A Trip to Toys R Us

To help me think about the state of the world, as Janet Jakobsen asked us to do, I took a trip to Toys R Us. If, as a good feminist, I believe that cultural conceptions of gender as well as discursive and iconographic representations reshape the experience and meaning of war and militarism, and if I think that war and militarism are terrains in which gender is negotiated and that the preceding occur effectively through the mechanisms of a consumer culture, then what better place to conduct fieldwork during times of terror than Toys R Us? Certainly Barbie would offer some insight.

I do not mean to be flippant about these militarized and violent times. And my trip to Toys R Us was indeed sobering. As the United States prepares for yet another war, toy companies reap profits from such "war on terrorism"-inspired toys as "Clay Ramsey, U.S. Counter-Terrorism Advisor," "American Freedom Fighters Live from Afghanistan," "Command Headquarters Tent and Tunnel Combo," and the Osama bin Laden head offered by Protect and Serve Toys "to allow enthusiasts to enact what it may be like when we finally catch him." The "World Peace Keepers Battle Station" for children ages 3 and up is a "peace keeper" surrounded by grenades, assault rifles, rocket launchers, and a set of sandbags. None of these peacekeepers/warriors are women.

I did, however, find a version of Barbie - or the absence of Barbie - and I brought this toy with me because I think it makes some feminist points. This toy, called the "Forward Command Post" for children ages 5 and up, is a bombed-out version of Barbie's dream house.[1] For those of you who cannot see it, Forward Command Post is a two-story house designed to look like an "all-American" suburban home with pale yellow walls, checkerboard floors, and charming, wood-framed windows. Yet this is Barbie's bad-dream house. The glass panes are cracked; bullet holes decorate the walls. On the balcony stands a helmeted soldier in battle fatigues clutching an assault rifle. At his feet, a rocket launcher is poised - where a pot of geraniums should be - with its muzzle aimed at all who approach.

Janet Jakobsen wrote to panel participants, "The basic question for your panel is Why? Why is the world in the state that it is in?" I do not know if I can cover that task in 15 minutes. What I will do is use the Forward Command Post toy to make a few points about militarism, why the world is in the state that it's in, what policies have led us to the current historical juncture, and what feminist analysis brings to the current public debate.

Lessons of the Forward Command Post

Miriam Cooke claims that when women contribute to what she calls the "war story," their stories contest the acceptance of a dyadically structured world and break down the easy oppositions - home versus front, civilian versus combatant, war versus peace, victory versus defeat - that have framed, and ultimately promoted, war.[2] Ironically, Forward Command Post makes the same point. Supposedly, U.S. citizens feel less safe since September 11, 2001, since the U.S. homeland, like "home," was allegedly a place of safety. Feminist and antiviolence movements have always challenged this notion of safety at home: The majority of violence women suffer happens at home. As Andrea Smith of the group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence writes, "Similarly, the notion that terrorism happens in other countries makes it difficult to grasp that the U.S. . . . "home" has never been a safe place for people of color."[3] Forward Command Post graphically makes this point. Interpersonal and state violence exist simultaneously. The soldier is inside the bombed home. And where is Barbie? Did he rape her? Did he kill her? Her absence is palpable.

The soldier's presence in the home also confuses the discourse of "protection" and of saving women. U.S. and other soldiers allegedly "saved" the women of Afghanistan from the oppression they suffered at the hands of the Taliban. And soldiers protect our "homes" and homeland. As Minoo Moallem writes, this

metaphor of home is gendered and as a spatial metaphor it stands both for the inside, which is protected from the outside, and a place of emotionality and affection. As a spatial and temporal metaphor it is related to discourses of protection in which men are protectors and women protected.[4]

Yet, this home is destroyed - it has no inside - and the soldier, as the embodiment of the gendered outside, is inside. Moreover, there are no women inhabiting this former space of emotionality and affection. Inside/outside dissolve, and there is no one to protect. Forward Command Post clearly demonstrates what has always been the case and challenges the assumption that state violence protects. The soldier is in the house, in the domesticated bordered space, as well as in the territorial homeland.

