This art icle was downloaded by: [ York Universit y Libraries] On: 12 June 2013, At : 12: 00 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK International Feminist Journal of Politics Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rfj p20 Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner ‘Abuse’ in Abu Ghraib and the Question of ‘Gender Equality’ Melanie Richt er-Mont pet it a a Polit ical Science Depart ment , York Universit y, 4700 Keele St reet , Toront o, Ont ario, M3J 1P3, Canada Email: Published online: 17 Apr 2007. To cite this article: Melanie Richt er-Mont pet it (2007): Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnat ional Feminist Reading of t he Prisoner ‘ Abuse’ in Abu Ghraib and t he Quest ion of ‘ Gender Equalit y’ , Int ernat ional Feminist Journal of Polit ics, 9:1, 38-59 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 14616740601066366 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sublicensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. 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The publisher shall not be liable Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and, or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. Empire, Desire and Violence Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 A QUEER TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST READING OF THE PRISONER ‘ABUSE’ IN ABU GHRAIB AND THE QUESTION OF ‘GENDER EQUALITY’ MELANIE RICHTER-MONTPETIT York University, Toronto, Canada Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dominant discourses in the United States paint the acts of prisoner ‘abuse’ committed by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib in 2003 as either the obscene but exceptional example of some low-ranking soldiers gone mad, or as the direct result of the suspension of the rule of law in the global ‘war on terror’. Alternatively, feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the pictures depicting female soldiers torturing prisoners are both horrifying and a sign of ‘gender equality’. This article departs from all three of these positions. I argue that the micro-level violences shown in the Abu Ghraib pictures are neither just aberrations nor a sign of gender equality. Rather they follow a preconstructed heterosexed, racialized and gendered script that is firmly grounded in the colonial desires and practices of the larger social order and that underpins the hegemonic ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy of the ‘war on terror’. I explore how the participation of some of the US Empire’s internal Others, namely White western women, may disrupt some of the social processes of normalization underpinning this colonial fantasy, but nevertheless serves to re/produce the identity and hegemony of the US Empire and its heterosexed, racialized and classed World (Dis)Order. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keywords Abu Ghraib, civilization, colonial, desires, Ehrenreich, Empire, fantasy, gender equality, militarized masculinity, Orientalism, US, ‘Whiteness’ [I]n the outskirts of the world . . . the system reveals its true face. (Eduardo Galeano cited in Slater 2004: 20) This article looks at some of the discourses and practices surrounding the detainee ‘abuses’1 in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, 2003, at the hands of US International Feminist Journal of Politics, 9:1 March 2007, 38–59 ISSN 1461-6742 print=ISSN 1468-4470 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http:==www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080=14616740601066366 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 soldiers. With the help of a queer transnational feminist lens I examine the ways in which the acts of torture were conducted as well as the ways in which they were represented in official and more critical discourses. I address three questions: first, how can we account for the highly sexualized character of many of the ‘abuses’? Second, given the conclusions of a large body of feminist literature on the link between violence and ‘militarized masculinity’, how is it possible that officers and low-ranking male-identified soldiers deliberately engaged female-identified soldiers in the torture of the detainees? Third, is the participation of female-identified soldiers a sign of gender equality as feminist theorist and social justice activist Barbara Ehrenreich (2004a, 2004b) has suggested? Dominant discourses paint the acts of violence in Abu Ghraib as either the obscene but exceptional example of some low-ranking soldiers gone mad or as the direct result of the ‘state of exception’, the suspension of the rule of law in the global ‘war on terror’. In contrast, Ehrenreich, an advocate of women’s full inclusion into the US armed forces, suggests that the pictures depicting Lynndie England and other female soldiers enacting acts of torture on the bodies of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison are horrifying and constitute a sign of ‘gender equality’ (Ehrenreich 2004a, 2004b). This article departs from all three of these positions. I argue that the ways that the violences were enacted on the bodies of detainees follow a preconstructed heterosexed, racialized and gendered script. The pleasure that the seven convicted military prison guards took in torturing detainees is grounded in colonial desires, similar to the nineteenth-century colonial fantasy of the ‘White Man’s burden’. The effect of these violences and violations is to (re)produce the current misogynist, racialized, heterosexed and classed neo-liberal World DisOrder, and therefore the torturing femaleidentified soldiers are not a sign of ‘gender equality’. Reading these discourses through a queer transnational feminist lens, I try to connect different sites of Empire, among them states and markets with bodies, the household, anti-queer politics and military and civilian prisons. My framework and argument draw on a growing body of literature self-identifying as transnational feminism(s) (e.g. Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kaplan et al. 1999; Shohat 1999), which poses a direct challenge to Euro-American liberal feminist theory and praxis and its assumption that ‘Sisterhood is Global’ (see Mohanty 1984; Mendoza 2002). Rooted in postcolonial and women of colour feminisms, these works bring together feminist approaches to political economy and discourse analysis in order to trace and contest the ‘uneven and dissimilar circuits of culture and capital’ across ‘boundaries of nation, race, and gender’ and the ways in which they constitute and are constituted by old and new forms of colonialism/imperialism (Grewal and Kaplan 2000). While the issue of sexuality2 has been largely undertheorized in much transnational feminist writing,3 my approach foregrounds explicitly queer interventions into the hegemonic sex/gender system, or ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1990), which challenge the notion of a stable male/female ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 39 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 and heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy. Central to this article is a notion of sexuality that conceptualizes heteronormativity not as a discrete relation of domination, but as intersecting with, and indivisible from, other power relations. While many of the current debates on bodies treat bodies and desire(s) merely as discursive or cultural phenomena, my inquiry into the gaps, silences and suppressions surrounding the ‘detainee abuses’ in Abu Ghraib seeks to un-cover the linkages ‘between Western [practices of] representation and knowledge on the one hand, and Western material and political power on the other’ (Moore-Gilbert 1997: 34). It is only by uncovering some of the social contradictions underlying these seemingly autonomous social practices that we can produce knowledge that allows us to transform existing social relations of exploitation and oppression (Ebert 1996: 7). The subject-matter of this article lies at the intersection of multiple areas of study, such as International Relations, Sociology, Political Science and Political Economy. My framework differs significantly from the hegemonic discourses in these literatures. Historically, their liberal versions in particular have been heavily shaped by modernization theory and its obsession with achieving ‘political stability’ based on western liberal polities. I favour a transformative approach that conceives of the social world as dynamic and of (non-violent) conflict and contradiction as potentially progressive. Moreover, the hegemonic discourses in the above-mentioned (themselves compartmentalized) fields of study tend to compartmentalize the social world and to treat its fragments in isolation from one another. Instead, I envision social phenomena as an overdetermined amalgam of mutually constitutive social processes. Hence, the violences enacted on the bodies of detainees are not ‘reducible to discrete elements, but rather [are] a complex [and often contradictory] phenomenon whose constituent parts have an organic unity’, to borrow from Ake’s observation on the nature of underdevelopment (1981: 6, my addition). The social crises leading to the outbreak of these micro-level violations and violences are deeply embedded in the larger social order. As long as this ‘order’, with its underlying relations of inequality, is not transformed, the kinds of violences performed on the bodies of Abu Ghraib prisoners cannot be overcome. Drawing on the insight of Edward Said (1993) and other postcolonial scholars, that Empire is not only about the accumulation of wealth, but also about ‘a deeply held belief in the need to and the right to dominate others for their own good, others who are expected to be grateful’ (Razack 2004: 10, emphasis in original), I argue that the torture and murder of prisoners were acts of colonial violence, firmly rooted in a continuum of racialized, (hetero)sexualized, classed violence. This continuum of violence reaches back in time to the modern ‘civilizing mission’ and outward in space to link the imperial violence enacted on the bodies of people of colour, Muslims, queers and women in the ‘mother’ country/‘homeland’, with the perceived moral righteousness or even duty of the US Empire to bring (liberal) 40 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 democracy to the ‘dark corners of the earth’ (Bush 2002a) in the ‘war on terror’, the war ‘to save civilization itself’ (Bush 2001e). Making legible some of the larger social relations at work in the events at Abu Ghraib is not intended to exonerate the military prison guards, but rather to show how our desires are not just a question of individual preference.4 I will start off with an exploration of the Bush administration’s foreign policy discourse, which I term the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy. I will show how, through this national fantasy and its interpellated subject-positions (‘Whiteness’), the discursive representation of the US nation-state and its citizens as benign defenders of ‘civilization itself’ made sense. With the help of a queer transnational feminist lens, I will then seek to forge a meaningful narrative to conceive of the ways the different acts of torture were conducted. ‘OPERATION IRAQI HOPE’, ‘WHITENESS’ AND THE NATIONAL ‘SAVE CIVILIZATION ITSELF’-FANTASY It is my claim that the violences enacted on the bodies of prisoners in Abu Ghraib are embedded in the linguistic and non-linguistic practices of the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy.5 Grounded in a long history of colonial practices and desires, this hegemonic fantasy should not be read as merely offering legitimacy to the US Empire’s ‘war on terror’, but as a site where imperial power is (re)produced. Discourses are not closed systems, but overlap and are open-ended. They draw on elements of other discourses; hence a newly emerging discourse always contains traces of past discursive formations (Hall 1996: 202). The successful deployment of ruling class ideas, such as the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy, depends on these ideas being embraced by the subaltern classes as the unquestioned, taken for granted, ‘common sense’ (Gramsci 1971). This ‘common sense’ provides frames of intelligibility that make certain practices, identities and desires appear ‘natural’, possible and desirable, to the exclusion of other practices and identities, thereby helping secure the societal status quo (Doty 1996; Weldes 1999). Yet what exactly constitutes ‘common sense’ at a specific historical juncture is not simply imposed by dominant groups, but involves unceasing processes of contestation and (re)negotiation between various social forces, which, however, do not operate on a level playing field (Gramsci 1971: 421). The struggle over the production of meaning does not only involve the consent of subaltern groups, but also the (re)production of subject-positions from whose location within the discursive formation the fantasy actually makes sense. In fact, I theorize the relationship between a discursive formation, its subject-positions and their desires as mutually constitutive and continuously (re)enacted. Following Althusser (1971), the process of constructing and locating identities or subject-positions can be understood as ‘interpellation’. Borrowing from Jutta Weldes’ inquiry into the ‘Cuban ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 41 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 missile crisis’, I argue that the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy successfully interpellated the ‘abusive’ prison guards, as well as the majority of the US electorate in the last presidential elections, ‘because it represents events as occurring in a world of familiar