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

In this popular book, feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver examines the ethical intersection of war, women, and the media. This represents a logical extension of her (2001) work on witnessing and colonialism and a bold response to dominant culture. Motivated to speak out against what is "not just a failure of action but also a failure of meaning" (153), Oliver analyzes various phenomena related to contemporary wars, such as photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib, and points us toward a witnessing model of ethics in the service of justice, nonviolence, and freedom. The book has stimulated public debate in both academic and non-academic forums, which inspires the question: Should feminist philosophers be contributing more robustly to public dialogue and attempting to reach a wider audience through their writings?

In chapter 1, Oliver discusses how the media blames feminism for certain acts of violence perpetrated against prisoners, including the use of sexuality by female soldiers as a tool of torture, a tactic that violates Muslim belief systems. Sexual torture, which includes smearing fake menstrual blood on prisoners, touching, and interrogating captives while scantily clad, has led male prisoners to report that they were "tormented by 'prostitutes,'" rather than female soldiers. The methods of torture implemented by female soldiers who claim to be ignorant of Muslim beliefs suggest many layers of deception, manipulation, control, and violence, which contribute to the production of subjects to whom these soldiers are not responsible. As Judith Butler states, "The torture was not merely an effort to find ways to shame and humiliate the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo on the basis of their presumptive cultural formation. The torture was also a way to coercively produce the Arab subject and the Arab mind" (2008, 16). These female soldiers—described brilliantly by Oliver in her final chapter as "cheerleaders for abjection" (121)—are linked to shahidas, Palestinian suicide bombers, or "female martyrs": Whereas U.S. female soldiers have been granted the equal opportunity to torture and abuse men, suicide bombers have been granted the freedom to kill themselves and gain cultural recognition for it.

Chapter 2 addresses the problem of freedom as it is figured in terms of sexual freedom, and sexual freedom as it is reduced to fashion and consumerism. Troubled by false formulations of feminism—the "freedom to shop" or "women's right to bare arms" (51)—Oliver laments that agency is reduced to a form of commodified sexuality. Though feminism as it is portrayed through antifeminist media backlash provides limited fodder for discussion, these insights are enhanced by Butler's claim that sexual torture is a "noxious deployment of the notion of sexual freedom" (18) and her suggestion that "we ought not to understand secularism as the sole source of critique, and religion as the sole source of dogmatism" (13). Based on a false antinomy between religious and secular thinking, the vision of "civilization" at work against "barbarism" is "part of a dubious secular politics that is no more enlightened or critical by virtue of its secularism than the worst forms of dogmatic and restrictive religion" (Butler 2008, 19). Oliver effectively employs Chandra Mohanty's concept of "contemporary ancestors" (55, 104) to describe the "pre-modern" subjects figured within the civilizing discourse of colonialism. Thus, Butler and Oliver, together, expose contradictions surrounding narratives of freedom, identifying torture as a nexus of violence and sexuality vital to critiquing state violence and rethinking concepts of freedom and consent.

In chapter 3, Oliver echoes Angela Davis's suggestion that we advance our skills of visual literacy in the service of political action and meaningful justice. Oliver exposes the shortcomings of "embedded reporting," which undermines the ability of journalists to gain critical distance from the events they both participate in and report on (79). Oliver's double sense of witnessing—bearing witness and being an eyewitness—is central to this chapter. This "process of perpetual questioning and interpretation" (103) calls to mind a...