Analysis by Dima Yehia, Visiting Contributor

August 1st, 2021

Ever since the Vietnamese War, followed by the 9/11 attack which led to the collapse of the Twin Towers, the United States of America has been on a mission to redeem its phallus. The country pledged to restore its sovereignty in the name of fighting terrorism by launching a War on Terror, a war that fundamentally changed the rules of war and operated through multiple gender frameworks. These frameworks worked on reinforcing normative gender roles, in supposedly progressive America, to ensure the people’s support of the brutal inhumane acts done against the “enemy”. To support the case, it is important to delve into how gender worked its way through other intertwined frameworks such as torture, race, and power that comes from the US presidency and military. In some way, gender did manage to shape the war on terror, reestablish power dynamics within the United States and maintain the status of its infamous equality even though it is not the case.

Through the use of gender, the United States succeeded in cementing its sovereign masculinity. Sovereign masculinity or national manhood is the idea of complete power attributed to the US nation in the ways it operates and the justificatory logic of how the War on Terror gained its legitimacy. This image of power is highly related to hyper-masculinity which explains why gender is so interconnected with this notion (Mann, Introduction 4). Thus, gender is not simply “a floating signifier”: it carries an ontological weight that is directly related to one’s reality, being, and belonging to a community. However, this doesn’t mean that gender is fixed, it means that gender is heavy and the process of changing it is violent (Mann, Introduction 3). So, how does the US make use of this heaviness to establish its manliness? The US does this by sexually torturing Iraqi detainees through “sexual shame and other forms of abuse, along with infliction of pain, to undo not only the manhood but the culture, religion and national identity of the enemy prisoner in the same act, while producing a feeling of power for the members of the nation” (Mann, Torture 1).  This process is known to be the “shame to power conversion”, in which it borrows the ontological weight of the violated detainee and uses it to construct national manhood in order to give it a sense of reality (Mann, Torture 5). Upon borrowing this weight, the detainee’s manhood is shattered and as Shweiri said, an Iraqi prisoner who experienced sexualized torture in Abu Ghraib Detention Center, it made him “feel like a woman” (Mann, Preface 1). This shattering destruction causes the loss of oneself, the loss of a sense of belonging to the Arab Muslim community, and a loss of manhood at a national level, giving the US a sense of power and superiority over the enemy, therefore cementing their sovereign masculinity.

This national manhood cannot stand on its own: it needs the support of the public. It is the father’s job to ensure the acceptance of the justificatory logic. The father is the “man” and “protector” of the family, and in the American case, he is the president. The latter’s masculinity is so tied up to the nation that it takes on different forms with each president. For instance, George Bush took upon the cowboy hotheaded man who will fearlessly fight for America (Mann, Father 3), while Obama played the role of the responsible rational father protecting ‘daddy’s baby girl’, America (Mann, Father 1). This father frame bestowed by Obama gives the people a sense of safety, security, and made the idea of a clean war seem more like reality. Obama’s use of drones in the War on Terror almost didn’t evoke any sense of danger due to the fact that its name carries no masculine power, which allows all of the massacred killings to occur without any objections (Mann, Father 7-8). The second way used to gain the people’s support is through the aesthetic of ‘cuteness’. Soldiers in the US military that make video remixes may not be aware of the impact of these videos or how they’re participating in the disposition of soft power. Maria Pramaggiore said that these “videos strategically allude to and mask the work of the soldier, sometimes employing gendered visual puns”. To further elaborate, the videos sent to families and friends deviate the audience from realizing how merciless the missions they undertake against the enemy truly are; they make them focus on the soldiers’ ‘cuteness’ while playing around the gender roles (Pramaggiore 102). Thus, this gender play “and sexual provocations resonate with official propaganda that justifies the US War on Terror through a starkly drawn dualism pitting a secular, enlightened, and egalitarian West against a patriarchal Islam whose oppressed women are in desperate need of rescue” (Pramaggiore 95). It is also very clear that in order to gain the public’s support, the media, with the support of the government, use the affective fields of terror, which are the feelings or emotions that mobilize public fear against the terrorist enemy and control their perception. In the case of Omar Khadr, they made use of this tactic to deploy him as a terrorist through circulating his adult image which shows his beard. This image reinforces the affective fields of terror, where Khadr was categorized as a terrorist in the eyes of the public through associating his beard with Arab masculinity, thus, a terrorist (Kouri-Towe 252).

