Gendering the Politics of Terror
In 1991 for the first time I got significantly involved in the story of a “terrorist.” I was an undergraduate in India when a suicide bomber, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, also called Dhanu, from the Sri Lanka-based secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He was campaigning for the upcoming parliamentary elections that could lead him to another term as prime minister. While India mourned the loss of its own and its national tragedy came to be written in the language of martyrdom of our leader by the press, which focused on images of his mutilated remains, another story emerged about India’s hegemonic control of South Asia. This story was about India’s intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) between the LTTE and Sri Lanka’s military, sealed by the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord that aimed to deactivate the various militant groups. It is believed that the Indian peacekeeping forces had wiped out Dhanu’s brothers and raped her. In retrospect, discovering Dhanu’s story seems like a key moment in my cross-border or transnational feminist realization when I shared a national tragedy as an Indian citizen as well as a woman conscious of the gendered violence that accompanies Indian dominance in South Asia—the kind that produces the Dhanus of the region.
A decade later in 2001, as an international graduate student in the United States, I was again deeply impacted by the story of “terrorists” as the Twin Towers fell and anyone perceived to be a Muslim, which included South Asian Sikhs, was grouped together in the discourse of the war on terror and Islamic extremism by the US state. As women in these communities also came to experience violence, and students of these communities on our university campus were advised not to walk alone, I formed strong cross-border feminist connections with women of other countries around shared vulnerabilities, as our conversations with US feminist students became fraught with the racial implications of the War on Terror and the stakes for feminism on both sides of the divide. Out of this transnational feminist wrestling with the War on Terror emerged Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture, henceforth referred to as TFPTLC.
TFPTLC draws on texts from a range of genres—novel, testimonial, biography, autobiography, memoir, treatise, published blog, prison photography, visual and performative art, music, film, media, and new media. This interdisciplinary work attempts to address the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Such a perspective defines terrorism as an ahistorical phenomenon to be solved through militaristic regimes of national and transnational securitization via high-tech warfare and counter-terror torture. It does not recognize that self-determination in the face of imperial injustice by populations of color has been re-defined as terrorism. The 1960 UN “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” granted self-governance merely in principle. Extra-judicial violence of the empire against such populations has come to be known as counter-terrorism—most recently in the US War on Terror. This lies in a continuum with earlier European-style colonialism that demonized resistance and aggression after provoking them with its own violence. Instead, TFPTLC maps the particular and connected histories of torture from the counter-cultural viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. It contests such associations that have emerged under the ideological/material conditions of Euro-American imperialism and postcolonial nationalism. The book argues that the true route to curbing international and domestic terror is ending Euro-American imperial domination and postcolonial disenfranchisement rather than torture and militarization in the name of global and national security.
The book is a gendered inquiry into terrorism and securitization, arguing that we live in a post-Declaration rather than a postcolonial world. It foregrounds the misogynistic and homophobic violence of empires and their legacies in the predicaments of Iraq and Afghanistan, Palestine/Israel, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. Such cross-border feminist and queer inquiries decolonize and dislodge militarized myths of femininities, masculinities, and queerness long held in place by imperial dominance, and contests the forward march of empires under the banner of gender liberation. Transnational feminism becomes an important tool of critical inquiry into such a racialized gender politics of terror as it forges strategic possibilities of discursive/material solidarities among women of color across various geopolitical and historical contexts to address colonial and neo-colonial domination.
Besides the US War on Terror and the impetus it provided to gendered narratives of terrorism that this book examines, this monograph can also be positioned against the UN Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace (1976–1985). A World Plan of Action for the Decade impelled the UN General Assembly to adopt the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1979. With women on the international agenda, a plethora of women-centered texts were published both by scholarly and non-scholarly, feminist and mainstream presses. My project draws on many such texts. The UN Decade for Women also saw the initiation of a dialogue between women of the “north” and those of the “south.” In July 1985 at the Non-Governmental World Conference of Women in Nairobi, women researchers and activists from the global south presented a report—Development Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspective. In it they underlined that in addition to the weight of cultural and political processes through which women across the world have less access to resources, the poor women of the postcolonial south bore the heritage of colonialism. With the establishment of a transnational feminist dialogue around the impoverished women of these countries, the publishing industries in both the north and the south disseminated accounts of and about these women.1 Many were about gender-linked violence against postcolonial women within political resistance, an issue that figures significantly in TFPTLC.
