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After September , , the Bush administration and the nation embarked on a strange and fated project of “manning up.” We recognize here an old quest for invulnerability, one that finally was to make up for the feminizing loss of the Vietnam War (Jeffords ; Boose ). Fated, like any quest for absolute invulnerability , the Bush administration’s policy of preemptive war led to the toppling of two governments and the death, disability, and displacement of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens—which is to say the policy is, at this writing, still fostering an ever-growing number of people who have deeply personal and immediate reasons to hate the United States. Each week, more U.S. soldiers are killed or disabled as well, and the lies of the administration regarding the reasons for these sacrifices grate on the patriotic nerves of even conservative U.S. citizens. As leaked details of the National Intelligence Estimate (Office of the Director of National Intelligence ) confirmed, the project of “manning up” has created more vulnerability, not less, in a global climate of intensified disgust for the world’s one remaining superpower. “Manning up” is also a strange project. U.S. national manhood is reconstituted through an exotic stew of stories that do not seem, at first, to belong together. Each of the two preemptive wars was tied to a racialized project of women’s liberation (explicitly in Afghanistan, implicitly in Iraq) by the Bush administration itself—we might say the administration took up and occupied the discursive site of a global Western (and Christian) “feminist” subject who set out to free the oppressed Muslim woman—whose supposed “liberation” reinvigorated, at the same moment, good old-fashioned masculinist protectionism. From the beginning, documents associated with the war effort have deployed complex 179 10 Manhood, Sexuality, and Nation in Post-9/11 United States BONNIE MANN You don’t prevent a war with words. But speaking was not necessarily a way of changing history; it was also a certain way of living it. —Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins,  ——————————————————————— ——————————————————————— CH010.qxd 5/28/08 7:39 PM Page 179 narratives of racialized homoerotic violence, and in the midst of our masculinizing military adventures, the use of torture by U.S. troops became an international scandal. The dominant images of this scandal from Abu Ghraib prison featured white women sexually humiliating Iraqi men—even while the strategies of torture and humiliation included the racialized homosexualizing of the prisoners, who were forced to simulate fellatio with one another and photographed with anuses exposed. As the pictures hit our evening news, the panic that had been building domestically over the prospect of legal gay marriage crescendoed into a flurry of right-wing activism, resulting in more than a dozen new state constitutional amendments defining marriage as “between one man and one woman.” American “tolerance” of homosexuality was claimed by right-wing pundits to be the cause of terrorism at home (Knight ), and warnings circulated, in the form of colorful pamphlets for voters, that the legalization of gay marriage would lead to the systematic sexual abuse of children, renewed terrorist attacks, and the downfall of civilization itself. If writing is, as Simone de Beauvoir suggests, a way of living through history (, ), then this writing is no more nor less than the attempt of one lesbian feminist philosopher to make sense of the pastiche of narratives of manhood, sexuality, and nation that continue to proliferate in post-/ America. Here I am moved by two observations. One is that the rebuilding of American national identity after / relies on what we generally consider to be postmodern sensibilities to reinforce what we generally consider to be modern notions of imperial power and sovereignty. The second is that the style of national manhood under reconstruction in post-/ United States is a big part of what, for too long, made the wars make sense to many U.S. Americans. Another way of stating this second observation is to say that the sense that the wars made, and continue to make for a good number of people, is primarily aesthetic. By this I mean that the process of making sense is more bodily than conceptual, carried by stories and images more than by argument or reason. The powerful commitments associated with the aesthetic of manhood that proliferated after / function first beneath rational argument, as the motivational base for things like argument and opinion, so that support for the war is an intentional posture lived viscerally, a...

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