Although the United States claims to be very open about gender, this doesn’t seem to be true. Bonnie Mann, an author, (Introduction 9) addresses this issue by asking “How is it that such viscerally held, life-or-death, and apparently old-fashioned gender commitments exist alongside our convictions of our liberality when it comes to gender? How can gay marriage gain ground and gay TV characters populate our most popular network shows while Bush uses 1950s cowboy rhetoric to address the threat to American security posed by the 9/11 attacks (and later, Obama adopts a 1950s responsible father narrative to calm the nation down after the Bush debacle)?”. The juxtaposition doesn’t end with the presidency, it is also visible in the military. Women are recruited into the military out of the need to show equality and not as a devotion to advocating equality (Howard III and Prividera 291). In fact, a study by the Pentagon showed that the number of unreported sexual assaults went up by 36% since 2010, and the estimated number of women and men sexually assaulted to be 26,000 in the military, and, the probability of female soldiers experiencing rape from a soldier is more likely than the probability of being killed (Pramaggiore 104). Furthermore, a woman’s body is used as a tool to torture Muslim detainees and sexually violate them. This objectification of women serves the shame to power conversion (Mann, Torture 7), where the detainee’s agency is lost, upon his arousal, and given to the US nation (Mann, Torture 9). This brings us to the Lynndie England, in other words, the “Fallen Woman” case. England was a processing clerk in the military who became the face of the scandal after photos of her were leaked torturing and sexually “softening” detainees in Abu Ghraib Detention Center, even though 11 other male soldiers participated in these inhumane acts as well (Howard III and Prividera 288). Her behavior was framed as “immoral, embarrassing, deviant, and shameful, hardly soldier material” (Howard III and Prividera 300), thus, was categorized as a “fallen woman”, a woman who doesn’t adhere to the feminine archetype. Her falling started from the moment she became a divorced woman who joined the military, leaving behind her feminine caretaker role up until the moment she had premarital sex with a soldier, Garner (which was barely mentioned in the story) and also took part in sexually shaming inmates. Her redemption was successful when she turned back to her maternal role archetype. This incident clearly depicts that the US military is founded on hyper-masculinity and patriarchy. England being the scapegoat that got all the media’s attention also shows the military’s strategy of obscuring the main problem, which is the internalized patriarchy, marginalization of women, and most importantly, the unjustifiable abuse in detention centers towards detainees.

Normative gender roles are deeply ingrained in American culture and are reestablished through media. As mentioned previously, England was framed as a fallen woman and then redeemed to society. The falling was a result of these normative gender roles and so was the redeeming. This suggests that these archetypes are highly absorbed by society, thus, embedded in it. Hollywood contributes to keeping these gender stereotypes afloat through its heroic stories, such as those of Spiderman and Batman. After all, everyone wants a good story. Similarly, Omar Khadr was framed and reframed in order for his story to become a good one. At first, Omar’s image was simplified into a dual image of a victim/child or villain/adult in the context of the War on Terror (Kouri-Towe 252). Caught up in these Western frameworks and subjected to binary, Omar Khadr was reduced in a way that his humanity was stripped away from him due to the bombardment of different images, one that shows an innocent child, and the other a bearded Arab man. Thus, in order to redeem his image, it was necessary for the media to picture him as a normal heterosexual Canadian civilian and reassert him within normal gender norms to ensure the success of his redemption.

Gender ideologies shaped the War on Terror on many different levels. These ideologies are deeply entrenched in the United States as a whole and are used in order to justify immoral and brutal actions. So, that leaves us with one question: when will the United States’ mission of redeeming their phallus be considered successful?

 Work cited:

“Father.” Sovereign Masculinity Gender Lessons from the War on Terror, by Bonnie Mann, Oxford University Press, 2014.

 Howard, John W., and Laura C. Prividera. “The Fallen Woman Archetype: Media Representations of Lynndie England, Gender, and the (Ab)Uses of U.S. Female Soldiers.” Women's Studies in Communication, vol. 31, no. 3, 2008, pp. 287–311., doi:10.1080/07491409.2008.10162544.

Kouri-Towe, Natalie. “National (in)Security and the Shifting Affective Fields of Terror in the Case of Omar Khadr.” Norma, vol. 13, no. 3-4, 2017, pp. 250–264., doi:10.1080/18902138.2017.1368277.

Mann, Bonnie. “Preface.” Sovereign Masculinity Gender Lessons from the War on Terror, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Mann, Bonnie. “Strange Cousin.” Sovereign Masculinity Gender Lessons from the War on Terror, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Pramaggiore, Maria. “I'll Be Dancin'.” 2016, pp. 95–110.

“Torture.” Sovereign Masculinity Gender Lessons from the War on Terror, by Bonnie Mann, Oxford University Press, 2014.