 130–138 Mehaydali, Sanaá, 86 see also female suicide bombers memory, 52, 135, 162, 165, 197–201, 207 collective, 199 see also trauma, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Mexico, 2, 20, 34, 178, 186–189, 190n, 192n microcredit and microlending, 74–76 see also humanitarianism, Kiva Middle East, 86, 93, 105n, 135, 178–179, 233, 245–246, 250, 253, 260 migrants, 3, 19, 48–49, 56, 59, 60, 126, 130, 145–148, 150–156, 157n, 162 black, 133 Eritrean, 128, 132–138 non-Western, 152 second-generation, 151 migration, 18, 128, 131–132, 146, 151, 155, 172 family reunification, 151 globalization and, 146, 155–156 of religious clergy, 154 militarization, 11, 17, 21, 47,51–55, 59, 79, 100, 102, 127 military, culture, 12, 49, 54, 57, 58, 177, 181, 183, 184, 191n service, 48–49, 53, 55, 60, 60n, 178, 181 scandal in the, 18, 112, 115, 123, 181, 189 Miller, Philip, 20, 196, 199–204, 210n misogyny, 184, 186, 188, 189, 191n, 242n see also feminicidio, hypermasculinity, masculinity, rape monstrosity, 17, 27–28, 30, 41 Montoya, Mickiela, 12, 179, 183 Morocco, 151, 157n, 158n Morsi, Muhammed, 245, 258 Mortenson, Greg, 71–75

277

motherhood, 9, 15–16, 93 mourning, 1, 19, 93, 99, 242n movement, 4, 10, 84, 203, 214, 221–224, 249, 260 African Liberation, 4, 8, 12 anticolonial, 3–5, 13, 14, 84, 102, 113 antifacist, 14 feminist, 11, 14, 15, 59, 225 freedom, 3, 11 independence, 68, 114, 120, 171 militant, 6, 10, 13, 21, 83 nationalist, 4, 14, 104, 214, 224 social, 31, 59, 215, 218 terrorist, 2, 11, 83 Mubarak, Hosni, 231, 245–246, 248, 256–258 multiculturalism, 59, 157n Muslim Brotherhood, 245, 252, 256–259, 261 Muslims, 58, 87, 88, 90, 96, 102, 112, 116, 123, 145, 149–150, 154, 221, 224, 245–247 racism against, 58, 152 see also Islam, Islamophobia

N Naaman, Dorit, 11, 83, 85, 229 Naar Nederland (Coming to the Netherlands), 146–148, 150 Nablus, 84–85, 101 national, history, 129, 199–200 identity, 18–19, 49, 54, 59, 112–114, 120, 124, 146 liberation struggle, 114 membership, 145 pride, 112, 119 shame, 123 nationalism, 9, 15, 51, 69, 71, 103, 124, 136, 146, 207, 229 nation-state, 10, 14, 20, 64–65, 126– 127, 129–130, 132, 136–138, 139n, 145–146, 150, 154, 196, 205, 207, 229, 234, 237 NATO, 48, 49, 52, 134 neoliberalism, 15–16, 30, 32, 33–36, 40, 65, 68, 76, 240 and privatization, 32–34 and technologies of containment, 28, 37, 39 as hegemonic ideological project, 35 “never again”, 20, 196, 197, 199, 201, 204

278 Index Newsweek, 92, 96 new wars, 14, 17, 28, 37–42 NGOs, 32, 37, 38, 42, 42n, 49, 64, 67–71, 73–74, 77–78, 233 feminist and women’s, 67 see also humanitarianism No Fly Zone (NFZ) on Lybia, 53, 134 non-refoulement, 132–133 see also border, Mediterranean, migration North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 188, 192n

O occupation, 7, 9, 14, 18, 59, 93, 96, 98, 103, 112 see also Palestine orientalism, 18, 82, 86, 89–90, 102, 105n, 172, 250, 253 Oslo Accords, 82, 102, 105n

P Pakistan, 53, 71–74 Palestine, 10–11, 85–86, 92, 96–97, 99 Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), 10, 87 Paradise Now, 101 see Hany Abu-Assad peacekeeping, 38, 47, 49, 51, 139n photography, 12, 20–21, 49, 58, 65, 76, 146, 229–240 see also media poetics of scrap, 201 political economy, 30, 37, 41, 70 political transition, 20, 196–210 see also art, justice: transitional, Truth and Reconciliation Commission politics, of naming, 246 of portrayal, 28–29, 33, 42 sexual, 17, 28, 31, 33, 58, 151, 153, 180, 210 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 5–6, 100 see The Battle of Algiers Portillo, Lourdes, 186–190, 192n see Señorita extraviada Portrait Busts, 20, 196, 204–206 Portraits, 196, 204–205 Portugal, 162, 165, 171–172, 173n postcolonial, 3, 7, 12, 14, 17–19, 21, 31, 50, 55, 84, 104, 121, 126, 138, 146, 155, 156, 161–162, 164, 229, 234, 246, 261 approach, 1, 15, 16

citizens, 49 confl ict, 27–28 Europe, 18, 19 feminism, 7, 14, 217 migrant, 48, 126 politics, 209 state, 34, 42 theory, 126, 128, 130 postsecular, 19, 21, 245–246, 250, 252–254, 259–260 see also secularism postwar gender relations, 11, 13 private and public, 1, 7, 15, 82, 229 psychoanalysis, 197

