What Single-Sex Classrooms Have to Do with the Militarization of Women’s Bodies
Robin Truth Goodman
As a defense I’m neutered and spayed
What the hell am I trying to say?
It is now time to make it unclear
To write off lines that don’t make sense
I love myself better than you
—Nirvana, “On a Plain” (1991)
In 2008, the Florida state legislature, by a nearly unanimous vote, rushed the passage of a statute that allowed sex segregation in public school classrooms.1 According to the version of the bill that passed through the Florida House, sex-segregated public school classrooms would be an expansion of school choice, and would be implemented only voluntarily. The Florida bill follows a national trend, coming on the heels of a 2004 federal provision. Early in 2009 it was reported in the New York Times that 445 sex-segregated classrooms and 95 sex-segregated public schools have arisen nationwide for the purpose of solving “sagging test scores and behavioral problems.”2 This trend is happening despite a 1991 Supreme Court decision in Garrett v. Board of Education where the court decided that single-sex classrooms violated the Fourteenth Amendment. That case, however, was in response to proposals to establish public schools for African American males in Detroit in order to resolve “self-esteem” issues, and the girls’ parents combined with National Organization of Women (NOW) advocates filed the complaint, arguing that there was no evidence that single-sex classrooms cured self-esteem issues in African American males.3 There is still no evidence today, though the argument continues to be used, but now by NOW and for girls.
Asking why—if they do not make education “better”—sex-segregated classrooms have such a growing appeal, this paper argues that the defense of single-sex classrooms uses girls’ bodies—in line with the liberal tradition—as symbols of the limits of state regulatory authority and public interventions, and that the appearance of such limits helps to set in place a market fundamentalist or neoliberal ideology.4 In fact, arguments for sex segregation in schools intersect with aspects of arguments for the growing involvement of women in U.S. military combat, particularly when it comes to reappropriating women’s working bodies as evidence of free market successfulness as well as the ineffectiveness and immorality of enforcing regulatory restrictions on (labor) markets. In this chapter, I argue that the logic of privatization inhabits different spheres of political life in ways that cross-fertilize. I look at two recent accounts of women in military service: Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, which tells of her participation as an Arabic translator in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Brigadier General Janis Karpinski’s One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story, which follows Karpinski’s career path—a woman pioneering in a “man’s army,” in her own description—as she rises to become—finally, after many tests, trials, and tribulations—the officer overseeing prisons in Iraq until the Abu Ghraib torture photographs are exposed in 2004. Both these memoirs talk about women’s inclusion in the military as evidence of growing but not yet realized gender equality in U.S. culture and work regimes.
The memoirs share with arguments about sex segregation in schools the underlying sense that other people’s sex and desire restrict the self-determination of women’s bodies that markets—particularly, labor markets—require and, in fact, enhance. Giving first-hand “real” accounts of women’s experience in military service and exploring their new relation to combat, books like these memoirs of women soldiers respond to a cultural need to explain the paradox of democracy’s relation to women. That is, the current wars display a fundamental contradiction in their sexual logic: on the one hand, their mainstream rationale is at least in part presented as the spread of democracy and choice, particularly for women, and, on the other hand, the army that carries forward this promise is itself democratically compromised by not promoting equality within its own ranks. The paradox of democracy surfaces as an ambivalence over women’s work: such memoirs show women as working, on the one hand, outside of the private sphere as their bodies become abstracted in the technological-rational workforce in a warring culture. However, the connection of women and the private sphere is still maintained as the target of corporate-rational appropriation with its direct investment, labor deregulation, and accumulation through national dispossession.
Some feminists have alluded to women fighters as evidence of the democratization of the armed forces and, by association, of public participation for women. The New York Times, for example, celebrates the democratization and equality brought to the armed forces by women’s combat this way: “Despite longstanding fears about how the public would react to women coming home in coffins, Americans have responded to their deaths and injuries no differently than to those of male casualties.”5 The New York Times here seems to find a lot to celebrate that women, once dead, achieve equality in the ranks. I argue here, rather, that with the technological-rational erasure of women’s bodily difference, assumptions about women’s sexual differences continue to play three alternative symbolic roles that diminish public sphere authority rather than expand it: 1) former attributes of women’s bodily difference can now be found delineating hierarchical differences between cultures; 2) women’s involvement in combat has meant also a dissipation of the line separating the battle from civilian domestic life—where the battlefield appears as the most vibrant or only form of a public sphere—and an equally disappearing distinction between soldiers and citizens. This collapse of the citizen into the soldier hides behind a conceptual take-over of political functions by market enforcement; and 3) this new understanding of combat has meant a transformation in the division of labor: the symbolic cartography of the public/private split has moved from one between women and men, to one between the sphere of laboring national citizens and the sphere of unregulated labor: private contract labor or commercialized, informal entrepreneurs.
I show these women’s narratives of equality in the military to be symbolically part of a broader cultural narrative of privatizing civil society by reprivatizing women’s work that debates over single-sex classrooms also affirm. The “choice” of the desexualization of girls’ bodies in single-sex classrooms provides a quintessential mise-en-scène for loosening the alienating controls on girls’ minds and bodies under the gaze, intertwined with a call to free up labor freedoms that the demand for women in combat also invokes. The idea that sexual integration in one instance and sexual segregation in the other are both upheld as proof of rising equality, “choice,” and democratization makes evident that there are larger stakes at play. The campaign that supports school “choice” that sex-segregation is supposed to enhance participates in a movement to dismantle public schools by encouraging an exodus that looks voluntary. Kenneth J. Saltman has shown that the current practice of public school privatization reform “attempts to bring privatization through the back door by forcing school districts to allow students to leave ‘failing’ school districts to attend better ones.”6 As The Atlantic’s Wendy Kaminer has argued about the establishment of single-sex public school education, the discursive formulation of women’s combat integration is also “part of a campaign by conservative elites to dismantle the public […] through privatization.”7 The logic for schools is to reveal that public co-education has failed by producing numbers of students who “choose” an alternative. The change in the idea of the “private” that arguments for school segregation assume is partner to the logic of military expansion through the evolution of military organization into networks of privatized security, provisional, and service tasks.
