International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Veiled references: Constructions of gender in the

Bush administration discourse on the attacks on
Afghanistan post-9/11

Laura J. Shepherd

To cite this article: Laura J. Shepherd (2006) Veiled references: Constructions of gender in the
Bush administration discourse on the attacks on Afghanistan post-9/11, International Feminist
Journal of Politics, 8:1, 19-41, DOI: 10.1080/14616740500415425

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616740500415425

Published online: 16 Aug 2006.

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Veiled References

CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDER IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

DISCOURSE ON THE ATTACKS ON AFGHANISTAN POST-9/11

LAURA J. SHEPHERD
University of Bristol, UK

Abstract -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Understanding the ways in which the discursive construction of gender allowed for the
US-led attacks on Afghanistan to be considered a legitimate response to the attacks of
9/11 is vital to the study of international relations and for the reclaiming of a feminist
politics of the attacks. Through the identification and exploration of various represen-
tations of identity in the period after 9/11 and before the attacks on Afghanistan, I will
illustrate the centrality of narratives of gender to the production of a recognizable and
legitimate narrative of war. I focus on the identities of ‘the nation’, ‘the enemy’ and ‘the
intervention’, with each exploring not only the ways in which they are created and per-
petuated, but also the ways in which they make certain responses, actions and attitudes
permissible and censor others. In conclusion, I draw attention to the economic concerns
of the USA that were marginalized within the discursive construction of identity
post-9/11, and the ways in which the tensions created by this marginalization can
be used as a critical tool to begin to unpick gendered constructions that were
represented as seamless at the time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keywords
Afghanistan, discourse, gender, identity, masculinities, nation, Operation Enduring
Freedom

Gender is ‘deeply implicated in the carving out of political spaces [and in] the
construction of identities’ (Steans 2003a: 434). The emphasis that the Bush
administration put on particular constructs of gender in the preparation for
and subsequent conduct of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan,
which began in October 2001, served to create and perpetuate a particular
understanding of the situation and to organize a response based on this

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:1 March 2006, 19–41

ISSN 1461-6742 print=ISSN 1468-4470 online # 2006 Taylor & Francis
http:==www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080=14616740500415425
 understanding. The discursive links between Al Qaida and Afghanistan,
between supporting war and believing in peace, were reinforced through
gendered articulations. As Laura Bush (2001a)1 stated soon after the operation
began:

Civilised people throughout the world are speaking out in horror . . . because our
hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan . . . because in
Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of
us . . . Fighting brutality against women and children . . . is the acceptance of
our common humanity.

Laura Bush’s speech shows how gendered discourse helped to position war
as an appropriate response to the situation in Afghanistan. The running
together of ‘women and children’ twice in close succession infantilizes the
women of Afghanistan, denying them both adulthood and agency, affording
them only pity and a certain voyeuristic attraction. Simultaneously, the perpe-
trators of gender apartheid in Afghanistan are de-humanized through their
association with (animal) ‘brutality’, although not disempowered, as their
visions of the world they seek to create, as represented in Afghanistan, are
threatening enough to those who accept a ‘common humanity’ to require
action. There are complex and problematic gendered mechanisms at work
here, which I believe are central to gaining an understanding of how it
became thinkable, doable and to an extent inevitable that the USA would
bomb Afghanistan as punishment for crimes that had been attributed to Al
Qaida.
The approach that I use in the following analysis is Discourse-Theoretic
(Torfing 1999: 12). Discourses are understood here as systems of meaning-
production rather than simply statements or language, encompassing
narratives, texts and images, systems that ‘fix’ meaning, however temporarily,
and enable us to make sense of the world (see, inter alia, Doty 1996; Laclau and
Mouffe 2001). Thus I am not adopting the more empiricist approach to dis-
course analysis whereby discourses are understood as ‘frames, . . . primarily
instrumental devices that can foster common perceptions and understandings
for specific purposes’ (Howarth 2000: 3). Nor do I subscribe to the distinction
posed by critical discourse analysts between the realm of the discursive and
‘material reality’ (Fairclough 1992: 60; see also Fairclough and Wodak
1997; Sunderland 2004: 11). Such an approach does not problematize the
processes through which ‘reality’ is constructed and the ‘material’ given
meaning as a ‘reality’. In my view, the sense that we make becomes ‘real’,
and, as will be discussed through my investigation, these systems of
meaning-production are intimately related to practices of power – the
power to define and defend ‘reality’.
The time frame of this discourse analysis is limited. I investigate texts
produced by the Bush administration, predominantly statements made by
President George W. Bush himself, in the period from the attacks in the USA

20 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

on 11 September 2001 (known in the USA as 9/11) through to the end of
October 2001, by which time ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ was well estab-
lished. I also analyse leaflets dropped over Afghanistan by the US military
in the course of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ as part of US psychological
operations. The three sections of this article will address in turn the ways in
which ‘the nation’, ‘the enemy’ and ‘the intervention’ were discursively con-
structed in the USA post-9/11, with specific attention to the ways in which
a particular discourse of gender was employed by the Bush administration
to construct gendered discourses of identity. I argue that the constructions
of gender explored within this analysis are vital to understanding the
mobilization of public support in the USA for the attacks on Afghanistan. In
the concluding section, I draw attention to the economic concerns of the
USA that were marginalized within the discursive construction of identity
post-9/11 and the ways in which the tensions created by this marginalization
can be used as a critical tool to begin to unpick gendered constructions that
were represented as seamless at the time.