objects and familiar threats forged of conventional, already familiar articulations. Its common-sense character was and is secured by interpellating most Americans into familiar and acceptable subject positions’ (Weldes 1999: 121). In this section, I will explore some crucial linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of the ‘world of familiar objects and familiar threats’ on which the currently hegemonic national fantasy draws. Following the killings of 9/11, the official reasoning of the current Bush-administration for its pursuit of the ‘Global War on Terror’ and its attack on Iraq in particular, has oscillated between self-defense (in terms of a response to 9/11 or a search for ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’) and humanitarian intervention (in the form of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’). In this ‘war’, the Bush-administration announced a permanent state of emergency, which has suspended the UN Charter’s prohibition of force and the Geneva Convention on the treatment of Prisoners of War. The justification for the breach of international law is self-defence: President Bush claims that ‘the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers’ (Bush 2002b). ‘We act to defend ourselves and deliver our children from a future of fear’ (Bush 2001e). Bush argues that this war is a total war, as the ‘threat [from terrorism] cannot be appeased. Civilization itself, the civilization we share, is threatened’ (Bush 2001e). Therefore, ‘[w]e wage a war to save civilization, itself. We did not seek it, but we must fight it – and we will prevail’ (Bush 2001d). This discourse essentializes and then pitches the ‘civilized’ nations in diametrical opposition to the ‘terrorist’/‘foreign fighter’ ‘who dwells in the dark corners of the earth’ (Bush 2002a) or ‘rogue states’ such as Iraq. In this permanent state of war, ‘[y]ou are either with us or you are against us’ (Bush 2001c). The epistemological and ontological distinction between the two enemy camps ‘puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’ (Said 1994: 7). The trope of ‘rogue states’ draws on the orientalist idea of the duplicitous character of ‘orientals’ who cannot be trusted, and henceforth diplomacy and other ‘civilized’ ways of interaction are not appropriate – the only language ‘they’ understand is violence. This representation of ‘orientals’ and the ‘Orient’ has been circulating in western discourses since classical times and continues to shape western responses to the Middle East (Said 1994, 1997; Moore-Gilbert 1997: 39 – 40).6 The ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy builds on the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’, whose theological and secular components date back (at least) to the rise of European colonialism and the ‘discovery’ of the New World. From the story of Europe’s destined conquest of America at the hands of Christopher Columbus, followed by the American Puritans’ divinely ordained ‘errand in the wilderness’, to the secular ideology of a ‘Manifest Destiny’ to expand westward to the Pacific coast (Spanos 2000: 22) and the Cold War 42 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ ‘defender of the Free World’-discourse, the American national identity has been constructed around, Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 a long story – a story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slaveholding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer. (Bush 2001a) The religious dimension of the fantasy feeds on the faith that the USA is the land of the chosen people, the ‘redeemer nation’ (Tuveson 1968), handpicked by God to defend freedom and ‘save civilization itself’. As Bush put it: ‘This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America, the most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that rejects hate, rejects violence, rejects murderers, rejects evil’ (Bush 2001b). ‘We have a special responsibility to defend freedom’ (Bush 2002a); ‘we’ve been called to a unique role in human events’ (Bush 2002b). This narrative constructing US national identity as peaceful and ‘the most free nation in the world’ obscures the fact that, historically, the internal and external civilizing missions of ‘the New World’ (and the ‘Old Europe’) were based on systematic violence against Other(s)7 and the extraction of their labour – from the genocide of the indigenous Americans to the transatlantic slave-trade, and from the mass lynchings in post-bellum South to the ongoing ‘war on drugs’ and the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. In the context of the latest invasion and occupation of Iraq, this rhetoric obscures the violence unleashed by the Allies’ own ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (such as depleted uranium and ‘daisy cutters’) and the outright robbery of Iraqi riches, among them the large-scale privatization of Iraq’s state-owned industries. The extreme neo-liberal makeover of the Iraqi economy imposed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which includes the adoption of a 15 per cent flat corporate tax rate and the right for foreign investors to repatriate 100 per cent of the profit (Klein 2004), altered every economic policy of the Hussein-government except for the ones ‘restricting trade unions and collective bargaining’ (Klein 2004). A World Bank (2004: 2) report on Iraq recommends the launch of a public relations campaign to ‘educate’ the 97 per cent of the Iraqi population who, according to its survey, have not yet understood the supreme superiority of a free-market development model. Like his nineteenth-century colonial predecessor, today’s ‘White man’, ‘Davos-man’, is getting generous compensation for shouldering his ‘burden’ of bringing ‘civilization’ to others. To conclude this part of my argument, the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy articulated by the Bush-administration represents ‘Operation Iraqi Hope’ as an altruistic civilizing mission, creating the discursive space for the subjectposition ‘Whiteness’. I argue that the prison guards/soldiers were not just passively ‘hailed’ into this subject-position, but that their willingness to ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 43 identify with the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy was embedded in their desire to enact ‘Whiteness’. As ‘freedom-loving’ First World citizens from ‘the most free nation in the world’, they saw themselves as civilizing the Third World oriental or ‘hajji’8/‘raghead’9/‘sand nigger’. In the next section, I will focus on the actual torture practices of the soldiers, and the ways in which the violence involved was portrayed and (re)produced in US military investigations and public discourses. A QUEER TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST READING OF THE TORTURE PRACTICES Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 The ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy operates not only to interpellate individual soldiers but also to structure the four official US military reports into the ‘detainee abuses’ (two published together as Fay and Jones 2004; see also Schlesinger et al. 2004; Taguba 2004). One such report declares that, after the events of 9/11, ‘the President, the Congress and the American people recognized we were at war with a different kind of enemy’ (Schlesinger et al. 2004: 6). It cites approvingly US General Abizaid’s orientalist testimony before a Senate Committee on 19 May 2004: ‘Our enemies kill without remorse . . . Their targets are not Kabul and Baghdad, but places like Madrid and London and New York’ (Schlesinger et al. 2004: 28). This narrative obscures the resistance the ‘coalition troops’ face in both Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the fact that the population in these two countries is most affected by the ongoing strife between the US-led ‘coalition troops’ and the ‘terrorists’. Moreover, by pitching western cities in diametrical opposition to eastern cities seen as Other, Abizaid‘s testimony and its recounting in the report serve to (re)construct the line of conflict in international relations in a way that separates and homogenizes the civilized West on the one side and Bush’s ‘dark corners of the earth’ on the other. Concretely, in these ‘dark corners of the earth’, which represent ‘a complex and dangerous operational environment’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 6), ‘there are no safe areas behind “friendly lines” – there are no friendly lines’ (Schlesinger et al. 2004: 57, emphasis in original). This narrative clearly recalls Manifest Destiny’s trope of ‘Indian country’.10 In this national fantasy of the global ‘war on terror’, ‘tens of thousands of men and women in uniform strive every day under austere and dangerous conditions to secure our freedom and the freedom of others’ (Schlesinger et al. 2004: 18). In their quest to ‘preserve the freedoms and liberties that America and our Army represents throughout the world’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 6), and in ‘supporting the Iraqi people’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 33), they ‘confronted a faceless enemy whose hatred of the United States knew no limits’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 12). In stark contrast to the seemingly benign intentions articulated in this hegemonic national fantasy, the four reports came to a similar conclusion whereby 44 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 between October and December 2003, ‘numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees’ in Abu Ghraib prison (Taguba 2004: 16). At this point, we should note a large body of feminist literature challenging the supposed exceptionalism of ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ among soldiers in war zones and at home (see Seifert 1996; Barrett 1999; Whitworth 2004). This feminist scholarship on militarism suggests that being a soldier is, ‘in short, about violence and about preparing people to destroy other human beings by force’ (Whitworth 2004: 151). Yet the problem goes beyond military training, it is about what constitutes becoming and being a soldier – it is about militarized masculinity. Drawing on Cynthia Enloe, Whitworth (2004: 16) argues that militaries rely on a certain kind of ‘ideology of manliness’ in order to function well, an ideology premised on violence and aggression, individual conformity to military discipline, aggressive heterosexism, misogyny and racism. The military compensates the soldier for subordination and physical stress with the promise of community, and physical and emotional toughness (Whitworth 2004: 16). Militarized masculinity is inherently fragile, due to the discrepancies between the ‘myths and promises’ associated with militarized masculinity as experienced and enacted in military training as well as in simulations of warfare, and the lack of control in the actual lives of soldiers (Whitworth 2004: 166). Whitworth further argues that, through violence and the denigration of Others who undermine their promised entitlements, soldiers seek to (re)constitute their militarized masculine self. Following Whitworth, I suggest that the various forms of torture enacted by the soldiers on the bodies of Abu Ghraib detainees were a way of reasserting control and reconstituting the soldierly Self, particularly after the ‘emasculating’ events on 9/11 and the daily resistance against the occupation of Iraq. The heavy involvement of female-identified soldiers in the torture of prisoners seems to stand in clear contradiction to feminist theories of militarized masculinity. How can we make sense of this tension? I argue that we can do so if we understand ‘Operation Iraqi Hope’ as a colonial endeavour, the racialized encounter between prison guards and detainees as a colonial one and the torturing of detainees as acts of colonial violence rooted in the desire to enact ‘Whiteness’.11 I will now turn to the ways the acts of torture were staged. According to the military reports male detainees were ‘sodomized’ by prison guards, forced to ‘masturbate themselves’ and/or ‘perform indecent acts on each other’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 72), such as simulating and/or performing oral or anal ‘sex’ on fellow male detainees. The prison guards also arranged naked male detainees in a human pyramid, in such a way ‘that the bottom guys [sic] penis would touch the guy on tops [sic] butt’ (Taguba 2004), and called them names such as ‘gay’. Many of these ‘homosexual acts’ ¼ ‘indecent acts’ were photographed and/or videotaped. Moreover, the soldiers stripped male detainees and forced them to wear female underpants, often on their heads. ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 45 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 I suggest that these torture practices are embedded in colonial narratives and practices that, first, paint the colonies or ‘dark corners of the earth’ as feminized and ‘spatially spread for male exploration’ (McClintock 1995: 23) or ‘penetration’; and, second, equate the lack of potency and domination of the male body (and the nation) with femininity and male ‘homosexuality’. From the ‘discoveries’ of the Middle Ages on, the racialized sexualization of colonial conquests played a central role in western imperialisms in terms of constructing boundaries along the intersecting lines of class, gender, race, nation and civilization in ways that helped regulate the larger social ‘order’, and in particular helped organize the exploitation of labour. ‘For centuries, the uncertain continents – Africa, the Americas, Asia – were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticized’ (McClintock 1995: 22). Sex was considered the Other of civilization – ‘a threat to social order, modernity and the