Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson's War’

Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.     

‘You Are a Girl’

Feminist scholarship has shown how gender is integral to understanding war, and that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was partly legitimated through a reference to Afghan women's ‘liberation’. Recognizing this, the article analyses how gender is crucial also to understanding the practice of ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Because this type of warfare aims at ‘winning hearts and minds’, it is in engaging the population that a notable gendered addition to the US military strategy surfaces, Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Citing ‘cultural sensitivity’ as a key justification, the US deploys all-female teams to engage with and access a previously untapped source of intelligence and information, namely Afghan women. Beyond this being seen as necessary to complete the task of population-centric counterinsurgency, it is also hailed as a progressive step that contributes to Afghan women's broader empowerment. Subjecting population-centric counterinsurgency to feminist analysis, this article finds that in constructing women both as ‘practitioners’ and ‘targets’, this type of warfare constitutes another chapter in the various ways that their bodies have been relied upon for its ‘success’.     

POPULISM AND SPECTACLE

In On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau proposes that the reputedly ‘empty’ rhetorical excess of populism constitutes the ontological and aesthetic ground on which the existence of an entity called ‘the people’ depends. This essay considers the tensions and affinities between the particular set of aesthetic relations that Laclau attributes to populist rhetoric, on the one hand, and the set of apparently techno-economic relations that Guy Debord describes as the logic of spectacle in The Society of the Spectacle, on the other, arguing that Laclau's conception of populism compels us to recast the ontological problem of the relation that Debord describes between the social and the spectacular in expressly aesthetic terms. Beginning from this premise, the essay contends that the ‘empty’ aesthetic conventions likewise associated with spectacular entertainment – and in particular, the staging of the relation between audience and onstage spectacle that defines the variety showcase aesthetic in this account – enact a set of tropic relations that constitutes the audience as a generalized figure of ‘the people’ in much the same terms as Laclau's rhetoric. Tracing this aesthetic logic through an especially charged performance from the history of blackface minstrelsy, the essay concludes by considering how such a staging of the relation between populism and spectacle might challenge the dominant models for understanding what constitutes ‘popular’ aesthetic form within Cultural Studies, and in the process, afford new critical insights into the formal dimension of Laclau's political logic.     

‘We Were All Involved’: The ‘Great Violence of 2008–2012’ on the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez Border

Abstract

This article discusses El Paso–Ciudad Juárez residents’ experiences of the ‘Great Violence of 2008–2012’ in the border region between the United States and Mexico. As a result of the Mexican government’s ‘war’ on organised crime, launched by President Felipe Calderón in 2016, the region saw a wave of violence that created mayhem, thousands of deaths, and a vast sense of insecurity among the border community. The physical sites border residents had access to – or were denied entrance to – had a fundamental significance for their everyday existence. By the same token, the refusal to succumb to spatial restrictions, or claiming space for oneself despite ongoing atrocities, served as an empowering way to deal with the threat of violence. Drawing on 54 interviews and 22 written testimonies, the article claims that the intersection of spatiality and agency is central in conceptualising experiences of security/insecurity caused by the violence. It argues that spatial strategising provided tools with which the various parties involved exercised their agency in imposing, coping with and countering violence. The discussion concludes by problematising the intersecting issues of agency, involvement and complicity as broader ethical and epistemological questions invoked by the study of violence.     

‘Gutsy’ Decisions and Passive Processes

Abstract

The Obama administration has positioned itself against the militarized discourse of the Bush-era Global War on Terror (GWOT) by articulating a ‘return to the rule of law’. And yet, the figure of the US decision-maker remains as masculinized and militarily-oriented as ever. I demonstrate this seeming incongruity through an analysis of: first, the decision to render the Christmas Day (would-be) bomber of 2009 to the criminal justice system, a decision for which Obama was labelled ‘weak’ (hence feminine) on terrorism; and second, the killing of Osama bin Laden by the US Navy SEALs special operations team, a decision which reaffirmed Obama's warrior credentials, since it proved that he was the ‘strong’ (hence masculine) commander-in-chief. Both cases demonstrate that the hegemony of the masculine ‘warrior decision-maker’ remains privileged and facilitates the re-emergence of the GWOT ‘war machine’, despite the Obama administration's commitment to change.     