GENDERING THE NATION

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, dominant representations of the US

self-as-nation were constructed through particular discourses in ways that
resonated with the prior masculinization of US identity (see, inter alia, Jeffords
1989: 180 – 6). The nation under attack was represented as ‘the greatest force
for good in world history’ (G. Bush 2001a), ‘a great nation’ (G. Bush 2001b).
The USA sought to protect ‘freedom and opportunity’ (G. Bush 2001b) in the
attacks on Afghanistan, with the USA being represented as the ‘brightest
beacon’ for these values, suggesting that both power in terms of military
and political strength and power in terms of defining these values resided in
the USA prior to 9/11. For the purposes of this investigation, I have identified
three ways in which this identity was framed. Performances of masculinity
post-9/11 divide into two complementary images of ‘the nation’, which I
call the Ordinary Decent Citizen and the Figure of Authority. The corollary
feminine position was that of the Happy Shopper.

Ordinary Decent Citizen

The relationship between ‘the nation’ and the Ordinary Decent Citizen is made
explicit by Bush (2001c): ‘[T]he strength of this nation is founded in the
character and dedication and courage of everyday citizens’. These citizens
are represented as overwhelmingly masculine. Bush (2001d) lauded the
‘national character’, embodied in the ‘man who could have saved himself’
but instead stayed to comfort ‘his quadriplegic friend’. This signified ‘a

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 21

 return to the glorification of masculinity. . . expressed in a kind of God, guts
and guns patriotism’ (Ruby 2001: 149).
This glorification is reinforced by the active valorization of ‘manly men’ by
their heterosexual female-bodied counterparts; ‘[w]omen used to get in a snit
when a hardhat with a flag decal [sticker] wolf-whistled at them. Now women
get in a swoon’ (Dowd 2001). The reduction of the assumed male body under
the hardhat to the hardhat itself as a symbol of Ordinary Decent Citizen(ship) in
this extract demonstrates that the performance of gender is paramount, over
and above the materiality. It could literally be any-body; it is the masculinity
of the construction that is vital here. The President identified ‘police, firemen
and rescue workers’ as the ‘Heroes in New York’ (Bush 2001e), lending weight
to this construction.
This masculinity was further affirmed in speeches to Congress by President
Bush, in which he commended ‘the daring of our rescue workers’ (G. Bush
2001b). The use of ‘daring’ to describe the behaviours exhibited during the
rescue operation reinforces the valorization of this role. The ‘rescuers who
have worked past exhaustion’ (Bush 2001f) and ‘the heroes who are struggling
so valiantly to deal with . . . [the] tragedy’ (Bush 2001g) embody an action-
impulse that has overtones of the construct of ‘working-class hero’; these
are ‘real men’ doing jobs that ‘real men’ do. Bush forged a discursive link
between the Ordinary Decent Citizen and the action-impulse noted above,
commenting that ‘people . . . gave thanks for the heroes . . . and tomorrow
the good people of America . . . go back to work’ (Bush 2001 h), to ‘go about
their business’ (Bush 2001i). These jobs support the political economy of ‘the
nation’, as well as emphasizing the importance of active citizenship in times
of crisis. Even children were mobilized in support of this construction:
‘Study hard, because this country says, you work hard, you can realize your
dreams’ (Bush 2001j).
‘A hero is somebody you look up to, of course’ (Bush 2001j). On the White
House web-pages dedicated to representations of 9/11, a poem called ‘Heroes’
is featured, written by a Second Grade Class at Washington Elementary School,
Ohio. ‘[I]nspired by Ground Zero Heroes’, the poem is ‘dedicated to our heroes
nationwide’ (Mrs Konigsberger’s Second Grade Class . . . 2001). The photo-
graph accompanying the poem shows two male firefighters amid wreckage
and debris. Their faces are set in expressions of determination and their
positioning within the frame is elevated, representing triumph over adverse
circumstances. Their well-worn and dirtied clothes signify uniformity and
hard work.2
Ordinary Decent Citizens were exhorted in the aftermath of 9/11: ‘live your
lives, and hug your children. . . be calm and resolute’ (Bush 2001k). A positive
link was made between ‘every American family and the family of America’
(Bush 2001l), connoting ‘family values’ and therefore a valorization of the
(assumed nuclear) family unit. Supported by an understanding of appro-
priate femininities, which I discuss later, it is assumed that the Ordinary
Decent Citizen has children to hug and is therefore conforming to norms of

22 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

appropriate gendered behaviour, but also that he will display calmness and
resolution in the face of the potential dangers ahead. Citizens were presented
with statements that reaffirmed that ‘making the nation proud’ was conditional
on ‘[their] hard work’ (Bush 2001e) and ‘sacrifice’ (Bush 2001m). ‘There was no
greater example of that sacrifice than on Flight 93, when American citizens,
after having said the Lord’s Prayer, said “Let’s roll”. And they stormed the air-
plane’ (Bush 2001m).
The discursive organization of the Ordinary Decent Citizen centres on key
notions of action, stability and normality, in opposition to inaction, chaos
and deviance. ‘America suffered greatly . . . [b]ut thousands of . . . citizens
rose to the occasion to help. . . [W]e saw the best of America’ (Bush 2001n).
‘[T]he greatest gift’ one young girl could give was her father: ‘“As much as I
don’t want my Dad to fight”, she wrote, “I’m willing to give him to you”’
(cited in Bush 2001o). The stability signified by these performances of mascu-
linity hinges on their successful claim to normality and their reproduction of
highly traditional narratives of gender.

