American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal

5. Breeding Patriotism: The Widows of 9/11 and the Prime-time Wombs of National Memory

· 109 ·· CHAPTER 5 · Breeding Patriotism The Widows of 9/11 and the Prime-time Wombs of National Memory The domestic realm can be figured as well by a battleship as by a nursery. —Laura Wexler, Tender Violence In the weeks following the terrorist attacks intheUnited States on September 11, 2001, Oprah Winfrey’s television talk show featured pregnant survivors who had lost their spouses. In February 2002, thirty new mothers—all widowed in the attacks of 9/11—graced the cover of People Weekly magazine, each one cradling an infant. Six months later, ABC’s Primetime gathered sixty-one such widows and the children born to them in the months after the attacks for a photo session at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. On the second, and then again on the fifth, anniversary of the attacks, Primetime followed up with these women and their “9/11 babies” in two more television specials. The episode that showed us where these “babies” were five years after their fathers’ deaths included a professional photo shoot that mirrored the one conducted four years earlier. Amid klieg lights, camera equipment, flashbulbs, and a sea of mother– child pairs, Diane Sawyer proceeded in a serially sentimental fashion to prompt individual testimonies of “Daddy’s” memorialization from the children and from their mothers, some of whom (as Sawyer’s lead-in to the feature warns/confesses on their behalf) had “even remarried.” Countless local newspapers and nationally distributed popular magazines continue to cover the ongoing lives of individual 9/11 widows and their sons and daughters, who invariably resemble their dead fathers in “remarkable” ways. The prevalent figuring of “9/11 widows” as—first and 110 BREEDING PATRIOTISM foremost—heterosexual mothers provides a constantly regenerating site on which the American public can project their feelings of loss, fear, anger, and recovery in the wake of the attacks. As Susan Faludi reminded us in her treatment of the 9/11 widows as “Perfect Virgins of Grief,” since the Civil War, U.S. widows “have been expected to take the lead in memorializing and exalting the nation’s fallen heroes.”1 Indeed, wherever she is represented as a widow of a righteous war, a mother grieving the loss of her husband is an invaluable breeder of patriotic sentiment and fervor.2 The structures of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class underlying such maternal exaltations have been much less visible, however.3 The deployment of the grieving widow-mother was perhaps never so immediate and hyperbolic, so widespread—and yet so tenuous—in our popular cultural landscape as it became with the “acts of war” constituted by the 9/11 attacks.4 With astounding speed, the media manufactured maternal war widows out of women whose spouses were not military personnel, and war heroes out of individuals whose professions ranged from rescue worker to custodian to movie producer to investment banker. Just as the flag of the United States was displayed and flown in a manner and on a scale utterly unprecedented in our historical visual landscape, so too it seemed were “the widows of war,” as described by Good Housekeeping, placed immediately everywhere in our visual and textual fields.5 Close examination of these images and narratives, however, reveals that the historical, material, and multiple experiential makeup of September 11 widows resisted any untroubled or untroubling insertion into the war-widow and widow-mother niches of masculinist nationalism. Despite this resistance—or perhaps because of it—mainstream and critical media texts and genres wrestled tirelessly with her figuring, attempting to make sense of her proximity to or distance from traditional patriarchal and nationalist scripts of reproduction, recovery, and resurrection within the contexts of terror, war, and death.6 Almost a decade after the terrorist attacks, the media image archive of 9/11 widows continues to offer up a range of types to our visual cultural field.7 While clearly not fully accounting for, or being accountable to, the actual range of these women’s experiences or their complicated and changing political locations, the form and content of these representations varies to a surprising and interesting degree .8 Comparatively analyzing the figuring of the widow of 9/11 types as sympathetic maternal and/or outspoken and (un)patriotically politicized illumines the ways in which specific imaging practices fix these and other BREEDING PATRIOTISM 111 women’s positions relative to their proper roles as reproducers of the nation through the bodies and...