Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture

Conclusion

This transnational feminist critique links the gendered figure of the “terrorist” in geopolitics from the Middle East to Latin America and Africa to South Asia, offering a corrective view of the phenomenon of terrorism. The geographic breadth of the analysis, spread across centers of European colonization and American oil imperialism and agro-business investments, speaks to the comprehensive validity of this alternative perspective on terror. Such a wide-ranging study is crucial to challenge the Euro-American intellectual hegemony that controls the widespread conceptualization of terrorism as unprovoked violence by non-state actors. Exploring a transnational politics of terror and counter-terror torture clarifies confusions about the meaning of terrorism by debunking the a priori foreign policy premise that terrorism exists in an ahistorical vacuum and that torture is an effect of terrorism. Instead, the comparative breadth of this book traces how terrorism is an effect of violent imperialisms and nationalisms across the world. It examines the figure of the “enemy” from across Asia, Africa, and the Americas to unravel the shared histories of imperial violence and its legacies bequeathed to nationalisms on these continents. Such histories of violence gave rise to revolutionary dissent against injustice by disenfranchised populations. This kind of dissent has been re-signified as terrorism by “enemies” who are presupposed as being prone to subvert governments at home or abroad without any instigation.

In examining the enemy of color in diverse geographies the book takes a microscopic look at the myth of the post-colonial. It traces how terror is as much constitutive of the colonial state as it is of the postcolonial state. This study also uncovers how a politics of terror is as much a tool of earlier European imperial formations as it is of American neo-imperialism. This is particularly evident in the discussion of the US War on Terror and its Islamophobic incarceration of populations of color abroad and at home, as well as its linkages with the Zionist politics around the figure of the Palestinian terrorist. In an earlier Cold War era the Communists/guerrillas in Guatemala were iconic of the transnational terrorist threatening US interests in Latin America. They symbolized Communist Cuba, represented a threat to the Monroe Doctrine,¹ and hence stood for a breach in Guatemala’s relationship with its powerful neighbor the United States. As such, the home-grown guerrilla/Communist in postcolonial Guatemala was not merely the kind of domestic terrorist showcased in the figure of the caste-disenfranchised Phoolan Devi, who threatened the national security of India through a rather localized culture of banditry. Similarly, the Soweto uprising of South Africa, where an entire generation of schoolchildren was made scapegoats and labeled as terrorists by the apartheid regime, was self-contained and localized. Nonetheless, the anti-apartheid movement itself was connected to the larger transnational and pan-African struggle for decolonization, just as the FLN’s struggle against the colonial state and the backlash of postcolonial Islam in Algeria were connected to the larger global and pan-Arab resistance to colonialism and neo-colonialism.

Injecting the woman question and the queer question into an inquiry of a transnational politics of terror shows how an ideology of comparative sexual power lies at the core of imperial and statist control of terrorism and torture as well as revolutionary dissidence. Such control is inextricably tied to racialized class structures linked to unequal transnational and domestic economic realities. This is evident not only in the homophobic and misogynistic torture of detainees in the War on Terror but also in the orientalist queering of anyone considered to be a Muslim. The Muslim male from whom Muslim women need to be saved through imperial wars against terrorism comes to be queered as the other of sexually liberated Euro-America. Such politics showcase American femininities along with American masculinities as corrective agents of Islamofascist terror. Orientalist assumptions about Muslim men and their subsequent torture echo the premises of Enlightenment science which placed black men at the bottom of the hierarchy of human evolution. This helped the white empire to justify a politics of terror where lynching black men was undertaken in the name of white masculinity protecting white femininity. Israeli hegemony in the Middle East aligns itself with this gender politics of a transnational white empire. Projecting itself as the harbinger of feminist and queer liberation in the Middle East, it demarcates itself from the Palestinian “enemy” who is then cast as the iconic terrorist opposing gender liberation. At the same time Palestinian literature, art, and activism foreground how Israeli politics replicate the empire’s racialized schema of misogynism and homophobia. Such a schema terrorizes and renders all Palestinians destitute in their own homelands as Zionist settler colonialism continues in the region.

