Control + 1 – Block Headings

AT: There are Women in the Military
Media and popular representations of women in the military as simultaneously live-giving mothers and savage killers destroys any notion of liberation from patriarchy.

Kelly Oliver, prof philosophy, UT-Austin, 2007, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media, p. 19-22

Even as the presence of women in the military seem: to signal their liberation from patriarchal traditions the rhetoric surrounding their involvement betrays the lingering association between women, sexuality and death. We might think that we have moved beyond these questionable images of women, but media representations of women’s recent role in warfare tell us otherwise. In the past, American women served behind the front lines as nurses in Korea and Vietnam, and women even ferried warplanes in World War II. But the idea of women soldiers working in combat zones is new to the American public. Technically, these women are assigned to supply carriers and military support troops. But given the absence of well-defined “enemy lines” in Iraq, however, women regularly confront combat situations. Women have been active warriors in other countries. For example, some Nazi women became infamous for their torture and abuses of Jewish concentration camp prisoners; Ilse Koch, called the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” was known for riding the camps on horseback looking for interesting tattoos on prisoners that she could turn into lamp-shades made from human skin. Women also served in the Soviet Army in World War II. Reportedly, memoirs of German soldiers suggest that they feared the Russian women more than the men, and that they refused to surrender to them for fear of the consequences. And during Pinochet’s regime in Chile some detainees reported that “among the torturers ‘the women were the worst.’” Recounting such tales, Scott Johnson concludes that “such stories rekindle images of Amazons, and the myth of women even more savage than the most savage men.” While women are obviously capable of the most heinous abuse and torture, this myth of women more savage than men continues today with the stories of women torturers and women interrogators in Iraq.

The most uncanny images from U.S. occupation of Iraq are those women engaging in abuse. Although these images of teenage women who smile while abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib are shocking, they are also somewhat familiar to us as the result of centuries of literature, philosophy, history, religion, and more recently, film and television in which women have been imagined as dangerous, particularly in terms of their sexuality. By now the very virgin-whore dichotomy setup within cultures that historically have excluded female bodies from the properly social or political realm is well known. Women have been figured as either innocent virgins of dirty whores; and in fantasies one easily morphs into the other… the virgin uses her innocence to trap and betray, the whore with the heart of gold saves the jaded man from his humdrum life.

In the case of Abu Ghraib, we see seemingly innocent girls gleefully torturing men. The images are uncanny precisely because they conjure both the strange and the familiar, or perhaps here we could say the familiar, or perhaps here we could say the familiar within the strange. In his essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as unheimlich , which means both at home and not at home. Things that are uncanny have a double nature: a familiar face that hides a mysterious danger, or the evil villain who is somehow familiar. The double, or doppelganger, both is and is not what s/he seems. It is this ambiguity between good and evil that makes us uneasy.

To Freud, the most un­canny figure is that of the mother because she is associated with both life and death, with both plenitude or nourishment and threats of withholding nourishment. For Freud, the life-giving power of the mother is the un­canny double of her death threat.

Significantly, Freud's analysis of one of his own dreams in The Interpre­tation of Dreams makes this connection. In the "Three Fates," after going to bed tired and hungry, Freud dreams of a woman in a kitchen. She is mak­ing dumplings and tells him that he will have to wait; he is impatient and tries to put on his overcoat to leave; but the coat is too long, with strange fur trim and embroidery, and seems to belong to another man. In his analy­sis of the dream, Freud identifies the woman making dumplings with his mother. His dream appears to him as the wish fulfillment of the basic need for food and love, which he claims come together in the mother's breast. In his analysis, however, no sooner is the maternal figure in his dream associ­ated with love and nourishment than she becomes a messenger of death. Freud associates the dumpling-making hand motion with an experience from his childhood when his mother taught him that everyone dies and returns to the earth by rubbing her hands together as if making dumplings to show him the "blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we are made of earth."6 Not only in Freud's dream, but also within patriarchal culture more generally, the mother is the symbol of life­giving nourishment (dumplings), but also of the inevitability of death and returning to the (mother) earth.

The woman in Freud's dream might be interpreted using another one of his works, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," in which Freud talks about the appearance of three beautiful women connected to choice and death in literature and myth, as the three faces of woman-birth, sex, and death-that ultimately belong to the mother: "We might argue that what is

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AT: There are Women in the Military
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represented here are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman-the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the Woman who destroys him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man's life-the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms."7 Birth, sex, and death are condensed into the figure of woman, specifically the Mother as a triple and ultimate threat. In important ways, Freud's views of women are symptomatic of his culture's views of women more generally.

