War-on-terror Femininity and the Sexualised Violence(s) at Abu Ghraib

1. The ‘Third-world’ Muslim Woman in Need of Rescue and Protection

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, US intervention was justified on the grounds that both missions were part of a broader campaign to rescue and liberate Muslim women from ‘barbaric’ Islamic regimes (Holland, 2009; Khan, 2014; Nayak, 2006; Riley, 2013; Shepherd, 2006; Sjoberg, 2006a; Stabile & Kumar, 2005; Steans, 2008; Tétreault, 2006).

In the Introduction, I talked about western efforts to instil gender equality in Afghanistan. Part of this mission involves the liberation of Afghan women. The mutilated face of Bibi Aisha on the front cover of Time Magazine in July 2010 is a perfect illustration of western civilising missions. The image is graphic. We see a hole where the nose has been cut off. The headline reads: ‘what happens if we leave Afghanistan’. In the article that follows, written by Aryan Baker (a news reporter for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Heck & Schlag, 2012), we learn that Bibi Aisha was an 18-year-old Afghan woman who ran away from her husband and his family who, under orders from the Taliban, cut off her nose and sliced her ears. Bibi was rescued by US forces in Afghanistan and was taken to the US to receive reconstructive surgery (Heck & Schlag, 2013; Khan, 2014). This narrative, as Khan (2014, p.102) notes:

[…] leads to a logical conclusion: NATO and the United States should stay in Afghanistan to continue to rescue women from the Taliban who want to brutalise them. Logically, [w]estern forces are set up as saviors of the Afghan woman. (see also Rasul & McDowell, 2010)

The violence involved in US interventions in the middle-east is obscured. Here, drawing on Schept (2016, p. 5), we return to the relationship between visuality, empire and the State:

Visuality, then, is the mechanism by which the quotidian violence underwriting authority is made illegible and un-seeable… [it masks] the inherent violence of [S]tates in a vocabulary that leaves intact the very logics, infrastructures and institutions necessary for the violence to occur in the first place.

In the previous chapter, I talked about sighting and citing women. Unlike the image of President Trump signing the anti-abortion Executive Order, where woman is absent, in this picture the woman is present. Bibi is both sighted and cited. However, she is still marginalised. Her story is not simply about fighting gender injustice; about the violence enacted upon her, its (geo)political scope is greater than this: victory in the battle against the evil forces of Islamic terrorism. This agenda is based on ethnocentric and orientalist ideas about women, Islam and the middle-east. Orientalism, as coined by Said (1979), is based upon ontological and epistemological distinctions between the ‘orient’ and the ‘occident’, where the west dominates, restructures and has authority over this threatening, dangerous, mysterious ‘Other’. For Said (1979, p. 300), orientalism is the systematic attempt to distinguish ‘between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior’. Furthermore, the Orient is considered as a ‘hotbed of terrorism, ignorance, poverty, oppression, racism and misogyny’ (Nayak, 2006, p. 46).

To explore this case in more detail, I turn to Walklate’s (2017) work on the power of the visual to communicate ideas about victimhood and suffering (see also Gies 2017 who discusses mediating suffering in relation to staged imagery of killing and torture).

In the chapter Mediated Suffering, Walklate (2017) draws on three images to discuss the concepts of ‘pain, horror and resilience’. The first is an image of a woman running towards a funeral procession. The funeral is for her cousin who died in Afghanistan. This is reviewed under the subheading Pain? This is followed by the image of a woman in Norway covered in blood following the attacks by Anders Breivik in 2011. This section is entitled Horror? The final image, dissected under the title Resilience?, is of a march in Paris in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The image features a banner with ‘Not Afraid’ written on it. Walklate (2017) argues that all three, produced in the aftermath of 9/11, ‘carry the marks of that moment in time in how they have been mediated and responded to’. Through her analysis, we see how suffering is ‘…reshaped, commodified, and packaged for its public and didactic salience’ (McEvoy & Jamieson, 2007, p. 425 as cited in Walklate, 2017).

To this canon of post 9/11 images, we can add the photo of Bibi Aisha. I argue that the image of Bibi Aisha offers a ‘mediated’ illustration of pain and horror vis-à-vis the generic ‘third-world-woman’. In this example, the orchestration of female suffering was used by the US administration to sell the war on terror to the American people. As Stabile and Kumar (2005, p. 778) note:

As long as women are not permitted to speak for themselves, they provide the perfect grounds for an elaborate ventriloquist act, in which they serve as the passive vehicle for the representation of U.S interests.

As an illustration of how gender can serve American exceptionalism, Bibi Aisha is only one example of the various ways in which women were used to justify this global campaign (see Stabile & Kumar, 2005; Steans, 2008 for a more detailed analysis).

2. The Woman in Danger

The next narrative I want to draw upon is a variation of the first. However, in this instance, the woman in danger was a US soldier deployed in Iraq. Her name was Jessica Lynch. News stories reported that 19-year-old Lynch had ‘gone down fighting’, that she had been injured in battle and then sexually violated in captivity (Sjoberg, 2007, p. 86). However, this was a fabricated story (by the Pentagon) of capture, detention and sexual violation. The reality was far more banal: Lynch’s gun had malfunctioned. She did not ‘go down fighting’. Her injuries were not battle-related. She was not captured per se; rather she willingly surrendered. She was held but received medical care (Bragg, 2003 as cited in Sjoberg, 2007; see also Lobasz, 2008; Mason, 2005).

