Eman Ahmed Khamas Dra. Felicity Hand

405 Pages·2013·2.41 MB·English

Doctoral Thesis
Eman Ahmed Khamas

Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Doctorat en Filologia Anglesa

Barcelona 2013

Director
Dra. Felicity Hand

1
Between patriarch and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-
formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine
nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced
figuration of the ‗third-world woman‘ caught between tradition and
modernization…Imperialism‘s image as the establisher of the good
society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection
from her own kind.
Spivak, ‗Can the Subaltern Speak?‘

2
Abbreviations

CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis
CTS: Critical Terrorism Studies
ME: The Middle East/ Middle Eastern
WOT: The War on Terrorism
WTC: World Trade Center

3
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 5
I- Introduction 7
II- Theoretical Framework 17

PART ONE
III- The Discourse of War on Terrorism: Critical Overview
 Conceptual Confusion 35
 Definitions 44
 War on Terrorism 50
 The Metaphor of Terrorism as War 58
 Writing the Terrorist Identity 63

IV- In Her Name: Targeting Woman in the Middle East
 Evolution of a Discourse 67
 Conceptual and Contextual Frame 86
 Orientalism / Neo-Orientalism 99
 ME Women in the Neo-Orientalist discourse of WOT 112
 Anti-WOT Feminism 135

V- The Mitigating Effect of Soft Power / Case Study: Iraqi Women 141

4
PART TWO

VI- The Evolution of an Image
 Representations of Middle Eastern Women 183
in Anglo-American Narratives: Critical Overview

VII- The Victim’s ‘Authentic’ Voice 262
 Azar Nefisi Reading Lolita in Tehran & Things I’ve Been Silent About
 Khali Hosseini The Kite Runner & A Thousand Splendid Suns 309

VIII- Anglo-American Literary Representations of ME Women 313

 Ian McEwan Saturday 313
 Richard Zimler The Search for Sana 335
 John Updike Terrorist 352

IX – Conclusions 368

Bibliography 380

5
Acknowledgements

I would like first to thank Qusai Aneed Sultan for making this dissertation possible at all.
When I started the research, he was a young Iraqi high-school student. Now he has a BS degree
in optics. He had risked his safety several times to help me obtain my certificates from Baghdad
University, the Ministries of Higher Education and Foreign Affairs, and the embassy. I had to
leave everything behind and run away for the safety of my family, in the fourth year after the
occupation of Iraq in 2003, and didn‘t have time or opportunity to bring my certificates. Many
times I decided to forget all about this research if it meant risking the life of a wonderful Iraqi
boy, but he never lost hope. Obtaining certificates from Iraqi Universities is almost a miracle, not
only for security reasons. Many young and old students are denied their certificates because of
loss, blackmail, mismanagement or corruption. But he could.
I am immensely grateful to my supervisor Dr. Felicity Hand, the director of this research,
for her understanding, generosity, solidarity, and above all her insightful directions, and
invaluable observations without which the dissertation wouldn‘t be what it is now. My thanks are
to Drs Sara Martin, and Isabel Alonso, for their significant observations during the annual
discussions of the research progress.
My thanks are to my friend Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi novelist, journalist, and anti-colonial
feminist, for her support and encouragement. My Iraqi, European and American friends in the
6
international anti-occupation movement, many of whose writings are included here, thanks for
everything you have done, and are doing to dismantle lies and make the truth appear.
I would like to thank all my Catalan and Spanish friends. They have given me a second
home, especially Professor Jaume Botey for taking my family and me in his house and helping
us stand on our feet in exile, and my friends Josep M. Pijuan Utges, Beatriz Morales Bastos,
Pedro Rojo, and Paloma Valverde for their relentless work against injustice and occupation. Last
but not least, I am grateful to my friend Lluïsa López Segarra, and her daughter Anna, for their
endless support.
My daughters Hanan and Quitaf, this research is for you and about you, Iraqi young
women who are going to build our country from ruins again, and make our voices heard.