Figure of Authority

The Ordinary Decent Citizen was constructed as an image of national identity,

and in a similar way an alternative emerged, recognizable as the Figure of
Authority. ‘I’ve got a job to do’, claimed Bush (2001p), ‘and that’s to explain
to the American people the truth’. If the Ordinary Decent Citizen was the embo-
diment of valorized masculinities, literally re-presented as the corporeal form
of ‘the nation’, then the Figure of Authority was his cerebral counterpart, re-
presented as the brains of the body politic. This imagining was reinforced by
the claims to responsibility and protection of ‘western’ values that the USA
made pre- and post-9/11.3
‘We [the USA] defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedoms
of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear’ (Bush
2001o). ‘Our compassion and concern do not stop at our border. They reach
across the world’ (G. Bush 2001a). Bush (2001q) was at pains to reassure
‘our boys and girls of America’ that ‘our government is doing everything we
can to make America safe’. Laura Bush (2001b) reiterated this sentiment in
an open letter to a New York elementary school, in which she promises the
children that ‘people . . . love and care about you and are looking out for
your safety’.
International politics was once again, for the most part, represented as the
preserve of elite white men, supported by Ordinary Decent Citizens. The inter-
play between the two representations of the US self-as-nation was noted by
Bush (2001r), who commented that ‘we’ve all got a job to do . . . people
digging out rubble in New York have got a job to do, those of us in government
have a job to do’. On the White House website under the title ‘America
Undaunted’ is a photograph of Bush meeting firefighters. His body language

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 23

 is supportive and paternalistic, with both hands resting on the shoulders of a
firefighter who stands with his head bowed. Although in stature Bush is
smaller than the firefighters who surround him, he is central in the frame
and clearly holds authority within the group. All of the figures shown in the
image are male and white (White House 2001). In a discussion of the displace-
ment of women and non-white ethnic identities from panels of ‘experts’ called
in to comment on the attacks of 9/11, a leading media studies scholar argued
that:

‘[w]hether we like it or not, people tend to believe what they read and see on the
TV’ . . . By going to the same sources repeatedly, television reinforces the false
notion that only white and male are synonymous with expert and authority.
(Kunkel cited in Farhi 2001)

Where Are the Women?

Suggesting that it is worthwhile looking for the ‘women’ in performances of

gender after 9/11 does not mean trying to identify actual female bodies
from which to read statements about gender. Rather, I am looking for the
performances of femininity that were made visible in this period, as this also
indicates the ways in which gender was constructed and deployed. Similarly,
the femininities that remained invisible, or were actively marginalized, also
speak to the construction of ‘truths’ about gender that were then dominant.
The representations of femininity that became dominant were, on closer
inspection, hollow. Condoleezza Rice, for example, was given ‘face-time’ on
most major TV networks, but through close association with the masculinized
Figure of Authority was rendered un-feminine: ‘Rice has a direct line to the
most powerful man on earth . . . her firm handshake guides the receiver to
sit and get down to business . . . she says she never dates’ (Harris 2003). This
reinforced the notion that ‘women’ in positions of power must surrender
their femininity.4 In contrast, performances of appropriate femininity, rep-
resented by Laura Bush, enter into the construction of the US self-as-nation
as a supportive counterpoint to the ‘real/man’s’ world. She assumed a
maternal position, taking responsibility for the welfare of American children:
‘I want you to know how much I care about all of you’ (L. Bush 2001b).
‘Woman’ was discursively permitted to mother, care, shop and support, all
behaviours associated with a very traditionalist model of gender; ‘she’
became visible as a Happy Shopper, contrasted to the Helpless Victim of
Afghanistan that will be discussed later. Other than these allowable demon-
strations of agency, women performing femininities post-9/11 were silenced
and absented from public debate:

Virtually the only female faces in the media at the [time were] the victims;
women are cast as passive. . . The polls seem[ed] to bear out some of the oldest

24 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

 gender stereotypes. . . how little boys play war games and bomb their Lego
buildings while little girls look after babies.
(Bunting 2001: 26)

This feminized passivity could also be seen as another mechanism for silencing
dissent. As Hunt (2002: 117) argues, ‘[t]his casting of north American women
as passive, and in need of protection, contributes to justifications for a violent
American response’. In the following section, I consider the ways in which
masculinities of ‘the enemy’ were performed and interpreted in order to
reinforce and complement the work that gender was doing in the construction
of the US self-as-nation.

GENDERING THE ENEMY

The feminized passivity of ‘women’ in the nation overlaps with the construc-
tion of ‘women’ abroad, identified as Helpless Victims, which has important
ramifications for the gendering of ‘the enemy abroad’. This discourse of
gender is heavily racialized, as the ‘privileged discursive position’ held
by ‘the nation’ is reinforced by ‘a whole history of global dominance – of
imperialism and colonialism’ (Tomlinson 1991: 28). The women abroad are
recognizable within this discourse as variations of what Mohanty (1991: 56)
calls the ‘average third world woman’ who ‘leads an essentially truncated
life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being
“third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic,
family-oriented, victimised etc.)’.

Veiled References Part One

In much the same way as the dual constructions of ‘the nation’ rely upon and
complement each other, the constructions of ‘the enemy’ both abroad and
within are mutually constitutive. ‘The enemy abroad’ is recognizable as an
Irrational Barbarian, constructed with reference to gender on several levels.
Irrational Barbarians are marked as such through ‘barbaric behaviour. They
slit [the] throats of women’ (Bush 2001c).