I am concerned in this chapter about the ways that women’s bodies are being used to naturalize the economic turn towards privatization in a neoliberal age. The second wave of feminist theory developed a narrative of liberalism which exposed how women’s bodies were symbolically shoring up the domestic sphere as representing both citizens’ and labor’s autonomy from the state and the economy in ways that, in the name of abstract equality, reinforced social inequality. “Woman has ovaries, a uterus,” Simone de Beauvoir famously quipped, “these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity.”8 References to bodily sexual differences, such readings forewarn, determine women as essentially mired in the subordinate class of the private sphere, and equality could only be achieved in a total obliteration of the inextricable private-domestic partnership. Such references portray women as disassociated from politics and citizenship and as performing work that does not reside within the framework of wages and rights. On the other hand, equality— Shulamith Firestone, for example, insists—requires that the private sphere, and its companion sexual difference, be completely wiped out and replaced by technological-rational means now available: “[t]he reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by […] artificial reproduction […]. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.”9 The current phase of technologized militarism ushers in the displacement of the residual autonomous private sphere of the liberal home into the structure of private corporate governance.
Neoliberal culture has appropriated the disassociation between women’s bodies and state regulatory restrictions that the domestic sphere under industrialism maintained.10 When, for example, John Stuart Mill extolled “the most suitable division of labour between two persons” as the arrangement where “the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure,”11 he was creating the sense of what we now call a deregulated “free trade zone” that made the bodies of women a naturalized limit to state authority. In the so-called post-industrial era, when the sexual division of labor between the home and the factory has been superseded (at least as a dominant), the symbolic link between women’s work and state non-intervention persists. One need only look so far as 2008 initiatives by both JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to invest in business education for women in the Third World. Right at the same moment as these banks’ deregulatory practices were going to cause world financial markets to come crumbling down around them, provoking worldwide havoc throughout the systems they had created, Goldman Sachs was investing in the same model of business and management education for 10,000 women in 16 countries, over four continents, with the hope, their promotional video announces, of global “economic and social growth,”12 that is, translating their failed policies directly to Third World investments in women-run businesses by bypassing the regulatory state. The video depicts such projects as a local caterer and a crafts-manufacturer, with women—using words like “strategy” and “leveraging”—working in the home, maintaining domestic gendered roles and the division of labor of the family as a productive unit that has historically signaled the outside of state interventions. Such forms of labor can be feminized as, like the industrialized home, beyond oversight, and often consolidate themselves through the practices of First-World corporate management in Third-World labor-intensive settings.
One can see this scenario playing out in new “reconstruction” policies that stand in for the new imperialism. One can look, for example, at a November 13, 2009 New York Times article taking up the military’s line that counterinsurgency is still possible in Afghanistan in the form of small-grants development projects investing directly in villages. The article responds to the malaise surrounding the war in U.S. public debate due to the obvious corruption in the Kabul administration that the U.S. supports—evidenced in the 2009 presidential elections, where polling stations were able to produce ballots even without voters, and a host of other indiscretions were on widespread display. The corruption in the Kabul administration does not really matter for U.S. efforts, the New York Times infers, because money does not need to be filtered through the central government to reach the population of the needy or for development. Instead, money can find its way to village councils where it can back projects that communities themselves decide through local governance, with a little bit of help from foreign private contractors and non-profit groups. “Local residents contend that the councils work,” writes reporter Sabrina Tavernise, “because they take development down to its most basic level with villagers directing the spending to improve their own lives, cutting out the middle men, local and foreign, as well as much of the overhead costs and corruption.”13 The message here is that development can happen without the state, and that insurgencies are best put to rest through privatization.
The outcome in The New York Times is the same one that we see endlessly offered in report after report about developmental success: that is, girls’ schools were constructed. The idea is that schools (and therefore liberalism) can only appear in these backward, savage, warlord-torn regions with private foreign investment that does not need to pass through a regulatory, democratic body like a state. This is the plot, for example, of Greg Mortenson’s best-selling Three Cups of Tea, where the brawny Greg descends from the mountains like Moses or Paul Bunyan to build schools in Pakistani and Afghani villages whose poverty and lack of schools “prove” that the state has failed. Comments from eager fans like “Arab nations should look at your tremendous work and wallow in shame for never helping their own people”14 seem to nail shut the case. The quintessential rugged individual Mortenson, heroically and against all odds and in the face of personal danger to himself, pursues the adventure of raising money for the schools by soliciting private investments from his oh-so-rich-but-oh-so-generous mountain-expedition-buddies and other private donors and then returns to Asia with wooden planks and other building materials which the villagers dutifully assemble on their own design and initiative, weather permitting. The hard-core clerics at first resist but fall quickly into line. Once the schools are built, education automatically just happens—without struggles, contentions, or mishaps—and ambitious young naturally-talented girls study hard and become doctors. Girls’ education also produces staffing for the tiny businesses that Mortenson sets up “for the rural poor, like bicycle taxis and cigarette stands, that could quickly turn a profit on a small investment.”15 Such reports assume that the local, small-scale sale of cigarettes and the like is enough to end such violence, hunger, and poverty. Not mentioned is the fact that, actually, the state has been supported as a puppet of foreign interests that might have their own reasons for claiming that the Afghani or Pakistani authorities do not educate their public and that the state has failed. That is, neither the New York Times reporter nor Mortenson draw a connection between the corrupt election of a U.S.-supported government and the absence of schools. This conclusion gets covered over by the conclusion that the Afghanis themselves are responsible for the production of backwardness and ignorance, and only private capital can fix this.
