Media Representations of Women and the "Iraq War"

This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.” Because the so-called war in Iraq is unlike others in that there is no front-line, U.S. women have been engaged in combat along with men. Women soldiers, not technically allowed on the front lines, continue to see action, to kill and to be killed. A shortage of military personnel leads to stretching the rules regarding women in ground combat forces. But, reportedly, the American public is no longer shocked at the idea of women dying in war; there is no more attention paid to fallen women than fallen men. Women’s participation in integrated units for the most part goes unnoticed. The women in these units adjust by using newer forms of birth control to make their periods less frequent or eliminate them altogether; and the military has disbursed a portable urination device that women soldiers call a “weenus” for long road-trips. They find ways of adapting their bodies to the male standards of war. Women are serving and dying, but conservatives think women should be mothers and not killers. And some military policy-makers foresee reopening debates about women’s participation in combat once the war is over. It is telling that although women’s deaths in Iraq get little attention in the media or from the American public, women’s involvement in abusive treatment of “detainees” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba continue to haunt debates over acceptable interrogation techniques and American sentiments toward the war. In addition, the sexual nature of the abuse was used by some commentators to argue that women shouldn’t be in the military; and that their very presence unleashed sexual violence. Although the deaths of women in the war in Iraq received little attention, reports of women’s violence and abuse captured public imagination. Why? Why did the images of women abusers from Abu Ghraib generate so much press and media speculation? Elsewhere, I answer this question by analyzing both the media coverage and the events themselves within the context of a pornographic, or voyeuristic, way of looking at sex and violence, which is normalized through popular media. 1