Engendering the Post-9/11 Era:
Feminism(s), Imperialism(s) and Fundamentalism(s)
Call for submissions for an edited volume on gender and the war on
terror
Editors:
Deepika Grover, York University
Krista Hunt, University of Toronto
Kim Rygiel, York University
More than two years after the war on terror began, there is now a
growing body of literature examining the development, motivation, and
effects of this US-led war. However, what is virtually absent from these
analyses is an examination of the central role gender and race play in
the post-9/11 era. As this conflict grows, spreads and deepens, it is
more important than ever to examine how diverse international actors are
using it as an opportunity to reinforce existing gendered, raced,
classed, and sexed inter/national relations.
Thinking back to the initiation of war in Afghanistan, for example,
images of burqa-clad Afghan women represented as victims of 'barbaric,
unshaven, cave-dwelling fundamentalists' dominated the media and
provided the basis for George W. Bush's rhetoric that this war would
liberate Afghan women. More recently we see a similar pattern emerging
in Iraq, in which gendered and racialized representations of the war on
terror are being used to sell the war to the public: from the images of
a de-masculinized Saddam Hussein, cowering in his hideout 'unable to
even used his gun' against American captors, to images of Jessica Lynch
being heroically saved by hyper-masculine US soldiers.
However, the gendered and racialized dimensions of the war extend even
further. Racial profiling continues to be used against Muslim men in
North America, resulting in hundreds being rounded up, confined without
charges, and even sent to countries where they are tortured for
information as in the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar. In France,
the war on terror has provided momentum to re-engage the debate around
religious rights, such as the right of Muslim women and girls to wear
the headscarf in schools. While these debates address many complex
issues, the intense scrutiny given to the headscarf issue also seems to
be playing into anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11.
Often, women who wear headscarves are represented as victims of an
oppressive Islamic culture. Such beliefs not only inform French policy
banning the headscarf in schools, but also echo the Coalition's racist
and colonial attempts to liberate Afghan women from the burqa.
We also see post-war reconstruction based on a neo-liberal economic
agenda that encourages Afghan and Iraqi women to become part of the
global economy while western nations battle over lucrative contracts to
rebuild Iraq. Such policies will, no doubt, reproduce within these
countries the complex and contradictory processes that have resulted in
the feminization of poverty in most of the world. In addition to the
dominance of market fundamentalism within imperialist agendas, one also
notes the resurgence of orthodox religious sentiment in many parts of
the world. In Afghanistan this has taken the form of violent opposition
to including women's rights in the constitution, while in the US this
has taken the form of serious claw backs of women's reproductive rights.
We propose a volume that examines the war on terror and post-9/11
international relations from an intersectional feminist approach. In
particular, this volume seeks to address the following questions:
a.. In the present geopolitical and economic conjuncture, in what ways
do feminisms, imperialisms and fundamentalisms intersect? How do these
intersections vary, given geographic, cultural and economic differences?
b.. (How) Is the war on terror being used as an opportunity to
reinforce and further the status quo in terms of gender, race, class and
sexuality?
c.. What responses have developed to challenge the imperialist and
fundamentalist agendas that characterize the post-9/11 era? What roles
do feminisms play within these responses?
To this end, we seek contributions that address (but are not limited to)
any of the following:
a.. Effects of the WOT on diverse areas of the world
b.. The militarization of women's lives
c.. The impact of the WOT for transnational organizing
d.. (Neo)imperialism, empire-building, occupation
e.. International political economy and the War on Terror
f.. Peace/anti-war movement(s)
g.. Orientalism in media representations of the WOT
h.. Militarized masculinity, peacekeeping, female soldiers
i.. Rise of violence, extremism
j.. WOT and middle-east politics
k.. Gender and nationalism, security, borders
l.. Post-9/11 migration, displacement, refugee, citizenship policies
m.. Women and post-war reconstruction
If you would like to have a contribution considered for this volume
please send a 250 word abstract including full contact information to
Krista Hunt [log in to unmask] Deadline: March 1, 04.
|