Q al-Qaeda, 10, 87

R race, 2, 13, 15, 18, 19, 30, 55, 58, 60, 66, 70, 88, 90, 112, 124, 180 racism, 19, 54, 58, 156, 157n, 191n, 254 racialization, 1, 11, 15, 27, 31, 48, 55, 69, 71, 123 racist stereotypes, 5, 41, 135, 151, 209 see also class: race, class and gender Rajaratnam, Thenmuli (Dhanu), 86 see also female suicide bombers rape, 3, 7, 8, 20, 27–33, 37, 40–42, 116–119, 131, 177–190, 222, 225 as terrorism, 177, 180–181 culture, 177, 182–185, 190 in the US military, 11, 53, 123, 177, 179, 181–182 mass, 28, 31–32, 40, 42, 116 victims, 18, 32, 111, 181, 225 wartime, 2, 27–30, 32, 40–42, 116–118 see also torture rapist, 27, 30, 41, 181–183 Ratnam, Mani, 101 see Dil Se al-Rayasha, Reem Salih, 85 see also female suicide bombers reconciliation, 3, 19, 92, 98, 203, 229, 239 see also Truth and Reconciliation Commission Red Brigades, 10 refugee, 2, 19, 132–138 camps, 17, 84–85, 92, 95–96

Index religion, 69, 83, 85–86, 88, 90, 103–104, 146–147, 149, 152, 154, 155, 207, 218, 245, 246, 250–254, 256, 259, 261 repatriation, 134–135 rescue narratives, 31 see also Western: rescuers revolt, 20, 196–197, 207, 245–251, 256–257, 259 revolution, 4, 9, 10, 14, 20, 34, 196–197, 231–232, 245–247, 249- 251, 257–260 see also Arab Spring REwind, 20, 196, 199–204, 207, 210n Rumsfeld, Donald, 123 Ryan, William, 191n Rwanda, 13, 14, 40, 192n

S Said, Edward, 253 see also orientalism Sartre, Jean-Paul, 121–122 Strocchi, Stefano, see Witness. Return to L’Aquila: Broken Promises secularism, 83, 157n democracy and, 21, 245, 247, 250–259 gender, new media and, 245 security, commercialization of, 49 moms, 14–15 national, 49, 133, 200 studies, 50–51, 127, 139n Segre, Andrea, see A Sud di Lampedusa Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Women), 19, 177, 178, 186– 190, 192n see Lourdes Portillo sexual, abuse, 20, 31, 116–117, 120, 136, 139n, 177, 180–181, 184–185, 189 assault, 117, 181–184, 189, 190n, 191n harrassment, 7, 8, 12, 53, 55–58, 148, 181–184, 187, 221–222 violence, 13, 17, 19, 27–29, 32, 37, 41–42, 180–186, 198 see also rape, torture sexuality, 16, 18, 47, 52, 54, 56–59, 69, 111–112, 115–117, 119, 124, 146, 148, 158n, 184, 209, 211n

279

Schengen Agreement, 135 shahida, 17, 84–85, 87, 104 see also female suicide bombers Shahida—Brides of Allah, 99–100 see Natalie Assouline Terebilo shame, 20, 231–234, 236, 240–241 Shiv Sena, 214, 221, 224–225, 226n see also Mahila Aghadi Sinclair, Ingrid, 8 see Flame soldiers, citizenship and, 48–50, 52, 54, 59 lesbian, 58–59 racialized and gendered, 48 representations of, 47, 48, 50, 52, 57, 59 South Africa, 2, 4, 8, 20, 196–201, 204, 207, 209–210 postapartheid, 196, 197, 201, 204, 209–210 “the becoming” postapartheid of, 210 see also ANC, Truth and Reconciliation Commission sovereignty, 2, 9, 18, 38, 40, 59, 68, 69, 78, 93, 101, 126, 128–132, 135–139, 154–156, 170–172, 229–231, 234 Spivak, Gayatri, 28, 122, 126, 129, 134, 151 state of exception, 78 Stevenson, Michael, 208–208 structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 35 see also World Bank subjectivity, 5, 29, 85, 216, 240, 261 Suicide Bomber Barbie, 101, 105n Suleiman, Elia, 100 see Divine Intervention surveillance, 15, 52, 68, 101, 136, 230 see also security Swapo, 4