Today, Freud's theories about women seem outdated, even sexist. But recent representations of women as weapons of war suggests that the as­sociations between women, sex, and death are as powerful as ever. In this chapter I will examine the ways in which women are figured as both offensive and defensive weapons of war. In the case of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons in particular, women have been identified with sex and their sexuality has not only been figured as a weapon in the media but also explicitly used as a weapon by the military. According to some commentators, just the presence of women in the army naturally turns the scene into a sexual orgy. And the supposed power of that so-called dan­gerous natural sexuality can be harnessed by the military to "break" and "soften up" recalcitrant prisoners.

Women in the military is just another manifestation of patriarchy

Eisenstein 8 Zillah Eistenstein, professor at Ithaca College, anti-racist feminist activist, 2008. [Zed Books, Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism, Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, editors at Zed Books, p. 30]

Women in the military may make the military look more democratic as though women now have the same choices as men, but the choices are not truly the same. So this may be a more modern military, if modern means changed, but it is not more democratic or egalitarian. Actually, it is because there is less democracy, if democracy means choice and ,-opportunity, that more women have joined the military. At present, this stage of patriarchy often requires women to join the army in order to find a paying job or a way to get an education. The military - given this militarist stage of global capital - is a main arena where working- and middle-class women can find paid work, as domestic labor was for black women in the 1950s. Given the structural changes of labor in the global economy, marriage no longer affords most women - no matter their race or class - life without paid labor. These women are looking for ways to get medical and housing benefits, educational resources, career training. These are significant shifts in women's needs and lives, and in the institutions of marriage and family, which cut across racial and class divides.    
The military is unsafe for women because of its focus on masculinity

Eisenstein 8 Zillah Eistenstein, professor at Ithaca College, anti-racist feminist activist, 2008. [Zed Books, Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism, Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, editors at Zed Books, p. 33]

Women who enter the military enter a masculinist bastion. Military culture seeks to stabilize and punish the dangerous female. At the US Naval Academy a nightly ritual is practiced in which the new plebe says, 'Goodnight, Jane Fonda'; and the entire company responds, 'Goodnight, bitch' (Burke 2004; 14). Domestic violence is found to be three to live times higher in military couples than civilian ones. Men who have been in combat are four times more likely to be physically abusive. In 2002 five military wives were brutally killed by their husbands upon returning from Iraq to Fort Bragg (Lutz 2004: 17). Before the September ii 2001 attacks, the Miles Foundation - a non-profit agency in Connecticut that 33 (I >4 (a 3 a -I 3 0 -I -p CD Ca 0 C. CD N C 0) 4I C 0) U) 'U deals with abuse in the military - received about seventy-five calls a month from military families reporting domestic violence and sexual abuse. After 9/11 it starting receiving 150 calls a week. Eight soldiers after returning from Iraq committed suicide; another drowned his wife in the bathtub (Davey 2004: Al).     War supposedly exposes the evilness that lurks beneath the surface, which gives purpose arid trivializes everything else. War is both desired and despised. It is an 'orgy of death,' destruction and violence. As such war seduces. Christopher Hedges describes and authorizes this Hobbesian version of life and death as one of male conquest. Men are driven by eros, their flirtation with life, and thanatos, death (Hedges 2002: 3, 158, 171). Thomas Hobbes's world was a world of men women were missing. War does not give me meaning. Nor do I think war gives most people - male or female - meaning. Hohbes was not right about most men or women. Yet the naturalization and normalization of war are maintained by this notion of a mythic human nature, which is also constructed as male.
AT: There are Women in the Military
Turn – the sexuality of women soldiers is used as a weapon for war, making the feminine seem dangerous.

Kelly Oliver, prof philosophy, UT-Austin, 2007, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media, p. 31-33

In reports of women's involvement in abuse, there is a telling ambiguity between the rhetoric of tactic, technique, and weaponry and the rhetoric of natural biological urges and female sexuality. Implicit in this discourse is the notion that women's sex is an especially lethal weapon because it is natural. Within popular discourse, women's bodies, menstrual blood, and female sexuality can be used as tactics of war because of the potency of their association with the danger of nature, of mother-nature, if you will. Akin to a natural toxin or intoxicant, women's sex makes a powerful weap­on because, within our cultural imaginary, it is by nature dangerous. Yet it becomes more threatening because we imagine that it can be wielded by women to manipulate men; it can become the art of seduction through which women beguile and intoxicate to control and even destroy men: think again of Hollywood's femme fatale.

