Biblical Promise and Threat in U.S. Imperialist Rhetoric Before and After September 11, 2001

“Saving” Afghan Women

To turn the eye to gender for a moment, perhaps the impulse in the United States to save the world from hidden threats is somewhere at work behind the sudden urge to save Afghan women from the veil.¹ Here gender is the site on which imperialist, apocalyptic, and covenantal discourses converge. Postcolonial feminist critics point out how the discourse of protection harms Afghan and Muslim women. At a panel, “Responding to War,” convened at Columbia University shortly after September 11, 2001, Lila Abu-Lughod suggested that the rhetoric of liberating Afghan women was just one more case – in Gayatri Spivak’s words² – of white men trying to save brown women from brown men. Taking this postcolonial critique as a premise, I would like briefly to consider the rhetoric whereby white men both assume savior complexes and use the fear of hidden threats to assure public support. To be very clear, I am in no way arguing that Afghan women should not have self-determination. But I am suspicious that the American will to “free them” is consistent with the rest of the apocalyptic and covenantal discourses being mobilized, and therefore operates from a base of fear, and also misogyny.

Evidently, the trope of rescuing women has played a major role in shutting down popular American resistance to the attacks on Afghanistan, even though it has been well recognized that the discourse of saving women is only a front for ongoing U.S. military activity in that country. The urgent need to rescue Afghan women is successful as a front, because it necessarily interacts with many other American discourses with pretensions to “saving.” As a front, however, it plays the important rhetorical role of tapping into the senses of inexorability and urgency that the prevalent apocalyptic and covenantal discourses carry. There is an urgency to “do something” to save the women of Afghanistan from the evil they face. The “something” that is accepted as the only option is American military aggression, because it fulfills expectations about the United States’ savior role in the world.

I wonder though, whether the ready acceptance of this mission to save Afghan women has also to do with the apocalyptic underside of the U.S. covenantal savior complex. Misogynist portrayals of female sexuality through apocalyptic imagery have in the past been used as motivations and justifications for the subjugation of women (as internal and external threats) in colonial contexts. Fear of women’s “secret” powers are typified by apocalyptic figures such as the Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17-18), and her more “secreted” latter-day Wiccan offspring, whose evil was “exposed” in the Salem witch hunts.³ Literary critic Mary Wilson Carpenter has suggested that the fear of women demonstrated by misogynist tropes in apocalyptic discourse bolsters male homosocial utopic visions, such as the apocalyptic vision of finding, conquering, and controlling new “heavenly” lands.⁴ Along these lines, religious studies scholar Catherine Keller draws connections between Christopher Columbus’s apocalyptic vision of the new world, his description of the new world as a woman’s nipple, and the corollary violation of the new world’s women and children.⁵

In other words, the fear and subsequent violation of women’s chosen mode of comportment is a theme familiar to feminist critics of the colonial uses of apocalyptic language. Certainly, the “freeing” of women has justified homosocial conquest after September 11, 2001. Is there anything more homosocial than the father-son war competition? As Castelli suggests, with characteristic acumen, “It is perhaps not incidental that the efforts of Bush-the-son since September 11 have had a decidedly Oedipal cast. One doesn’t need to be Freud or Fellini to understand Bush-the-Son’s assertion that his war will be bigger and longer than his father’s.”⁶ But beyond justifying the war and saving brown women from brown men, the United States has also “saved” the world from a mode of dress – one which hides women’s bodies from prying eyes – distinct from that prescribed by “universal” values. At a panel in New York City in March of 2002, sponsored by War Is Not the Answer, feminist academic and activist Silvia Federici made the point that there may be a fear of veiled women as the Other operating in the demand to free Afghan women. Federici derived her argument from Franz Fanon’s suggestion that the French were concerned about Algerian women unveiling, not because they cared about women’s freedom, but because it inhibited their proprietal gaze. If, on some level, a perceived threat of veiled women influenced the public’s acceptance of the bombing of Afghanistan, it was a perception consistent with apocalyptic misogyny.

1. There is a large body of literature on the complex set of colonial and postcolonial relations behind the problem of a Western drive to “unveil” Muslim women and on Muslim women’s political and social agency in wearing the veil, with which I cannot engage within the scope of this essay. See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Zohreh T. Sullivan, “Eluding the Feminist, Overthrowing the Modern? Transformations in Twentieth-Century Iran,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 215-42; Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1999); Minoo Moallem, “The Textualization of Violence in a Global World: Gendered Citizenship and Discourse of Protection,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 11-12 (December 1999-2000): 9-17; Minoo Moallem, “Transnationalism, Feminism, and Fundamentalism,” in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli with Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 119-45; and Homa Hoodfar, “The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: Veiling Practices and Muslim Women,” in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Castelli with Rodman, 420-46. [↩]
2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. [↩]
3. Caroline Vander Stichele, “Apocalypse, Art and Abjection: Images of the Great Whore,” in Culture, Entertainment and the Bible, ed. George Aichele (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 124-38; Pippin, Apocalyptic Bodies; and Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell. [↩]
4. Mary Wilson Carpenter, “Representing Apocalypse: Sexual Politics and the Violence of Revelation,” in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 107-35. See also Pippin, Apocalyptic Bodies; Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then; and Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse. [↩]
5. For a critique of Keller’s proposed alternatives to apocalyptic language, see Laura E. Donaldson, “The Breast of Columbus: A Political Anatomy of Postcolonial and Feminist Religious Discourse,” in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, ed. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41-61. [↩]
6. Castelli, “Globalization, Transnational Feminisms, and the Future of Biblical Critique.” [↩]