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Feminism and War

Confronting US Imperialism

Zed Books Ltd

A vocabulary for feminist praxis: on war and radical critique

ANGELA Y. DAVIS

I begin by questioning what it means to live in a country that is at war, a country whose president, in announcing a global war on terror, has, in effect, declared war on the rest of the world. This question requires us to consider the unrepresentability of war in the United States, a country that has not experienced war within its own borders since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet we have experienced a comprehensive militarization of this society, and multiple wars are still being waged on many of our communities. Moreover, the war on terror that is unfolding both within and outside US borders has produced a moral panic that urges us to feel and act as if we were living under a state of siege.

Many years ago, when I first traveled to Europe, I was struck by a prevailing popular consciousness of war. It was almost two decades after the conclusion of World War II, although there was still material evidence of the assault of fascism. I was struck by the extent to which war was still palpable, by the contemporaneity of historical memories of war. And I compared these historical memories to what I considered to be an inability of people in the United States to cross the temporal divide that placed war in an inaccessible past.

Later, in 1973, I had the opportunity to meet a young girl who survived the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and at that moment experienced a disjunction between the ways our movement against the war in Vietnam tended to represent war and the unimaginable suffering the US military was causing the people of Vietnam. Today people refer to the Haditha massacre that took place in November 2005, when US Marines killed fifteen Iraqi civilians in their homes, as the contemporary counterpart to My Lai.

But, despite our flaws in that era, we did respond, we did rise up in massive numbers, and we did take to the streets. As in previous historical periods, women were the key organizers of the anti-war movement, though they were not necessarily the most visible spokespersons and frequently were unable to move past the single-issue syndrome that focused only on 'ending the war.'

I am not saying that today we are afflicted with a collective apathy that prevents us from achieving the heights of activism that were decisive in bringing the Vietnam War to an end. That is not my point. Indeed, it might be possible to argue that popular anti-war consciousness is far more widespread in the USA now in face of the war in Iraq than it was in relation to the war in Vietnam.

Yet I remain concerned about the failure to translate the vast antiwar sentiment within the country into a sustained movement that can effectively counter the imperial belligerence of the USA. If we are to reflect on ways feminism can aid us in contesting the culture of war, I want to pose the question of how feminist approaches can help us decipher the challenges we face today, which are, I believe, far more complicated than the challenges of the Vietnam War era. How can feminism help us to meet these contemporary challenges?

Before attempting to answer this question, I should say that the tradition of feminism with which I have always identified emphasizes not only strategies of criticism and strategies of transformation but also a sustained critique of the tools we use to stage criticism and to enact transformation. This tradition of feminism is linked to all the important social movements - against racism, against imperialism, for labor rights, and so forth. This tradition of feminism emphasizes certain habits of perception, certain habits of imagination. Just as it was once important to imagine a world without slavery, to imagine a world without segregation, to imagine a world in which women were not assumed to be inherently inferior to men, it is now important to imagine a world without xenophobia and the fenced borders designed to make us think of people in and from a southern region outside the USA as the enemy. It is now important to imagine a world in which binary conceptions of gender no longer govern modes of segregation and association, and one in which violence is eradicated from state practices as well as from our intimate lives - from heterosexual and same-sex relationships. And, as in the past, it is important to imagine a world without war. And, of course, this is just the beginning of the list.

But it is not enough simply to imagine a different future. We can walk around with ideal worlds in our heads while everything is crumbling around us. Feminist critical habits involve collective intervention as well. The feminist critical impulse, if we take it seriously, involves a dual commitment: a commitment to use knowledge in a transformative way, and to use knowledge to remake the world so that it is better for its inhabitants – not only for human beings, for all its living inhabitants. This commitment entails an obstinate refusal to attribute a permanency to that which exists in the present, simpy because it exists. This commitment simultaneously drives us to examine the conceptual and organizing tools we use, not to take them for granted.