The US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief

This article analyses the US response under former President George W. Bush to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic at the intersection of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, highlighting the various ways their distinct gender logics collide to reproduce masculine privilege and gender inequalities on a global scale. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the United States global HIV/AIDS policy and is the largest commitment made by any single nation for an international health project. My analysis is based on PEPFAR's ‘formal’ policy texts, including its authorizing legislation, five-year strategic framework and specific policy directives for recipient organizations. In addition, I examine more ‘informal’ texts like Congressional reports and Presidential speeches delivered by George W. Bush on various occasions. Drawing on a rich body of feminist ethnographic work in the fields of global governance, international political economy, organizational theory and sexuality and masculinity studies, the following article examines the various ways market-based norms and practices can legitimate the moral imperatives of neo-conservatism to promote ‘traditional’ values and institutions in the global South as leading solutions to global problems and insecurities.     

The Problems of Public Relations: Eisenhower,Latin America and the Potential Lessons for the Bush Administration

Abstract

Accompanied by intense media interest, President George W. Bush visited Latin America in March 2007. The trip, it seemed, was a rather obvious attempt to try and improve inter-American relations by demonstrating that the US did care about is neighbours to the South; to counter the seemingly endless bad press and repair some of the damage done to the American brand by Bush's policies and the influence of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. As this article will demonstrate, though, this was reminiscent of another era: that of the 1950s and the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Throughout his eight years in office, Eisenhower would consistently use public relations operations as a way of improving inter-American relations. However, the intense problems that this eventually brought about suggest that the present administration may have been misguided in its attempts to follow a similar path to its Republican predecessor's.     

Playing with materiality: an agential-realist reading of SethBling's Super Mario World code-injection

ABSTRACT

This article takes inspiration from Youtuber and software developer ‘SethBling’ and his 2016 ‘code-injection’ (Bling, 2016), in which, using only a standard Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller and in-depth knowledge of the console, he ‘injected’ and executed the code of popular mobile game Flappy Bird (Nguyen, 2013) into a running instance of Super Mario World (Miyamoto, 1990), effectively transforming one game into another through play. Drawing from this I propose a performative understanding of videogames (and software in general) to reinvigorate discussions of software's materiality. Though it is possible to contrast Wendy Chun's (2008a) suggestion that one can view software as ‘vaporous’ against Friedrich Kittler's (1995) assertion that ‘there is no software’, I propose a more holistic approach. Academics and users alike should attempt to see software as living a double-life: as simultaneously solid as it is (metaphorically) gaseous. It then becomes possible to embrace software(s) as performative examples of the entangled ‘phenomena’, suggested by Barad (2007), that produce everyday reality through quantum activity. I explore SethBling's code-injection suggesting that actions clearly reveal software's double existence as both tangible ‘thing’, locatable on magnetic memory, and as a vaporous non-entity. Accepting these propositions together, software can be understood as continuously re-emerging through shared activities. Following Barad, I conclude that this quality is not unique to software, but software – and videogames above all – are a useful tool for understanding a vision of reality that favours activity over materiality as the basis of our existence.     

The tyranny of the moral majority: American religion and politics since the pilgrim fathers

Abstract

Americans claim to be the most religious people in the Christian world. Religion has informed their politics ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, who began the tyranny of the majority which Tocqueville outlined in Democracy in America (1985), his version of Aristotle's ‘ochlocracy’. In recent times this has taken the form of the ‘moral majority’ institutionalized by Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists who set out to capture the Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan. In fact, it was never a majority: ‘born again’ Christians, not all of the right‐wing in politics, were less than one fifth of a national sample in 1980 ‐ a third of African Americans, who voted ten to one against Reagan. Nonetheless they influenced every President from Eisenhower to Bush, and they are the major force behind the move to impeach Clinton. Since they failed, they may now give way for a more moderate politics of Christian forgiveness.     