After nine days, US soldiers rescued Lynch from the Iraqi hospital where she was being held (Lobasz, 2008). Lynch was portrayed as helpless, as needing male soldiers to rescue her (Sjoberg, 2007). As Lobasz (2008, p. 319 emphasis in the original) notes:

[…] Lynch was represented not only as a woman in need of rescuing, but as a virtuous and good woman in need of rescuing. Depicted as an innocent small-town girl who wanted nothing more than to teach kindergarten…Lynch both needed and deserved to be rescued.

While the story of Bibi Aisha was used to legitimise the continued presence of US forces in Afghanistan, it can be argued that the fabricated rescue mission of Jessica Lynch formed part of US efforts to revitalise support for the war on terror in Iraq. Like with Bibi Aisha, Lynch’s story was central to the war on terror narrative. Conversely, our final ‘story’, concerning women’s involvement in sexualised violence and torture, did very little to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In fact, this comparison – between victim and perpetrator in the form of Lynch and England – has formed the basis of numerous academic articles on the subject of women’s role in the US military (see Howard III & Prividera, 2008; Lobasz, 2008; Mason, 2005; Sjoberg, 2007). Here, as captured in the title of Lobasz’s (2008) article, The woman in peril (Lynch) is compared with ‘the ruined woman’ (England). Lynch embodies women’s normative role within the US military, while England represents the subversion of it.

3. Abu Ghraib and Female Perpetrators of Sexualised Violence

In April 2004, 60 Minutes II, a CBS American news programme, broadcast a breaking report detailing the sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib (Howard III & Prividera 2008; Murphy, 2007). The show released images of hooded naked detainees being piled on top of one another to form a pyramid, while other images depicted forced simulated sexual acts (Holland, 2009). Later, in May 2004, Seymore Hersh also reported on the story in The New Yorker. This was followed by published photographs of the violence(s) in the The New York Times, Newsweek and The Washington Post (Tucker & Triantafyllos, 2008). US soldiers, over the course of three months, took an estimated 1,800 photographs of the sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees (Murphy, 2007; Richter-Montpetit, 2007).

Hersh’s article in The New Yorker, Torture at Abu Ghraib, was based on the classified report by Major General Antonio Taguba (Holland, 2009). And although, as Sjoberg (2007) notes, there were eight official investigations into the sexualised violence and torture, only those written by General Taguba in 2004 and by Major General George Fay in 2005 are in the public domain. Among the acts of physical, mental and sexual abuse listed in the Taguba (2004, pp. 16–17) report are: the use of military dogs to intimidate detainees; various acts of physical violence, including jumping on prisoners’ feet; forcing prisoners to pose in sexually explicit positions for the camera; forced nakedness, forced masturbation and ‘forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear’; the sodomising of a detainee; and ‘threatening male detainees with rape’. This is corroborated by Fay and Jones (2005) who also found that military personnel engaged in the improper use of isolation.

Seven US military soldiers – the seven ‘rotten apples’ (named earlier) – were found guilty of various violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), including numerous counts of dereliction of duty, as well as the maltreatment of prisoners between May 2004 and September 2005 (Caldwell & Mestrovic, 2008, p. 276). No senior officers within the US military were charged or tried for their crimes (Howard III & Prividera, 2008, p. 288). Janis Karpinski, the female general in charge of Abu Ghraib, was ‘formally admonished and quietly suspended’ (Hersh, 2004). For my purposes here, I will provide details of the three women who were involved as well as Charles Graner, the supposed ringleader of the violence(s) and England’s boyfriend at the time of the scandal.

In 2004, Megan Ambuhl, following a plea deal, pleaded guilty to a single charge of dereliction of duty. She was dismissed from the army and did not serve any prison time (CNN, 2013). In 2005, Sabrina Harman was demoted and sent to prison for her role in the sexualised violence and torture at Abu Ghraib. Following her sentence, she received a bad conduct discharge from the army (CNN, 2013). In the same year, as part of a pretrial agreement, Lynndie England pleaded guilty for her involvement, while claiming that she did not understand that her actions were wrong. This resulted in a mistrial. During her second trial, England was found guilty of ‘four counts of maltreating detainees, one count of conspiracy and one count of committing an indecent act’ (CNN, 2013). She received a three-year prison sentence but was released after serving half of this time. Charles Graner was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He also received a dishonourable discharge from the army (CNN, 2013).

