The Unwomanly Face Of War

In December 2001, the US and its allies launched their 바카라�war on terror바카라� in retaliation for the September 11 attacks on New York City바카라�s World Trade Centre buildings and the Pentagon. It was well known by then that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks바카라�as the events had come to be known바카라�were mostly young, well-educated men with engineering degrees. They were from Saudi Arabia and other places in the Middle East, in thrall of Al Qaeda, a transnational Islamist Jihadi organisation led by Osama bin Laden.

To avenge the 바카라�attack on America바카라� by a new kind of enemy바카라�one who defied nationalist affiliations in favour of a purportedly global religious ideology바카라�the US and its NATO allies sent in hundreds and thousands of troops into Afghanistan, a country that seemingly had played no role in the 9/11 attacks and that had already been ravaged by the proxy wars of the Cold War era and beyond. Soon after that, troops from the US, the UK and their allies invaded Iraq, a country led by the erstwhile socialist and secular-minded dictator Saddam Hussain, thereby laying bare the politics of oil and the interests of the weapons industry propelling the inauguration of new war fronts.

In some sections of the international Left, Al Qaeda and its allies were hailed as anti-imperialist heroes바카라�men and boys who had taken up arms in the face of the West바카라�s cynical manipulation of politics in the Middle East for oil and corporate profit. What was less openly defended was the fact that the Jihadists also saw the West and its 바카라�values바카라� of sexual and political freedoms as dangerously antithetical to Islamic principles.

It was undeniable that it was an unequal war바카라�the might of the neo-imperial West was pitted against a transnational network of Islamic fundamentalists. For most liberal and Left-leaning anti-war activists, political commentators and academics, the critique of the war on terror had thus to be directed primarily against the new US empire바카라�and the 바카라�new world order바카라�, as declared by the then US President George W Bush바카라�that was being forged in that moment of reaction.

This story was published as part of Outlook Magazine's 'War And Peace' issue, dated January 11, 2025. To read more stories from the Issue, click here.

It was only a gendered analysis that enabled many of us to cut through what was being presented in the international media and by ideologues of the Right바카라�and in a curious irony also of the Left바카라�as, to use Samuel Huntington바카라�s infamous formulation, 바카라�a clash of civilisations바카라�, or what Gilbert Achcar put more powerfully as 바카라�the clash of barbarisms바카라�.

Feminists, however, were pointing out (and typically being ignored) that both sides were equally dangerous and that both were waging wars against women and on women. After all, Bush and his allies were cynically weaponising the oppression of women under the Taliban in Afghanistan바카라�a group that the US and its ally Pakistan had long nurtured and encouraged to challenge the Soviet-backed mujahedeen바카라�as a major objective of the war on terror.

As many Western feminists aligned themselves with this position, a new kind of imperial feminism was seen to be consolidating itself in the public spheres. This was led by figures such as Condoleezza Rice, the first African American and the first woman to occupy the position of national security advisor, and Madeleine Albright, the first US woman to be the US Secretary of State. At the same time, the Taliban바카라�that had been increasingly emboldened by the US and its allies until just a few years prior바카라�was waging an internal war on Afghan women for attending schools and colleges and for appearing in any public space whatsoever.

For many of us committed to a feminist vision of the world, the war on terror had to be fought on at least two fronts simultaneously바카라�against the neo-imperialist designs of the US and its NATO allies, and against the religious fundamentalists who were beginning to gain control of many societies worldwide.

In the small town in the US South where I was teaching at the time, I teamed up with my friend and colleague Miriam Cooke, a well-known scholar of Arab literary and feminist studies, to organise a teach-in called Feminists Fight Fundamentalists. It struck many as an odd move바카라�why would we want to focus on fighting fundamentalists when the US was waging a brutal war in Afghanistan and Iraq? We wanted to pick apart precisely this conundrum always posed to women바카라�the impossible necessity of keeping the home front stable and pacified as wars are being fought abroad.

We knew then바카라�and we know now바카라�that we were treading a treacherous terrain. We risked being accused of playing into the hands of the US imperialists by criticising the Jihadis. And we risked being accused of pandering to the Jihadis by maintaining a persistent and critical distance from those waging the imperialist war on millions of people in the Middle East and North Africa who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.