INSTRUMENTAL AND GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE

This essay examines the torture and death of Gul Rahman in the CIA secret prison/black site known as the Salt Pit, located in northern Kabul, Afghanistan. Virtually excised from the public record, his name and death are mentioned in footnote 28 of the Classified Response to the US Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility Classified Report. This report, prepared by Counsel for Jay S. Bybee, is a detailed and lengthy repost to the accusation made by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) that Judge Bybee's memo (1 August 2002) to Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, authorized some forms of torture that contravened the US Torture Statute – 18 U.S.C. § 2340, which defines torture and declares it to be a federal crime. In its Report, the OPR concludes that Judge Bybee ‘committed professional misconduct’. In what follows, I proceed to discuss the details of Gul Rahman's torture and death in the CIA Salt Pit in the context of the Bybee memo and his Counsel's response to the OPR's condemnatory report in order to flesh out the relations of legal and governmental power that were instrumental in establishing US regimes of torture and death in the CIA secret prisons. In delineating the forces that were operative in the torture and death of Rahman, I proceed to identify two intersecting modalities of violence – instrumental and gratuitous. In the concluding section of this essay, my analysis of the torture and death of Rahman is framed by the literal and tropological dimensions of redaction, as that legal process that edits and censors a document of any secret or sensitive information. I argue that the process of redaction must be seen as producing, analogically, its own discursive black sites of silence, loss and death.     

Moby-Dick and the American Empire

Abstract

This article explores the parallels between the narrative tropes of Moby-Dick and the conduct of the Mexican War of 1846–48. Drawing on the theories of Austin and Butler, the article develops an account of the performative speech acts deployed by President James K. Polk in order to secure Congressional support for the war, and the rhetorical power exercised by Ahab on the Pequod. It also examines in detail Melville’s use of the Biblical figures of King Ahab and Belshazzar, showing how the novel turns the Biblical-republican typology used in the American Revolution against the British to indict America’s own practice of imperialism. The article concludes by reflecting on both the vision of perpetual war which Melville presents as the consequence of Polk’s assumption of imperial power, and the parallels between Polk’s prosecution of the war with Mexico and the US invasion of Iraq.     

ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN J. M. COETZEE

This essay reads J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year in its historical context (the moment of the US war in Iraq, Abu Graib, Guantanamo and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism), while also probing the problems at stake in the practice of contextual reading and of taking the work as staging the opinions of the biographical Coetzee. The essay teases out not only the question of whether Coetzee should be seen as a public intellectual (the short but not entirely satisfactory answer is ‘no’), but also how the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ play out in his oeuvre and are helpful in pondering Coetzee's approach to questions of genre, censorship and authorship.     

Extractivismo unearthed: a genealogy of a radical discourse

This article provides a genealogy of extractivismo discourse. In South America, the critical discourse of extractivismo has shifted political horizons and fomented a protracted intraleft dispute. Decades of neoliberalism unified popular movements to resist austerity and recuperate national sovereignty, but the ascendency of leftist administrations across the continent fragmented the field of radical politics. Ecuador exemplifies this internecine conflict: environmental and indigenous activists and allied intellectuals crafted the discourse of extractivismo to resist President Rafael Correa’s ‘21st century socialism’. State actors assert that oil and mining revenues will trigger economic development. But anti-extractive activists contend that ‘the extractive model’ pollutes the environment, violates collective rights, reinforces dependency on foreign capital, and undermines democracy. Drawing on 14 months of archival and ethnographic research, I recover the source discourses of extractivismo and outline the conditions of their coalescence into a novel problematic. I trace extractivismo to the neoliberal period (1981–2006). In that period, I identify the co-existence of two distinct critiques of resource extraction, which I call resource radicalisms: resource nationalism and proto-anti-extractivism. But alongside it, in their struggle for territorial sovereignty and collective rights, Amazonian indigenous groups articulated the discursive elements that would later be unified by the term extractivismo. I argue that a particular conjuncture – the election of a leftist President, the rewriting of the Constitution, and the government’s avid promotion of extractive projects – enabled the crystallization of extractivismo discourse. Anti-extractive resistance in turn triggered a tectonic political realignment: activists that once fought for the nationalization of natural resources now oppose all resource extraction, a leftist President finds himself in conflict with the social movements who initially supported his election, and the left-in-power has become synonymous with the aggressive expansion of extraction. Finally, I consider the tension between extractivismo-as-critique and its capacity to generate collective action.     

