Post-9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women’s Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas

Abstract

The gender question in the Middle East now serves ends beyond the local. It may be registered within a cluster of international patriarchal war-promoting discourses that find tremendous benefit in the historical bulk of literature that demonizes the Middle Eastern male and victimizes the female. This article attempts to defend two related arguments, both of which are well served by Foucault’s Biopolitics (Foucault, The birth of biopolitics), in which he correlates between territorial control and the violence inherent to any hegemony’s preoccupation with the body (i.e., the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body) and Achille Mbembe’s theory of Necroplotics and its designation of who “may live” and who “must die” (Mbembé, 2003:11–4). I argue that in the post-9/11 era, the world has witnessed a globalist civilizational masculinist incursion on its demonized Middle Eastern/Islamic Other. The militaristic discourse at work seems to be self-appropriating the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body as a site of sexual oppression and (mis)using it to its own means. The impetus of the 9/11 necropolitics, aggressively transposes gender dialog/conflict in the Middle East/Muslim countries from a benign social and intellectual interface, where different alliances may be negotiated, to an aggressive militaristic zone, where the “bogeyman” must “die.”.