Women as Weapons of War

"Exclusive" to Long Sunday - an excerpt (courtesy of the publishers) from Kelly Oliver's recent book, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (Columbia UP, 2007).

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.

From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Women as Weapons of War, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to bare arms is a sign of freedom and progress.

Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

Read an interview with Kelly Oliver here. A PDF version of the excerpt can be found on Columbia UP's site for the book here. The publicity page for the book can be found here.

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rev tim haggard: music saturday

A song I listened to recently put me in mind of Reverend Tim Haggard's situation.

The song is by the band 'Garbage.'

The title of the song is "Sex is not the enemy"

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Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp is a documentary about the "Kids On Fire" summer camp, located just outside Devils Lake, North Dakota and run by a Pentecostal children's pastor named Becky Fisher. The film focuses on the indoctrination of the children through music, games and emotional terror.  I would almost describe the methodology as a severe form of brain washing. It is one of the most disturbing pieces I have ever seen, as terrifying as any horror movie you could imagine.

There is a lot one could say about this "camp" - its focus on recruitment, the passion of those running it, or the explicitly political nature of the experience.  But what brought me to write about this today are the revelations surrounding Ted Haggard, the infamous leader of the National Association of Evangelicals. 

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The insane mechanics of the 'fear ritual' of capitalism

The following is a guest post by Aren Airuza, blogger at the moving going somewhere?.

I've spent the last week trying to decide whether to engage––as may be expected on a 'literary' blog––in 'close reading' in a philosophical/literary manner, or to get eclectic on your asses, and tie some questions Spivak asks to questions I'd like people to think more about.  I ended up going with the latter, and at length.  But first, prefatory caveats.  Part of the oddness of my response to "Scattered Speculations", I think, is that capitalism has never seemed that coherent or smooth to me.  It has always seemed crazy.  Now, I am not a scholar of Marx, and I lack skills in parsing the distinctions in debates about use-value, exchange-value and surplus-value unless they are explained to me very slowly.  But it still seems 'intuitive' that capitalism runs on crisis.  There's an interview in Hatred of Capitalism where Jack Smith calls capitalism (or rather, landlordism, but he saw landlordism as an extension of capitalism) a fear ritual, completely counterintuitive:  "We have to spend the rest of our time struggling against the uses we make of our money against us."  This might be about antagonism rather than indeterminacy, I know, but I will come back to Jack Smith later.  (I also committed to blogging against heteronormativity today, and later I'll try to address that in regard to value.)  What I get from "Scattered Speculations" is yet another insight into the precise mechanics of that insanity; and, more importantly, the role of imperialism and 'culture' in that mechanics.

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erotica!

[A mock-heretical post-Catholic meta-erotic short story for Easter Sunday]

The library was almost empty.  A few art students meandered asymmetrically towards the exit, large colour-plate books in hand, undecided if they would actually look at them later, or merely use the flat surface to skin up.  Laura walked past them with an efficient high-heeled clip, pencil skirt riding up a little, to floor two, philosophy.  She had recently become intrigued by the work of Georges Bataille, and was looking for a decent secondary text that might help her put some of his, and her, ideas in context.

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