In Chapter 1, I talked about the tendency to argue that perpetrators of excessive and brutal violence dehumanise their victims prior to carrying out their acts of violence. Accounts of the sexualised violence at Abu Ghraib are no exception. A number of writers have argued that the sexualised violence and torture at Abu Ghraib was enacted upon dehumanised victims (Apel, 2005; Spens, 2014). My position on this remains the same: dehumanisation was not a precursor to this violence. What happed to the detainees at Abu Ghraib may have dehumanised them, after the fact, but this violence was not enacted upon dehumanised bodies. It was inflicted upon bodies that were identified and marked as enemies of the State. Bodies that ‘required’ punishment as part of a western civilising mission. In the context of Abu Ghraib, moving beyond dehumanisation allows us to appreciate the racial (and by extension, ethnocentric and orientalist), political and gendered meanings and motivations behind this sexualised violence (see also Richter-Montpetit, 2007; Tétreault, 2006).

What Is the Appropriate Response to These Images?

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Fig. 1.

Lynndie England Either Doing the ‘Thumbs-up’ Gesture or Signalling That She Is Holding a Pistol Aimed at the Penis of the Hooded Naked Iraqi Detainee at Abu Ghraib (en.wikipedia.org, 2003).

In Fig. 1, England has a cigarette in her mouth and is smiling for the camera. In keeping with my discussion of taking ‘selfies’ at memorial sites, this is a more playful image of Lynndie compared with the infamous picture of her with the detainee on a leash. My decision to use the term ‘playful’ to describe England in this image will become apparent when we discuss the phenomenon of ‘doing a Lynndie’ in due course. This first image will be unpacked in relation to gender, ethics and appropriate responses to suffering and violence.

Writers have expressed concern about the inability of images to move people, both in general, but specifically in relation to the photos that were taken at Abu Ghraib (Butler, 2007; Carrabine, 2011; Kennedy & Patrick, 2014; Sontag, 1979, 2003). In her book On Photography, Sontag declared that images of suffering and violence had lost their ability to alarm (Sontag, 1979). In her next book, Regarding the Pain of Others, published in 2003, Sontag concedes that habitual viewing of horrifying images does not always result in compassion fatigue. Others have raised similar concerns to those raised by Sontag in her earlier work. Bulter (2007), for example, in her article, The Digitalization of Evil, grapples with ideas about what is grievable, which lives matter and whose lives are represented in the aftermath of war. With reference to Abu Ghraib, Butler tries to understand the process by which these images and their distribution were normalised. Her argument is that the so-called enemy, depicted in these images, was ‘…not idiosyncratic, but shared, so widely shared, it seems, that there was hardly a thought that something might be amiss here’ (Butler, 2007, p. 958). Furthermore, the images, Butler argues, came to be perceived as banal because they were catalogued alongside the soldiers’ ‘holiday’ photos:

In these instances, it would seem that the photos are part of a record of everyday life, and that everyday life has to be understood in this context as consisting in a certain sequential interchangeability of such images. (Butler, 2007, p. 960)

In this context then, the actions of these soldiers are normalised and not regarded as ‘morally alarming’ (Butler, 2007). Here, the exceptional becomes the quotidian.

It is a common argument that repeated viewings of images of war, violence and atrocity, eventually lead to compassion fatigue (Kennedy & Patrick, 2014). When the images of the sexualised violence and torture at Abu Ghraib surfaced in 2004, various newspapers expressed their shock and horror at what had taken place, particularly given the involvement of women (see Åhäll, 2017). But do these images still have the same impact? I always provide students with a trigger warning when teaching on this subject. I also do the same when presenting at conferences. In fact, in December 2018, I presented a paper at The Evil Women conference in Vienna. The title of my paper was The feminine-as-monstrous: Using the whore narrative to unpack representations of militarized femininity gone awry. As per my usual practice, I forewarned the audience that I would be showing violent images. In this particular presentation, I was showing images of Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman. No one in the audience seemed concerned. In fact, the person who presented after me (with no visual cues) received more outrage for his teaching practices than I did for showing images of sexualised violence and torture. Is this compassion fatigue or do images of female violence no longer shock us? Carrabine’s (2011, p. 19) work on this is instructive. He reminds us that images of suffering and violence are deeply embedded in human storytelling therefore, ‘“human outrage” is not the “natural response” to images of torture’. Furthermore, such images have to be placed within the broader cultural context. While for some, this means addressing the consumption of violent pornography and video games within American culture (see Sontag, 2004), the cultural context I am interested in is the war on terror, which created simplistic binaries between good and bad; rescuers/liberators versus dictators/extremists. Perhaps for some, the violence that we see in these images can be regarded as a just and necessary response to the threat posed by ‘dangerous terrorists’. This is compatible with the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Recall the image of Bibi Aisha. Although her story relates to Afghanistan, a similar rhetoric (the protection of women) was applied to the case of Iraq. Maybe for some, the men in these images are a synecdoche for men in the middle-east. The kind of men who cut off women’s noses.

