Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media (review)

Kelly Oliver’s Women As Weapons Of War investigates the investments in violence that characterize the post-9/11 cultural imaginary and reminds us of the relevance of feminist psychoanalytic thought to contemporary social issues along the way. The book is fundamentally a meditation on our relationship to violence, particularly the forms of violence birthed by our “war on terror”— ranging from torture at Abu Ghraib and suicide bombing, to sadomasochism in action films and magazine images of Muslim women “unveiled.” Oliver takes as a point of departure the idea that examining popular representations of this violence can teach us something about the desires and anxieties that perpetuate it. Her guiding thesis links this violence and the way we represent it to “a crisis of meaning.” More specifically, Oliver argues that the violence and our representation of it are symptoms of a “pornographic” cultural context, a context in which we sexualize domination to cope with the absence of forms of law that would support genuine ethical response.

Some of Oliver’s most insightful claims center around the type of disavowal made possible by our “pornographic way of looking.” She asks what cultural forms facilitated the view that some of the torturers at Abu Ghraib had of themselves as “just kids having fun.” Oliver’s fascinating answer to this question lies in her notion of the “abysmal individual.” Abysmal individuals attempt to excuse their actions through regression to a childlike state that is pre-responsibility. They enact this regression partly by sexualizing their otherwise formless violent desires. In a cultural context that relegates our sexual and emotional lives to a space beyond representation, we do not see ourselves as responsible for the desires of our bodies. This makes transforming violence into sex an apt way of denying responsibility for it; if we are innocent of the desires for bodily pleasure, we cannot be called to account for that which was done in pursuit of bodily pleasure.

The pornographic way of looking that Oliver analyzes in Women as Weapons of War is both a generalized cultural attitude and a literal way of looking. Oliver devotes a chapter to showing how the technologies of visually representing war post-9 /11 also facilitate our disavowal of responsibility for violence. They transform reality into fantasy. The use of the term fantasy in Oliver’s analysis is crucial. It is not simply that war reporting makes real violence seem unreal; it is also that the spectacle of war becomes a means to pleasure given the unsublimated state of our destructive urges. Oliver notes the similarities between war reporting and the sadomasochistic pop culture images that circulate alongside it. The era of embedded reporting and Internet video is also the era of the Internet-disseminated “choking game” and the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in which a couple rekindles their sexual desire by trying to assassinate one another. The conf lation of violence with entertainment discourages us from seeing real violence from the vantage point of the one against whom it is perpetrated. Technologies of war reinforce this conf lation; embedded journalism, for instance, risks turning journalists into vehicles for the transmission of the U.S. military’s perspective. Oliver also argues that new conventions of war reporting also produce something like arousal in spectators; images arrive so instantaneously we feel as though we are there, and this moves us into a “perpetual present” in which sites of war are experienced as sites of intimacy.

According to Oliver, an atrophied conception of freedom sustains the pornographic way of looking characteristic of the post-9/11 cultural imaginary. Oliver identifies three tropes for freedom common in the post-9/11 media and shows how each fails to constitute genuine freedom and how each perpetuates war. In one popular trope, freedom is reduced to women’s capacity for sexual self-exhibition. It is this understanding of freedom that renders facile the jump from...