Fathers,others: The sacrificial victim in Freud,Girard, and Levinas

Abstract

This paper derives from an interest in murder. This interest began through reading fictional narratives which ceaselessly stage and restage scenes of murder; but it has also become clear that a range of theoretical texts are no less preoccupied with the basic question, ‘Why kill?’ (see Davis, 2000). In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Freud, Girard and Levinas, directly address the question of murder, its causes and consequences. In each case, the theoretical question turns out to depend upon a minimal core narrative in which the stakes of murder are crystallized; rival theoretical accounts are thus also bound up in a competition of stories. As this paper traces a common concern from Freud's Totem and Taboo, through Girard's La Violence et le sacré, to Levinas's Totalité et infini, the question ‘Why kill?’ gets entangled with the dynamics of storytelling and the issue of what it means to do theory.     

The ‘gong beat’ against the ‘uncultured’: contested notions of culture and civilization in Mongolia

This article explores the Mongolian concept of ‘culture’ (soyol) and its transformation in the state socialist and post-socialist eras. The notion of culture and those without it – the soyolgui or ‘uncultured’ – played enormously important parts in the construction of the new society of the Mongolian People’s Republic. The history of the twentieth century shows a transformation of this highly normative concept from a category associated with teachings, doctrine, ethics and nurturing to one linked to modernist notions of hygiene, secular education, urbanism and cosmopolitanism. In addition, however, it became a category that included a set of historical styles and works thought of as national ‘cultural heritage’ (soyolyn öv). This was the result of a movement that in the late socialist period led to the critical re-evaluation of earlier Eurocentric uses of the ‘culture’ concept, and that sought new applications of the notion of ‘civilization’ – in particular by popularizing the metaphorical term ‘nomadic civilization’ (nüüdliin soyol irgenshil). I argue that these strands of thought have become central to the new nationalist politics of post-socialist Mongolia and form the basis of what remains by way of political orthodoxy, following the collapse of Soviet ideology.     

Carl Schmitt’s politics in the age of drone strikes: examining the Schmittian texture of Obama’s enemy

When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.     

Black Lives/White Backgrounds: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Critical Race Theory

How do you criticise a hierarchical racial formation that is rendered nearly invisible by its colour (white) and positioning (background) in the contemporary, so-called colour-blind or post-racial US? The reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric that this essay will undertake seeks to offer a response to this question utilising some key insights from Critical Race Theory (CRT). As they are understood here, both CRT and Citizen offer counter-stories by ‘call[ing] out’ to what you ‘don’t see’, specifically to America’s racial formations so as to promote colour-consciousness and an anti-racist critique. Beginning with a discussion of the relationship between literary and legal narratives, followed by two sections on Rankine’s rhetorical strategies, this essay ends by closely reading her texts about Trayvon Martin, who was murdered on 26 February 2012.     

Can a Poll Affect Perception of Candidate Traits?