Perhaps due to some, or all of these reasons, the images of Abu Ghraib did not shock as much or, as universally, as one would assume.³ This may also explain why they have been appropriated and recontextualised in numerous ways (Carrabine, 2011, p. 25). Some of these reimagining’s have offered critical analyses of this violence (see Carrabine for a discussion of Phil Toledano’s 2008 virtual exhibition), while others fall short. The most obvious example being the ‘doing a Lynndie’ phenomenon. This involves posing like England, as captured in the image above, and taking a photograph. According to Hristova (2013), 827 photos of the ‘Lynndie pose’ were uploaded to the British blog, Bad Gas, following the release of the Abu Ghraib images in May 2004. Most of the submitted photos are, Hristova (2013) argues, mundane; taken in the context of people’s everyday lives. These are the instructions for visitors to the site:

1. Find a victim who deserves to be ‘Lynndied’.

2. Make sure you have a friend nearby with a camera ready to capture the ‘Lynndie’.

3. Stick a cigarette (or pen) in your mouth and allow it to hang slightly below the horizontal.

4. Face the camera, tilt your upper body slightly forward but lean back on your right leg.

5. Make a hitchhiking gesture with your right hand and extend your right arm so that it’s in roughly the same position as if you were holding a rifle.

6. Keeping your left arm slightly bent, point in the direction of the victim and smile (Know Your Meme, Lynndie England Pose, n.d.).

The gesture is also included in the Urban Dictionary as: ‘the act of pointing and laughing at an unaware victim while holding a cigarette half-cocked in your mouth and being photographed. Much like Lynndie England’ (as cited in Hristova, 2013, p. 431).

Let us unpack this phenomenon in more detail with reference to semiotics, postmodernism and the uses of memes. For our purposes here, a brief overview of these subjects is provided.

The Lynndie England Pose as Postmodern Meme

The term meme, from the Greek mīmēma, meaning that which is imitated (Grundlingh, 2018), was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene (Boudana, Frosh, & Cohen, 2017; Cannizarro, 2016; Grundlingh, 2018; Krsteva, Donev, & Iliev, 2018; Marchant, 2019; Milner, 2012). Internet memes, to paraphrase Huntington (2013), are considered a subversive form of communication within participatory media culture (see also Gradinaru, 2018). As everyday artefacts, memes recycle, mimic and parody popular culture (Kuipers, 2005 as cited in Huntington, 2013; Marchant, 2019). They also appropriate and transform cultural texts (Milner, 2012). Milner (2012, p. iii) defines internet memes as ‘amateur media artefacts, extensively remixed and recirculated by different participants on social media networks’. Also, in the words of Krsteva et al. (2018, p. 136):

[M]emes can be viewed as postmodern hybrid creations combining the visual and the written modes of expression. They make use of different artistic forms, genres, modes and techniques. The visual and the written parts form one unit often using radical parody, irony, kitsch, quotations and other stylistic devices. The result is a new media item of rich semiotic content, a metaphor ready to be seen by more media consumer than ever before.

A number of scholars have used ideas from semiotics to examine the use and meaning of memes (Cannizarro, 2016; Grundlingh, 2018; see also Gradinaru, 2018). Semiotics is interested in unpacking the meaning attached to cultural objects and how that meaning is conveyed through signs. Signs contain the signifier, the physical form, as well as the signified, the concept (Hall, 1997 as cited in Huntington, 2013; see also Gradinaru, 2018). Within postmodern thinking, the relationship between signifier and signified is viewed as arbitrary (Gradinaru, 2018). For writers such as Lacan, Barthes and Derrida, the meanings of signs are fluid, ‘…signs do not need to be fixed in any particular signified, the “free play” of signifiers being the only authentic semiotic movement’ (Gradinaru, 2018, p. 295). While Gradinaru (2018, p. 304) bases her discussion on GIFs, we can apply her thinking to memes to posit that memes change the meaning of the initial sign, modifying the signification and transforming ‘the originals into floating signifiers’ (Gradinaru, 2018, p. 304). Or, as articulated by Boudana et al. (2017, p. 1226), ‘the signifiers are disconnected from their historical signifieds and reassigned according to the users’ will and wit’.

Boudana et al. (2017, p. 1212) unpack the use of postmodern memes in relation to iconic photographs. For them, iconic images consist of three traits:

(a) the recognition of these photos by a large public, (b) their repetition and recycling across media platforms, and (c) their broad social and moral significance, beyond the referential meaning of the originally reported event.

In their research, they review 34 different memes of the iconic photograph The Napalm Girl, taken by Nick Ut in 1972. This image depicts children fleeing the Napalm attack during the Vietnam War. In terms of the various appropriations of this photograph, in the form of memes, the authors note:

[T]hese appropriations reveal a fundamental paradox: the more a photograph is recycled, the more it may influence the public – yet the more the original referential context may be lost in the process. (Boudana et al., 2017, p. 1214)

In terms of appropriations, there are two types: ‘politically oriented’ or ‘pop-culture-oriented’ (Shifman, 2013, p. 372 as cited in Boudana et al., 2017, p. 1225). The former, on the whole, are sardonic, while the latter, are more humorous (Boudana et al., 2017). While some memes aim to revolt and subvert, others can be viewed as ‘a solipsistic, self-referential, closed…and ultimately dysfunctional approach to community that accepts offending others as a normal part of everyday experience’ (Kien, 2013, p. 560 as cited in Boudana et al., 2017, p. 1227).