Previously not on the West’s radar screen, Afghan women are now showing up as
‘pregnant’, ‘fleeing’, ‘starving’ and ‘widowed’. All are true . . . but such adjectives
reduce Afghan women to nothing more than the sum of their most desperate parts.
(Peters 2001: 123)

This is not an accident: the representations of Afghan women, congruent with

the accepted image of Mohanty’s ‘average third world woman’, can be read
against the dominant representations of the US self-as-nation as a marker of
US superiority, social advancement and civilization.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 25

 This in turn marks ‘the enemy abroad’ as inferior, backward and uncivilized –
and male: ‘The men . . . plan, promote and commit murder’ (Bush 2001t). ‘There
are no rules’ governing their behaviour (Bush 2001c) and ‘[t]hey have no
justification for their actions’ (Bush 2001u), which are framed as ‘heinous
acts of violence perpetrated by faceless cowards’ (Bush 2001v).
The issue of the veil, or burqa, was central in constructing this image of
‘the enemy abroad’ as an Irrational Barbarian. One leaflet dropped over
Afghanistan during ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ ‘shows a member of the
Taliban religious police whipping a woman in a burqa’ with text accompany-
ing the image reading ‘Is this the future you want for your women and
children?’ (Friedman 2004). Relating closely to the image of the ‘average
third world woman’, the veiled women of Afghanistan were reduced to a
snap-shot image that was ultimately unsustainable, as was the denial of
female agency that was again central to this construction. As Ask and
Tjomsland (1998: 13) argue, ‘the differences in personal meaning and public
significance among women who wear the veil are lost if it is simply reduced
to an index of Muslim women’s oppression’. In addition, the sheer symbolic
power of the image of the ‘average veil-clad third world woman’ acted to
close down discursive space for dissent. ‘[T]hese sorrowful tales are now
used to claim a further elevation in the “moral high ground” on which
retaliatory violence can be undertaken’ (Stanley 2002: 209).
Strengthening the discursive link between Afghanistan’s Taliban govern-
ment and the terrorist network of Al Qaida was also central to the construction
of ‘the enemy’. ‘The leadership of Al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan
and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In
Afghanistan, we see Al Qaeda’s vision for the world’ (Bush 2001k). This link
was forged through a particular understanding of statecraft and responsibility,
as well as being supported by the visions of ‘the nation’ as discussed earlier.
Afghanistan was conceptualized as a ‘weak’ state in opposition to the USA,
which was constructed as politically and militarily strong. In realist terms,
this renders the ‘weakness’ of Afghanistan – and its willingness to harbour ter-
rorists – the responsibility of the Taliban government, just as the responsibility
for guiding and guarding its own citizens lies with the US government. ‘The
Afghan people are victims of oppression and misrule of the Taliban regime’
(G. Bush 2001a). Thus the population of Afghanistan is in need of the
‘proper’ guidance they do not receive from the Taliban, which lends weight
to the legitimacy of the attacks on the country, ostensibly to remove the
Taliban from power.
It is not surprising that the media focused on the Taliban as an embodiment
of ‘[t]he dark side’ of ‘cultural notions of manliness’ (Brown 2001), given that
the masculinities of ‘the enemy abroad’ are seen as deviant and abnormal. This
construction is reproduced through reference to the (vulnerable) women of
Afghanistan, who were placed centre stage as the drama of the US response
to the attacks of 9/11 unfolded. The attacks on Afghanistan were
articulated through a discourse of gender that centred on notions of

26 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

appropriate protection and care towards women. In turn, this required the
exclusion of performances of femininity that allowed for the valorization of
female agency. ‘What good is it to flaunt images of Afghan women marching
militantly with fists in the air, carrying banners about freedom, democracy and
secular government? Those women wouldn’t need saving’ (Kolhatkar 2002).
But the ‘[w]omen [who] are not allowed to attend school’ do (Bush 2001k).
These constructions served a dual purpose. First, the construction of
woman-as-victim marked the enemy abroad as the Irrational Barbarian in
need of rectification and punishment from the Figure of Authority. Second,
through reference to accepted narratives of gender this construction of the
enemy facilitated the conceptual division between ‘the nation’ and ‘the
enemy’. ‘[I]t may take us a while to catch him’ (Bush 2001w), this ‘enemy
. . . who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people’ (Bush 2001x), but the
USA has ‘patriots, people who love their country’ (Bush 2001p) on their
side. ‘By creating a “monster” in the face of Bin Laden, the USA [tried] to
create a myth that the problem is out there’ (Alloo 2002: 95). This divide
was sharpened by the infamous rhetoric used by Bush concerning loyalties
post-9/11. ‘If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents,
they have become outlaws and murderers themselves’ (Bush 2001o). The
language was unequivocal: ‘Stand with the civilised world or stand with the
terrorists’ (Bush 2001y).