In the neoliberal era, the symbolic re-functioning of women’s bodies is marking certain spaces as autonomous, that is, as directly accessible to capital without the state stepping in to manage. In the older days of industrial development, as noted economist Samir Amin has shown, investments were funneled through state bureaucracies—even relatively weak ones—that were to control and operate projects affecting a national territory or a national population solidified for the most part by a national army. “Until recently,” Amin documents, “the expansion of capitalism was founded on the coincidence between the space in which the reproduction of accumulation was determined and the space of its political and social management: the space of the central national state shaped the structure of the international system. Now, however, we have entered a new era characterized by a separation between the globalized space of capitalism’s economic management and the national spaces of its political and social management.”16 Borders of the nation-state are no longer the prime orientation of economic policies, investments, and strategies. Feminist anthropologist Aihwa Ong calls the resulting direct influx of capital “graduated sovereignties,” and what she means by this is an end to the nation-state as a point of reference for the promotion of markets in the Third World and a focus instead on specific areas of exploitation. Corporate economic actors, she says, have “fragmented the national territory and the population,”17 producing regions of differential neglect where states cede control, often in line with racial or ethnic population dispersements. The geography of development investment results “not from an anemic state apparatus but from a deliberative neoliberal calculation as to which areas and which populations are advantageous or not advantageous in appealing to global markets.”18 Flexibilized networks of economic activities and outcomes, linked to nodes of productivity that may be in other countries or continents, such transnational zones are often exempt from tax policies and tariffs, and also witness wage depression, deskilling, and the frequent harassment of union organizers. They attract rural migrant workers who, for the most part, are women.
Emphatic claims that women supply the best route to increasing global productivity for corporate-private rather than national accumulation are finding their way into the mainstream press with the backing, the reporters note, of both the World Bank and the U.S. military: “In many poor countries,” Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times, for example, reminds us, “the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold, it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.”19 These new mechanisms of “women’s empowerment” like girls’ education and micro-credit often generate minor incomes for communities based on the exploitation of the family structure, as the entire family unit is mobilized towards a specific service like—the example that Kristof gives— embroidery for tourists. In such endeavors, women’s specific domestic roles can be capitalized on by direct foreign finance and direct foreign consumption. Women’s domestication is now representing the symbolic autonomy of such new corporatizing technologies. The effect is to expropriate the bodies of women directly into abstract networks of task-specific manufacturing units set up to appear as domestic simulation. With the domestic sphere appropriated as a profit vessel belonging to a depersonalized private foreign interest, privatization results in alienation, but, mediated through the bodies of women, this alienation is cheered on as the natural and moral grounds of freedom and prosperity.
The research routinely shows that single-sex classrooms have no proven or provable effect on educational “success.” A 1998 study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) found that sex-segregated classrooms did not make education “better.” “There is no evidence,” the researchers conclude, “that single-sex education in general ‘works’ or is ‘better’ than coeducation. The ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of any K–12 single-sex initiative is relative to a particular group of students in a particular setting and a given set of academic social objects. Claims that single-sex education is inherently ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than coeducation beg the questions: What constitutes a ‘good’ education? And for whom?”20 Furthermore, they add the obvious, “No learning environment, single-sex or coed, provides a sure escape from sexism.”21
Much of the advocacy for “choice” in public single-sex classrooms is based on a stated moral impetus of developing self-esteem. Yet, the shoddy evidence for self-esteem suggests rather emphatically that quantifying measurements of self-esteem are imprecise and misleading, often based on whimsical or trivial questions—like are you “happy the way that [you are]”—whose correlations to a certain set of feelings, outcomes, or behaviors have, at best, cataclysmic margins of error.22 More stridently, single-sex schools and colleges seem to assume and reinforce gender stereotypes. Common answers to why women at Smith like single-sex education were that they “didn’t have to worry about their appearance in class” or, as a 1971 survey found, they did not have to be concerned that academic competitiveness would make them “unfeminine.”23 Though formulated as reasons for alternative types of cognitive attention, stereotypes used to defend cognitive sex differences more than often focus on bodily detail: “Mr. Cannon had experimented with after-school tutoring,” reports The New York Times about an all-boys’ public school in Manhattan, “playing sports with students and their fathers on weekends […] Test scores improved enough.”24 When asked why he favored his single-sex learning environment, one 11-year-old student responded, “I like learning how to be a man,” and then explained by commenting, “To put on deodorant.”25 Outside of such wielding of clichés about gender and the body, Wendy Kaminer observes, “[S]tudies do not show that girls fare better in single-sex schools,” and there is absolutely “no consensus” among psychologists that there are cognitive differences between the sexes that would lead to different learning behaviors or needs.26
Despite the contrary and insubstantial conclusions of available research, those Floridians advocating for the bill argued—apparently persuasively—that sex segregation would lead to more equality in public school instruction and higher test scores, as reported in the Florida Sun’s Tallahassee bureau.27 They claimed that girls and boys had different learning habits and needs: that is, girls learned differently than boys. The main difference, the reports cited, was that boys needed to move around in order to learn better, and were more spatially and physically oriented, while girls could remain still. “‘Boys learn differently,’ said Wise, a former teacher. ‘They like to move around.’”28 The New York Times’s coverage identifies the problems of coeducation with too much sexual interest getting in the way of “focus,” student-teacher bonding, “independence,” a “sense of community,” or “participation.”29 In other words, gender equality in schools is premised on a conceptual separation of “girls” from “girls’ bodies” in order to desexualize them. As I illustrate below, this happens conjointly in arguments for women’s equality in combat status.
