The veil as a means of legitimization

Abstract

The article raises the question of how the news narrative of the liberation of Afghan women from the Taliban regime is linked to the legitimization of military involvement in general and of German foreign policy in particular. We extend the concept of media logic put forth by Altheide and Snow (1979) by those of gender logic (the symbolic construction of male-female dichotomy) and the logic of war (the legitimization of war through the construction of self and other). The interconnectedness of these three logics leads to a specific presentation of women, which in turn serves as proof for the allegedly altered circumstances after the defeat of the Taliban. The discourse analysis of Germany’s leading news magazines Der Spiegel and Focus shows that the veiling and unveiling of women is the most prominent feature in their reports on Afghanistan. ‘The veiled woman’ becomes a highly symbolic representation that marks the other culture as both foreign and irrational.