To address this false choice given to women between the neo-imperialists and the Jihadis, we invited the fierce Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, the founder of Women Against Fundamentalism Gita Sahgal from London, and the radical American Southern feminist writer Mab Segrest to address the issues women were facing in the crossfire of the war on terror.

While El Saadawi talked about the ways in which deeply deformed notions of sexuality and piety were gaining ground in Muslim societies in the Middle East and North Africa, Sahgal argued that far from going after religious fundamentalists, the US and its allies were, in fact, strengthening the hand of these fundamentalists in a bid to pacify and discipline domestic discontent among minority communities. Segrest pointed powerfully to the role of the Christian Right in mobilising gendered notions of who was to be on the frontline and who was to manage the home front during times of war.

The discussions revealed that an urgent rethinking of the very definition of war was needed. War is typically thought of as a form of militarised violence that takes place between nations, at borders, in the skies and on the oceans, in moments and events of intensified conflict and bloodshed. Now with new technologies of drones and AI-enabled military strategies, we may well be accomplishing what Jean Baudrillard in his work The Gulf War Did Not Take Place referred to when he was describing war in postmodern times as not war but primarily as the simulacrum of war.

Feminists have shown powerfully that far from the seeming unreality of contemporary wars, we are, in fact, living in societies completely saturated by war, in a permanent state of militarisation, in which perpetual military readiness defines existence itself.

On this view, the home front is where wars are incubated and nurtured. In a moving and revelatory ethnography of the military town of Fayetteville in North Carolina, home of the military base of Fort Bragg and not far from where I taught, anthropologist Catherine Lutz had, around the same time, published her hugely important book Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century.

Fayetteville, as her research showed us, was paying the cost of maintaining the US in a perpetual state of war readiness, not only through endemic economic inequalities but through high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and domestic and racial violence perpetrated by psychologically damaged and economically marginalised soldiers returning from the frontlines. Later, when I saw images of the sexualised torture, rape and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, I thought of the soldiers at home in Fayetteville, returned to their wives and children.

Before Lutz, it was political scientist Cynthia Enloe who, in her work Bananas, Beaches and Patriarchy, published in 1990, had already demonstrated the militarisation of everyday life in the globalised twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book had pointed out how wars were deeply dependent on the reproduction of gendered assumptions about men and women바카라�s roles in society, and the relations of these to power. From military wives to sex-workers to the women who cleaned and cooked for American soldiers in US bases abroad, her work asked key questions about the relations of intimacy that structured war.

The last year has seen an intensification of wars on both fronts바카라�the home front and the frontline. The ongoing genocide being perpetrated in Palestine, with accusations of rape on both sides바카라�the settler colonial state of Israel as well as Hamas, the militant Islamist group created by Israel to weaken the secular fight for Palestinian liberation바카라�has presented fresh dilemmas for feminists.

On one hand, there is the danger posed by Hamas and its masculinist vision for a free Palestine in which women will be subject to all sorts of curtailments, on the other, there is the very real presence of Jewish fundamentalists바카라�seeking to 바카라�protect바카라� Jewish women from Arab violence바카라�whose dastardly tendencies are fuelling the orgy of violence in Gaza.

As the collective 바카라�Feminist Dissent바카라� wrote in their blog piece, 바카라�It (Hamas) is no more concerned with women바카라�s human rights than the Israeli state, which has also wasted no time in instrumentalising the rape and sexual violence of Israeli women to justify the massacre of Palestinians.바카라�

The struggle for women바카라�s rights is currently caught in the crossfires of wars, but it is only a gendered analysis that can enable us to understand the complex interweaving of masculinity and its association with violence, of femininity and its duty of care, and the vast apparatuses of state and non-state power that are engaged in violent conflicts that we experience as wars.

It is in these crossfires that women activists바카라�from Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere바카라�have gone to work on issues of peace, women바카라�s health, education and citizenship rights, saying resolutely, as the Algerian American legal theorist and feminist Karima Bennoune puts it, 바카라�Your fatwa does not belong here바카라�. For these feminists, the struggle must go on, not only against wars but during wars, in order that the wars may end.

(Views expressed are personal)

Rashmi Varma is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and founding editorial collective member of the journal 바카라�Feminist Dissent바카라�

(This appeared in the print as 'The Unwomanly Face Of War')