Orientalism and ‘saving’ US state identity after 9/11

Abstract

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 (9/11) radically destabilized the US sense of self and thus necessitated a particular reassertion of state identity that pivots violently on gender and race. This identity draws upon hypermasculinity, a religious code of ethics and the constitutive differences between Self/Other necessitating the persistent and forceful coding, interpretation and targeting of particular actors and politics as Islamic fundamentalist. In particular, 9/11's posttraumatic space requires US participation in an orientalist project that institutionalizes gendered and racialized violence through the infantilization, demonization, dehumanization and sexual commodification of the 'Other'. The US state project to 'save' its identity intertwines religion, ideology and conflict so as to permanently etch within the American psyche a fear/loathing/paternalism regarding the 'Orient' abroad and within. This article proposes a feminist theoretical framework for empirically understanding and recognizing orientalism's logic in US state identity making.---

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

“…. structure of dominant foreign policy discourse' (Weldes 1999: 119) in its ideological sequel, American 'war on terror' culture, while anachronistically echoing its rhetorics of 'women's rights', muscular nationalism and revenge (Hunt 2006;Nayak 2006;Shepherd 2006). When filming began in 2006, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan and withering domestic support for President George W. Bush's muscle-flexing in Iraq had undermined America's post-9/11 'manly moment' (Eisenstein 2004: 161), its embrace of patriarchal, militarist, flag-waving discourse as a mode of national identity defense secured by male savior elites (Parpart and Zalewski 2008: 5).…”

Navigating Orientalism: Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy

“…She emphasizes that 'we need to examine closely how the discursive constitution of Otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation' (2). Nayak (2006) argues, in the context of US state identity making after 9/11, 'other' women have been infantilized. Infantilization is 'the representation of certain political actors/communities a vulnerable, helpless, and backward children' (Nayak 2006, 48).…”

Anxiety and the creation of the scapegoated other

“…Neo-Orientalism offers an update to include critical examinations of gender, sexuality, and the conflation of Muslims with Arabs (Akram 2000, 8-9;Nayak 2006, 43). Moreover, neo-Orientalism constructs Muslims as fundamental religious fanatics resistant to progress and education, differentiating Muslims from liberal, progressive, and tolerant Westerners (see Nayak 2006;Shepherd 2006;Hellmich 2008;Gentry and Whitworth 2011). This bias infuses the new terrorism thesis, which holds that future terrorist events will be (and have been) driven by large-scale attacks dependent upon fundamentalists (such as radical Islamist violence).…”

“…Anxiety creates and maintains the very binary upon which the US/Western response to terrorism is currently situated-the neo-Orientalist discursive binary of the rational, progressive US against the irrational, less progressive Muslim world (as discussed in Nayak 2006;Shepherd 2006;Nayak and Malone 2009). In this case, the global Muslim community began (if not continued) to bear the brunt of social anxiety about terrorism (Puar and Rai 2002, 120;Morey and Yaqin 2011;Esposito 2011).…”