Synopsis:
Maryam Khalid contributes to the transnational feminist theme of militarism and the war on terror in her chapter titled, “Feminist Perspectives on Militarism and War: Critiques, Contradictions, and Collusions”. This chapter synopsizes how a militaristic attitude has feminized and masculinized implications, and how militarism is naturalized in Western society. Khalid uses the war on terror as an example of how the West creates binaries based on a perceived “other” which is in this case the Muslim East. She asserts that war, aggression, and violence are seen as innately masculine, and thus, that nation states exercise violence in order to appear as masculine, dominant, and threatening to the rest of the world. She also writes about how militarism goes beyond state conflict and the prison industrial system. A militaristic society uses militarism in all areas of life by believing that violence and conflict are necessary and reasonable methods to resolve disputes.
Rationale:
This work is important to the canon of transnational feminism because it connects masculinity and femininity to the nation state. Because international discourse does not problematize dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity, these attitudes are connected to all international decision making. In this context, dominant constructions of gender influence the West’s construction of the terrorist and the binary between the West and the East. For example, Jasbir Puar illustrates in her work how Western constructs of the terrorist have racialized and heterosexist implications, as the terrorist is constructed as queered and exclusively a person of colour in dominant media. Furthermore, gender is central to the binary between the West and the East, because it constructs a dichotomy between masculinity of the West (“civilized, moral, and benevolent”) and masculinity of the Arab world (“barbaric, backward, oppressive, and deviant”) as well as constructs of free Western, white women as post-feminist agents compared to oppressed, helpless brown women (Nayak, 2006 & Khalid, 2011, as cited in Khalid, 2015). Thus, discourse surrounding the war on terror is important to transnational feminism because it considers how racialized constructs of gender encourage the West to vilify the East and allow for continued colonization and military conflict.
URL/Link: doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943494.013.006
Keywords: War on terror, Orientalism, Western hegemony, Binaries
Author: jbb28
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