The idea that militarization implies the disassociation of girls from their bodies may seem far-fetched or counter-intuitive. After all, soldiering seems to be so much about bodies and the occupation of physical space. It seems to require an absorption in a Hobbesian world of the “body politic”: the ability to overpower through committing bodily injury to others without being injured or through muscling into territory with a force greater than those who stand in the way. Movies about soldiers in war often start with sweaty work-outs, while even Stephen Colbert had to go through physical training for his week hosting comedy in Iraq’s “Green Zone” in 2009. The militarized impetus towards building muscle and physique, however, can be seen as an attempt to extract the femaleness out of the body, to bring the body public as “man.” Feminist scholarship has counted it as one of the effects of militarism that, as Zillah Eisenstein contends, “the sexual body itself is left silenced […] This process silences and obfuscates the female body and leaves it unreadable.”30 Eisenstein explains that the sexed female body is the birthing body, so that the visibility of reproduction draws the line between the soldier and the civilian. In these contexts, women’s sexed bodies seem to be keeping them from the work they need to do.
Deployed in Iraq, Kayla Williams would agree that women’s sexed bodies are what keep them from productive soldiering, just as girls’ moving bodies keep them from productive learning in The New York Times’s account: “It totally sucked,” Kayla complains, “pun intended. It made it easy for guys over there to treat females as if we were less reliable. Which is enraging, since our skills as soldiers are what landed us in this war in the first place.”31 Arguments about single-sex classrooms and arguments about women in combat share the idea that women’s equality can only come about without their bodies, or at least without their sexed bodies: that is, women’s sexual and reproductive bodies justify inequality, and “getting over” them offers the promise of “getting over” inequality as well.
The inclusion of women in combat bodes a new culture of militarization where the border between combat (or public service) and non-combat (or private activity) often becomes obscure. As Miriam Cooke has highlighted, “The military is no longer so different from civilian society.”32 Though there has been no act of congress that officially changes the policy of restricting women from combat, the nature of a war fought in neighborhoods and residential areas is that geographies of battle melt into civilian routines. “The fight was on every base and street corner,”33 Lizette Alvarez of the New York Times explains why women’s involvement in Iraqi operations was necessary. This meant that conventional women’s service roles demanded quick reactions sometimes under enemy gunfire: “I gunned. I drove. I ran as a truck commander. And underneath it all, I was a medic,” confessed one army Specialist who won a Bronze Star for valor.34 The movement of women into war zones coincides with the increasing movement of war into civilian spaces where, traditionally, women held the line.
Some feminists have taken this breakdown between public and private culture to signal a break-through for feminism. Cynthia Enloe, for example, is concerned with global political movements organized around broader acceptance of gays, lesbians, and women within the armed services, where gay, lesbian, and women soldiers “took on the status of paragons of citizenship.”35 In such rhetorical twists, Enloe breaks down the gendering of the border between public and private life as if this would provide for a greater equality: the logic is that if the border between private and public life were divorced from its affiliation with gender, then the distinction between private and public ceases to institute inequality, and this creates the possibility of a new understanding of public culture and the state: “No other public or private institution,” she notes, referring to the military “comes so close to being the sine qua non of a state.”36 My readings suggest, on the other hand, that women’s bodies—when they are refigured for combat—do not so much evince a broadening of egalitarian participatory public culture as women are disassociated from private sphere work but rather a privatizing of state functions that leads to greater inequality.
For Enloe, the “soldier as a public figure”37 stands in for citizenship, and, as women have historically been relegated to the margins of citizenship, soldiering often seems their only chance of entering public life, participating in a national activity, or engaging with public discussion: “warfare has been imagined by many to be the quintessentially public and national activity.”38 This conflation between the soldier and the citizen denotes, for Enloe, a basic contradiction: that is, sometimes the inclusion of women in the military could be seen as further democratizing the military, and other times it could be seen as further militarizing women.39
What remains out of the scope of either of these options is to question the inevitable status of the military—an institution whose role in invasion, combat, and occupation is to de-democratize the public—as the only viable participatory public sphere. A third alternative to Enloe’s problematic can be found in current literature on combat, where the military, in its stubbornly masculinist ethos, remains as a depleted recourse for public life, but now with women combatants in its ranks. The entry of women into this sphere becomes allowable only through a denial of gender difference in bodies, sexes, labors, and spaces. In such scenarios, sexual difference appears as the natural justification for differences in labor potential, or rather as a physical block to free markets in labor becoming actually and fully free. The absence of a substantive difference dividing female and male bodies in military service translates into the demolition of the line dividing soldier from civilian, or the disappearance of the “frontline” as the organizing principle restricting some populations from the labor of war. No longer delineating the “home-front” as opposed to the “battlefield,” privacy persists to define unfairly and inefficiently, the logic goes, private military labor or contracting as civilian. Unlike soldiers, civilian military labor or private contractors can fall outside of the chain of command, the requirements of resource and equipment provisions, and the rules of engagement, as became evident in the killing of four Blackwater operatives, whose vehicles were insufficiently armored, that catapulted the main battle offensive in Fallujah in 2004, or the 2007 murder of 14 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square by guards without directives to engage. The division of gendered labor gets displaced onto the division between soldiers and private contractors (now citizens)— that is, between the state and the private sector (or the ideology of the market).
Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski’s book One Woman’s Army provides an example of how private contract labor fills the place of women’s work once the sexual difference in women’s bodies has been erased. In command of prisons in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, Karpinski’s40 account of her sense of her own mission starts by elaborating how women’s sameness with men makes them different from men. A self-defined feminist, Karpinski begins by talking about how her military career—including her pioneering role in creating and training the first Arab women’s military division—would be an intrusion on “hallowed male turf.”41 “I … wanted to remain a woman,” she insists, as though not remaining one was on offer or demand. “I wanted to be tough, but not to lose my femininity.”42 “You could become a master jumper and maintain your femininity, too,” she later adds. Karpinski’s attempts to define the content of that femininity do not give a clear sense of what specifically the coveted femininity entails. When she does make an attempt, gender difference often takes on surface-forms like dress, style, softness, jewelry, hygienic needs, or hair length, but she dismisses all these, along with childbirth and menstruation, as situations the army could and does easily overcome, creating a perfectly genderless society of warriors.