Veiled References Part Two

The constructions of ‘the nation’ and ‘the enemy abroad’ also functioned to
construct ‘the enemy within’, which is the sphere through which most
dissent is manifested and therefore most disciplining is necessary. Bell
(2002: 433) comments that ‘[s]ince September 11, I see the citizen/foreigner
and good/evil binaries being evoked and fused. . . To prove one is a citizen
and good, one must be loyal’; to be otherwise is to be not of ‘the nation’, there-
fore marginalized as an Irrational Dreamer. As counterpoint to ‘the nation’, the
Irrational Dreamer represents a subordinate masculinity, to be read as untrust-
worthy, idealistic, dangerous to varying degrees, because the legitimized
response in keeping with the dominant representation of the (masculinized)
nation was ‘a renewed sense of patriotism’ (Bush 2001z). The singularity of
the nation was discursively reinforced and the disruption of this singularity
therefore disciplined. ‘We know we are a single nation’ (G. Bush 2001a),
‘willing to work hard to help our fellow Americans’ (Bush 2001p).
This construction clearly functioned to silence critical voices after 9/11, as
illustrated by the words of Dan Rather (cited in Palast 2002: 91; see also Healy
2001):

It’s an obscene comparison, but there was a time in South Africa when people
would put flaming tyres around people’s necks if they dissented. In some

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 27

 ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tyre of
lack of patriotism put around your neck.

To maintain the construction of the Figure of Authority, the Irrational Dreamer

was constructed as ‘traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner’ (Kingsolver
2001: 106) and occupied the subordinate subject position of irresponsible/
child as counterpart to the Figure of Authority read as responsible/adult.
The Irrational Dreamer also disrupted the ‘family’ unit of the Figure of
Authority and the Happy Shopper through ‘her’ disobedience. In these ways,
the dual gendered constructions of the enemy abroad and within served to
(re)produce the gendered constructions of the nation.
It is vital to note here also the role played by discourses of (singular)
truth and (superior) morality. US citizens were repeatedly told that ‘we go
forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world’
(G. Bush 2001b). Bush (2001b) quoted Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for You are with
me’; not only is the might of the US military backing the intervention, but
God himself is also on the side of the Bush administration. Thus certainty
was valued and doubt disciplined, reducing discursive space for dissent
after 9/11.

GENDERING THE INTERVENTION

While the gendering of ‘the nation’ and ‘the enemy’ was an integral part of the
production of consent to the US-led attacks on Afghanistan, the gendering of
‘the intervention’ itself was also key. As I have demonstrated earlier, the domi-
nant constructions of the nation and the enemy were closely congruent with
existing cultural narratives of gender, class and race, resonating strongly
with already-available interpretations of ‘the nation’ and ‘the enemy’, and
were to an extent mutually constitutive. However, the construction of the
intervention was more problematic, in that ‘the intervention’ had to fit with
the now widely accepted understandings of ‘the nation’ and ‘the enemy’ and
reinforce these constructions where possible.
‘This is a unique type of war’, declared Bush (2001s). The British government,
closely allied with the Bush administration, agreed: ‘[M]ilitary action is
only one part of our wider response, which also includes equally important
diplomatic, legal, economic and humanitarian measures’ (Ministry of
Defence 2001). Given the constructions of ‘the enemy’ in particular, dependent
heavily on the symbolic power of the burqa, it was necessary to integrate
deliberately ‘hard’ military initiatives with the ‘soft’ humanitarian concerns
that the Bush administration had been championing as a key component to
the dominant understanding of the US self-as-nation and of the enemy.

28 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

A Queer War?

‘Broadly speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models which

dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromoso-
mal sex, gender and sexual desire’ (Jagose 1996). An analysis of ‘the interven-
tion’ as a ‘queer war’ draws attention to the ways in which the narratives of
gender around which it was organized were conflicting, and served to illumi-
nate rather than detract from the tensions within its construction. These ten-
sions then serve to call into question the stability of the very narratives of
gender upon which the identity of ‘the intervention’ was founded, as, in the
binary construction of gender that has become the dominant model for under-
standing masculinities and femininities, it is not possible to be ‘both – and’,
only ‘either – or’.
The construction of ‘the intervention’ was troublesome as it necessitated the
negotiation of existing narratives of gender that mark the ‘hard’-military
initiatives as a masculine domain, while humanitarian-‘soft’ concerns are
feminized. ‘As we strike military targets, we’ll also drop food, medicine
and supplies to the starving and suffering men, women and children of
Afghanistan’ (Bush 2001o). This tension was illustrated in the statements
made by Bush (2001s) at the time: ‘We have no compassion . . . we must
never forget we’re a compassionate people’. As Weber (2002: 141) comments,
‘American forces dropped bread (idealist humanitarian relief) as well as bombs
(realist foreign policy tools) over enemy territory, thereby delivering a morally
mixed message’.
One way in which ‘the intervention’ was discursively organized fitted with a
masculinist understanding of what a war should be in the contemporary world,
and at the same time signified a strong commitment to a realist-masculinist
image of world politics. In the early days of the intervention, Bush (2001s)
framed the attacks on Afghanistan as representing ‘a strong coalition,
because we’re right’, and ‘we will not tire . . . we will not relent’ (Bush
2001t). As Youngs (2002: 109) comments, this articulation impacts on the
ways in which the intervention is interpreted and therefore relates to the legiti-
macy of the attacks: ‘Suddenly, especially in the so-called West, there seems
nowhere to hide, no safe boundary. Suddenly life, as Thomas Hobbes would
have it, is and threatens to be, nasty, brutish and short.’
In contrast to this dark vision of a traditionally masculinist war, ‘the
intervention’ also had to be congruent with the commitments that the Bush
administration and others made to the feminist platform. These commitments,
enacted through humanitarian initiatives that took place throughout the US-
led attacks on Afghanistan, were met with general scepticism, not least
because the population of Afghanistan was in such a precarious position
before the bombing campaign began. A poster put up at Kandahar airport
with the intention of reassuring the local population that humanitarian
supplies would be able to get through featured the threatening and militaristic
image of a soldier with a large machine-gun in silhouette with fighter planes