This is the very core of feminism – at least the feminism with which I identify. Of course, there are many feminisms, including the George and Laura Bush version, which evokes the putative status of women under Islam as a rallying call for state terrorism. In this 'feminism,' Islam – within the Samuel Huntington 'Clash of Civilizations' framework – produces the terrorist enemy of democracy and the victimized woman who has to be saved by US democracy.

But a more thoughtful, a more radical, feminism exists, and with it we can make gains in our efforts to end war, torture, and pervasive militarization. This more radical feminism is a feminism that does not capitulate to possessive individualism, a feminism that does not assume that democracy requires capitalism, a feminism that is bold and willing to take risks, a feminism that fights for women's rights while simultaneously recognizing the pitfalls of the formal 'rights' structure of capitalist democracy.

So, for example, this feminism does not say that we want to fight for the equal right of women to participate in the military, for the equal right of women to torture, or for their equal right to be killed in combat. This feminism rejects, as I have heard Zillah Eisenstein relate, the claims of a US military officer attending the graveside service of a female soldier killed in Iraq – a man who wept at what he spoke of as a palpable expression of women's equality, the dead woman's right to a military funeral.

But even as we are critical of an exclusive insistence on formal rights, we can consider other approaches to struggles for 'equality.' Instead of conceptualizing equality using a standard established by the dominance of men in the military, we can advocate for the equal right of women and men to refuse participation in the military. Moreover, we can extend our anti-military advocacy to include the dismantling of the military machine, even within a struggle for 'equality.'

But the larger issue here is the relationship between individual and collective accomplishments. Victories achieved by individuals do not necessarily count as collective victories. For instance, women of color who manage to reach the highest level of government and who position themselves as architects and defenders of war do not advance the collective struggle of communities historically subjugated on the basis of race and gender. Rather their situation militates against gender and racial equality.

Feminism is concerned with women's equality, it is concerned with gender equality, and it is also concerned with issues of sexuality and race. But there may be something more important than the particular issues traditionally associated with feminism. It may be far more important to emphasize feminist methodologies than the abstractions that count as the objects of feminism. The importance of this approach is suggested by the history of feminisms in the twentieth century – a history that consisted largely of contestations over who gets to represent the abstraction 'women' and particularly the raced and classed character of those representations.

When I refer to feminist methodologies, I include both scholarship and organizing – in other words, methodologies for interdisciplinary analysis, and also methodologies for building movements. These feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. They enable us to inhabit contradictions and to discover what is productive about those contradictions. These are methods of thought and action that urge us to think things together that appear to be entirely separate and to disaggregate things that seem to naturally belong together.

Feminist scholar/activists present at the 2006 'Feminism and War' conference – Zillah Eisenstein, Cynthia Enloe, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Jasbir Puar, for example – have given us conceptual tools that are applicable both to research and to organizing practices. There continues to be a need for the development that was so exciting at the conference – scholars talking to activists, scholar/activists talking to activist intellectuals about a whole host of questions raised by the current state of US wars.

Feminist scholars and feminist activists attempt to peer through the ideological veil. And feminists have always been in the forefront of the peace movement. But as we now know, it is not enough simply to call for peace. And peace cannot be envisioned as the simple cessation of war. Aristophanes' play Lysistrata was not only about the women withholding sex from the male warriors in order to compel them to stop making war, it was also about restructuring a gendered society.

Let me return to my earlier reflections on My Lai and Haditha as a way of engaging with the ways in which the circumstances of war are represented, and with the attempts to pierce the ideological veil thrown over it. It cannot be denied that the widespread circulation of photographs of the My Lai massacre, during the Vietnam War era, played a role in crystallizing opposition to the war. But it was certainly not the case that the photographs by themselves mobilized millions of people. The mistaken assumption that the mere existence of visual evidence of war atrocities elicited the anti-war sentiment that ended the Vietnam War leads people to ask today why a similar response was not generated by the images of the war in Iraq.