The area where Karpinski comes to be most at odds with army policy over gender is combat. For Karpinski, the restriction of women to non-combat roles is an arbitrary restriction on her career advancement that should be determined on the basis of her accomplishments, talent, leadership, and public service. The army’s rationale for keeping women out of combat is that women still have a protected place in American society and are not prepared for “the dirty work of war-making,”43 so that if a woman got hit in a foxhole, the man with her would lose focus on the enemy in order to rescue her, risking unit cohesion. Karpinski argues against this by citing her own extensive experience, where she has learned, she says, that the instinct that most determines conduct on the battlefield is not courtesy or chivalry but survival. Karpinski offers instead an alternative explanation for the army’s preservation of an antiquated, even pre-technological idea of gender roles in military work. In her reading, the under-reported reason the army wants to maintain its policies that keep women out of combat can be found in the needs of the division of labor and the end of the draft. After Vietnam, men were volunteering for service wanting education and training marketable in civilian life but were not so interested in combat, where acquired skills were less translatable to other professions. The extension of women personnel into the “non-combat” ranks was therefore designed to fill staff and combat-support positions so that male recruits would be forced to choose front-line jobs and lifetime career tracks. Karpinski criticizes this as too much regulation.
Karpinski thinks that this division of labor is based on false premises and so could be overcome. Like Enloe, Karpinski believes that accepting women into combat positions is the next necessary step for democratizing the public sphere, and like Enloe as well, Karpinski considers the military as the public figured large. The Iraq war proved for Karpinski the arbitrariness of the public/private divide: places like Abu Ghraib were located outside of the official combat zone but shelling and insurgent attacks occurred regularly, so that even under fire the troops there were not receiving necessary equipment or back-up. With a woman general in command, Karpinski reasons, the army never saw fit to change the designation of the private- or civilian-designated location of the prison to public combat status. Karpinski’s ideal shattering of gender with its public/private divide—or combat/non-combat divide—leads her to advance an alternative military structuring where large portions of those working in newly-minted combat zones—formerly “non-combat” because of their association with women, their command, and private labor—would fall under private management coordinated under the now-unlimited rules of combat. Like women in their formerly non-combat roles, paid security personnel would operate in Iraq as providers of “service” and support like cooking and laundry as well as “auxiliary duties” like security guards, military police, private intelligence gatherers, interrogators, and suppliers. She includes in this category as well the Iraqi national prison guards, who would, she imagines, easily cast off their citizenship, its state allegiances and its sovereign loyalties for the much more appealing status of a low-level employee of a privately-owned foreign company now protected from law by its combat status. This means that the gendered division of labor was not relinquished so much as replicated within a division of labor that—under the provisions of combat—economically privatizes civilian public services by reprivatizing women’s work.
The mainstream media covers the story of women in combat as a “problem” of their (sexed) bodies in much the same way as it covers the “problem” of public school coeducation as a problem of girls’ (moving) bodies: as disruptions in learning that single-sex classrooms would dissolve. The “sex” in women’s and girls’ bodies serves as a symbol of a limit to their “choice,” particularly in their “choice” to work as soldiers, to participate in a public capacity. Steven Le Myers in the New York Times says that the inclusion of women in the military defied the army’s expectations that their sexuality would be a functional “disruption”44 or, like gay and lesbian soldiering, a disturbance to unit cohesion or preparedness. Unit integration was likely to turn the military into “a bunch of young people with raging hormones.”45 He then goes on to catalog the various specific challenges that women’s bodies might have posed to operations, from sexual assault or harassment, which U.S. military women’s bodies provoke, to pregnancies and peeing under fire. Fortunately, the article ends, the army was now supplying a device called a “feminine urinary director,” to allow women to pee while driving and, to boot, the informant Specialist announced, “it’s even pink.”46 The reporter thereby reassures us that the technologization of war has mitigated such risks posed by the “disruption” of women’s sexuality, and the actual occurrences of pregnancies were minimal (perhaps, as an earlier New York Times article admitted, because official records were not released47). Thankfully, the reporter concludes, “women preserve their femininity without making much of it.”48
Kayla Williams’s take on women’s sexualization in the military shares a lot of the same features as the New York Times report. Women’s bodily differences can vanish as they fuse with crude but everyday technologies: “Once we move, we keep moving. If you need to piss, piss in a bottle.”49 For the most part, the disruptions caused by women’s bodies are mitigated by archaic, pre-technological external desires that want to subject women to conventional roles. Kayla, however, adds a twist: women’s right to her own private control of her sexuality constitutes, for her, the American culture she sees herself defending. Judith Butler has remarked on this phenomenon as the way “culture” is being constituted as a field of norms through excluding certain types of sexual expression as less “advanced”: “women’s sexual freedom or the freedom of expression […] is invoked instrumentally to wage a cultural assault on Islam that reaffirms US sovereignty and violence.”50 For Butler, culture is bounded in the performance of certain more “progressive” sexual practices that put into relief modernity’s notions of time and progress. Butler’s main example here is the Abu Ghraib photographs, where the sense that the prisoners can be terrorized through forcing them to view or participate in our own more advanced sexual practices dehumanizes the victims of torture: it makes them seem culturally outside of the “now,” and so unrecognizable. The time of progressive modernity, exhibited in sexuality and expression, makes itself visible through a set of exclusionary cultural frames.
Kayla does draw cultural borders around the temporality of sexual practices, but the U.S. soldiers’ tendencies to sexualize women’s bodies are not the solution to the problem of Islamic restrictions on women. In fact, Kayla does agree to a certain extent with Islamic critiques of the absence of freedom that the sexualization of women in the U.S. implies. Before enlisting, back in Tennessee, Kayla dates a Lebanese Muslim, Tariq. Tariq admits to her that he would not want to bring up children in the U.S. because he was “[d]isgusted by the extent to which we sexualize children in our society,”51 and this is particularly an issue when raising girls. His rich Saudi and Kuwaiti friends think of the U.S. as a fantastic land for unbridled sexual exploits to visit before marrying “good Muslim girls” back home, and Kayla lauds Tariq for not so indulging. For Kayla, the free sexuality that sets borders around modern identities threatens free expression, especially for women.