The continuities between the transnational white empire and the politics of terror of the postcolonial state are also evident in the gendered manifestation of terror on internally colonized populations in Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa—all previously under European colonial rule. Caste-disenfranchised women in India have contested the Brahminical ideology of the postcolonial Indian state, reiterating the dynamics of the earlier anti-colonial dissent against British colonial rule by the “sons of India.” However, the brutal treatment of women resisting postcolonial caste injustice, in sharp contrast to the reverence of anti-colonial revolutionary men, illuminates the anomalous caste democracy of India and its gendered manifestations. Queered out of their femininities, dissident lower-caste women are sexually tortured both by the agents of the state as well as their peers in the resistance. The resistance itself is built on entrenched structures of postcolonial caste patriarchy that are premised on ancient Indian texts like Manusmriti. Similarly, in post-apartheid South Africa, women in the anti-apartheid revolution were disenfranchised both by the revolutionary patriarchy and the Anglo-Boer state patriarchy. Post-apartheidism was a national reconciliation between the state patriarchy and the revolutionary patriarchy where the untold stories of South African women remained repressed. Similarly, the legacies of homophobia were handed down from the anti-apartheid movement to the post-apartheid nation-state. In the same vein, postcolonial Guatemala saw the reiteration of the Spanish colonial land grab. American neo-colonialism allied itself with the elites of the state to appropriate indigenous land for coffee and banana plantations. Indigenous resistance to this land grab was labeled as terrorism by Communist guerrillas, and Mayan women experienced torture rape and forced impregnation as a state-sponsored strategy to humiliate and violate the enemy. In this ideology of sexualized torture women of the opposition were punished through “whoredom” for stepping out of their gendered roles as political participants or even for just belonging to dissident communities. When the indigenous community rejected these women and the children born out of such sexualized torture they reinforced an ideology of comparative sexual power. In this ideology indigenous women’s bodies became merely a sign of racial purity/impurity in the unequal contest between ladino masculinity and indigenous masculinity. Thus a transnational feminist perspective within terrorism studies clarifies how both counter-terror violence against populations of color and dissident politics by them are based on the differential social locations of the gendered body. But more importantly, it unravels the unfortunately neglected stories about how the sexual ideology of torture is related to epistemological control of racialized populations through categories foundational to cultures, such as caste, indigeneity, etc.

This gender politics of terror and torture masquerades as global, regional, and national securitization against the racialized “enemy.” In a transnational feminist study of this politics of terror it is vital to examine the terrain of post-conflict transitional justice and its ability to hold accountable key figures responsible for the atrocities. The post-World War II International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg set a precedent in this regard. Mapping the topography of war-crimes trials from Nuremberg to Guantanamo provides an understanding of who gets to be a war criminal based on the differential accountability of various heads of states. Nuremberg laid “the ground for the subsequent reform of international humanitarian law (“laws of war”) that materialized in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949.”² Before this “international laws were oriented primarily to relations among states” and “[s]tate sovereignty constituted a form of supreme power based on principles of political independence, domestic jurisdiction and foreign non-interference.” As such, “the most egregious atrocities, perpetrated by modern sovereign states, were not illegal because there were no laws to prohibit them and no authority to prevent them.” In November 1945 Hitler was dead, but the Nuremberg tribunal of “four judges, one appointed by each Allied power” prosecuted Hitler’s subordinates in the Nazi government for war crimes (Haas 242). Ten of these defendants were executed. The Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita was also executed in 1946 after the American Military Commission at Manila “charged him with offenses of soldiers under his command, who murdered, plundered, raped, mistreated prisoners of war, and engaged in summary executions” (241). Moreover, Kiichiro Hiranuma, Koki Hirota, Kuniaki Koiso, and Hideki Tojo—all of whom served as prime ministers of Japan during the war—were executed for war crimes in 1948 in Tokyo.³ That the Axis powers did not have recourse to similar war crimes tribunal for the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki highlighted that Nuremberg and Tokyo were merely evidence of the victors’ justice/retribution.⁴