TFPTLC has three main goals. First, it attempts to make an intervention into contemporary debates on terror and gender through a wide-ranging examination of the emergence of the woman torturer and the woman terrorist across a breadth of comparative cultural texts. This is an effort to revise the current frame of terrorism discourse dominated by the non-queer male as the political actor. In the process the monograph forges a responsible transnational feminist analysis that links women as perpetrators and targets of violence in the context of terrorism, closing a gap in feminist studies that does not address violence by women in the same breath as it addresses concerns about abused women. This enables a conceptualization of the power imbalances between women of the global north, who support, participate in, and benefit from imperial wars on terror, and women of the global south targeted by it. The book uses a transnational feminist approach and method to underscore continuities among diverse historical and geographical contexts in which wars on terror on populations of color manifest themselves through gendered power hierarchies involving femininities, masculinities, and queerness, where targets of violence often become perpetrators or “terrorists.” In these contexts, relationships between women of the global north and south as well as between women across specific regions, despite their power imbalances, also manifest themselves through fraught negotiations across colonial and imperial contexts as women collaboratively articulate the stakes for women of the south in such wars on terror.
The second goal of TFPTLC is to address how gendering the terrorism and counter-terrorism question illuminates subterranean, racialized ideologies of transnational and trans-historical terror that have long justified and sustained imperial and statist mechanisms of counter-terror violence on bodies/communities demonized as terrorists. This will clarify how the historically linked geopolitics of Euro-US imperialism and their brutal legacies manifest themselves in regional and national conflicts across the world. Bringing a transnational feminist and queer perspective also enables the project to look at how the macro-political interconnections of the transatlantic empire are manifested in the micro-political workings of desire and private identities, underlining the contamination/leakages between public governance and private lives.
The third goal is to trace how demonized or “enemy” communities, especially women and queers, reconfigure and resist such gendered and racialized oppression in colonial and imperial contexts. Contesting the forward march of the empire in the name of its messianic mission of emancipating women and queers of the elsewhere, this goal attempts to demonstrate how violations of women’s and queer lives cannot be separated from contexts of occupation or internal colonization that leave their legacies on such lives. It powerfully argues against the myth of a global sisterhood and the political power it provides women of the global north as agents of imperial terror to “liberate” their less fortunate “sisters.”
“Trans” in this book is a politically charged prefix and a generative paradigm, enabling a reconsideration of knowledge production by underlining the porosity of borders—across disciplines, bodies, geographies, histories, ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and methodologies.2 As such, this transdisciplinary work assumes a multiplicity of approaches, undergirded by a transnational feminist scaffolding and drawing on a plethora of sources and their representations of material bodies in varied contexts to formulate a diverse approach to the phenomenon of meaning formation around “terrorism.” Through the meaning and formation of “trans” as critical epistemology and politics of possibilities, this work attempts to fill an epistemological gap in global security practices and discourses by disrupting the normative underpinnings of a patriarchal epistemology of tightened borders and hierarchies. In this epistemology the vast majority of texts written from supposedly non-gendered perspectives are written with the male as the norm, creating an inequity in knowledge systems.
Transnational feminism deployed in this book offers a critical apparatus to engage with unbound feminisms that establish frames of recognition across diverse geopolitical contexts to decolonize knowledge about “terrorism.” It offers a feminist rethinking of how terror is created, perpetuated, and sustained by dominant gender ideologies within a global order of unequal geopolitical power relationships that has also left its legacies on the internal colonies that postcolonial nations maintain. Such rethinking clarifies where the burden of “response-ability” for terror really lies. The transgressive possibilities of such border-crossing feminism lie in their ability to forge much needed and long overdue dialogues, bringing together women in various contexts of terror to re-imagine more empowered feminist futures in the twenty-first century. The frame of mutual recognition here is constituted by shared historic moments of colonial and neo-imperial terror and their legacies. The paradigm of the transnational queer that this book utilizes works both in tandem with and is implied by a transnational feminist epistemology. Varied modalities of the transnational queer attempt to interrupt imperialist and nationalist missions while simultaneously offering productive fragmenting of anti-patriarchal, anti-nationalist, and anti-imperialist feminist politics so that feminism itself is restrained from bio-determinism and essentialism by acknowledging shared vulnerabilities to terror across gender locations.
The category of the queer in this monograph signifies sexual orientation as well as alternative understandings of identity/phenomenon. Queer also becomes an avenue for examining the demonization of entire populations as terrorists. In other words, queer here functions as a positionality—relationally and oppositionally to the ethno-racial norm and the norm’s pathologization of the dissident politics of the other as terror and hence queer. It also functions substantively by addressing the materiality of bodies that are pathologized as aberrant. In both cases queer comes to signify an existence of disability/debility that inflicts terror through the monstrosity of its desires—whether political or sexual—that imperialist and nationalist forces harness or dispossess according to their own needs. The queer in turn contests the forces of imperial and state terror that norm desires in order to articulate other ways of desiring—sexually and politically. Thus the function of the categories of women and queer in my work lies in speaking back to imperial missions and their claim to gender liberation by deconstructing the usage of these categories in the service of imperialism.
