Gender and War

“… the sense that we make becomes ‘real’, and… these systems of meaning-production are intimately related to practices of power - the power to define and defend ‘reality’” (Shepard, 20).

In this piece, Shepard argues that the narratives and identities created following the 9/11 attack allows the nation to produce its own reality, which, in turn, permit and enable the narrative of war. The framing and perpetuation of nation identities work in this process of “meaning-production” to “make certain responses, actions, and attitudes permissible and censor others” (19). Displays of gender in this process, Shepard argues, become vital to the public support for the US to respond to the attack with war. The process of “gendering” is seen present in the assigned identities of “the nation”, “the enemy”, and “the intervention”. To demonstrate this, Shepard points to the immediate masculinization of the US after the attack, through overly dominate displays of identity and values; this masculine display then leads to the universal assertion of US values as well as feelings of superiority and social advancement. Shepard shows this idea through images used of the burqa, which removed any significant meaning it may hold to the women and, instead, reduced it “to an index of Muslim women’s oppression” (26). The identity provided to “the enemy” also takes on a masculine narrative, but one that is widely contrasting from “the nation”. “The enemy” is framed as aggressive, cruel, and uncivilized - or, as Shepard puts it, the “Irrational Barbarian”. This display of villainous masculinity is paired with the framing of Afghanistan women as victims and in need of saving, which works to heighten the presumed responsibility for intervention. For instance, in her address, Laura Bush demonstrates how constructing the two together makes “the fight against terrorism… also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (The Weekly Address Delivered by the First Lady). By presenting this as a morally charged war, the administration has effectively silenced potential opposition, by placing the “Irrational Dreamer” (critic of war) with a binary decision between moral and immoral action. This idea of moral obligation is seen further as the rhetoric used by the Bush administration develops a sense of urgency to act, despite barely receiving coverage “by the mainstream media or even publicly discussed by policy makers” prior to the 9/11 attack (Stabile and Kumar, 765). The previous disinterest with this long known problem before the attack makes clear that the women in Afghanistan are used to accomplish an agenda - seemingly in efforts to mobilize the country as the administration looked to go to war - by framing the issue as an unignorable new reality that the US must confront. The mix of displays between citizenry, the nation, the enemy, and women, and the application of genders to these displays, overlap to create “a further elevation in the “moral high ground” on which retaliatory violence can be undertaken” and go on unopposed (26).