This story of Anglo-American exceptionalism has repeated itself. Subsequent to his capture by the coalition forces in 2003, Saddam Hussein was tried and executed in 2006 by the Iraqi interim government for “the murder of 148 Shi’ites and torture of women and children in Dujail” in 1982 (Haas 242). After his trial and conviction in a Special Court instead of a regular court, Hussein was held in an American-controlled prison till his execution. In 2011 in the CIA-led Operation Neptune Star, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by the US Navy SEALs in a raid on his compound in Pakistan. Though he was unarmed, he was killed instead of being taken alive, and his capture and death were applauded by the UN, NATO, and the European Union. However, even after the widespread publicity of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as centers of torture and extra-judicial killings, George Bush and his accomplices in the War on Terror have lived with complete impunity. In 2004 in the Rasul v Bush case, the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration for unlawful detention in violation of habeas corpus. In the 2006 case Hamdan v Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Rumsfeld had violated the Geneva Conventions and George Bush was a potential war criminal for passing the 2001 executive order to establish unconstitutional courts to try prisoners in the custody of the US military.⁵ Nonetheless, neither Bush nor Rumsfeld has been tried for war crimes.

The United States has also never taken responsibility for President Harry Truman’s facilitation of the formation of the Israeli state in 1948 amidst the mayhem of the Palestinian population by Jewish terrorist groups. The role of the first US ambassador to Israel, James McDonald, in resettling a European Jewish population in the Middle East instead of in Europe and creating a European nation-state outside Europe has hardly been acknowledged as a war crime by the US. In displacing thousands of Palestinians from their homeland, McDonald’s foreign policy paved the way for the continuing regional crisis in Palestine/Israel today. For its oil interests in the region, the US has continued to support Israel and has created a powerful ally in the region to drive a wedge through the Arab world. On July 27, 2012 President Obama signed the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012.⁶ The Act promises US financial and technological support for the Israeli military. It includes the supply of US-made military equipments and excess defense articles as well as more training opportunities for Israel with the US military. In fact, President Obama secured the largest funding for Israel in US history in 2012 that included $3 billion in foreign military financing. During the November 2012 bombings in which Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari was killed in a targeted Israeli air strike in Gaza, the US refused to recognize the unequal relationship between airstrikes by a heavily militarized state and stateless Palestinians fighting a protégé of the United States superpower. Secretary of State John Kerry has negotiated for a two-state solution with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and with the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah. What are the chances that an imperial power that supports Israel militaristically against Palestinians will be able to negotiate a just situation for Palestinian self-determination? What are the chances that Arab leaders will have confidence in representatives of an imperial state that sponsors Israel to resolve the extended regional crisis? A transnational boycott like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement with its translocal organizing and active pursuit of justice for Palestinians is a strong alternative to US negotiations in the Middle East.

The Arab uprising since December 2010 in Tunisia that spread across the Maghreb, Mashriq, and other countries in Africa also underlines the possibilities of translocal networks of dissidence in collectively pressuring states to address entrenched structures of injustice. In the wake of the self-immolation of the vendor Mohamed Bouazizi which forced President Ben Ali to flee after misruling Tunisia for 23 years, Algeria saw a series of self immolations in front of government buildings. As the 19-year Algerian state of emergency was lifted under the pressure of a growing people’s movement against the state of housing, employment, food prices, and more, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika promised constitutional amendments on media, elections, and political parties.