Tracing how terror morphs or translates across temporalities and spatialities will be crucial in defining a transnational feminist/queer epistemology. Such an episteme will facilitate an understanding of the gendered ways in which terror is deployed in the context of the connected histories of European colonialism and American neo-imperialism and their legacies. For instance, one of my entry points in TFPTLC is the neo-imperial moment and its images where US women soldiers at Abu Ghraib, backed by an imperialist feminism, negotiate for recognition within the military by torturing naked, brown male bodies whom they associate with terrorism and Islamofascism. The poster depicting the Empire State Building anally penetrating Osama bin Laden as a torture method, echoed by the US military forcing anal penetration of detainees by detainees in the Abu Ghraib torture photographs, was based on Islamophobic assumptions about the Arab psyche and its intensified responses to the queer as cultural shame. It was also based on homophobic assumptions about the queerness or monstrosity of the Arab “terrorist” who then deserved queer modes of torture associated with bodies that are disabled/debilitated sexually.
These moments of torture are used to look back at other wars on terror such as the caste war in India and the textual representation of its spectacle of torture where the lower-caste Indian woman retaliates against upper-caste men who stripped her publicly by disrobing and castrating them in turn. Once again the queer articulates the gendering of terror as the lower-caste woman dissident against caste violence is queered by upper-caste patriarchy that, through sexual humiliation, attempts to subjugate her monstrosity, which contests the social order. Consequently, the lower-caste woman appropriates the queer as vector in a monstrous spree of sexual violence on upper-caste men—an unimaginable disruption of the rationality of a social order based on caste and gender hierarchies.
Both Abu Ghraib and India’s caste locations enable an analysis of dangerous locations of women’s empowerment. They speak of continuities between the projects of US imperialism, with its prison industrial complexes around the world, and British colonial bureaucracy in India that served to consolidate pre-colonial caste hierarchies in violent ways, leading to the internal colonization of lower-caste Indians by the postcolonial state. Nonetheless, the dialectics of terror and torture lead to differential valences in these two contexts. The first leads to an inquiry into the intersections of the project of US imperialism and feminism, where women work with the empire, while the latter opens up critical conversation about lower-caste women who resist the postcolonial nation that has replaced the empire merely in name. It offers an instance of indigenous self-determination of caste-disenfranchised women in India. The public spectacle of the tortured Mayan woman’s body as a lesson by the Guatemalan state under US patronage, as well as the Islamophobic torture in French Algeria of Arab women resisting the colonial project of French enlightenment both resonate with the torture of lower-caste women in India. These examples embody the vicious cycle of state terrorism, popular resistance, and counter-terror torture of revolutionaries labeled as terrorists—those whose political acts violate the normative feminine. Their monstrous femininities are pathologized as irrational and hence they deserve to be punished in grotesque ways.
The gendered dialectics of terror and torture that accompany caste apartheid in India also form strong links with the gender apartheid that continues in post-apartheid South Africa. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission refused to include the stories of women tortured by their comrades within the revolution. It also excluded the stories of the mothers of the revolution who testified to the violence that took over the children of apartheid. The terror unleashed by the post-apartheid state against women testifying to such violence within the revolution forms a continuum with the terror against queer South Africans that continues in the post-apartheid state—a legacy of the apartheid-era ANC, which suppressed the expression of queer sexual identities within its own ranks. Apartheid in South Africa—a legacy of British and Dutch colonialism—has become a paradigm for the analysis of the Israeli apartheid sponsored by British and US imperialism where Palestinian women figure both as targets of sexual harassment at checkpoints as well as terror-unleashing, queered plane hijackers. In both the South African and Israeli apartheid draconian laws were instrumental in sustaining land appropriation and regimes of terror. Despite Israel’s claim to being the bearer of women’s and queer rights in the region, apartheid’s violent effects on the lives of Palestinian women and queers—the latter blackmailed by the Israeli authorities into turning informers for Israel—ascertain that gender apartheid cannot be separated from racial apartheid.
These diverse dialectics of torture and terror trace how the burden of terror/torture inevitably lies with the empire and the nation, and how such a critical inquiry leads to the emergence of the affects of retaliatory violence in the context of captivity that bring light to the collective suffering and collective rights of disenfranchised communities. Such affective moments also generate unlikely alliances between women of the global north and south that rupture essentialist notions of terrorism of the global south through common-front, dissident politics that map how terror is sustained by the colonialism and imperialism of the global north.
