Artist’s Statement

This play is my reflection on the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror. Before the war in Iraq, I had no clear idea of what women actually did in the US military. They are currently operating in contexts that, despite President Bush's assertion that the war "ended" shortly after the invasion of Iraq, are combat zones. Women constitute 15 percent of the armed forces in Iraq and 35 percent of US military intelligence. These figures are unprecedented for the American armed forces. Media coverage of the experience of American servicewomen has largely characterized them as victims—of sexual harassment and rape by male soldiers and as working mothers troubled by long separations from their children. Even the media's treatment of Lynndie England, one the military police at Abu Ghraib who appeared in several of the infamous photographs depicting abuse of prisoners, characterizes her as a victim—of her boyfriend, Army Spc. Charles Graner, and of her circumstances as a working-class, poorly educated young woman.

When the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib were first released, I was struck by the presence of women in them as perpetrators of violence. A few months later, stories began to be leaked to the media about how female military interrogators in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were using sexual harassment as a tactic to break Muslim detainees. These tactics have been mentioned frequently in detainee testimony, as well as in public statements made by military intelligence officers and FBI investigators. Military historian Alfred McCoy (A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006) and journalist Seymour Hersh (Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, 2004) have both argued that the use of sexual harassment by interrogators is part of CIA special operations designed to capitalize on the supposed vulnerability of Arabs to such methods. Research for the development of these operations includes anthropological studies that proffer stereotypical and Orientalist views of the so-called "Arab mind."

It seemed to me that the phenomenon of instrumentalized female sexual violence raises many disturbing questions, not only for those who are concerned about the use of torture by the US military, but also for feminists who are accustomed to conceiving of women solely as victims of sexual violence, not as agents. What does it mean to have female soldiers, acting at the behest of the US government, use their sexuality as a weapon against terrorism? Of all the abuses that have been investigated, why has this form of interrogation not been considered torture?

My performance is presented as a typical military briefing. I appear before my audience at a podium flanked by two screens. On one screen is a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates my briefing with photographs, charts, and drawings depicting sexually inflected interrogation tactics used by women interrogators. On the other screen is projected a simulated CCTV video showing a detainee being held in an interrogation room. At various moments during the piece, I leave the stage to go and speak to this detainee, using pidgin Arabic phrases and epithets spoken by American soldiers in Iraq. Ironically, the detainee is a Pakistani who responds to me in Urdu and broken English, trying to get me to understand that he is not an Arab and that he wants to speak to a male officer.

In actual military prisons, it is quite common for observers (visiting politicians, human rights officials, and intelligence analysts) to watch interrogations via closed-circuit television. The military also uses PowerPoint presentations to illustrate their public presentations and as a pedagogical tool in various training contexts. I incorporated these media forms into my performance in an attempt to approximate the military's way of staging interrogation for outsiders.

A work-in-progress version of this performance was presented in New York at The Kitchen as part of Performa05. The first production of A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in June 2006; additional performances have been presented at P.S. 122 in New...