In the context of postcolonial dictatorships it is crucial to examine the structures of accountability in the current transnational system of justice that lead to some kinds of war crimes and dictatorships being romanticized as justice and some being tried at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Certain war criminals and dictators are touted as messiahs saving the world from terrorism and others are condemned for committing crimes against humanity. What is defined as a war crime and who is defined as a war criminal depends on the social locations of the agents of such crimes within the international division of socio-economic structures. This is because despite the international status of the UN, its structures are premised on the ideology of state sovereignty since its laws are enforceable only through the consent of states. Whether heads of states can be tried, convicted, and sentenced in the International Criminal Court is dependent on whether the state is willing to accept the ruling of the court. Even if states sign UN conventions, the UN has no authority to enforce them if states choose not to abide by them or if other states choose not to hold a state accountable for its crimes against humanity. The arrest and detention of former Chilean General Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998 after Spain issued an international arrest warrant against him for the torture and death of Spanish citizens serves as a test case here. The European involvement created enough international pressure so that upon his release and return to Chile in 2000, Pinochet was charged with numerous crimes against humanity, despite the 1978 amnesty laws of the Chilean military junta, before dying in 2006. He did not serve any sentence. The coup led by Pinochet in 1973 that overthrew the democratically elected socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and brought Pinochet to power was backed by the Cold War United States. However, neither then US President Richard Nixon nor Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were indicted for crimes against humanity for sponsoring a regime that disappeared, tortured, and annihilated the opposition and for turning Chile into a mass grave. Similarly, on May 10, 2013 the 86-year-old José Efraín Ríos Montt, a former military general who was the president of Guatemala from 1982–83, was charged with genocide and other crimes against humanity in a domestic court. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Together with his intelligence chief, Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, who was found not guilty, Ríos Montt was “accused of being responsible for the massacre of 1,771, the forced displacement of 29,000, and the subjecting of the Mayan Ixil to conditions designed to destroy it” (Allison). The majority of the approximately 250,000 Guatemalans who were killed during the Mayan genocide were civilians. The Ríos Montt case echoes the Pinochet case. Though the United States supported the Ríos Montt trial, the Reagan administration, which was responsible for sponsoring the Mayan genocide with huge amounts of ammunitions and by training the Guatemalan military in torture methods, was never held accountable.⁷ The fact that decades of terror and torture in Guatemala were linked at its foundations with American business enterprises and America’s Cold War foreign policy was all but obliterated in this courtroom drama.⁸ Moreover, days after the trial court ruling, the constitutional court annulled the judgment, subsequently pointing to a decade-old amnesty law that could prevent prosecution. A new trial date of January 2015 has now been set. Thus it is evident that unless there is a shift from implementing transnational justice through the paradigm of the state, states will continue to maintain a status quo that sustains the powerful. Instead, it is crucial to re-imagine a world led by various translocal networks for justice and the pressure of meaningful grassroots public opinion that sustain them.

At the level of national reconciliation projects in Guatemala, South Africa, and India the state has also proved to be dysfunctional as a conduit for justice. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa, and the Mandal Commission of India all testify to the same failures of the state. In the case of Guatemala the truth commission had no subpoena powers to necessitate testifiers, through a writ, to appear in court.⁹ Though the unspeakable brutalities against women were recognized, the commission got only nominal responses on inviting high-ranking military and police officers of the regimes to testify to human rights violations.¹⁰ The Ministry of Defense was resistant to CEH, claiming that it did not know the addresses of the officers to be invited and it refused to deliver the letters to them (Tomuschat 246). It also denied the existence of files in the military archives about the conduct of military operations during the worst years of the armed struggle. After a CEH staff member discovered “an evaluation paper assessing ex post certain fighting activities of that epoch” in a regional military headquarter, all direct assistance by regional commanders to the CEH was forbidden by the Ministry of Defense. From then on all requests for information had to go through a fruitless centralized channel where the CEH accessed only “a number of prospective annual campaign plans and some fairly insignificant statistical figures” (250). The secret services were even more impenetrable. Moreover, the CEH did not have the prerogative for penal prosecutions of parties responsible for the armed atrocities, and the CEH report came under heavy criticism for its refusal to name the perpetrators of violence. Furthermore, though the 1996 Law on National Reconciliation did not provide amnesty to genocide, torture, and forcible disappearance, this law has been debated because it intensified impunity by leaving “political” crimes open to interpretation.¹¹ Within such a frame of national reconciliation, accountability for political crimes against women is doubly erased—for the lack of penal strictures on political violence¹² and because the hegemonic image of the target of political violence or the prisoner of conscience is always male. In addition, in this scheme of national reconstruction that grants amnesty to many political acts, the everyday violence against women enjoys impunity as acts of political expediency.

Unlike the CEH, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had the power to summon people to appear before it but could not “through ordinary legal process, cross-examine people to determine the accountable truth” (Slabbert 69). By defining apartheid violence through individual perpetrators and victims, the TRC also erased the structural violence of apartheid and its vicious effects on women. Moreover, Desmond Tutu’s philosophy of ubuntu (traditional African jurisprudence based on restorative rather than retributive justice) demanded superhuman powers of forgiveness from victims and kin of victims. This has raised crucial questions about the powers, privileges, assumptions, and demands of the patriarchs of the nation in times of national reconstruction.¹³ Moreover, the Amnesty Committee of the TRC also breached international law by granting amnesty for gross human rights violations. The South African Court claimed national sovereignty over international human rights law on the ground that it was not incorporated into municipal law by acts of legislation, and refused to prosecute apartheid cases brought to it.¹⁴ In effect, the pattern of refusing criminal prosecution of atrocities that marked the apartheid era has continued through the post-apartheid Constitutional Court, thus recirculating apartheid impunity in the post-conflict state. The TRC also truncated testimonies of rape within the ANC, refused to recognize rape as political torture, and separated political atrocities on women from the realm of the criminal.¹⁵