Based on the criteria outlined by Boudana et al. (2017), the photograph of Lynndie England, shown in Fig. 1, can be categorised as iconic. The ‘doing a Lynndie’ meme falls under pop-culture-oriented appropriation. To explore this postmodern phenomenon, I visited the Know Your Meme website and looked up ‘the Lynndie England Pose’. The site includes background information on the ‘doing a Lynndie’ pose, as well as the instructions that were posted on Bad Gas. It also includes details of how the phenomenon spread, the original photograph of Lynndie (as shown in Fig. 1), as well as some brief information about her involvement in the sexualised violence and torture at Abu Ghraib. Details of her sentencing are also provided. What I find most problematic is the ‘notable examples’ that are included of people ‘doing a Lynndie’. In total, there are hundreds of thousands of posted images, however, I have limited my analysis to the ones included in the ‘notable examples’ section. Of the six that are included one stands out in particular. It is of a young boy doing the pose, pointing at an overweight woman sat opposite him in a chair. He appears to have a pencil in place of the cigarette. It is not clear why he is smiling sardonically at the woman. Perhaps he is mocking her for being overweight. Whatever the reason, the woman looks back at him with disdain. In keeping with the original image, the boy is smiling. Unlike in the original, where the men’s faces are obscured by the hoods they have been made to wear, we see the woman’s response to the boy’s mocking pose. It is not clear why this woman/victim ‘deserves to be Lynndied’. Regardless of the appropriation, if the boy is indeed mocking this woman due to her size, this is problematic in and of itself. The fact that this is a parody of sexualised violence and torture adds to the discomfort this image elicits.

The sign in this case is the object of the photograph. In the original photograph, the image of Lynndie England pointing at the naked Iraqi prisoners is the signifier. The signified is American exceptionalism and the war on terror. I believe that ‘the original referential context’ of this image – the use of sexualised violence and torture as part of the war on terror – is lost in these mimetic performances. While the uncoupling of signifier and signified within postmodern signs can, in some cases, challenge and disrupt in ways that are positive, this is not the case with the ‘doing a Lynndie’ meme.

I would like to make one final comment on this image and the ‘doing a Lynndie’ phenomenon. To do so, I will return to where I started the chapter: dark tourism and taking selfies at memorial sites.

Dark Tourism and Taking Selfies at Memorial Sites

Based on the Urban Dictionary definition, what is missing from these re-enactments (i.e. the Lynndie pose) is the intersubjective meaning behind the violence in the original image. To reiterate, the violence(s) witnessed in the images at Abu Ghraib, were enacted upon discursively constructed (as opposed to dehumanised) bodies; where racial, gendered and political meanings were inscribed prior to, and post, these acts of sexualised violence. Reminiscent of my argument about sexualised violence against Jewish women presented in Chapter 1, there is an intersubjective dynamic to this violence. Both the victim (the racially inferior terrorist ‘other’) and the perpetrator (the white knight of the US empire) are consumers of this political economy of violence. It is hard to imagine how these broader narratives surrounding the original Lynndie pose are captured in these re-enactments/performances. The question for me is: in what way, if any, is ‘doing a Lynndie’ similar to what I witnessed at Ground Zero? The answer, I believe, is that both involve superimposing individuals onto key moments in American geopolitical history. In both cases, the specific context and meaning of the original events are lost in these frivolous retellings. And yet herein lies the paradox. Both examples – ‘doing a Lynndie’, talking selfies at Ground Zero – involve actions that are at once ahistorical (apolitical even), while simultaneously existing within, and responding to, a specific moment in history: the 2001 terrorist attacks. Now we will move on to consider the second image in this collection.

Masculinities, Femininities and the War on Terror

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Fig. 2.

James Graner and Sabrina Harman Pose Behind a Pyramid of Naked Iraqi Detainees at Abu Ghraib (en.wikipedia.org., 2003–2004).

In previous chapters (Chapters 2 and 3), I have talked about globalisation masculinities. These include: masculinities of conquest and settlement, masculinities of empire and masculinities of postcolonialism and neoliberalism (Connell, 1998, 2005). Masculinities of empire, postcolonialism and neoliberalism were applied to the invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, I argued that this intervention was informed by a hyper-masculine agenda to re-masculinise the US after 9/11 (see Chapter 3). Paradoxically, in the context of the invasion of Iraq, this hyper-masculine campaign relied upon war-on-terror femininity in the form of Ambuhl, Harman and England. It is this paradox I wish to unpack. I will do so with reference to Connell’s (2005) hierarchy of masculinities framework. Readers will recall from Chapter 2 Connell’s (2005) four types of masculinity: hegemonic, complicit, marginalised and subordinate. As the most dominant form of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity is positioned above the others. Complicit, marginal (those unable to meet the requirements of hegemonic masculinity) and subordinated masculinities (those prevented from achieving hegemonic masculinity) are always positioned below hegemonic masculinity. Within this hierarchy, femininities are also placed below masculinities. As Connell and Messerchmidt (2005, p. 848) articulate: ‘[g]ender is always relational, and patterns of masculinity are socially defined in contradistinction from some model (whether real or imaginary) of femininity’. Indeed, hegemonic masculinity was formulated alongside hegemonic femininity. The latter was then renamed ‘emphasised femininity’ to denote the asymmetrical relationship between masculinities and femininities (Connell & Messerchmidt, 2005).