It is true that the embeddedness of war journalism has restricted what we see and hear and read about Iraq. Yet we have seen horrendous images of torture. There were the accidental images of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison that were never meant to be publicly released. If photographs by themselves were able to spur people to action, long ago we should have been in the street by the millions twenty-four hours a day. Even though we have not seen the worst images. Even though we have yet to see images of women who were detained and interrogated in Abu Ghraib. Even though we have not seen and have to imagine the conditions of prisoners who have been subject to extraordinary rendition. Even though we have not seen prison cells that are the size of a coffin – six by three in places like Syria, where people labeled by the US government as enemy combatants are being held. Even though we have not seen visual evidence of these atrocities, we have accessed this information in other ways. So we are aware, for instance, of the massacre at Haditha.

But let's return to the question of the images we have actually seen. It seems that we think about them in eighteenth-century terms. We still believe in enlightenment. I am not suggesting that we shouldn't be enlightened and that we shouldn't enlighten others. The problem to which I am referring emanates from the assumption that rational communication and publicity are sufficient – as Immanuel Kant suggested.

We tend to relegate so much power to the image that we assume not only that the meaning of the image is self-evident but we also fetishize the image, thinking that it will spur us to action.

The images of My Lai and other instances of massive violence that did not distinguish between military personnel and civilians are not what organized the anti-war movement. The photographs did not organize the movement – it was organized by committed women and men who were enraged and engaged, not only at the point of mobilization, but in other areas of their lives as well. Their engagement created the context for the reception of those photographs. Their engagement produced the meaning that was attached to the photographs.

The images depicting torture at Abu Ghraib were released into an environment so charged with assumptions about the hegemony of US democracy that the images themselves were overdetermined by the need to explain them in relation to democracy. The concern with the need to rescue US democracy pushed the real meaning of torture, and especially the suffering of prisoners depicted, into the background. People voicing widespread expressions of shock and revulsion in relation to the photographs asked, 'How is this possible?', 'How can this happen?', and asserted, 'This is not supposed to happen' – all within certain assumptions about US democracy. There was disbelief and an impulse toward justification, rather than an engagement with the contemporary meaning of torture and violence seen in the images.

As feminists, we cannot relinquish our own agency to the image. We cannot even assume that the image has a self-evident relation to its object. And we must consider the political economy that constitutes the environment within which images are created and consumed. Feminists adopt critical habits, including a critical stance toward the visual.

And we are also vigilant with respect to the vocabulary we use to conceptualize and implement strategies for change. As I indicated before, we should develop habits that impel us to engage in constant criticism of the things that we wish to change, as well as criticism of the tools that we use to conceptualize what we want to change.

In this context, I want to bring the term 'diversity' into my discussion. The danger of this term consists in the way its use has colonized histories of social justice, so that much of what we were once able to talk about with greater specificity is forced into hiding behind the concept of 'diversity.' The use of the term also promotes a hidden individualization of problems and solutions that ought to be collective. For instance, one hears about the 'diversity' of US military forces – with respect to people of color and increasingly with respect to women – as a model for racial and gender equality in other institutions. As a matter of fact, besides the military, another place you might go if you want to see diversity is in the US prisons.

And – what is immensely important – 'diversity' is a concept that provincializes the relationship of people within the USA to the world. The concept emerges from US ideology that equates racial and gender justice with color blindness and gender blindness. But undocumented immigrants live outside the embrace of official diversity. With the retooling of a racism that equates the practice of Islam with terrorism, people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent live outside the embrace of diversity.

And if we are feminists vigilant with respect to the vocabulary we use in thinking and implementing strategies for change, we must consider that 'democracy' is also a term that requires constant criticism, for wars are being conducted in its name, torture is justified in its name, and democracy has become a watchword for the most abominable violations of human rights. The official deployment of the term 'democracy' by the administration of US President George W. Bush has led to its equation with torture, terror, and a wholesale denial of individual and collective rights. The ideological strategies of the Bush administration involved the invocation of the struggle to preserve and expand democracy as a justification for the rapid erosion of democratic rights. Feminism is committed to a constant criticism of these ideological processes.

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Excerpted from Feminism and War by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt. Copyright © 2008 Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Minnie Bruce Pratt. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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