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 29

 in the background (Friedman 2004). This image enacts the tension between the
military and humanitarian objectives of the campaign, and is a reminder that
the attacks inevitably caused disruption to food supplies, competition for
scarce resources and massive displacement of people living close to US
target zones.
The Bush administration’s commitment to liberating women in Afghanistan
from oppressive Taliban rule was also held up to scrutiny for additional
reasons. Among these was the suggestion that:

[a]t home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval office he cut off
funding to any international family-planning organisations which offer abortion
services or counselling (likely to cost the lives of thousands of women and children).
(Viner 2002)

Furthermore, it was suggested that ‘[c]hampioning the rights of Afghan

women works well with a domestic audience, but Bush officials caution[ed]
against raising it too loudly abroad’ (Stanley 2001). Despite the commitment
made to ‘liberating’ women, so-called ‘consolidation’ leaflets used in the inter-
vention, ‘to facilitate military operations and promote maximum cooperation’
(Friedman 2004) depict the rebuilding of Afghanistan with images from which
women are conspicuously absent. These images include the making of a rug,
the building of a house and male fighters shaking hands. Women appear on
later leaflets, smiling coyly at the camera from uncovered eyes or holding
children in family groups (Friedman 2004), reinforcing the notion that
liberation of the women in Afghanistan was dependent on their removal of
the veil and integration into a family unit that would be acceptable to the USA.
Thus the integration of women into public and political life in Afghanistan
was measured using the same homogenizing symbolic marker as was used to
construct ‘the enemy abroad’: the veil. ‘Such representations suggest a
moment of blending of the colonial woman, the third world woman, and the
Muslim woman as the other who is oppressed and needs to be liberated’
(Khan 2001). Thus agency is still denied to the ‘women’ (read as victims) of
Afghanistan.

Combating Tensions

The efforts made to construct ‘the intervention’ as a duality of the masculine

and the feminine were further undermined by the emphasis placed on the
masculinist organization of the attacks, especially when read alongside
the masculinism of ‘the nation’ as it was constructed post-9/11. The normative
claims made by Bush regarding the necessity of the intervention and
the association of the USA with ‘a noble cause’, ‘a war between good and
evil’ in which the USA ‘stand[s] strong on the side of the good’ (Bush
2001y) lent weight to this masculinism rather than successfully allowing the

30 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

conceptualization of ‘the intervention’ as feminist. Another leaflet dropped
over Afghanistan stated bluntly: ‘Our goals will be achieved, if not willingly,
then by overwhelming force’ (cited in Friedman 2004).
In one operation during which a fortress in Kandahar was attacked,
‘American troops left 2 million leaflets featuring a photograph of New York
City firemen raising the flag over the ruins of the World Trade Centre with
the text “Freedom Endures”’ (Friedman 2004). The ‘freedoms’ championed as
part of the package of values inherent in the ‘civilized’ world seem to centre
on freedoms of choice in relation to consumerism rather than freedoms that
are vital to true democracy. The centrality of geopolitical and economic con-
cerns to ‘the intervention’ compounded this tension between the masculinist
war and the feminized humanitarian commitment. As Bush (2001g) stated,
‘part of the war we fight is to make sure that our economy continues to
grow’, and there are few ways to draw successful links between the success
of the US economy and the ‘liberation’ of Afghan women.
With this in mind, the attempted feminization of ‘the intervention’ became
extremely problematic.5 Representations of female soldiers and of feminized
male soldiers-as-peace-keepers were prevalent, but the conceptual relation-
ship between women and peace worked to diminish their symbolic power as
a militarized security force. They were also not credible, given the masculinist
bias of the US-led attacks on Afghanistan. In a statement to troops at Travis Air
Force Base, Bush (2001za) told of

a four-year-old son of a cargo specialist [who] said good-bye to his Dad here at
Travis . . . the boy has been telling neighbours that ‘Daddy is saving the world’ . . .
There are a lot of people like his Daddy fighting this war.

The successful (re)production of ‘the intervention’ as a moral mission was

necessary to reinforce the constructions of ‘the nation’ and ‘the enemy’.
‘This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight’ (Bush 2001 k). ‘This
world He [God] created is of moral design’ (Bush 2001d). The ways in which
these constructions were organized around narratives of gender, class,
sexuality and race feed into this morality with devastating effect, as Delphy
(2002: 314) argues: ‘This. . . combination produces a potentially very danger-
ous ideology for non-Westerners and more generally for all dominated groups,
for it provides as much justification for military intervention as for humanitar-
ian action’. Moreover, the notion of moral responsibility feeds directly into
narratives of modernity and civilization, ‘because modern people are to be
held morally responsible for their actions and ought not to allow themselves
to be provoked, while primitives do not know any better’ (Brown 2002: 297).
It is my suggestion that the gendered construction of ‘the intervention’ was
ultimately unsuccessful and therefore unsustainable, which illuminated the
disjunctures in the discursive constructions of ‘the nation’ and ‘the enemy’ as
they were (re)presented post-9/11. This in turn led to the opening up of space
for critical engagement with the legitimacy of the US-led attacks on Afghanistan