In India there has been no colossal project testifying to caste violence like the truth commissions in Guatemala and South Africa. However, the Mandal Commission can be perceived as a national reconciliation project because it was established to make recommendations for affirmative action for India’s Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). Quotas were already operative in education and employment for SC/ST but the Mandal Commission Report (MCR), published in 1979, recommended a further quota of 27 percent for Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and thus raised to 50 percent reservations in government and public-sector organizations.¹⁶ On August 7, 1990 the government of India under Prime Minister V.P. Singh declared its intent to implement the 1979 MCR. This triggered vehement responses from upper-caste Hindus who stormed the streets of India protesting against the government by role-playing lower-caste occupations like street-cleaning and boot-polishing.¹⁷ The most virulent of protests took the form of self-immolation. Upper-caste women clamored for their citizenship rights to a democratic, secular, and egalitarian nation. They based their claims of merit, as opposed to reservation, on an ideology of the free will of the individualistic subject of liberal humanism. They constructed a myth of unified Indian citizenship, undifferentiated by cumulative structures of oppression and privilege which define merit. Thus they redeployed Indian citizenship as upper caste, upper class, and educated.¹⁸

The exceptionalism of a transnational white empire demands unequal accountability from the others of its imperialist imaginary. This, together with the failures of national reconciliation projects, underlines a strong need for a praxis of justice to go beyond the paradigm of the neo-imperial and postcolonial state. In this context it is impossible to examine regional and national crises without situating them in the larger historical backdrop of the continuities/legacies of imperial power politics. Within such a geopolitical framework neither the empire, nor the region, nor the state is a route to justice for gender-based violence in conflict zones. Political women/queers and women/queers caught in the political crossfire are almost erased from the rhetoric of post-conflict restorative justice where negotiations take place between the hetero-patriarchies of the state and the revolution. Such negotiations are premised upon an ideology that war and politics are hetero-normative male domains. So then, what kind of processes can be re-imagined in the twenty-first century to contest such a gendered understanding and implementation of transitional and transnational justice? Drawing on the special hearings sensitized to atrocities on women initiated by Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes at the South African TRC can enable a conceptualization of gender specificity as a frame for truth and reconciliation. Since the state has emerged as a questionable platform for justice, stronger transnational futures might envisage a Permanent Transnational Court for Gender Justice analogous to the existing International Criminal Court (ICC). However, such a court would have to significantly diverge from the ICC’s basic premise of imagining and administering justice. The ICC, established in the Netherlands in 2002, requires states to be parties to the Rome Statute that established the ICC to try cases of state-sanctioned violence like war crimes and genocide. The ICC can try such cases only when national jurisdiction is unavailable.¹⁹ On the other hand, in the transnational court trying gender-based crimes of the state and the empire, the target of state violence will have autonomy to decide whether transnational jurisdiction will benefit the case. To ensure such autonomy of the plaintiff, signatures/ratifications by state parties will be redundant for such a court and the verdicts of the transnational court will be binding on states that have ratified it or not. Such a transnational tribunal will be vested with subpoena powers and the authority to demand restorative justice and reparations for the injured party from both individuals and states concerned.

Nonetheless, such a transnational institution of justice should safeguard against certain pitfalls of institutional power in a world marked by structural inequalities. The court needs to be educated in the particular local reality in which the case under jurisdiction is situated. This is particularly important because of how unequal power relationships along the international division of cultural and socio-economic control influence jurisprudential and juridical discourse. Such relationships are produced by centuries of colonial and contemporary neo-imperial dominance. Otherwise, invisible cultural and legal violence on already brutalized populations will be recycled in the name of justice while Euro-American values are touted as universal ideas for legal redress. To avoid strategic control by ex-colonial/neo-imperial powers in the fashion that the ICC or the UN has come to be controlled, the transnational court needs to break away from the paradigm of the state. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine, called “the court of people” or “the tribunal of conscience” that brought together international figures known for their moral integrity,²⁰ offers an alternative. However, unlike the Russell Tribunal that only has investigative powers and has to refer the cases to be tried at the ICC, the Transnational Court will have judicial powers.