Below (see Fig. 3.) I offer a visualisation of this gender hierarchy.

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Fig. 3.

Visual Representation of Connell’s (2005) Gender Hierarchy.

Drawing on this visual representation of the gender hierarchy, my notion of war-on-terror femininity, and Sjoberg’s (2007) ideas about subordinated femininities and inferior masculinities, we can map the image of Graner and Harman (see Fig. 2.) onto this pyramid and reformulate this illustration of the gender hierarchy in the following way:

At the top of the pyramid, we have Graner, arms folded, relaxed, playful, representing the patriarch and hegemonic masculinity. Then we have Sabrina. She is both literally and figuratively placed below him. She represents emphasised femininity which, in this context, is reimagined as war-on-terror femininity. This femininity is above subordinated and inferior masculinities, which are positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy and represented by the hooded men. This photo, viewed in this way, at once reproduces Connell’s gender hierarchy while, at the same time, challenges it. Unlike in the illustration of the gender hierarchy – where women are always and already inferior to all types of masculinity – in Figure 2, Sabrina is positioned above inferior Iraqi men. However, she remains subordinate to the white, western man. What we see here is a temporary, context specific enactment of hypermasculinity that – within the contours of American exceptionalism – relies upon war-on-terror femininity.

Who Was the Real Sabrina Harman?

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Fig. 4.

Sabrina Harman Giving the ‘Thumbs-up’ While Smiling Over the Dead Body of Manadel al-Jamadi Who Died During Interrogation at Abu Ghraib. His Body Bag Has Been Opened So Graner and Harman Can Take Photos of Themselves (wikimedia.commons.org, 2003a).

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Fig. 5.

Sabrina Harman Gesturing a ‘Thumps-up’ While Stitching a Wounded Detainee Who ‘Has Been Bitten by a Military Dog’ at Abu Ghraib (wikimedia.commons.org, 2003b).

In her book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, Linfield (2012) asks: ‘[w]hy are photographs so good at making us see cruelty?’ Her answer is ‘…because photographs bring home the reality of physical suffering with a literalness and an irrefutability that neither literature nor painting can claim’ (Linfield, 2012, p. 39 emphasis in the original). This is particularly true when, as argued earlier, the bodies being looked at are subjected to real and virtual marking. Or, indeed, when images of violence and torture have been ‘carefully choreographed with the visual experience of viewers in mind’ (Gies, 2017). As Gies (2017) explains, ‘[t]he audience encoded within the images occupies the position of helpless onlookers, but it is also assigned an instrumental role in the degradation of victims’.

And yet for some, the photos of sexualised violence and torture at Abu Ghraib do not tell the whole story. Philip Gourevitch (writer), in collaboration with filmmaker Errol Morris, created the documentary Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Gourevitch believed that in order to get a fuller picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib we need to speak to the perpetrators. In this section, I will draw on an interview transcript with Sabrina Harman, as well as other pictures of Harman in relation to the war on terror, to see if these offer a more comprehensive portrait of her and her involvement in what occurred at Abu Ghraib.

In 2013, I wrote a review for the aforementioned book by Caldwell. In my review, I suggested that the book fell short of delivering a more nuanced account of gender and the sexualised violence and torture at Abu Ghraib. I argued: ‘[m]uch like analyses which simply demonize the women involved, the case presented here – that these women were exploited and coerced participants – is every bit as reductionist’ (Banwell, 2013, p. 216). I found the denial of female agency in these acts of violence problematic and concluded my review with the opinion that Fallgirls was a misguided attempt to ‘…excuse these women because current gender stereotypes are incompatible with their existence’ (Sjoberg, 2007, p. 96). Here, I want to revisit Caldwell’s book to unpack the final two images in the collection (Figs. 4 & 5).

Under the image of Harman tending to the detainee who has been bitten (see Fig. 5), Caldwell (2012, p. 108) includes the following caption: ‘Harman giving stiches and giving instrumental care’. She also includes, in a sub-section titled Maternal Sabrina and Friendships, a number of photos of Harman smiling with Iraqi families in their homes. We also learn that Harman, who cared for some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, was described by many as a maternal caregiver. In addition to this supplementary information, Caldwell includes the transcript of her conversation with Harman in 2007 (Caldwell, 2012, pp. 173–174):

Caldwell: In Al Hilla, did you purchase a family mattress and a refrigerator? Why? What did this family mean to you?

Harman: Yes, because she made me…lunch and I wanted to return the favor. They were important to me and I was around them for almost everyday for three months. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain without coming off as anti-American. They had nothing and were still happy because they had each other. Their situation seemed horrible but they made it work and never complained about it to me. If I got their kids clothes and small toys like a soccer ball they were so happy while kids in the U.S. would be so pissed if they didn’t get an Xbox. I don’t know, they were just amazing people that I learned a lot from.