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 31

 ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

In my concluding remarks, I want to look further at these discursive disjunc-

tures and the space for critical engagement that they open up. Given that the
suffering of the people, most notably the women, of Afghanistan was articu-
lated as one of the primary reasons for removing the Taliban from power,
there is a dreadful irony to the attacks on the country that gives a particular
nuance to ‘Enduring Freedom’. Delphy (2002: 315) suggests that the tensions
in these claims are resonant of ‘the missionary’s paradox’: ‘We will save their
souls (their freedoms) even if we have to kill them to do it.’ The specific
rendering of ‘the intervention’ as motivated by feminist concerns is frankly
unbelievable in this light, not least because the issues of increased public
and political participation of women in life in Afghanistan once the Taliban
were removed have fallen off the international agenda. ‘Abuses of women’s
rights in Afghanistan were headline news as we were preparing for war;
now they are hardly worth a mention’ (Walter 2002).
It is simply not the case that the situation of the population of Afghanistan
has been dramatically ameliorated by the US-led attacks. ‘One and a half years
after the U.S. and its allies took control, peacekeepers are on the ground but the
war is far from over’ (Cviic 2003); ‘rape and sexual violence by armed factions
and the public harassment of women who try to take a role in politics has
persisted’ (BBC News 2003). The insecurity and instability of daily life in
Afghanistan continues. ‘George Bush has abandoned the women of
Afghanistan: where is his concern . . . for the very many Afghan women
who live in fear of the marauding mojahedin who now run the country?’
(Viner 2002). Despite this, the USA maintains its performance of self-as-
nation, organized around narratives of gender, class, race and religion, as
the global Figure of Authority. With reference to Afghanistan, this construction
is upheld by the assertion, repeated by representatives of the Bush adminis-
tration, by opposition politicians, journalists and commentators, that ‘[a]
series of governments in Afghanistan oppressed women until the liberation
by the U.S. and allied forces’ (Johnson 2002).

A Thoroughly Modern(ist) War

The articulation of feminist concerns was hollow in one respect, but at the
same time actively reinforced the constructions of ‘the nation’ and ‘the
enemy’, as Amiri (2001) reminds us:

It has come to be assumed in much of the Muslim world that to be a proponent of

women’s rights is to be pro-Western. . . [W]e see that women have long been the
pawns in a struggle between the elite modernists, usually defined as pro-Western,
and the religious and tribal-based traditionalists.

32 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

Through this association, it is possible to interpret the feminist concerns
articulated by the Bush administration as concern for the markers of moder-
nity as defined by the USA rather than concern for the lived experiences of
the Afghan population. In the dichotomies of modernist thought, the binary
opposition between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ structures the ways in which
it is permissible to think about such notions as religion, culture and democ-
racy. Read along these lines, the attacks on Afghanistan could be seen as a
mission civilisatrice, (re)producing the construction of the Figure of Authority
in bringing the benefits of modernity to a traditionalist people.
However, the centrality of a concept of economic progress to this narrative
of development in modernity complicates the matter somewhat when read
alongside the centrality of moral superiority to the US sense of self-as-
nation. There is a vigorous body of literature addressing the specific ways in
which narratives of economic ‘globalization’ and neo-liberalism are organized
around highly traditional narratives of gender (see, inter alia, Marchand and
Runyan 2000; Peterson 2003; Steans 2003b). The ‘liberation’ of Afghan
women is complicated by adherence to these narratives of formal economic
enterprise in which men are the subjects of the discourse: ‘adventurous,
risk-taking, fast-paced, globe-trotting young men’ (Marchand 2000: 223).
Meanwhile, women are perceived as closer to the social sphere than the politi-
cal and are firmly absented from the economic (Peterson 2003: 115).
‘This [the USA] is a great nation. It’s an entrepreneurial nation’ (Bush
2001zb), one that relies on the appropriate femininities of the Happy
Shopper to ensure continued economic growth. The ‘enemy’ ‘hate freedom,
and they hate freedom-loving people’, according to Bush (2001zc), who dis-
cursively joined this ‘hate’ to ‘the events of September 11th [that] shocked
our economy’ (Bush 2001zc), thus suggesting that ‘freedom-loving people’
value economic freedoms. Furthermore, with the emphasis put on the installa-
tion of a democratic government in Afghanistan after the Taliban, investi-
gating notions of democracy as championed by the US government becomes
relevant. The freedom of the press or the freedom of public assembly are con-
ceived of as less important in this vision of democracy than the freedom to
choose between one consumer product and another. ‘America is the economic
engine of freedom . . . Trade is about more than economic efficiency. It pro-
motes the values at the heart of this protracted struggle’ (Zoellick cited in
Grossman 2001).
While the policy reforms suggested by neo-liberal economic logic are ‘pre-
sented as a benign and ideologically neutral pragmatism’ (Cammack 2002:
132), identifying the ways in which these reforms are inherently tied to a
vision of American freedom and its sense of self in the world is crucial to a
critical analysis of these policies. As Bush (2001i) states, ‘the American
people . . . seek . . . to win a war against barbaric behaviour, people that hate
freedom and hate what we stand for’: not only the ‘liberation’ of women but
also entrepreneurial behaviour and economic freedom. If ‘[t]he grand strategy
of US neo-conservatism is to bring the full force of US superpower to bear on

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 33

 the crusade to spread democracy and freedom around the world’ (Liu 2003), it
also draws on narratives of economic liberalism that are strongly gendered,
‘portraying the state as a feminized spinster/siren and the market as a mascu-
linized roving bachelor on the make’ (Runyan 2003: 139).
Gill (1996: 212) argues that the market reforms necessary for increasingly
globalized trade regimes support a particularly thin notion of democracy
through ‘the attempt to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest
number of politically influential consumers, citizens who are an affluent
and politically central minority’. With regard to moral superiority, such a
notion of democracy is clearly flawed, as are practices such as the restriction
of civil liberties and the silencing of critical voices in a supposedly free media.6
The construction of ‘the nation’ as the Figure of Authority begins to unravel
and the space for critical engagement with the attacks of Afghanistan opens
further in the face of these concerns.