This book both belongs to and extends the critical transnational feminist and queer scholarship on terrorism that emerged in the wake of 9/11. In Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007) Cynthia Enloe alerts us to the urgent need for an analysis of the gendered myths of militarism and of the globalization of such myths of femininity and masculinity. In Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (2010) Enloe uses a transnational feminist lens to bring into critical conversation the lives of Iraqi and American women during the military occupation of Iraq. Like Enloe, my transnational feminist work engages with war-making on a global scale, and examines how diverse gender locations of populations in conflict intersect with other social locations to determine the experiences of both perpetrators and targets of imperialist nationalist violence. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) traces the Orientalization of terrorist figures through the imperial mechanism of demarcating the desirable from the undesirable of the empire’s geo/biopolitics—the properly homo from the improperly homo, determined by the assumed allegiances or lack thereof of these figures to the empire. TFPTLC draws on the symbolic function of the improperly homo, with hir dissent against the empire, defined by Puar’s Foucauldian frame of monstrous sexuality as it intersects with a paradigm of disability/debility, to examine how the transnational queer works as a vector vis-à-vis the phenomenon of terrorism. The properly homo, on the other hand, becomes a marker of the “good” politics of the empire, leading to the appropriation of radical politics for imperial expansionism. Sherene Razack’s Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008) and Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2013) offer feminist critics of Islamophobic wars with a focus on how Islam itself is demonized to divide Muslim men—the bad Muslim (the terrorist) from Muslim women—the good Muslim (the victim of the terrorist’s Islamofascism) who can also supposedly be converted to the empire’s mission. Razack’s and Abu-Lughod’s work has provided important frames in this book to examine the relationship of imperial women as they have entered this messianic project of the empire, particularly with the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
TFPTLC also belongs in the category of books that have directly addressed how the sexualized representation and the conduct of the War on Terror illuminate a racialized narrative of transnational geopolitical relations, such as Zillah Eisenstein’s Sexual Decoys (2007) and Gargi Bhattacharya’s Dangerous Brown Men (2008). Eisenstein addresses the profits of the state and its reliance on terror through a critique of liberalism and capitalism and its exploitation of women of the elsewhere, while in addition to this, my book engages with a critique of left movements that contest wars on terror. Bhattacharya’s work on the brown masculinity of the sexualized enemy sharply resonates with many of the arguments that this book arrives at via its own cultural/literary/visual archive.
Robin Riley, Chandra Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, who edited Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism (2008), and Nadjie Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, who edited Women and War in the Middle East (2009), are also part of this hefty genealogy of gender/security/postcolonial studies that address the mythology of terror. Critical race-studies scholarship, such as Angela Davis’s Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire (2005) and Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber’s co-edited Race and Arab-Americans Before and After 9/11 (2008), argue about the subjectivity of the legal state in its relationship to gender and terror. Davis focuses on the racialized incarceration of African-Americans and Jamal’s and Naber’s anthology concentrates on how the category of race evolved vis-à-vis Arab-Americans who increasingly underwent an un-whitening process. Similarly, my monograph brings the war on terror abroad home to the US as it critically analyzes the shared experiences of populations of color of South Asian and Arab heritage in the US and abroad after 9/11, and their relationship to the transnational US prison industrial complex.
However, none of the above works engages with literary studies, while my interdisciplinary work incorporates literary analysis to a large extent. By drawing on literary texts—a genre that has seldom been the site of studies in terrorism—my work joins Alex Tickell’s Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947 (2011). However, while Tickell’s work is on British colonialism and all of the other texts largely focus on US imperialism in the Middle East, my work uses Islamophobia, misogyny, and the homophobia of the US War on Terror as a lens to address the historically linked geopolitics of Euro-US imperialism and their brutal legacies manifested in regional and national conflicts across the world. Furthermore, while these works critique US foreign policy and the gendered violence of its ethos, actions, and effects, my scholarship examines the history of Euro-US foreign policy and highlights how a gendered understanding of terrorism has come to differentially define the acts of the transnational white empire and those of its subjects. In this, my work is aligned with Laleh Khalili’s Time in the Shadows (2012), which maps the politics of counter-insurgency through colonial, neo-colonial, and settler-colonial moments. However, TFPTLC also deals with postcolonial governmentalities, and broader oppositional discourses and movements through cultural, artistic, media productions, and activist alliances. Unlike the texts discussed above, TFPTLC focuses on terrorism and counter-terror torture in avatars that still mostly lie under the critical radar by bringing together the figure of the woman terrorist and the woman torturer in a transnational feminist framework. Neloufer de Mel’s Women and the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka (2002) and Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (2008) do offer rich studies of the LTTE woman militant, particularly the female suicide bomber, and how representations of these figures mediated the civil war in Sri Lanka and its official discourse. However, unlike TFPTLC they do not engage in a larger transnational feminist conversation—with how Indian women benefit from India’s regional hegemony in South Asia and the concomitant disenfranchisement of women in Sri Lanka. But most significantly, TFPTLC looks at terrorism itself as a critique of Euro-US foreign policy through the linked figures of the woman terrorist and the woman torturer as critical responses to the empire’s packaging of its violence as messianic for gender liberation. It articulates the necessity of a constant feminist vigilance that refuses closure through any sense of security, even in transnational alliances among women, because of our differential vulnerabilities in the global, regional, and national regimes of securitization and democracy.
