Women and War

Abstract

This chapter examines how the participation of women in war was advanced by both the military and the media as evidence for the equality of women in the West. Attention to the plight of women in the Muslim world turns the gaze of feminists and other potential critics away from the continuing oppression of women in the West. Western women are enlisted, with Western men, in the project of saving brown women from brown men. In participating in this campaign, they learn to look upon Western models of sex and sexuality as liberating, universally valid, and exempt from criticism. The chapter considers the tragedy of the presence of women at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It argues that women's supposed sexual freedom was deployed by the military as a weapon of war. Women soldiers, supposedly the equals of their male colleagues, were reduced to sex workers.