Who is at most risk when the protector/soldier is in the house? In past decades, small arms (not weapons of mass destruction) have helped fuel 46 of the 49 largest conflicts worldwide and, in 2001, "were estimated to be responsible for 1,000 deaths a day; more than 80 percent of those victims were women and children."[5] Most people killed in war are civilians, not soldiers. And, more than four-fifths of war refugees are women and children. Yet the emphasis on the "warrior class," as U.S. News and World Report calls it, renders women invisible during wartime. The continuing invisibility of women in war manifests itself in the fact that the widespread use of wartime rape has only been recently recognized as a war crime by some international agencies.

Why do we make ourselves less safe by inviting the soldier into the house? I mentioned earlier that U.S. citizens feel less "safe" since September 11, 2001. Fatality statistics demonstrate the extent to which our fears are manufactured and then manipulated to justify a militarized economy and wars. One in 300 people in the United States will die of a heart attack and one in 509 of cancer. One in 9,450 of us will die of a gunshot wound and one in 18,800 in a car accident. How many of us will die in an airline accident? One in 8,450,000. A terrorist attack? One in 9,270,000. Yet we have constructed fear in such a way to justify a global war against a nearly nonexistent threat. Why is our fear of terrorism out of proportion to the risk? Why do we surrender civil liberties for terrorism?

If we think of the soldier in the house of the world, we can make feminist sense of these questions. As we look at the world-house, we see refugees, polluted waters, bombed villages, starving children, a global HIV/AIDS epidemic, seemingly disparate crises. Militarism, unequal development, and environmental crises are problems that are linked and gendered. For almost 50 years of the twentieth century, the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union threatened to destroy the planet. Rather than reducing poverty in the so-called Third World and First World countries, the Cold War actually exacerbated development problems. The competition for military superiority promoted massive expenditures on weapons instead of on social problems, such as poverty, education, sanitation, health care, and sustainable food cultivation. Inequalities between peoples and nations were heightened so that, overall, countries in the north prospered while those in the south remained poor and dependent on the rich countries that had originally colonized them. Current environmental, development, and military conflicts reflect this legacy of colonialism as affluent nations continue to exploit less affluent countries' resources, enforcing their will through world financial institutions, free-trade agreements, and militaries, and leaving massive environmental destruction in their wake. So, although poverty in Africa may seem to have little to do with environmental destruction in Russia or wars in Iraq, these actually constitute interrelated global problems. Unequal development is often enforced by armed interventions, and competition over scarce ecological resources often leads to war. Militarism causes environmental destruction, and both exacerbate development problems. Worldwide environmental problems are linked directly to the implementation of mainstream development models.

These problems are not only interrelated, they are also gendered. Ecological destruction, unequal development, and militarism disproportionately affect women. The current environmental crises, increasing global inequalities, and military conflicts worldwide, including the current war with Iraq, can be understood only if we examine misguided development strategies, the militarization of global culture, and the persistent subordination of women as part of these processes. Studying one problem without considering the others can produce incomplete and artificial analyses. We can no longer think about women and development without considering both direct and structural violence, and these cannot be divorced from their impact on the environment. Examining the environment, development, and militarism through the lenses of gender highlights the invisibility and marginalization of women. Consider the following examples, which demonstrate how development models, environmental crises, and militarism are inextricably linked.

In Africa, war and maldevelopment have produced environmental disasters that have helped generate a nearly continent-wide food crisis. Military conflicts in Ethiopia, South Africa, West Africa, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Rwanda, Somalia, the Sudan, and elsewhere have promoted great internal migration throughout the continent as well as the inevitable environmental devastation caused by war. Conflicts often arise over land and natural resources in times of ecological scarcity, leading Robert Kaplan to conclude that armed conflicts over environmental resources will be the primary reason for future global instability.[6] Since the early 1970s, the rate of growth in food production has lagged well behind the demand in most sub-Saharan countries. This food crisis results from the failure of export-based development, from the monetization of African economies, and from the deforestation and desertification caused by development projects such as damming and timber clearing for market purposes. The increased scarcity often escalates military conflicts. Whether resulting from war or environmentally destructive development schemes, the food crisis especially harms women. In Kenya, women spend the same amount of time as men working to produce cash crops such as coffee. But they spend at least 18 times more time than men on basic life - maintenance tasks such as collecting water and firewood, preparing food, caring for children, and cleaning the house.[7] Providing for the family becomes more burdensome as war, environmental crises, and export-led development merge to make women's resource prospects bleaker and bleaker.