‘America Strikes Back’ 7

I have argued in this article that the dominant discursive constructions of ‘the
nation’ and ‘the enemy’ were (re)produced with strong references to existing
cultural narratives of gender that placed the masculinized Ordinary Decent
Citizen and Figure of Authority in a superior position to the femininized
Irrational Barbarian and Irrational Dreamer. These constructions and their
juxtaposition allowed the necessary claims to moral superiority and therefore
responsibility to enable ‘the intervention’ in Afghanistan.
Thus, while the claims made by the Bush administration that ‘this is the fight
of all who believe in progress and . . . freedom’ (Bush 2001 k) are congruent
with the narratives of development and ‘democratization’, framing this fight
through a gender lens enabled a stronger claim to moral righteousness. As
Laura Bush (2001a) put it, ‘[t]he fight against terrorism is also a fight for the
rights and dignity of women’. The Bush administration engaged in the ‘theft
of feminist rhetoric . . . without a care for the women on the ground’ (Viner
2002) and the tensions in the discursive construction of the intervention
demonstrate just how problematic the US-led attacks on Afghanistan have
been. Just as worryingly, despite the tensions, the discursive strength of the
constructions of ‘the nation’ and ‘the enemy’ enabled the attacks to begin,
and to begin again in Iraq not so much later.
Finding a purchase for engagement with constructions of identity that are
presented as natural and therefore unproblematic is vital to the understanding
of the ways in which international politics is performed with significant
material impact daily on the lives of individuals world-wide. Gendering this
analysis is particularly vital, to draw attention to the various ways in which
gender as a relational identity becomes visible in specific locations at specific
times with differential impacts, and to offer alternatives to the dominant
narratives. I have sought to demonstrate here how feminist gender analysis

34 International Feminist Journal of Politics ------------------------------------------------------------

can challenge the gendered assumptions underpinning the US construction of
self-as-nation, which elevates freedom of markets above freedom of thought
and allows ‘[e]very kind of outrage’ to be ‘committed in the name of
democracy’ (Roy 2003). As Viner (2002) argues ‘[w]hen George Bush mouths
feminist slogans, it is feminism which loses its power’. Critical feminist inter-
jections are not just necessary for better understanding of political processes
but central to the construction of a better world and a more vigorous feminist
politics.
Laura J. Shepherd
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Politics
University of Bristol
10 Priory Road
Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK
E-mail: Laura.Shepherd@bris.ac.uk

Notes

1 This quotation is included to illustrate the gendered imaginings through which the
attacks on Afghanistan were legitimized and mobilized. In reproducing this quota-
tion, I do not mean to suggest that Laura Bush somehow speaks for her husband, or
indeed the Bush administration, and I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who
noted that this might be misinterpreted. The words employed by Laura Bush in this
quotation are both a product of and productive of a discursive terrain wider than the
‘Bush administration’, and can legitimately be included in this investigation as I do
not conceive of discourses as tied to individual actors.
2 It is also noteworthy that both men are white. The intersections of discourses of race,
class and sexuality with the discourses of gender under investigation here are of
analytical importance but within the parameters of this article I am unable to pay
them the critical attention they deserve.
3 This is not a new construction, and resonates closely with existing understandings
of the US self-as-nation that have been dominant since the end of World War II
(Campbell 1998: 22–30; Weldes 1999: 42 –4).
4 In the much-cited case of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the UK, Sylvester
(2002: 65– 6) notes that ‘“[s]he” was not really the truth of sex . . . With her
female cues and her blistering politics, her sex was homeless, misidentified, disiden-
tified’. This seems to resonate strongly with Rice’s performances of gender.
5 While it was claimed that Bush ‘not only erased any questions about legitimacy, he
. . . also erased the gender gap’ (Mitchell cited in Pozner 2002), closer examination
of these statistics suggests that ‘pundits and press roundly ignored the Post and
Gallup data about women’s more conditional approach to the “war on terrorism”’
(Pozner 2002).
6 Palast (2002: 11 –81) argues very convincingly that this evacuation begins in the
USA, with the electoral procedures that led to the installation of George W. Bush

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura J. Shepherd/Veiled References 35

 as the President of the United States of America, whereas Dahl (cited in McGrew
2002: 207) traces the effects of thin democracy to the level of an international
polity, arguing that ‘the necessary preconditions for democracy remain largely
absent from the international public domain: a domain which lacks the credentials
of a properly functioning polity and where might still trumps right’.
7 This was a newspaper headline in the USA on the day that the attacks on Afghani-
stan began (cited in Kingsolver 2001: 106). I find it almost impossible to believe that
the reading of the headline was not meant to evoke memories of the Star Wars film
with almost the same name, and therefore the population was reminded that, in fact,
The Empire Strikes Back. The notion of intertextuality is useful here: ‘signifiers refer
only to other signifiers . . ., i.e., [we see] a complex and infinitely expanding web of
possible meanings’ (Doty 1993: 302).

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