The condensation between the rhetoric of technology and of nature in the construction of woman as weapon is even more dramatic in the British and American media reports of Palestinian women suicide bombers. A news story in the London Sunday Times describing the frequency of suicide bombings by Palestinian women begins: "They are anonymous in veils, but when they go out to kill they may be disguised with a ponytail and a pretty smile .... Israel's new nightmare: female suicide-bombers more deadly than the male"; the reporter goes on to call them Palestine's "secret weapon," and says that their trainers describe them as the new "Palestinian human precision bombs."36 One Islamic Jihad commander reportedly explains, "We discovered that our women could be an advantage and one that could be utilized .... [women's bodies have] become our most potent weapon.37 In this report, women's bodies are described as secret weap­ons," "potent weapons," "human precision bombs," and the means to fight a war machine. The image of the human precision bomb again combines the rhetoric of technology and of nature to produce what the Times calls "female suicide-bombers more deadly than the male." This tension between technology and nature, bombs and bodies, is explosive. These women suicide bombers make manifest this tension insofar as they bring the re­pressed female and maternal body back into politics. Their bodies appear as the uncanny double: body and weapon.

Like the women involved in Abu Ghraib, the shahidas, or female mar­tyrs, not only unsettle assumptions about gender but also make manifest age-old associations between women and death. Images of pretty young nineteen- and twenty-year-old women torturing or killing themselves trans­fix us with their juxtaposition of life and death, beauty and the grotesque. Compare what the Times calls their "ponytails" and "pretty smiles" to de­scriptions of Sabrina Harman's "cheerleader's smile" or Lynndie England's "perky grin" and "pixy" haircut. 38 If the images of these American women conjure fun-loving girls-"America's sweetheart" or "cheerleaders"- the images of Palestinian shahidas portray them as tragic rather than comic, more masochistic than sadistic, sadly beautiful rather than perky. Within Palestinian communities the shahidas are reportedly described as beautiful, pure, and self-sacrificing; their images are printed on posters and pocket- sized icons, to be idolized. While the American interrogators are portrayed as prostitutes or whores, the Palestinian shahidas are portrayed as virgins. Again, we see the age-old dichotomy: women portrayed as virgins or as whores, but in either case dangerous.
Women are only accepted in the military if they behave in a masculine way

Tessler and Warriner 97 Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner, Mark Tessler is a Political Science Professor at University of Michigan, Vice Provost for International Affairs, and a PhD from Northwestern, January 1997. [Cambridge University Press, Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes Towards International Conflict, JSTOR p. 257]

Yet another interesting situation concerns the implications of women’s participation in the military dimension of a nationalist struggle, as in the war for Algerian independence or some aspects of the Palestininan resistance movment during the 1970s or even later. Sometimes called “integrationist feminism,” or “feminism of reality,” this holds out the prospectof greater equality between women and men, but it also reinforces the military as an institution and warfare as a strategy of progress, thereby encouraging the view that women are of value and merit consideration to the extend they behave like men. Accordingly, whatever the potential for a partnership between women and men in the pursuit of national objectives, there is not a fusing of feminism and nationalism in this situtation but rather, again, the subordination of the form to the latter.
AT: War is Good for Women
Even if women gain in wartime, it quickly evaporates as woon as the war is over

J. Anne Tickner Ir prof at the School of international relations, USC, 2002 (Feminist perspectives on 911, International Studies Perspectives)

Paradoxically, it is sometimes the case that wars are good for women. European and American women first received the vote after World War I and Japanese women did so after World War II. Frequently, women are mobilized into the paid economy during war thereby gaining more economic independence. Women have also been mobilized in times of struggle for national liberation and sometimes they have fought in liberation armies. Quite often these gains evaporate once the war is over; in the West, the years after both World Wars saw a return to the cult of domesticity and motherhood—a move that had to do with the need for women to step aside and let men resume the jobs they had left to go to war. And women who have fought alongside men in wars of national liberation, and who have been promised a greater role in post-liberation society, often find that these promises evaporate once the struggle is over. Few revolutionary movements directly address women’s problems or attempt to solve these problems in postrevolution political and social constitutions and institutions ~Tetrault, 1992:92!. When women fight for their rights, they generally get less support than when they are perceived as victims. This is because gender justice demands profound structural changes in almost all societies, changes that would threaten existing elites along with existing political, social, and economic structures. And, frequently, both international governmental and nongovernmental organizations ~NGOs! find these types of radical changes too politically risky to support. For example, RAWA receives very little financial support from international NGOs, undoubtedly because its agenda is to empower women in ways that would demand very different political and social relations in Afghanistan.35
Links – Terrorism
Feminists have a unique and important perspective on terrorism that is ignored in the affirmative discourse.