The choice of the United States, Palestine/Israel, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa as sites of analysis in this book is guided by a need to offer a critique of the colonizing mission’s march in the name of progress and modernity, made incredibly urgent in the twenty-first century by the US War on Terror. As an earlier European colonialism had marched forward in the name of liberating women, similarly the US empire has claimed itself as the global icon of women’s and queer rights. With this, gender liberation measured by the yardstick of the United States came to signify a people’s right to sovereignty. Thus, once again, the rhetoric of progress and modernity was deployed to justify invasion and conquest.
In US imperialism’s march forward in the post-Cold War, post 9/11, twenty-first century, Islamophobia came to replace the red scare of Communism. Islam became iconic of not only a threat to America’s Judeo-Christian heritage but also its women’s and gender-rights regime. As men associated with Islam were labeled as terrorists, “saving the Muslim woman” from their Islamofascist men became a slogan of the War on Terror and fighting against “terrorism” came to stand in for fighting for women’s rights.
A discussion of the Palestine/Israel situation becomes imperative after an analysis of the US War on Terror since, in the global parlance on terrorism, influenced massively by the US-Israel alliance, the Palestinian had become the iconic Islamic suicide bomber long before the suicide mission of the 9/11 hijackers. The question of Palestine is also key to understanding why US-Arab relations in the entire region of the Middle East are contingent upon the ability of the United States to delimit its relationship with Israel, and why 9/11 cannot be divorced from the Palestine refugee crisis that the United States has created in the Middle East by sponsoring Israeli terrorism on Palestinian Arabs. Israel, speaking in the rhetoric of the US gender-liberation regime to seek continuing support from the US, has repeatedly projected itself as the sole bearer of women’s and queer rights in the Islam-dominated Middle East. As with Afghan and Iraqi women in the context of the US War on Terror and to demolish the empire’s gendered myths of progress and modernity, this book has examined the agonizing plight of Palestinian women and queers in the face of the Israeli apartheid that officially started with the formation of the Israeli state in 1948. Thus Islamophobia and “spacio-cide” (land appropriation) provide categories of inquiry into the US War on Terror and the Palestine question to examine US imperialism in the Middle East and South Asia.
Similarly, indigeneity offers a critical category to examine the continuities between an earlier-style Spanish colonialism and US neo-imperialism closer to home in Latin America through the twentieth century war on terror in Guatemala. Communism rather than Islam was the bogeyman in this world where the balance of global power swayed between the US and the Soviet Union. In Guatemala, Spanish colonialism had marched forward in the name of modernity till the nineteenth century and everything indigenous had become a marker of hindrance to progress. This logic was inherited by the postcolonial Guatemalan state with its neo-liberal ties to US enterprises and the global free market. State terror was unleashed against the indigenous people of Guatemala, labeled as Communist guerrillas for resisting the postcolonial government’s redistribution of their land to the US enterprise United Fruit Company. In the civil war that ensued (1960–1996), ethnocidal mass rape and forced impregnation of Mayan women became officially sanctioned torture techniques of the state. This was an attempt to curb indigenous resistance to modernity and development. The Guatemalan revolutionary Rigoberta Menchú, who brought the atrocities against the indigenous population of Guatemala to the transnational platform of the UN, became the iconic indigenous leader. Her Nobel Peace Prize brought further attention to the indigenous cause, not only in Guatemala but also globally, and she became the spokesperson for the indigenous population at the UN. This growing recognition of indigenous rights led to the 2007 UN Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People, first conceptualized in 1982. Menchú’s testimonials, which this book draws, on highlight a transnational feminist indigenous philosophy against global capitalism that challenges the notion of colonial and postcolonial modernity by emphasizing how indigeneity is a more sustainable way of life.
As the self-determination movement of the indigenous population of Guatemala is examined through the phenomenon of land dispossession, the self-determination movement of the indigenous population of India is examined through caste dispossession. Caste, which is peculiar to India, offers a vital site of analysis to show gendered mechanisms of British colonialism in India, the hub of British colonial control in South Asia. Like Spanish colonialism and American neo-imperialism in Guatemala, British colonial rule in India manipulated the notion of emancipation of the indigenous people from the Hindu caste system as a marker of modernity, progress, and British messianic rule. At the same time it strengthened the caste system by building its own administration, which policed native criminality through the category of caste and left distinctively gendered legacies of state terror and torture for caste-disenfranchised women in post-independent India after 1947. Thus India becomes crucial in my argument about how the politics of terror that marched in the name of European modernity have been handed down from the colonial to the postcolonial administration.
While India joined the 1955 Asian-African Conference in the Indonesian city of Bandung as an independent nation, Algeria joined the conference as a French colony that would win liberation in 1962. The Conference was the first step toward the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement, established to retain the sovereignty of the “Third World” against superpower politics. It was conceptualized by India, Burma, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and Yugoslavia. As such, the introduction of Algeria, particularly after a discussion on India from which it has been conventionally delinked, generates cross-border linkages between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Algeria. As British colonialism has left its bureaucratic legacies on the religio-cultural category of caste, similarly French colonialism’s Islamophobia left a legacy for postcolonial Algeria where Islamic militants defined Islam in opposition to anything French. Particular religious and cultural practices that violently affected the lives of Algerian women came to define Islam itself. The category of law figures prominently in the discussion of Algeria, and the eviction of Muslims from the law, enunciated through a discussion of sexual brutality against Algerian women revolutionaries in French Algeria, forms strong links with the Islamophobic torture of detainees and their eviction from law in the US War on Terror.