Kayla repeatedly though despairingly assures her readers that “sex is key to any woman soldier’s experiences in the American military”52 and that war was “like a massive frat party” only “with weapons.”53 She often resents that her fellow enlistees exhibit sexually aggressive behavior towards her that might deny her choice, and she often isolates herself in order to avoid the constant sexual jokes, rebukes, innuendos, and imbrications: “I coped with existence mainly by getting away on hikes. Rock climbing with my M-4 was not easy.”54 Additionally, in one of the two scenes where Kayla describes her task as a translator, she feels anger and disgust at the use of her sexuality by Military Intelligence to embarrass and even torture a victim of interrogation who might even have limited Intel value: “Mock the size of his genitals. Point to me. Remind him that he is being humiliated in the presence of this blond American female […] Degrade the prisoner. Try to break him down.”55 She refuses to repeat her assistance and, for then on, refuses even to walk in proximity to the rooms where such questioning was taking place. Instead of sexuality offering cultural belonging through framing it as temporal advancement, it threatens the pursuit of advancement through self-determination that the war was supposed to be about partly through the freeing-up of women’s bodies from religious, state, or community control: “The right of the American people to say whatever they want,” she announces, “is one reason I joined the military. It’s one reason I am willing to die for my country.”56 Self-expression opposes exploitative sexualization of women in the U.S. just as it is a key to fixing the problems of regression in the authoritative Iraqi state, as I show below. To resolve the contradiction between the lack of freedom in the sexual practices of American soldiers and the promise of freedom in the mission of the war, Kayla transfers modernity’s free expression and choice from the symbolic baggage of free sexuality to the more progressive frameworks (in her terms) of privatization through work.
The moment of sharpest critique in the text is not, as one might expect, a scene of collateral damage or an encounter with a civilian that spirals out of control, with uncontainable consequences. Rather, Kayla has very few battle adventures outside of stories about unit cohesion and getting along with other young Americans who want to “fuck me or fuck any other girl he wants at the same time.”57 The main conflict, for her, is between her own sexuality and those who want to control it. The war’s sore point, when she begins to question the occupation in which she is involved, is during the post-traumatic stress she undergoes not as a result of battle, but rather as a result of an unwanted advance by one of her platoon-mates. The war she describes is not against enemy Iraqis but against American men who reduce her to her sexual body-ness: “And now the guys I considered my friends were treating me like a girl. I was tits, a piece of ass, a bitch or a slut or whatever, but never really a person.”58 Expecting that she would “suck […] his cock in the back of a Humvee”59 or “spread her legs while they lined up and took turns,”60 these men, she says, did not recognize her free choice exhibited in her productivity as a working soldier.
In contrast, she depicts Iraqis more like partners through trade. Iraq will be the place where American culture is re-instituted and defended not as a culture of temporal progress in free sexuality but rather as a culture of progressive freedom in private initiative. Very few moments in the text show Kayla interacting with the war’s environment or populations in Iraq: most of the plotting has to do with her encounters with members of the U.S. armed forces, trying to get along with flirty men and commanding women, to do her job. She calls in-fighting within these ranks that disrupt her work performance “communism” because it limits freedom: “I became convinced that the Army was really this vast communist institution in disguise […] In real-world communism, folks did as little as possible to get as much as possible.”61 In contrast, the moments when the Iraqis appear are less filled with rancor, underhanded competition, or interpersonal intrigue. She generally applauds the Iraqis she meets as hard workers and clever, merchandising entrepreneurs: “Jimmy is an awesome guy who has quickly and efficiently mastered the skills of the marketplace. We respect this about him.”62 An ambitious local, Jimmy learns to capitalize informally on the needs of U.S. troops stationed in isolated areas, bringing them essentials like ice, soda, and cigarettes in a taxi he hires by the day. Jimmy’s enterprise reflects the army’s capitalization of service labor. Jimmy’s naturalized ingenuity in creating and expanding markets is a demonstration of pure, primitive capitalism that the text attributes to Third World sensibilities, a capitalism so pure and so primitive that it is still outside of the formal legal structures that would counter its energetic profitability, put blocks on growth, or stifle its inspiration. Observed by the children from neighboring mountain villages, Jimmy’s services are soon replicated: “you can’t help but take note of how fast the free market has taken root out here in the Kurdish mountains […] I loved this about Jimmy. That he does this. Capitalism in its purest form.”63 Without any middle-men, commercial managers, taxation, or regulation, Jimmy—whom Kayla identifies with “people with manual skills”64 who are not restricted to public military duties like time-consuming guard duty, constant oversight, and regular shifts—extracts direct profits from transporting goods desired by U.S. service personnel, making what Kayla calls a “small fortune.”65
In the end, Kayla leaves Iraq and returns to Tennessee, reflective but disgruntled in learning that “the war was based in lies.”66 Though having been impressed by the budding of Jimmy’s privatized capitalism that she witnessed as a positive outcome produced by the war, the only “goodness” that she finally attributes to her tour is when she thinks “about the children I saw, attending schools again in places where they had not been able to do so for more than a generation.”67 The schools, Kayla says earlier when she first begins to notice them, furnish proof that the Iraqis in the mountains value their contact with U.S. soldiers and want the occupation to continue, as these schools exhibit what a direct influx of an American touch can accomplish: “schools for their children, schools for kids who had never gone to school. So basically, they wanted us to stay—forever, if we liked.”68 Basically, Kayla stages a scene where foreign soldiers watch from the sideline, carrying combat arms that they do not use, as a civil society magically breaks through Saddam-era barriers to progress. Within the logic of the text, this theme runs parallel to her own magical break out of her sexualization through others’ desires, her survival as a working soldier.