Finally, a critique of reconciliation projects will remain incomplete unless it is linked back to the two figures we began with: the woman terrorist and the woman torturer. It is crucial to examine what reconciliation means for the representational possibilities offered by turning to these two figures. If transnational feminism is invested in decolonizing a feminist epistemology of reconciliation where women are irrevocably the injured party and never the injurer or where women are unqualifiedly targets of patriarchy and never participants in its mission, then these two figures have much to offer. When brought together, the figure of the woman terrorist in the global south and the figure of the woman torturer in the global north that this book has examined make a strong intervention into a model of conflict negotiations among male political actors. It challenges the representational politics of the north that has consistently used colonial photography and narratives as well as the media as the cultural arm of imperialism to portray the woman of the south as exotic, silent, and apolitical. By doing so, it opens up new epistemologies of reconciliation where women of the global south can confront imperial patriarchy and imperial women about the gendered ideology of “saving” women in the south that has not only enabled colonialism, militarism, and imperial patriarchy to invade and conquer the south but has also enabled the women of the north to participate in neo-imperial wars and benefit from them. This opens up representational possibilities for women in reconciliation projects in a way that “peace talks,” premised on the understanding that affairs of the state are a male bastion, cannot. A transnational feminist critique of reconciliation that includes the woman torturer and the woman terrorist also deconstructs certain feminist myths about women inevitably being peace-mongers, and opens up dialogic spaces for discussions of women’s contribution to projects of dissident and imperial politics and violence against them within such projects. Within the larger project of global reconciliation this facilitates the deconstruction of the hierarchy between northern masculinities that supposedly protect women and southern masculinities that allegedly terrorize them. Such a deconstruction is realized by foregrounding consolidated fronts of dissident populations of color with whom the woman terrorist is affiliated. This disputes the imperial logic that the south does not have the right to be sovereign since it does not grant sovereignty to its women. In postcolonial contexts, the female domestic terrorist as a participant in national reconciliation projects strengthens the ability of revolutionary women to negotiate for belonging, legitimacy, and citizenship of women of disenfranchised groups within the nation. Injecting the figure of the revolutionary woman in male-dominated projects of post-conflict national negotiations also opens up possibilities for introducing a discourse about the differential treatment of women by projects of self-determination and violence of the revolutionary patriarchy against women comrades.

This discussion about women terrorists and women torturers inevitably leaves us with the question of what queering such reconciliations projects would mean in theory and practice if queering speaks to a move away from bio-determinism. How does an insistence on female “terrorists” complicate histories of queering terror? Transnational and national reconciliation projects that inject the question of the woman terrorist move away from bio-determinism by queering reconciliation discursively since they extrapolate women in conflict zones from bio-deterministic discourses of peace and victimhood and place them within discourses of aggressive political action. It is a move away from a bio-deterministic understanding of epistemologies/practices of torture and terror as essentially male. An entry of the woman terrorist into reconciliation discourses also allows for women’s negotiation for post-conflict political power in practice—a queer move in itself since political action by women which largely remains outside the norm inevitably un-genders political women as androgynous. Nevertheless, if the political purchase of the postcolonial queer lies in a monstrosity of political and sexual desires—a pathology of debility/ disability—as a contestation of the empire and the postcolonial nation-state, the woman terrorist complicates histories of queering terror. Unlike the sexual desires of gender queers which work in tandem with their political desires in literary and cultural representations, the portrayal of the political desires of women terrorists seems to stand in for their sexual desires.

NOTES

1. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was a US foreign policy aimed at barring European interference in Latin America in exchange for American non-interference in the internal affairs of Europe or its existing colonies. It assured the dominance of the United States in the Western hemisphere.

2. Hajjar, Lisa. “From Nuremberg to Guantanamo: International Law and American Power Politics.” Middle East Report. 229 (Winter 2003). Web. 19 May 2013 <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer229/nuremberg-guantanamo>

3. Haas 241.

4. Hajjar.

5. Ibid 4.

6. “President Obama: Advancing Israel’s Security and Supporting Peace.” <http://www.whitehouse.gov/advancing-israels-security>

7. Allison.

8. Ibid.

9. For a comprehensive understanding of the national reconciliation process in Guatemala, see Forsberg et al., Tomuschat, and Christian Tomuschat et al.