This not only articulates the continuum between European colonization and US neo-imperialism but also underscores why the white man saving the brown woman from the brown man is a myth, and how colonized populations are inextricably tied to each other. Algeria is also called the Palestine of yesteryear because of the persistence of its anti-colonial struggle, the demonization of its freedom fighters as iconic Islamic terrorists, and its symbolic status in the Arab world and beyond as a dispossessed people’s liberation movement.
South Africa remains crucial to my argument on terror because it complements my Palestine chapter and forges strong links with it through the comparison of the Palestinian situation with the Anglo-Dutch apartheid—both having to do with perpetual states of exception under settler colonial formations. The South Africa chapter highlights how the globally networked, historical consumer-boycott movement against apartheid in South Africa inspired the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid. It also discusses the historic role that South Africa, with its apartheid history, played in November 2011 in hosting the third session of the International War Crimes Tribunal—the Russell Tribunal—on apartheid and the Palestinians.
TFPTLC consists of six chapters. Chapter One is a transnational feminist and queer inquiry into writings, speeches, photography, music, and films that depict and resist the Islamophobia of the US War on Terror. Through a queer understanding of the “enemy combatant”—a term that has anomalously come to include non-combatant Afghans, Iraqis, and US immigrants—this chapter specifically examines women of the empire and women subject to imperial governance. The primary sources include Abu Ghraib torture images, music, and films on the War on Terror, as well as Mahvish Khan’s My Guantanamo Diary (2008), Haifa Zangana’s City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance (2007) and Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (2005) and Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq (2006). Archival research on the role of women prison guards in Nazi concentration camps in Germany and the interrogative torture of World War II Japanese detainees vis-à-vis the vivisection of American prisoners of war are of critical importance here. They help to explore how the US War on Terror replicated the Holocaust in queering the other of the nationalist imaginary. The analysis situates the September 11 suicide hijackings within twentieth-century US and British foreign policy in the Middle East. This enables a critique of the frame of terrorism and counter-terror national security measures, US exceptionalism, and sovereignty that are at cross-purposes with international law. Such a frame is explicit in presidential speeches, administrative, military, and even legal documents in the US. This perspective sets the stage for the exploration of a US empire embedded in an ideology of racial and cultural supremacy, with its transatlantic heritage drawn from earlier European colonialism. The role of women in the continuities of counter-terror torture emerges when images and writings about women prison guards at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are engaged in a conversation with earlier imperial torture photographs. Women in twentieth-century photographs of lynched black men in the US highlight such linkages. Of particular interest here is a transnational feminist and queer analysis of the hierarchy of sexual power that torture photographs of Muslim men and discourses about the War on Terror establish between American women and Arab/Afghan women. However, such imperial mechanisms of geopolitical, visual, and discursive power do not go unchallenged. Counter-cultural discourses of musicians and filmmakers and repression of such discourses highlight the linkage between wars abroad and civil-rights wars on Americans and non-Americans at home. Islamophobia in the US has been made particularly evident by independent filmmakers, who focus on the profiling and incarceration in US prisons after 9/11 of Muslim men—both citizens and non-citizens—and the plight of Muslim women and children in the aftermath of such incarceration. The dissemination of these images in transnational circuits of aesthetic consumption can generate pressure of international “counter-public” opinion against such imperial governance and its abuse of women.
In Chapter Two, narratives of Palestinian dispossession foreground encounters of Palestinian women and queers with the terrorism of the militarized Israeli state. Such locales of contact include Palestinian land, homes, and refugee camps as well as Israeli checkpoints, curfews, and prisons, where women’s detained bodies are violently restricted and searched. Bringing this into conversation with a queer analysis of the body searches of Palestinian men at militarized Israeli checkpoints, the chapter challenges the logic of Israel’s exceptionalism in the Middle East as the bearer of women’s and queer rights. The Palestinian struggle against Israeli oppression expresses itself through violence and non-violence. Plane hijackings and suicide bombings by female freedom fighters challenge the status quo and queer the gendered assumptions about Arab women. So do the weapons of culture—graffiti, posters, poetry, performances, and films by Palestinian women and their Israeli and diasporic allies, “the weapon of culture” being the title of a 2006 essay by Columbia University Associate Professor Joseph Massad. The analysis also draws on Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live (1973), Raymonda Tawil’s My Home, My Prison (1983), and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010). It also draws on interdisciplinary arts such as Sharif Waked’s film Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2011), Suheir Hammad’s poetry, and Mona Hatoum’s and Rana Bishara’s art, among others. The central question here contests dominant narratives about Palestinian terrorism by asking: Whose definitions are at work when it comes to recognizing terrorism? The Palestinian people’s armed struggle against Israeli oppression has been queered by the Israeli state as terrorism, while the long history of Zionist terror groups in Mandate Palestine has been repressed and Israel’s state-sanctioned terrorizing of Palestinian lives has come to be defined as national security. Critical questioning about the definitional limits of terrorism argues for a careful analysis of the formation of the Israeli state in 1948 through the UN-sanctioned partition of Palestine under the aegis of the US and British empires. An inquiry into colonial legal-administrative documents from the British Mandate years in Palestine, such as the Balfour Declaration of 1917, British White Paper of 1922, and the 1938 Macdonald White Paper, together with the diplomatic papers of James MacDonald—the US ambassador to Israel in 1948—prove especially useful in understanding earlier imperialist decision-making that sustain the predicament in the Mashriq (Arab world east of Egypt) region even today. They allow for an alternative reading of the Jewish immigration to Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust as Zionist settler colonialism, in continuum with and sustained by a Euro-American empire that controlled and still controls the Middle East.