What Kayla neglects to mention is that before the 1991 Gulf War, nearly every Iraqi child went to grammar school, including girls,69 and that 20 percent of Iraq’s schools, or 18,000 buildings, needed reconstruction after the 2004 invasion, while all of Iraq’s education budget was needed for basic salaries.70 Privatization71 does not necessarily help the progress of girls’ schooling as much as destroy the public schools to make private investments look necessary, and even miraculous. Like Jimmy’s circuit of trade, seemingly divorced from the external controls and disruptions to which bodies are amenable, schools triumph as the mise-en-scène of expression and choice. They take the place of Kayla’s sexuality as the symbolic theater of progress. In the meantime, Jimmy, like the schooling that sprouts up where it was not before, represents the potential of organic generation of freedom and profit, or freedom as profit, spurred by direct foreign capital. In both instances, we see a foreign force, from a distance, bringing out beneficial economic, developmental, and infrastructural outcomes by skirting the politics of the nation-state.
The justification of the war on the basis of bringing education to Muslim girls carries with it symbolic repercussions that are not necessarily in the interests of Muslim girls or girls anywhere. The idea is that the education of girls will lead to the spread of democracy through the expansion of choice or the blooming of liberal diversity, and the expansion of choice promises the expansion of markets. Under the assumption that women’s bodies are the source of economic inequalities, new technologies of soldiering pose women as abstracted subjects proving equality, realized democracy, and capitalist agency—of “choice”—by marginalizing differences, specifically bodily ones. Such marginalization of differences lifts barriers on working bodies, making them more accessible to direct investment and informalization. Forging the education of women as the ultimate symbol of a working capitalism heralds certain ideological transformations in the structuring of imperialism: in particular, as women’s work and the private sphere in liberalism have framed an outside to the state and the public sphere—particularly in terms of state-run development and welfare systems—the direct appropriation of women, their service work, and the private sphere has wrapped a symbolic vanilla coating around the dispossession of their political recourse in the state. Capital’s dodging of the state and public authority, however, is not guiding women to the promised land of equality, but rather economic inequalities are increasing on a global scale, with women at the lead, under neoliberal governance. In this climate, the movement for all-girl classrooms can throw aside its rationales that try to make sense of its educational mission, as, against the evidence, it performs the ideological function of making moral sense of an empire of privatization.
1 I thank my former student Jessica Lowe for bringing this event to my attention.
2 Jennifer Medina, “Boys and Girls Together, Taught Separately in Public School,” New York Times (March 11, 2009), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/education/11gender.html (accessed April 25, 2010). The research on test scores as a measure of predictability is inconclusive, at best. As Kenneth J. Saltman concludes from reviewing the research, “[H]igh stakes testing regimes do not achieve what they are designed to achieve. However, to think beyond efficacy to the underlying assumptions about ‘achievement,’ it is necessary to raise theoretical concerns. Theoretically, at the very least, the enforcement-oriented assumptions […] fail to consider the limitations of defining ‘achievement’ through high-stakes tests, fail to question what knowledge and whose knowledge constitute legitimate or official curricula that students are expected to master, and fail to interrogate the problematic assumptions of learning modeled on digestion or commodity acquisition” (Capitalizing On Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Boulder, Colo. and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 128).
3 “Although co-educational programs have failed, there is no showing that it is the co-educational factor that results in failure.” Garrett v. Board of Educ., 775 F. Supp. 1004, 1005 (E. D. Mich. 1991).
4 David Harvey defines neoliberalism as when “[t]he free mobility of capital between sectors, regions, and countries is regarded as crucial” (A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66), where a “suspicion of democracy” (76) leads to increased labor flexibilization and privatization, and “[s]tate sovereignty over commodity and capital movements is willingly surrendered to the global market” (66), setting up a type of “accumulation by dispossession” by which women are hardest hit (129, 170): “Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common” (3). In the context of Europe, Pierre Bourdieu also laments neoliberalism as the shrinking of the “soft” or caring arm of the state in favor of its punitive arm, its policing function, in the service of defending the reign of commerce and its media. “[T]his utopia [offered in neoliberal theory] generates a potent belief, a ‘free trade faith’, not only among those who live from it materially such as financiers, big businessmen, etc., but also those who derive from it their justifications for existing, such as the senior civil servants and politicians who deify the power of the markets in the name of economic efficiency, who demand the lifting of the administrative or political barriers that could hinder the owners of capital in their purely individual pursuit of maximum individual profit instituted as a model of rationality, […] who preach the subordination of the national states to the demands of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of all regulations on all markets, […] also and above all the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of standing up to the effects of the infernal machine” (Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, trans. Richard Nice (New York: New Press, 1998), 100–102). This replacement of the political or nurturing sense of the state with an economic sense of power-from-without contradicts the modern liberal state’s ideologies of abstract equality in the public sphere. The shrinking of the caring arm of the state is co-terminate with the re-privatization of functions associated with women, their work, and their symbolic function of linking the state to care for the public.
5 Lizette Alvarez, “G. I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves,” New York Times (August 16, 2009), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16women.html (accessed April 25, 2010). Angela Davis contests that democratization through militarization—or militarization through women’s inclusion—is not the sort of democracy that feminism would warrant: “feminism does not say that we want to fight for the equal right of women to participate in the military, for the equal right of women to torture, or for their equal right to be killed in combat. This feminism rejects […] the claims of a US military officer attending the graveside service of a female soldier killed in Iraq—a man who wept at what he spoke of as a palpable expression of women’s equality, the dead woman’s right to a military funeral […] Instead of conceptualizing equality using a standard established by the dominance of men in the military, we can advocate for the equal right of women and men to refuse participation in the military” (“A Vocabulary for Feminist Praxis: On War and Radical Critique,” Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), 21).
