“W” Stands for Women: Feminism and Security Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Bush Administration

Abstract

Feminist criticisms of the Bush Administration distinguish its feminized security rhetoric, which claims to support women's rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, from its actions at home and abroad, which undermine hard-won gains for women. This distinction between words and deeds obscures, on the one hand, the tremendous progress that feminists have made in framing women's rights as an issue that ought to be taken seriously and, on the other hand, the way that this rhetoric is itself a significant form of political action: It aims to influence how Americans will conceptualize the struggle for women's rights. I correct for these problems by developing a political theory of what I call the “framing effect” of rhetoric—its power to shape our worldview. Frames, I suggest, are related to one another dialogically: They build on one another by transposing old rhetorical frames into new contexts. The Bush Administration draws on existing feminist rhetoric, but transforms it by combining it with two other kinds of discourse: a rhetoric of chivalrous respect and a rhetoric of democratic peace. I show that in both rhetorical frames, the Bush Administration bases its concern with women's rights abroad upon the presumption that the women's movement in the United States successfully achieved its goals long ago. My analysis of how current security rhetoric frames women's rights can help us to understand both how the Bush Administration is able to use feminist ideas in new and nonfeminist ways and how we in turn might redeploy the Bush rhetoric so as to challenge the presumption that women at home already enjoy their full rights.The author would like to thank Karen Zivi, Jill Frank, Alison Jaggar, Iris Young, the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender, as well as fellow panelists and audience members at the Midwest Political Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, and the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder for their comments. She would also like to thank Steve Chan for his encouragement. This project was funded, in part, by the University of Colorado at Boulder Graduate School CRCW Small Grant.