Chapter Three shows that the continuities between Spanish colonial rule that ended in 1821 in Guatemala and twentieth-century US neo-colonial governance are evident in the history of Guatemalan dictatorships externally controlled by the US. Indigenous dissent in the face of land appropriation by the Guatemalan state for the US enterprise United Fruit Company led to the civil war in Guatemala (1960–1996). Mayan women’s testimonials illuminate how torture of indigenous women by rape and forced impregnation was an official strategy of the counterinsurgency genocide of the Mayans in the name of national security against Communist guerrillas. The texts foreground how such guerrillas come to be constituted through the unequal accountability of the indigenous and the national security state backed by the empire. In understanding such narratives it is vital to examine the representations of Mayan women in contesting state-sanctioned terror through ecological activism and revolutionary maternity—the collective politics of indigenous mothers and children. This chapter is particularly useful in underlining the inadequacy of the nation-state in negotiating for indigenous justice, and the importance of transnational activism for indigenous rights. The primary texts are I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984) and Crossing Borders (1998), the testimonials of the Guatemalan indigenous leader Menchú. The former text generated debates about the veracity of the genre of testimonials itself—of the singular voice in representing collective experiences. It is significant to examine these mediated texts in uncovering the divergences in revolutionary alliances by bringing to light these debates, as well as the tensions between the testifier and the transcriber of such experiences. The central question revolves around how women’s testimonials have enabled an engagement with vacuums in international human-rights law and political platforms around torture, rapes, and the rights of war-rape orphans, as well as indigenous rights. Interdisciplinary use of the frameworks of forensic anthropology has been useful in excavating the local memory of state terror.
In Chapter Four a transnational feminist study of the postcolonial state of India highlights the geographical breadth that the white empire controls. In the politics of terrorism and counter-terrorism there is a narrative continuity between the British colonial state of India and what has anomalously come to be called the post-colonial Indian state. In British India’s First War of Independence in 1857, Indian queens belonging to the higher kshatriya caste, along with the lower castes and native tribes (Dalits), resisted British imperialism. Across the caste spectrum these resistance fighters came to be criminalized as insurgents or terrorists in the imperial hierarchy of racial identities. Nonetheless, the subsequent Criminal Castes and Tribes Act passed by the British, which identified entire communities as unlawful, targeted only the lower caste and tribal populations of the Dalits. This act, along with the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 that introduced a sharecropping system for colonial revenue, altered caste/class transactions in India between landholders and landless peasants. This led to the anti-colonial and anti-feudal Tebhaga Uprising (1946–7) by the peasantry in which Dalit women played a significant role. As independent India inherited these violent colonial legislative structures, internal colonization of the peasantry emptied the meaning out of the term post-colonial and rendered the UN Declaration of 1960, that claimed to end colonialism, a mockery. Peasant women again took up arms against the state in the Telengana People’s Struggle (1948–51) and the Naxalite movement (1967–71). It is in this context that narratives about the lives of Dalit women such as Phoolan Devi become key to examining the question of terrorism via caste in contemporary India. The central question pertains to how the criminalizing of lower-caste women as terrorists is really an outcome of a vicious cycle of violence based on their social value, both in colonial and independent India. India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi (1993) and The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman’s Amazing Journey from Peasant to International Legend (2003)—the mediated narratives of a lower-caste woman turned bandit who eventually became a Parliamentarian—offer scope for an inquiry into gendered caste violence through the figures of the girl child and the concubine. Such a critique traces the intense oppression experienced by lower-caste women in India that leads to dissident citizens such as Devi, who terrorize as a result of being terrorized. The Dalit woman, troped as the warrior goddess in Devi’s texts, allows for analyzing her resistance to the anomalous caste democracy of post-liberation India that led to counter-terror national security measures against her. Devi also becomes the border-crossing feminist as she engages in productive yet problematic transnational feminist coalitions with elite writers who transcribe and circulate the revolutionary stories of Dalit women. Such stories serve as catalysts for global human-rights politics against violence as a mode of maintaining caste order.