nation, a threat to progress’ (Binnie 2004: 17). Within these ‘porno-tropics for the European imagination’, as McClintock (1995: 22) puts it, ‘women figured as the epitome of aberration and excess’ and female sexuality was often depicted as cannibalistic (McClintock 1995: 27). Moreover, the first European conquerors of the New World often depicted indigenous men as sodomites – perverts that deserved to be penetrated and killed (Trexler 1995). In these colonial fantasies, the ‘Arabic Orient’ constituted the site of particular sexual excess (see Said 1994; Boone 2003). In the late nineteenth century, the western colonial projects coincided and intersected with the rise of ‘scientific’ racism and its systematic racialization of Others in the colonies and in the mother country. In the colonies, ‘[t]he personage of the savage was developed as the Other of civilization and one of the first “proofs” of this otherness was the nakedness of the savage, the visibility of its sex’ (Mercer and Julien cited in Somerville 2000: 5). ‘Back home’, the twin processes of sexualization and racialization constructed internal Other(s) – the degenerate European races such as the Jews and the Irish, prostitutes, the unemployed, the insane (McClintock 1995: 50) and homosexuals. These intersecting processes helped erect and police the boundaries between the imperial elites and the European and non-European subaltern, and served to rationalize, to render ‘natural’, the concomitant acts of exclusion and violence. The hetero-patriarchal association of the penetrated body as passive and feminine, and of the penetrator as virile and masculine has played, and continues to play, a significant role in military conquests of the US Empire. It intersects clearly with racialized notions of inferiority and superiority. For example, during the 1991 Gulf War, US airforce soldiers scribbled messages on their bombs, such as ‘Mrs Saddam’s sex toy’, ‘a suppository for Saddam’ and ‘bend over Saddam’ (Progler 1999). In this hetero-patriarchal narrative, to be feminized and sexualized by a female-identified soldier is deemed particularly humiliating for the colonized male body (and his nation). In the court martial of army reservist Charles Graner, witnesses reported that female soldiers were instructed by officers to ‘shout abuse’ (Reid 2005). As I will elaborate below, I do not suggest that 46 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 the ‘female’ soldiers were puppets in the service of racialized heteropatriarchy, but rather that their motivations were located in colonial desires. The deliberate involvement of ‘females’ in Abu Ghraib (and Guantanamo Bay), which also included ‘a female Soldier . . . press[ing] a broom against his [a male-identified detainee’s] anus’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 77), intersects with racist orientalist discourses that depict acts of sexualized violence against ‘men’ at the hands of ‘women’, as well as ‘homosexual sex’ and its simulation, as particularly humiliating for ‘oriental’ men. An example of this can be seen in an article by high-profile investigative journalist and commentator, Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker newspaper. Hersh’s article was the first to offer a detailed analysis countering the Bushadministration’s ‘few bad apples’ thesis on the prisoner ‘abuse’ in Abu Ghraib. Hersh (2004) argues that ‘[s]uch dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture’, but then continues to say that ‘it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law’. This reasoning conflates ‘homosexuality’ with dehumanization, as well as all inmates with ‘Arabs’ ¼ ‘ the Arab world’ ¼ ‘Islamic’ ¼ ‘Fundamentalist’; it also obscures how terror against queers in the alleged ‘most free nation in the world’ is systemic and state-sponsored.12 Among the current anti-queer sexual politics of the Bush administration is the attempt to pass a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to unions between ‘men’ and ‘women’. Bush (2004a) declared that a ban on same-sex marriage was a matter of ‘national importance’ because the union of a man and woman in marriage is ‘the most fundamental institution of civilization’. Same-sex marriage threatens ‘the basis of an orderly society’ (Bush 2004b) and ‘the welfare of children’ (Bush 2004a) – ultimately it threatens civilization itself. In fact, the only times Bush conjures up threats to civilization are in the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on same-sex marriage’.13 Moreover, the anti-queer sexual politics of the Bush administration are not limited to defending marriage, but are aimed at fighting non-normative sexualities tout court.14 For example, queer organizations in New York City have reported a dramatic increase in anti-queer violence since the Bush administration’s aggressively anti-queer agenda (Goldstein 2004). Today, federal law prohibits openly gay men and lesbians in the US military. Between 1994 and 2003, nearly 9,500 members of the US armed forces were discharged under the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue’ policy (Associated Press 2005). Moreover, it was not until 2003 that the US Supreme Court struck out the ‘anti-sodomy’ laws of fourteen US states and the military, which had criminalized consensual anal sex in the ‘private’ sphere.15 Against the backdrop of the institutionalized aggressive heteronormativity of the US nation-state, particularly within its military, it should not be surprising that the prison guards set the stage for their acts of violence and humiliation according to an aggressively homophobic script. In the following, I zoom in a little closer on the discursive practice of referring to ‘homosexual sex’ and ‘sodomy’, which, I suggest, helps erase certain aspects of the violences. ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 47 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 The four official investigations, as well as the US mass media, overwhelmingly reported that male detainees in Abu Ghraib were forced to have or simulate ‘homosexual sex’ or ‘sodomy’. The way this discourse frames these acts of violence as ‘sex’ and not rape recalls the orthodox interpretation that male rape of female bodies is about too much testosterone and/or the irresistible ‘sexiness’ of the victim/survivor (see Brownmiller 1975; Seifert 1993). However, there is also a large contemporary body of literature, including work by non-feminists and military psychologists, which argues that rape is about violence and domination, making the Other lose control over her or his body, particularly her or his sexuality (see Marlowe 1983; Goldstein 2001). But there is something else to it. The following poem by Miriam Axel-Lute (2001: 15) captures well the violent erasures of the sodomy discourse. The poem is about the ‘sodomizing’ of Abner Louima, a Black man from Haiti by White supremacists of the New York Police