Does this knowledge change our reaction to these images of Harman (Fig. 4 &5); to her involvement generally? To return to Gouervitch, was he correct to suggest that images alone do not tell the whole story? As I said at the outset, with regards to this final image (Fig.5), the smile and the ‘thumbs up’ gesture appear incongruous with the care that Harman is providing this detainee. Given her relationship with the Iraqi families, is Caldwell right in her assessment that these women did not ‘choose’ this violence? Even now, five years after I wrote my review, I find this denial of female agency problematic. I believe it is possible for Harman to occupy both positions: as a caring person (a civilian) who looked out for people in need and as an individual (a solider) who engaged in sexualised violence and torture. One does not, and should not, negate the other. I believe that my concept of war-on-terror femininity (where violence and torture are prescribed) resolves the paradox of Sabrina Harman, particularly if we accept that Harman chose to enact this type of femininity. Finally, despite portrayals of Harman as maternal, this does not (and did not) interfere with her duty to serve her country and play her role in the geopolitics of the war on terror.

The final part of the chapter will draw on Feminist Criminology to explore Lynndie England’s involvement in the sexualised violence and torture at Abu Ghraib.

Crazy in Love

Demonised, sexualised and, indeed, infantilised, England was believed to have acted under the influence of her then boyfriend, Charles Graner (Lobasz, 2008). For some, this narrative denied her agency and reduced her moral and criminal culpability (Sjoberg, 2007). Interestingly, both the media and England relied upon this narrative. In her own words, Lynndie claimed: ‘…he wanted me in the picture, and I was like, “no way”’. And ‘…Graner kept being persistent, “Oh, come on, just take the picture, take the picture”’ (Dateline NBC, 2 October 2005 cited in Howard III & Prividera, 2008, p. 298). And: ‘I was so in love with him that I trusted his decisions and I did whatever he wanted’ (Howard III & Prividera, 2008, p. 299). The idea that England was coerced and manipulated by her boyfriend is an all-too familiar trope within ‘stories of violent women’. However, if we turn to Feminist Criminology, a number of scholars within the discipline have demonstrated how women’s violence can be explained by gender oppression and/or patriarchy, particularly in cases of battered women who kill (see e.g. Banwell, 2010; Dunn & Powell-Williams, 2007; see also Batchelor, 2005). In England’s case, rather than dismiss her claims about Graner simply as a ploy to reduce her culpability, we might argue that she acted under the heteropatriarchal influence of this man, but still exercised her own agency, albeit in a way that was mediated by a number of interlocking oppressions (these are discussed below).

Not-woman

Other media stories focused on Lynndie’s gender or, more accurately, on her distortion of it (see Holland, 2009). Numerous references were made to her tomboyish features and her masculine appearance (Holland, 2009; Tucker & Triantafyllos, 2008). This is how a Washington newspaper described England: ‘[s]he has short-cropped hair, a tight, muscular body and that don’t-mess-with-me-expression’ (as cited in Gronnvoll, 2012, p. 376). As articulated by Holland (2009): ‘[s]he was represented as being inappropriately masculine as well as inappropriately female, a gender abnormality with one foot in each of these seemingly dichotomous categories’. These portrayals are reminiscent of the views of Lombroso and Ferrero who, in their 1893 book, The Criminal Woman, argued that the true biological nature of a woman is antithetical to crime. Therefore, the female criminal is not only abnormal, she is biologically like a man. As succinctly put by Hart (1994) in a more recent comment on gender and crime (Hart, 1994, p. 13, as cited in Gilbert, 2002, p. 1293):

Masculinity theory pursues its circular reasoning by arguing that women are less likely to engage in criminal activity because they are not men. Boys will be boys, say masculinity theorists; and girls will be girls, unless they do become criminals, in which case they are likely to be masculinized women.

Put simply, a woman who is capable of aggression and violence becomes constituted as the masculine woman, the ‘other’ (Gilbert, 2002). Also, as Campbell argues:

Her actions are forced into a masculine model of aggression, judged to be male, and the woman is seen as having violated not just the criminal law but the “natural law” of proper female behavior. (Campbell, 1993, p. 144)

In a similar way to the superficial reading of the woman-as-dupe narrative discussed above, this not-woman characterisation refuses to take women’s violent behaviour seriously. By placing women’s actions outside of their gender, the association of femininity/the feminine with non-violence is reaffirmed. Conversely, my war-on-terror femininity – which accepts that women can be violent and aggressive, while at the same time maternal – disrupts these gender binaries.

Class

In other accounts, the focus was on England’s white working-class background: ‘[a]s the fallen woman, England was not simply to be removed from the military caste but to be (re)placed into the white working-class Appalachian culture from which she originated’ (Howard III & Prividera, 2008, p. 302). Through numerous news sources, we learn that England was poor and grew up in a trailer behind a sheep farm (see Howard III & Prividera, 2008). She is described as an ‘uncivilized hillbilly’, as someone who is backward, ‘other’ and poor (Mason, 2005). Unlike in the case of Jessica Lynch, whose whiteness and Appalachian background were used to describe poor yet determined Americans (Tucker & Triantafyllos, 2008, p. 92), in England’s case these two facts were reformulated and used as evidence of her uncivilised and savage nature (Mason, 2005; see also Lobasz, 2008). In the words of Mason (2005, p. 43):

As representatives of Mountain country life, hillbillies can thus reflect either heroism – bravery and loyalty to traditional ways – or a deviance, sadism and primitivism that is said to fly in the face of modern progress.