In Chapter Five representations of Arab women in French colonial and postcolonial Algeria depict how they came to be defined as terrorists and experienced violence by both state and non-state agents. Abductions, disappearances, and torture of dissenting women constituted securitization in these regimes. Women were also branded as terrorists because of dissident men in their lives. Transnational and local solidarity politics between Algerian women and intellectuals, activists, and artists have challenged such brutal silencing to expose gendered oppression. Streets became iconic of women’s defiance in material and representational politics in Algeria during colonialism and during the 2010 Arab uprising. Of critical significance here is tracing why the dissenting Algerian did not figure prominently in the uprising. The chapter examines texts such as Djamila Boupacha (1962), a collaboration between the Algerian revolutionary Boupacha and her Tunisan lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World (2005), and the anonymous I, Nadia, Wife of a Terrorist (2006). It extends the previous chapter’s transnational feminist inquiry into who gets defined as a terrorist by arguing about the differential juridical accountability based on the social location of state and non-state agents when committing acts of terror. “Criminal” lawyer Jacques Vèrges’ perspectives, seen in the film Terror’s Advocate (2007), is of crucial significance to this legal critical argument. As with the Mashriq region of the Arab world and the Anglo-American imperial control examined earlier, exploring cultural representations about the Maghreb (Arab world west of Egypt) requires historicizing them against French colonial rule, Islamic backlash, and postcolonial democratic governments. The film Battle of Algiers (1966), based on the memoir of the Algerian leader Yacef Saadi and the Algerian revolutionary Daniele Amrane Minne’s historical account, has defined this backdrop here.
Chapter Six makes strong linkages between apartheid South Africa and its post-apartheid repression. Though South Africa obtained internal self-governance from British colonial rule in 1910, British control over its foreign affairs ended only in 1934. Nonetheless, the constitution of the so-called independent country granted civil and political rights to whites only, and when the National Party came to power in 1948 it introduced laws to reinforce this racial apartheid. Despite the 1960 UN Declaration of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and a UN Special Committee on Apartheid created in 1962, apartheid rule in South Africa was not dismantled until 1994. Moreover, the legacies of apartheid terror live on in post-apartheid South Africa. Novels like Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2001) and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) map out this inheritance by foregrounding the terror that marks the continuities between the gender apartheid of the past and the present. In fact, “post-apartheid” South Africa becomes a fiction as women writers highlight how racial emancipation has happened at the cost of gender emancipation. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in 1995 attempted to construct a post-apartheid non-racial South African democracy by silencing the testimonials of ANC women activists who were sexually terrorized by comrades in the anti-apartheid liberation movement. The Commission also refused to recognize the structural link between socio-economic disenfranchisement and gender-specific violence against South African women. Along with it, South Africa witnessed the deliberate destruction of apartheid-era records by the state, and restricted access to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Archives. However, unearthing the stories of women and queers during apartheid and under post-apartheidism, as well as reconstructing the South African archive that has been sanitized and censored by the apartheid era, fills the gaps and silences in the narrative of memory, truth, trauma, and reconciliation. Translocal resistance to continuing queer disenfranchisement, and South Africa’s solidarity with the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, also form vital sites of politics in the post-apartheid state. This underlines how, despite the legacies of apartheid in the post-apartheid state, common-front politics has become instrumental in creating pressure through transnational public opinion in a bid to eradicate not only injustice in South Africa but also at other linked centers of imperial oppression.
The conclusion examines the failures of national reconciliation projects like the Mandal Commission in India, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and the Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala, especially in addressing gender justice. It also explores the difficulties of addressing regional crisis in the pan-Islamic world in a global system directed by American intervention because of oil interests in the Arab region. The conclusion explores the possibilities of transnational justice. Nonetheless, it also analyzes what kinds of transnational justice have come to be romanticized under the aegis of the empire by bringing the Nuremberg and Pinochet trials into conversation with the assassination of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. The conclusion asks some vital questions: What kinds of war crimes are naturalized as justice rather than cases to be taken up by the International Criminal Court? How do global structural inequalities determine who gets to be a war criminal? How does a critique of reconciliation projects link us back to the two figures we began with: the woman terrorist and the woman torturer. What does reconciliation mean for the representational possibilities offered by a turn to these two figures? And what does “queering” such reconciliation projects mean in theory and practice? If queering is about a move away from bio-determinism, how does an insistence of female “terrorists” refuse or complicate such histories of queering terror?
1. For this history of Third World women’s intervention into the UN Decade for Women, see Hilkka Pietilla and Jeanne Vickers.
2. I am indebted to Debjani Chakravarty for helping me conceptualize the critical labor of “trans.”
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