Jan Jindy Pettman, Director of Centre for Women’s Studies at Australian National University, Spring 2004, pg. 88

9/11 is a condensed symbol of spectacle, loss, and grief; it calls for retribution and a dramatic refiguring of international politics. Those lost and those who suffered losses in 9/11 experienced shocking violence, replayed many times in the living rooms of homes across the globe. While responses to terrible loss are not always or inevitably violent, in this case grief turned to, or was turned to, official retaliation and revenge literally overnight. Military reaction, indeed war, was chosen as if there were no alternatives. Dissent became difficult and penalized in the face of military security and war talk. IR feminists recalled Carol Cohn's critical reflection on strategic security language, including "how gender discourse affects the quality of thinking" and "stops thought". She asks "[w]hat is it that cannot be spoken?" 19 Feminists and others have since closely examined the discourse around 9/11 and the war on terror in similar terms. In an early response to this crisis, Ann Tickner asked, "What can a feminist analysis add to our understanding of 9/11 and its aftermath?"20 She demonstrated that feminists do have some very important things to say regarding the gender of identity, violence, and war, and specifically developed these insights in relation to 9/11 and Afghanistan. Likewise Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinin²¹ began their commentary with the claim that 'concepts of sex and gender provide a valuable perspective on these devastating actions'. 22 Both articles noted the apparent disappearance of women in the violence and what followed, as men-hijackers, rescuers, national security officers, and media commentators-filled our screens and newspapers "September 11 and its repercussions have appeared, then, to be all about men attacking, saving lives, and responding through further attack," which seems normal.²⁴ Substitute 19 women hijackers, commentators, and leaders, and a different scenario develops. So too women, let alone feminists, were not seen as authorities having anything to add to the analysis. For example, according to the Guardian survey of almost 50 opinion pieces in the New York Times in the first six weeks after the attack, only two were by women.²⁶
The war on terror is inherently masculine

Jan Jindy Pettman (Director of Centre for Women’s Studies at The Australian National University) Winter/Spring 2004, “Feminist International Relations After 9/11,” The Brown Journal of World Affairs. http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:35OMUVDvXmoJ:scholar.google.com/+feminist+international+relations&hl=en&as_sdt=4000000001

9/11 did not change the world for feminists. The terror attacks and their aftermath forcefully demonstrated, anew, crucial feminist insights into international politics and war. They activated bounded and binary international identity politics in which both women and gender played a central part, in representation and legitimation. They authorized military action in ways that typified gendered civic identities and responsibilities. They effectively excluded other ways of knowing, of doing, of being in the world. They replayed the usual close associations of nationalism, war, and masculinity, and generated competing masculinities and stigmatized femininities. They also disrupted and damaged the slow uneven moves towards the incorporation of some feminist concepts into international politics and policy making.44 9/11 and the war on terror brought to the forefront those aspects of globalization related to militarization. They staged the return of the prerogative state, always understood by feminists to be a gendered state, to the center, and further militarized aspects of national security, intelligence and immigration too.45 They reminded us that earlier talk of the demise of the state had never applied to the high politics long favored in IR.
Links – Nuclear Discourse
Technostrategic discourse’s reliance on ‘rationality’ in evaluating impacts disregards opponents as ‘irrational’ and feminine

J. Ann Tickner, Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, ’92, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 44-5

In the nuclear age military strategy must be planned in peacetime, since it is hypothesized that there would be no time to plan a strategy that involves the use of nuclear weapons once war has broken out. Nuclear strategy is constructed by civilian national security specialists, far removed from public debate, in a language that, while it is too esoteric for most people to understand, claims to be rational and objective. Carol Cohn argues that strategic discourse, with its emphasis on strength, stability, and rationality, bears an uncanny resemblance to the ideal image of masculinity. Critics of U.S. nuclear strategy are branded as irrational and emotional. In the United States, these "defense intellectuals" are almost all white men; Cohn tells us that while their language is one of abstraction, it is loaded with sexual imagery.45 She claims that the discourse employed in professional and political debates about U.S. security policy "would appear to have colonized our minds and to have subjugated other ways of understanding relations among states."46 Cohn suggests that this discourse has become the only legitimate response to questions of how best to achieve national security; it is a discourse far removed from politics and people, and its deliberations go on disconnected from the functions they are supposed to serve. Its powerful claim to legitimacy rests, in part, on the way national security specialists view the international system.
Links - PMCs