6 Kenneth J. Saltman, The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 178.
7 Wendy Kaminer, “The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools,” The Atlantic (April 1998), available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199804/single-sex (accessed April 25, 2010).
8 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xxi.
9 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 11.
10 For example, Chandra Mohanty: “Homework capitalizes on the equation of home, family, and patriarchal and racial/cultural ideologies of femininity/masculinity with work. This is work done at home, in the midst of doing housework, childcare, and other tasks related to ‘homemaking,’ often work that never ceases. Characterizations of ‘house-wives,’ ‘mothers,’ and ‘homemakers’ make it impossible to see homeworkers as workers earning regular wages and entitled to the rights of workers” (Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 159. Also, though less explicitly, Zygmunt Bauman notes that the weakening powers of the public sector have paved the way towards a self-help society. His descriptions of this imagine a society completely obsessed with mothering as a replacement for politics. For example, “The only way to suppress that horrifying truth is to slice the great, overwhelming fear into smaller and manageable bits—recast the big issue we can do nothing about into a set of little ‘practical’ tasks we can hope to be able to fulfill […] Fat is but one issue of the large family of ‘practical tasks’ which the orphaned self may set itself just to sink and drown the horror of loneliness in the sea of small but time-consuming and mind-absorbing worries. But it is a well-chosen specimen, bringing into relief all the most important features of the whole family” (In Search of Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 44–45.
11 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, edited by Stefan Collini (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 164.
12 “10,000 Women,” available at http://www.10000women.org (accessed April 25, 2010). In relation to JP Morgan, see “J.P. Morgan Underscores Support for Microfinance at Women’s World Banking Conference” (June 12, 2009), available at http://www.jpmorgan.com/cm/cs?pagename=JPM_redesign/JPM_Content_C/Generic_Detail_Page_Template&cid=1159388295832&c=JPM_Content_C (accessed April 25, 2010).
13 Sabrina Tavernise, “Afghan Enclave Seen as Model for Development,” New York Times (November 13, 2009), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world/asia/13jurm.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Afghan%20Enclave&st=cse (accessed April 25, 2010).
14 Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 302.
15 Greg Mortenson, 234.
16 Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997), 32.
17 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations of Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 77.
18 Aihwa Ong, 77.
19 Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, “The Women’s Crusade,” New York Times (August 23, 2009), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.htm?_r=1 (accessed April 25, 2010).
20 American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls, edited by Susan Morse (Washington, D.C.: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 1998), available at http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/upload/SeparatedbySex.pdf (accessed April 25, 2010), 2.
21 American Association of University Women, Separated by Sex, 3.
22 Wendy Kaminer, “The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools.”
23 Ibid.
24 Jennifer Medina, “Boys and Girls Together, Taught Separately in Public School.”
25 Ibid.
26 Wendy Kaminer, “The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools.”
27 Anna Scott, “One-Sex Classes Bill Wins Approval,” Sun (April 3, 2008), available at http://www.gainesville.com/article/20080403/NEWS/804030321 (accessed April 30, 2010).
28 Anna Scott, “One-Sex Classes Bill Wins Approval.”
29 Jennifer Medina, “Boys and Girls Taught Together, Taught Separately in Public School.”
30 Zillah Eisenstein, “Resexing Militarism for the Globe,” Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), 34.
31 Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 19.
32 Miriam Cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 33.
33 Lizette Alvarez, “G. I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves.”
34 Ibid.
35 Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 18.
36 Ibid., 46.
37 Ibid., 16.
38 Ibid., 11.
39 “The most optimistic calculation is to figure that when a country’s military admits a once excluded or despised group, that institution is transformed and made more compatible with democratic culture. In this perhaps too-sanguine scenario, the outsider group campaigning to enter the military doesn’t become militarized; rather, the newly diversified military becomes democratized” (Cynthia Enloe, 16).
40 Karpinski should be applauded for her insistence that responsibility for the crimes at Abu Ghraib should move up the chain of command, including for her recent offer to testify against Donald Rumsfeld in the torture suit brought against him in France and her outspoken, public condemnations of shadow prisons, interrogation techniques, and the U.S. departures from the Geneva Conventions.
41 Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser, One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story (New York: Hyperion, 2005), 43.
42 Ibid., 48.
43 Ibid., 47.
44 Steven Lee Myers, “Living and Fighting Alongside Men, and Fitting In,” New York Times (August 17, 2009), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/us/17women.html (accessed April 25, 2010).
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Lizette Alvarez, “G. I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves.”
48 Steven Lee Myers, “Living and Fighting Alongside Men, and Fitting In.”
49 Ibid., 140.
50 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 105.
51 Ibid., 36.
52 Ibid., 18.
53 Ibid., 21.
54 Ibid., 183.
55 Ibid., 247.
56 Ibid., 43.
57 Ibid., 177.
58 Ibid., 214.
59 Ibid., 260
60 Ibid., 260.
61 Ibid., 269–270.
62 Ibid., 190–191.
63 Ibid., 192–193.
64 Ibid., 182.
65 Ibid., 194.
66 Ibid., 283.
67 Ibid., 283.
68 Ibid., 162.
69 “Though the U.S. media has largely failed to pick up on the attempts to remake education on the current conservative educational reforms, the Assyrian International News Agency reports that a new crop of private for-profit schools are being opened in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had nationalized education in 1973, and Iraq was regarded as having one of the best education systems in the Middle East, with full gender inclusion, free to all, fostering 80 percent literacy, and a secular curriculum that did not require non-Muslims to partake in religious instruction” (Kenneth J. Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Boulder, Colo. and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 107).
70 James Ridgeway, “Introduction,” Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq, by Riverbend (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005), xv and xix.
71 “Almost nowhere has press coverage addressed the privatization agenda of educational restructuring in Iraq or the political implications that privatization of education has for the nation” (Kenneth J. Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Boulder, Colo. and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 99).