Department in 1997: They Never Call It Rape Even the sympathetic media say Abner Louima was ‘sodomized’ by the police in a bathroom after being beaten. Sodomized as if the terrible part was his ass and not the splintering toilet plunger handle they used. Axel-Lute’s poem shows how the use of the language of ‘sodomy’ obscures the brutality and the concomitant pain inflicted by ramming a toilet plunger handle up a rectum with so much force that it actually splinters. The poem conveys how the anxiety of the sodomy discourse, with its focus on the ‘ass’, silences the concrete violation as an act of racist violence against a racialized body. Turning to the ways in which the acts of torture seem to be grounded in colonial desires, I would begin by highlighting the numerous reports and pictures of detainees being forced to crawl and to bark. Some of the most (in)famous pictures show army reservist Lynndie England holding a crawling prisoner on a leash like a dog. This logic of equating the Barbarian Other with animals also operated in the speeches of President Bush. On several occasions he announced that he would ‘smoke them out of their caves’ (2001f) in the ‘dark corners of the earth’ (2002a). 48 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 I want to make two points about the articulation of racialized difference through animal imagery. First, animals are wild and dangerous and need to be tamed/civilized – the most domesticated animal in the Euro-American context is the dog. Yet even when domesticated, a dog is still a dog.16 Second, historically, colonial Europe ascribed lust to animals – raw, untamed/uncivilized sexuality (Hoch 1979: 51). In one of the courts martial, a witness testified that when he saw ‘two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its [sic] mouth open’, one of the perpetrators, former civilian prison guard Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, told him: ‘Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds’ (cited in Hersh 2004, my emphasis). The Fay-Jones Report describes a picture depicting naked detainees who were forced to masturbate and then were ‘ridden like animals’ (2004: 78). Another instance revealing how much the soldiers imagined themselves to be in a civilizing mission is the inscription and picture on the door of one of the prison cells. One of the detainees was incarcerated in a ‘totally darkened cell measuring about 2 m long and less than a metre across, devoid of any window, latrine or water tap, or bedding’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 66). On the door to this ‘room’ was the inscription ‘the Gollum’ and a picture of said character from the Hollywood trilogy ‘Lord of the Rings’. In the movie, Gollum is portrayed as dangerous, irrational, ugly and naked; it hates sunlight and its warmth and, because of that, seeks refuge in a dark cave. Gollum is a murderer, constantly lying, and finally betrays the heroes. As he is irredeemably irrational, the only language he understands is violence. In fact, the only time in the film that Gollum speaks anything close to the truth is when he gets tortured. I suggest that the ‘coalition’ soldiers in their quest for ‘saving civilization itself’ saw themselves in a struggle between Good and Evil, like the heroes in ‘Lord of the Rings’. Their ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy was enacted in a ‘dangerous enemy land’ (Schlesinger et al. 2004), where regular mortar attacks on Abu Ghraib prison were part of the guerilla-style resistance to the occupation ‘of a different kind of enemy’ (Schlesinger et al. 2004: 6), including suicide-bombings. ‘Gollum’ is duplicitous, a common trope in orientalist discourses. He needs to be tortured in order to become truthful, thus rendering the torture of his body a civilizing act. Forced nudity, at times for several days, was a ‘seemingly common practice’ (Fay and Jones 2004: 68). The soldiers videotaped and photographed the naked bodies. The practice of forced nudity draws on the colonial imaginary discussed earlier, according to which the first ‘proof’ of the Barbarian Other’s primitivism is the open display of its genitals. Like colonial travellers and late modern tourists, the soldiers sought to enact ‘Whiteness’ by capturing the ‘exoticism’ of the Other with the help of video and photo camera. Over the period of three months, the soldiers took around 1,800 pictures of their acts of violence. These pictures also depict grinning soldiers giving thumbs up to the camera next to the wounded, naked flesh of the detainees, ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 49 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 strongly evoking the trophy pictures of colonial hunters standing proudly next to their prey.17 Immortalizing the moment of triumph over the beast with the help of pictures allows them to relive the triumphant moment of ‘Whiteness’ and to share it with friends and family.18 One of the pictures depicting naked detainees stacked in a ‘pyramid’ was used as a screensaver on the computer in the office of the prison guards (Fay and Jones 2004: 78). Both the Taguba and Fay-Jones reports mention pictures depicting two female detainees lifting their shirts and thereby exposing their breasts. Yet these pictures have not been published in the European or American media, nor did I find any journalist demanding that they be published. Against the backdrop of the publication of photos portraying in graphic detail the sexualized violence against male detainees, the silence concerning these pictures of women and the acts they depict should arouse our ‘feminist curiosity’ (Enloe 2004). The Fay-Jones Report (2004: 91) mentions that the two women were ‘arrested for suspected prostitution’ and states that ‘[t]here is no evidence to confirm if these acts were consensual or coerced’. Interestingly, none of the four reports, including Fay-Jones, ever raised the question of whether or not nudity was possibly forced on male-identified detainees. Also, this incident is the only one out of the four reports mentioning the ‘crime’ that a ‘criminal detainee’ was charged with. Clearly, the uncertainty of the Fay-Jones Report about whether or not these acts of nudity were consensual or coerced has to do with the alleged deviant sexual behaviour of the two racialized women. In a similar vein, the Taguba Report (2004: 17) mentions an MP (Military Policeman) ‘having sex’ with a female detainee. Due to the limited scope of this article I cannot further explore this rampant silence on sexualized violences enacted on female-identified detainees. However I suggest the need for further research to examine this issue in the light of the historical ‘unrapeability’ of black female-identified bodies (see Davis 1981; hooks 1997, 1998; Bakare-Yusuf 1999) and western representations of ‘oriental’ women as mysterious (e.g. veiled) and lascivious (e.g. in the harem). As my reading through a queer