The previous Persian Gulf War, Daddy Bush's war, also illustrates how underdevelopment can foster war, and how war causes environmental and economic destruction. Both sides in the Gulf War deliberately destroyed the region's ecology as part of their war strategy. Iraq pumped oil into the sea, causing an oil slick approximately 80 miles long and 10 miles wide. About 600 oil wells were set afire in Kuwait. Likewise, as a result of U.S. ecological warfare - including the deliberate bombing of chemical facilities - black rain fell as far away as the Himalayas. The economic and ecological bases of the region are devastated. The Gulf War effectively obliterated any improvements in living conditions that were achieved after the Iran-Iraq War. The current administration promises to protect oil resources in the guise of environmental protection, manipulating reality in the current version of a resource war. U.S. consumption and its dominant development model still depend on access to resources, in this case, oil.

These examples show that we cannot think about violence, whether direct or structural, without considering women and development. This violence also cannot be divorced from its impact on the environment. Links between gender and militarism, development, and the environment prove to be the critical problems in the new world order. Barbie may not be in this house, but she may hold the key to our analysis.

Long-standing U.S. Militarization

The soldier in the world-house is continuous rather than discontinuous with long-standing U.S. militarization. The nations and societies that the United States has helped to militarize are too numerous to list here. The current war on terrorism is a continuation and possible intensification of earlier wars. The war on drugs as played out in Colombia, for example, disproportionately affects the poor, especially Afro Colombian and indigenous communities, resulting in internal displacement and massacres. Under Plan Colombia, initiated by former president Bill Clinton, 1.3 billion dollars will be provided to the Colombian government, 80 percent of it for military arms, making it the third-greatest recipient of U.S. arms after Israel and Egypt. You may have seen recent New York Times' pictures of soldiers guarding Colombian oil pipelines. Why, you may ask, are arms supplied for a drug war used to protect private oil companies?

My current research and work is with new migrants to the United States, and the militarization and violence at the United States-Mexico border is nothing new. Following September 11, 2001, terrorism was blamed in part on a too-porous border. Terrorists and "illegal" immigrants threatened national security and calls were made to "tighten" our borders. (I should note that immigrants without documents have always been criminalized and seen as "illegal." A further slippage has now occurred in which "illegals" are also viewed as "terrorists" or potential terrorists). The U.S. border, however, has been militarized for some time. Before September 11, 2001, border communities already lived in a "deconstitutionalized zone" in which U.S. Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies operated with impunity. In urban border areas such as Tijuana, walls have high-tech detection systems including heat sensors, stadium lights, retractable observation towers, all-terrain vehicles, helicopters, and so on, all portraying a United States at war with . . . ? In 1994, the U.S. Border Patrol initiated Operation Blockade, intensifying its efforts at urban crossings, thus forcing migrants to cross more dangerous terrain - deserts and rivers. Since 1994, over 2,000 migrant deaths have been documented. Border-crossing deaths doubled in the year following September 11, 2001. We can expect more border deaths (which will be under-reported and not counted as "war" deaths) and further erosion of migrant rights. This is the "collateral damage" of militarization at work in the borderlands. Yet the state of siege created by INS operations in border communities is a nonstory and the deaths invisible to most people. The soldier is in the house of the nation-state.

The soldier in the Toys R Us world-house shows us that land and peoples are at risk. U.S. military projects do not protect our world-home but protect misguided development models and rapacious environmental policies designed to favor the few. The challenge to us as feminists is to clearly articulate the message of Forward Command Post from Toys R Us. What does it mean that the soldier is in the house?

Endnotes

1. Editor's note: In the fall of 2002, Forward Command Post was widely available from toy stores and, notably, the J. C. Penney online catalog. After significant media coverage of and public outcry about the toy, it seems to have essentially disappeared from store shelves and the Internet. [Return to text]

2. Miriam Cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). [Return to text]

3. Andrea Smith, Position Paper (presented at Responding to Violence Colloquium, Barnard College, New York, October 2002), http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/respondingtoviolence/smith.htm. [Return to text]

4. Minoo Moallem, Position Paper (presented at Responding to Violence Colloquium, Barnard College, New York, October 2002), http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/respondingtoviolence/moallem.htm. [Return to text]

5. Moisés Naím, "Reinventing War," Foreign Policy 127 (November/December 2001): 31-46, at 31. [Return to text]

6. Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Cold War (New York: Vintage, 2001). [Return to text]