During presidential elections, poll results frequently are presentedin the news. Reporters use these polls to tell the public whatit thinks about the presidential candidates. We argue that pollingresults tell the public what it should think about the presidentialcandidates as well. This study outlines how a character traitthat is not usually used to assess presidential candidates wasput into play during the 2004 presidential campaign. By repeatedlyascribing "stubbornness" to incumbent president George W. Bush,Democratic challenger John Kerry may have prompted this trait’sinclusion in a Los Angeles Times summer 2004 survey. The poll’sevidence that the public saw Bush as more stubborn than Kerrythen produced an attribute agenda-setting effect that strengthenedthe link between that term and Bush. Using data from the NationalAnnenberg Election Survey, we argue that the news coverage ofthis Los Angeles Times poll increased the salience of the trait"stubborn" in assessing President George W. Bush during Juneof the 2004 presidential campaign.     

Catch,class and bureaucracy: the meaning of Joseph Heller's Catch 22

The expression‘Catch 22’has become part of the language, routinely employed without further explanation in newspapers, television programmes and everyday speech, and invoked without further reference in the learned papers of both British and American authors.¹ A related, but less common tendency, which serves to identify admirers of the novel, is the predisposition to see particular incidents and characters as exemplars of the world beyond its pages.² Ransacking the text for such Goffmanesque parallels can, at a minimum, contribute to a kind of world weary higher gossip and a repertoire of novel epithets for characterising faculty committees. This is clearly not what so perceptive a political theorist as John Schaar had in mind when he located Catch 22 between Horatio Alger and Goodman's Growing Up Absurd as one of those books which, for Americans at least, has ‘had important effects on our political life’.³ Indeed one critic has even suggested that Yossarian, the central character, was a role model for those Vietnam war draft resisters, evaders and AWOL veterans who chose exile in Sweden and elsewhere.⁴ Whatever the status of this and similar contentions (and prescience seems a more plausible claim than influence) my intention is not to establish the precise impact of Catch 22 on attitudes and action. I am, however, concerned to explain the basis of its popularity. Hence my tactics are to reconstruct how the novel works on its reader and to suggest the ways in which this connects with, and selects for, a public which occupies a distinctive social and cultural situation. That public, it is argued, is all but coextensive with Gouldner's ‘New Class’,⁵ and the form style and structure of Catch 22 dramatises the sociolinguistic implications of the contradiction which characterises the New Class's social position. Moreover the book provides a symbolic solution to that contradiction. For Heller, method, ideas and sensibility are linked in a strategy which both uncovers the use of language as a bureaucratic resource and uses the resources of language to uncover bureaucracy.⁶     

Mediating potency and fear: action movies’ affect

ABSTRACT

Action movies participate in the administration of fear [Virilio, P., 2012. The administration of fear. Translated by Ames Hodges. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)], and the networked affects of contemporary warfare [Anderson, B., 2013. Targeting affective life from above: morale and airpower. In: P. Adey, M. Whitehead, and A.J. Williams, eds. From above: war, violence and verticality. London: Hurst & Company]. Through a sensory assault of intense bass soundtracks, kinetic camera movements, and intense CGI effects action movies work to produce what Steven Shaviro has termed ‘intensity effects’ [Shaviro, S., 2010. Post-cinematic affect. Winchester: Zero Books]. These intensity effects mediate between the age of terror's ecology of fear [Massumi, Brian, 2002. Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham: Duke University Press] and our bodies. Rather than producing fear, action movies work to dispel fear by producing potency and bolstering resolve. We can thus understand action movies as participating in the biopolitical effects of contemporary warfare. Affect is globalized and intensified through action movies’ aesthetics, with the aim of producing a kind of drone subject. Robin James significantly posits a drone atmosphere where our perceptual limit reconfigures through ‘droning’ – the creation of an affective timbre [James, R., 2013. Drones, sound, and super-panoptic surveillance. Cyborgology]. As James argues, ‘[d]roning rivets you to material conditions, affects, and sensations that compel you to behave in specific ways, and not in others’ (n.p.). So while drones currently work overseas to target morale, action movies work on the home front to target our potency and resolve and so engender a mode of sensation that also functions as action. Affect works as a translator, where sensation is displaced into the feeling of having acted. In having acted, we are led to believe that we are safe from fear, which can be understood as a pharmakon. We are kept safe by action movies’ mediation of potency and fear.