transnational feminist lens has shown, the sexed racialization of acts of violence against detainees in Abu Ghraib was not an aberration. The same kind of violent practices are reported from military installations in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, other US-led Iraqi prisons and US civilian prisons. The US prison-industrial complex is characterized by a grossly disproportionate incarceration of racialized bodies, and particularly of Black males. Rape, trafficking in inmates for sex, forced nudity, crawling naked, being hooded and made to wear women’s underwear are part and parcel of the civilian prison experience in the ‘most free nation of the world’ (see Butterfield 2004). Charles Graner, deemed one of the main perpetrators in Abu Ghraib, had previously worked as a guard in a civilian prison in the USA, where he is alleged to have put razor blades into the food of an inmate. Before his departure to Iraq, he was quoted as saying, ‘I can‘t wait to go kill some sand niggers’ (Black Commentator 2004). The new 50 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 racist slur ‘hajjis’, which collapses Arab/Iraqi/Muslim/Taliban, is now so commonsensical among US soldiers in Iraq that it is even used in official military documents (Rockwell 2005). My analysis of the acts of torture comes to the conclusion that they were staged according to a misogynist, heterosexed, racialized script. Enacting violences on the bodies of Abu Ghraib prisoners reasserted not only the perceived control of the individual, militarized Selves of the seven soldiers in the photographs, but also allowed them to enact ‘Whiteness’ – and thereby re/ produce the identity and hegemony of the US Empire and its heterosexed, racialized and classed World (Dis)Order. This brings me back to Ehrenreich’s argument that ‘the photos of abuse’ in Abu Ghraib prison are ‘a sign of gender equality’. Ehrenreich (2004b) bases her analysis on the ‘fact’ that three out of the seven prison guards involved, as well as the prison director, the top US intelligence officer in Iraq and the National Security Advisor, were ‘women’. An advocate of women’s full inclusion in the military, Ehrenreich (2004b) admits that she ‘did have some illusions about women’. While she ‘never believed that women were innately gentler and less aggressive than men’, she had hoped that once women achieved a critical mass in the military, they would change the institution over time (Ehrenreich 2004b: 1). I do not think that the participation of the three female-identified military prison guards in the acts of torture constitutes a sign of gender equality. Ehrenreich’s reading is based on a problematic liberal framework of equality and freedom, embedded in a hetero-normative ontology that maps a bipolar notion of ‘gender’ onto a bipolar notion of sexed bodies, and flirts with a certain essentialism about femininity (and masculinity) which seems based less on nature than nurture. Ehrenreich’s notion of subjectivity obscures how ‘gender’ is always already racialized, classed and sexualized, to mention just a few ‘markers’. The gendered subjectivity to which she refers is reminiscent of the (supposedly) universal feminist subject ‘woman’ conjured by dominant strands of the first- and second-wave feminist movement(s) in Europe and North America. This monolithic notion of ‘woman’ and its accompanying single-issue politics raise the question ‘gender equality for whom and at the cost of whom?’ and have been contested for being implicitly marked as White heterosexual able-bodied and middle-class (see Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981). In a similar vein, Ehrenreich’s notion of ‘gender’ erases not only the racialization of the female-gendered subject (namely White), but also the possibility of this subject being racist and/or homophobic. As my analysis of the sexed, racialized torture practices has shown, the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy, that is, the hegemonic national fantasy envisaging the First World civilized Self bringing (liberal) democracy to the Third World Other incapable of self-determination, and the subject-position ‘Whiteness’, depend on the association of femininity with subordination, weakness and passivity, in short, inferiority. While the (hetero)sexualized humiliation of ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 51 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 racialized men at the hands of White western women disrupts the fictitious clear-cut male/female dichotomy underpinning this fantasy, the violent practices constitute merely a reversal of that logocentrism, they do not displace it. To remain within Ehrenreich’s problematic framework, the female-identified soldiers ironically contributed actively to gender inequality. Moreover, I think Ehrenreich’s hope of taming/‘civilizing’ the military is an illusion. The military cannot be transformed, as its mission is to prepare and organize its workers to kill people; the reproduction of the ‘New World Order’ continues to depend heavily on the deployment of military force. As discussed earlier, physical violence and aggressive Othering play a constitutive role in the construction of the soldier Self. In sum, the acts of violence perpetrated by the female-identified soldiers on the bodies of prisoners should be located within colonial desires. Given the systematic, simultaneously racialized and heterosexed character of the acts of torture, and given that their effect is to re/produce the identity and hegemony of the US Empire and its heterosexed, racialized and classed World (Dis)Order, the participation of the three female-identified soldiers is not a sign of ‘gender equality’. Further, as Whiteness and the concomitant World (Dis)Order are also a classed project,19 both female- and male-identified prison guards occupy the subject-position ‘White but not quite’ (Agathangelou 2004). Though none of the torture pictures published depict soldiers of colour, the Fay-Jones Report (2004: 77, 80) twice mentions ‘Black soldiers’ engaging in torture of prisoners, and one of the seven soldiers convicted of prisoner ‘abuse’ self-identifies as a Black male. These reports do not contradict my argument that the soldiers desired and enacted a fantasy of ‘racial’ supremacy. I argue that the essentially colonial character of ‘Operation Iraqi Hope’, the commonsensical fantasy of the First World civilized Self that brings (liberal) democracy to the Third World Other incapable of self-determination, creates discursive space for the interpellation and participation of the sexed, classed and racialized bodies of some of the US Empire’s internal Others.20 CONCLUSIONS ‘Operation Iraqi Hope’ is part of the Bush-administration’s ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy, ‘the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer’ (Bush 2001a). This national fantasy constructed discursive space for