In a piece on The War on Poverty in Appalachia, professor Ronald Eller (2014) reviews the history of politics, poverty and inequality in Appalachia. Often regarded as the symbol of the failure of the War on Poverty, introduced by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, Appalachia was (and is) associated with the white poor. Eller also explores the racial tensions that emerged from the War on Poverty in Appalachia. Disparaging comments relating to England’s Appalachian background are common, and apart from the work reviewed above, few have given serious academic thought to how her poor, working-class, rural upbringing might have informed her decision to join the Army in the first place, as well as her willingness to take part in the violence inflicted upon the bodies of ‘brown’ terrorist ‘others.’ From a feminist perspective, Lynndie’s age, race, class and gender (or her supposed inappropriate performance of the latter) should not be interpreted in reductive ways that seek to explain her behaviour away, rather, they should be understood as interlocking constraints that informed her decisions. Indeed, an analysis which focuses solely on individualised explanations of women’s violence is one which ultimately depoliticises women’s experiences and does not attend to, or take into account, the structural constraints which inform their violent behaviour.

Sexuality

Details of England’s sexual history and her various sexual partners were revealed as evidence of her deviance and her culpability for her crimes. Mainstream news stories focused on her ‘dysfunctional, adulterous sexual relationship with Charles Graner’ (Holland, 2009, p. 252). According to Jennifer Wells in the Toronto Star: ‘[g]etting naked, it now appears, was not a shy pursuit for the 21-year-old England. Included in the not-yet-released Abu Ghraib archive … were videos and still photos of England. Said one senator: “[s]he was having sex with numerous partners. It appeared to be consensual”’ (as cited in Gronnvoll, 2017, p. 378). In another news article, we are told that England appeared ‘in sexually explicit pictures with other soldiers’ and engaged in ‘raunchy behavior before and after [her] company journeyed to Iraq’ (Gronnvoll, 2017, p. 379). Here, we can apply Sjoberg and Gentry’s (2007, 2008) whore narrative, specifically the first category, erotomania. Erotomania is based on the idea that violent women have an insatiable appetite for sex. It is this pathological relationship with sex that causes them to be violent. In my reading of England’s sexual history, stories about her sexual behaviour are incidental to, rather than explicable of her violent behaviour.

The Maternal Militarised Body

The final narrative I want to explore is that of the militarised maternal body (see Managhan, 2012). In her book, Sexing War/Policing Gender: Motherhood, Myth and Women’s Political Violence, Åhäll (2017) argues that stories about violent women’s agency are informed by normative constructions of motherhood and maternal reproduction. Women, and their maternal bodies, she argues, are not only judged and valued for their appearance, but also for the actions in which they engage. With specific reference to England, Åhäll argues that revelations that England was pregnant when news of the sexualised violence and torture surfaced not only underscored the tension between her role as a future mother and her current role as a soldier, but also drew more attention to the fact that women had taken part in the violence(s). For some news outlets, England’s pregnancy softened her image during her trial:

England arrived at military court this morning, seven months pregnant and dressed in combat fatigues. Nothing like the young woman in these pictures, where she is seen humiliating Iraqi Prisoners. (World News Tonight, 3 August 2004, as cited in Howard III & Prividera, 2008, p. 304)

In her review of news media representations, Åhäll (2007) cites numerous examples where Lynndie is transformed from monster to mother, a woman who is no longer capable of torture and sexual abuse. Implicit in some of these stories is the belief that motherhood is the reason England finally accepts responsibility for her actions. For others, however, her pregnancy and her subsequent status as a mother, rather than providing a recuperative narrative, serve as reminders of her confusing and dangerous sexual/gender identity (Holland, 2009). I will return to this shortly, first let us consider how war-on-terror femininity serves as a recuperative narrative.

Violence as a Resource for Achieving War-on-terror Femininity

Conventional femininity has not been associated with crime or violence therefore, for women and girls, their criminal and/or violent behaviour cannot be regarded as a resource for achieving this type of femininity. However, I would argue that within my construction of war-on-terror femininity, violence can, in this instance, be considered a resource for achieving this type of femininity. For Sjoberg and Gentry (2007, p. 87), women who behave like England and Harman ‘…have committed a triple transgression: the crime they are accused of, the transgression against traditional notions of femininity, and the transgression against…militarized femininity…’. Conversely, my notion of war-on-terror femininity offers a resolution to the paradox that is violent femininity. War-on-terror femininity does not negate their individual agency, it simple locates their violence within the wider US geopolitical agenda.

Within the discursive representations of England and Sabrina provided and discussed above, both women conform to and defy conventional femininity. With regards to the former, in keeping with traditional ideas about women as passive and weak, England’s claim that she took part because Graner told her to and she wanted to impress/please him confirms this stereotype of women (it also underscores gender oppression in a patriarchal society). Likewise, in the photo where Harman tends to an injured detainee, and in her stories about her time with Iraqi families, traditional femininity is upheld. Yet, by virtue of taking part in sexualised violence and torture, both resist these normative expectations. Instead, they perform a subversive femininity: war-on-terror femininity.