Women as Weapons of War

By Jayne Lyn Stahl, AlterNet. Posted March 6, 2008.

In her book Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media, published recently by Columbia University Press, Kelly Oliver vividly depicts, and correlates, the perverse behavior of a female suicide bomber in Iraq with that of a female Army private, Pfc. Lynndie England, whose sadomasochistic behavior towards her captors at Abu Ghraib drew international scorn.

This Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, at Vanderbilt University, draws important parallels between empire building and the "free market," as well as the deployment of women as both purveyors and pariahs of battle, thereby exposing the vulnerable to be both wounded and wounder. And, by extension, she shows how global occupation by a country that increasingly emulates the behavior of some back-alley dominatrix can only be linked to ongoing sexual repression.

In her interview with AlterNet, Oliver describes how, in the name of imperial expansionism, we, in the West, are quickly becoming victims of our own sexualized consumerism:

Jayne Lyn Stahl: How are women being used as weapons of war, figuratively and literally?

Kelly Oliver: News media repeatedly describe women soldiers as "weapons." Women warriors are not referred to as women with weapons or women carrying bombs, but their very bodies are imagined as dangerous. For example, a columnist for the New York Times said, "An example of the most astounding modern weapon in the Western arsenal" was named Claire, with a machine gun in her arms and a flower in her helmet. After news broke about female interrogators at Guantánamo Bay prison, a Time magazine headline read "female sexuality used as a weapon," and the London Times described Palestinian women suicide bombers as "secret weapons" and "human precision bombs," "more deadly than the male."

Even Pfc. Jessica Lynch (the U.S. solider who was captured and rescued early in the Iraq invasion) was labeled a "human shield" and a weapon in the propaganda war. Media and public reactions to the more recent capture and release of British Seaman Faye Turney display some of the same tendencies. The British media accused the Iranian president of using Turney as a weapon in a propaganda war at the same time that conservatives used this image of a mother prisoner of war to argue against women warriors.

The metaphor of weapon in public media discloses the association between women, female sexuality and danger in the popular imagination. This imaginary association appears to have become part of military interrogation strategy at Guantánamo prison and Abu Ghraib, where women's participation was reportedly used to "soften-up" recalcitrant Muslim men. And just this month, Al Qaeda allegedly used two mentally impaired women to detonate bombs in crowded markets in Iraq. Reports indicate that the use of women suicide bombers is on the rise in Iraq because they can more easily get through checkpoints without arousing suspicions. For this reason, media coverage imagines them as more dangerous than their male-counterparts.

Explain the "virgin-whore" motif with respect to female suicide bombers and women soldiers.

Within the rhetoric of mainstream media, what female suicide bombers, recovered heroes like Jessica Lynch and Faye Turney, and the bad girls of Abu Ghraib have in common is that they are figured on one side or the other of the classic virgin-whore dichotomy that has been a mainstay of Western culture -- think of the new fragrance for women called "Angel or Demon." On the demon side, what some reporters have called "equal opportunity killers" need to be interpreted in light of older images of violent women from Hollywood films, literature and religious traditions. These latest examples of women figured as weapons are a continuation of stereotypes of dangerous women who use their sexuality as a deadly weapon to deceive and trap men. Some soldiers still name their fighter-jets and bombs after Hollywood bombshells and "buxom babes" from magazines. The atom bomb that ended WWII was named after Hollywood "bombshell" Rita Hayworth's most famous femme fatale character, Gilda.

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Jayne Lyn Stahl is a widely published poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose articles frequently appear on The Huffington Post. She is a member of PEN American Center.

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