the subject-position ‘Whiteness’, the ‘freedom-loving’ and ‘civilized’ westerner, citizen of ‘the most free nation in the world’, who intervenes in Iraq to defend civilization itself and benevolently to sort out the problems of the Third World Other or ‘sand niggers’ who are unable to take care of themselves. The desire of the soldiers to have themselves interpellated by the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy was rooted in their desire to enact ‘Whiteness’, the racist fantasy and practice of ‘racial’ supremacy over 52 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 ‘hajjis’ and ‘sand niggers’, a pleasure clearly conveyed by the smiling faces giving thumbs up on hundreds and hundreds of pictures. That these pictures were emailed to friends and family back home shows the common-sense character of the perception of ‘Operation Iraqi Hope’ as a colonial and civilizing mission, and hence the moral righteousness of the associated acts of violence, from the ‘ordinary’ violence of warfare, to the unexpiated daily killings of civilians at road checks, to state-sanctioned prison torture. The participation of female-identified soldiers in the acts of misogynist, racialized and heterosexed violence against colonized bodies and territories is not a sign of ‘gender equality’, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests. Rather these practices make visible how White western women’s participation in empire-building – in this case by occupying typical male-identified positions – may disclose certain social contradictions underpinning imperial discourse; however, they do not challenge the hegemony of the ‘save civilization itself’fantasy but (re)produce this racist discourse and its concomitant practices of domination, expropriation and exploitation. Melanie Richter-Montpetit Political Science Department York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada E-mail: mellimo@yorku.ca Notes 1 2 3 4 5 All four official US investigations belittle the acts of torture as ‘prisoner abuses’. ‘Sexuality’ in this article refers to both a field of knowledge and an erotic practice. Among the transnational feminists incorporating sexuality studies are Alexander (1991, 1994) and Puar (1998). Due to the limited scope of this essay, my reading of the events surrounding the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib focuses largely on the US Empire’s hegemonic foreign policy discourse, the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy. As I will elaborate below, I do not conceptualize discourse or imperial power as monolithic and produced merely in a top – down fashion. In fact, this essay is part of a larger project in which I seek to explore how alternative narratives and identification-practices complicated or interrupted the workings of the ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy in Abu Ghraib, e.g. the multiple and potentially contradictory positionings of soldiers themselves due to their gendered, classed and/or racialized subjectivities in other social, historical and spatial contexts as well as the prisoners’ contributions towards, and contestations of, this discursive formation. I use fantasy instead of discourse or ideology because it captures better the contribution of our dreams and unconsciousness to the inter-subjective creation of our ------------------------------ Melanie Richter-Montpetit/A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading 53 6 7 8 9 Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:00 12 June 2013 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 54 life worlds and the ways we get to know ourselves. See Yegenoglu (1998: 2) for a discussion on ‘the risk of psychologizing structural processes by reducing them to individual psychological motivations’; see Grewal (2001) on the Eurocentrism of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Said has been rightly critiqued for not accounting sufficiently for variances between and within different national orientalisms, for example due to the gendered (Lowe 1991) and heterosexed (Boone 2003) nature of colonial discourses. On the racialization of the non-western Other in US foreign policy, see Hunt (1988) and Doty (1996). This racist slang directed at the homogenized Arab/Muslim/Iraqi/Taliban Other draws on the Arabic word for Muslims who have undertaken the pilgrimage to Mekka (‘haj’) (Rockwell 2005). There are reports that US drill sergeants use chants of ‘burning turbans’ and ‘killing ragheads’ to prepare their recruits in the ‘war on terror’ (Rockwell 2005). I owe this thought to Razack’s (2004) exploration of the discursive effects of constructing Somalia as ‘Indian country’ in her insightful book on Canada’s ‘Somalia Affair’. Razack (2004) makes a similar argument in the context of the quasi-peacekeeping operations of the Canadian military in Somalia. In fact, while it was only in 2003 that the US Supreme Court struck down ‘antisodomy’ legislation, the Iraqi Criminal Code did not explicitly criminalize ‘homosexuality’ until 2001 (Brown 2005). Rather than engaging in a discussion about which country is more aggressively homophobic, I want to problematize Hersh’s construction of the homophobic Other that ultimately secures the Self as more ‘civilized’ and benign. I am grateful to Mark B. Salter for pointing this out to me. Among these practices are Bush’s attempt in February 2005 to re-nominate prominent anti-queer activist Bill Pryor for the federal court of appeal and the 2001 Global Gag Rule restricting funding for family planning. For a good discussion on how the recent decriminalization of ‘sodomy’ sanctions only a particular form of ‘homosexuality’, see Ruskola (2005). I am grateful to Carmen Sanchez for pointing this out to me. Taking trophy pictures of the violences enacted on the bodies of ‘Third World people’ seems to be a common practice in peacekeeping missions involving western soldiers (Razack 2004: 53). In fact, the seven prison guards accused of ‘abusing’ detainees emailed pictures of their acts of violence to friends and family back home (Hersh 2004). Several gross orthographic mistakes made by the seven MPs offer a hint of the appalling class divide in US society reflected in military recruitment. For example, none of the ‘civilizing’ prison guards noticed that they had misspelled the word ‘Rapest’ [sic] when spraying it on one of the naked prisoners. In another instance, an MP log indicated that a detainee was ‘neked’ [sic] (Fay 2004: 89). For other studies exploring the interpellation of internal Others into colonial fantasies, see Lewis (1996) and Yegenoglu (1998) on White women and Razack (2004) on racialized soldiers. International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------ Acknowledgement I am deeply grateful to Anna M. Agathangelou for her encouragement and extensive comments on an earlier draft of this article. 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