T Taguba Report, 123 see also Abu Ghraib Talbot, Rhiannon, 2, 10 Tahrir Square, 231, 234, 241n, 245, 250 see also Arab Spring Takatka, Andaleeb, 82, 85, 102 see also female suicide bomber Taliban, 53, 72, 74 Tamil Tigers, 10, 82, 86, 104n

280 Index tegalit, 7 terrorism, 2–3, 9–11, 14, 19–20, 88–90, 96, 171, 177–178, 180–181, 185–186, 190 female, 82–104 gendered, 177–178, 185 sexual, 20, 180–181, 185 The White Picture, 46, 51, 59 To Die in Jerusalem, 92–99 see Hilla Medalia tolerance, 149, 152 torture, 7, 12, 18, 41, 111–124, 128, 131, 134–136, 178, 181, 187 psychological, 114 second degré, 114 sexual, 115–116 supplice de la bouteille, 115 wartime, 27, 29, 32, 40–42, 111–112 see also Abu Ghraib, French-Algerian War, rape toyi-toyi, 200–202 transnational, 10, 13, 15, 17, 19, 28, 37, 42, 56, 65–68, 90, 126, 155, 162, 164, 196 capital, 33–34 see also global trauma, 19, 184, 196–201, 204, 238 collective, 88, 198 national, 165 working through, 197 see also justice: transitional, political transition truth, 29, 50, 59, 196–198, 201, 203, 209 dialogical, 210n forensic, 210n narrative, 210n restorative, 210n Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 197–204, 209–210, 210n report, 198–199, 210n see also ANC, South Africa truth commissions, 20, 196–198 Tunisia, 135, 251, 255 Turkey, 151, 157, 162, 163, 165, 167, 171, 172 Tutu, Desmond, 198 Tyszko, Simon, 101

U United Nations (UN), 38, 53, 67, 70 United States (US), 12, 14, 15, 17, 27, 30, 40, 64–79, 90, 95, 122–123,

128, 132, 153, 157n, 165, 177–185, 188–190, 215 military, 12, 19, 51, 53, 64, 71–72, 87, 139n, 177–178, 181, 185, 189–190 post-9/11, 91, 178, 180 “soft power” of the, 68, 72–73 uprisings, 21, 134, 245–254, 258–261 see also Arab Spring, revolt, revolution

V Vasquez, Regina, 184, 191n veiling, 5, 88 Verdonk, Rita, 148, 151, 154 vigilantism, 215–216, 223, 225–226 violence, against women, 13, 15, 16, 29, 30, 148, 181, 183, 188, 214, 218 domestic, 15, 147–148, 165, 214, 221 epistemic, 28, 134 gendered, 16, 31, 126, 162, 171, 177 spectacularization of, 30, 33 state, 111, 128, 130, 164–165, 170 see also confl ict, rape, torture, war virginity, 115–117, 181

W Waked, Sharif, 100 see “Chic Point,” Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints “walking mattress”, 182, 191n war, borderland, 27, 37 civil, 36–37 hero, 53, 57, 60 on terror, 14–16, 39, 72, 79, 86, 90, 102, 172, 178, 180 proxy, 27, 38 see also confl ict West, 11, 13, 40, 66–68, 70, 74, 83, 85, 89, 92, 102, 233, 246, 249, 251, 258–260 West Bank, 92, 97 Western, 3, 5, 13, 14, 27, 29–31, 39, 42, 65–68, 83–92, 95, 100–103, 123,126, 128, 152, 162, 180, 209, 230, 233–234, 240, 248–256 civilization, 149–150, 152 feminist, 13, 103, 249, 253–254 media, 27, 66, 91–92, 102, 245–249, 256

Index rescuers, 67–68 whiteness, 31, 124 see also race Wicomb, Zoë, 8 David’s Story, 8 Witness. Return to L’Aquila: Broken Promises, 138 see Stefano Strocchi Witness series I–V, 20, 196, 204 women, African, 4–9 Algerian, 4, 5, 18, 100, 111–118, 120–124 Arab, 90, 249–250 as tools of war, 112, 123 black, 75 co-opting of, 123 in militant movements, 4–9, 10–11, 13, 18, 20, 21, 82, 120, 214 Indian, 20, 214–215, 218–222, 223–226 Iraqi, 123–124 Moroccan, 151

281

Muslim, 87, 112, 116, 122, 224, 247 non-Western, 151 Palestinian, 11, 18, 82, 84–96, 102 stereotypes about, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 31 82, 151, 181, 183 Turkish, 151, 158n Woodhull, Wininfred, 4 World Bank, 35–38, 40, 42n, 258 World Economic Forum, 33 World War II, 13, 33, 40, 104, 113, 129, 179, 191n

Y Yeğenoğlu, Meyda, 5 Yousafzai, Malala, 74

Z ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), 4, 12 Zarkov, Dubravka, 13–14, 230 Zimbabwe, 4, 8 Žižek, Slavoj, 161, 168 Zuma, Jacob, 209, 211n

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