7
Introduction
In recent years, late twentieth early twenty-first centuries, a new ‗feminist‘ discourse
accompanied the War on Terror1 in official Western discourse, in the media, feminist narratives,
popular culture, and in literature (novels, fiction and nonfiction bestsellers, literary journalism,
and autobiographies). The West, mainly the US, claimed feminist motivations for their wars in
the Middle East: to ensure women‘s rights in countries where these rights were violated and
abrogated, where women are rendered oppressed helpless victims; in other words these wars
have had a civilizing, modernizing rescue mission in the name of human rights, among other
justifications of democracy, such as curbing weapons of mass destruction, fighting terrorism,
legitimate oil needs, world peace and stability and so forth.
This new ‗feminist‘ discourse, in fact was adapted and marketed to conceal the real
motives of military interventions, invasions, and occupations within the context of reconstructing
the political, economic and cultural systems in the area, thus it is a discourse that involved too
many contradictions. To begin with it reenacts the same old colonialist racist discourse of the
white man‘s responsibility of civilizing and liberating the Other, the stereotyped primitive man
of color, from the chains of his own backwardness. Exactly as the white man‘s slogans through
the last five centuries had humane civilizing missions in their declared narratives, now the new
‗feminist‘ discourse has the same mission of saving the Other, the Middle Eastern, Muslim, Arab
woman from the misery she thrives in, imposed on her by patriarchal cultures, tyrant regimes,
and above all Mediaeval religious (Islamic) traditions.

1 Henceforth WOT
8
A new stereotype is constructed and represented: a helpless victim deprived of her
individual human rights, desperately needing help; and that it is the responsibility of the
advanced self-congratulating men and women who had preceded her in gaining their rights to
give her a hand in fighting patriarchal masculine oppression and its despotic institutions. This
stereotype, which is basically built on images drawn by the old Orientalist discourse, remained
faulty because it was based on impressions outside the cultural structure of a given society, and
on political backgrounds serving the US imperialist interests of colonizing the Middle East anew.
The new stereotype is decontextualized, western-centered and homogenous, hence often
incapable of understanding the real nature of man-woman-institution relationships, which are
necessarily controlled by systems of values deeply rooted in history, geography, and culture.
Women are not a homogeneous class all over the world (Mohanty, 1991), joined by -and fighting
against- the oppression of another homogeneous class, men. This binary universal division is
basically naïve and based on stereotyping. What an educated, Christian, enlightened middle-class
woman from a neighborhood, say, north of Baghdad, considers injustice and violation of her
rights, might well be considered protection of her rights by another Baghdadi woman a
kilometer away, with different education, religion, or class, to say nothing about millions of
cultural types all around the world. What is best for one woman in a specific society and a
specific historical period is not necessarily good enough for another.
In addition to that, Western colonial societies, the saviors in this case, built their
advanced economic and technological cultures, partly, on exploiting other nations, the Middle
East included, in which case they became the victims to be saved. This point in particular is a
repetition of the eternal question: why do the developing countries not learn from the experiences
9
of the developed and copy them? The answer is simply because the victim cannot- and indeed
should not- imitate her/his persecutors.
Middle Eastern2 women, lacking in educational, health, and economic opportunities, still
need to maintain the struggle to get out of the subaltern Other position within their own cultures.
Struggling out of this situation, however, assumes clear awareness of the dimensions of the
problem, deep feeling of its injustice, and willingness to fight. Moreover, in the Middle East, this
struggle is directly connected to the overall political and economic problems that it suffers from.
On the other hand, cultures are never static, and human beings tend to strategize their conducts
accordingly, in a kind of cultural negotiation or compromise. For example, progressive women
who volunteer to work as teachers in remote conservative communities wear Islamic dress, but
does that make them victims or fighters?
Wars, foreign occupations and invasions complicate the situation for women, indeed for
everybody, and make it even more difficult and, as in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, actually
deprive them from -and destroy- whatever rights they managed to achieve through their own
struggle, apart from the fact that wars violate very essential and cultural human rights. The
consequences are contrary to the declared intentions. These women
blame the USA for the devastation to the environment and the deterioration in their
quality of life…they have endured displacement, a cramped existence in refugee camps
in foreign lands, the rape and abuse of their sisters, mothers and daughters, the slaughter
of their loved ones on a daily basis at the hands of the US occupiers, and have had to
watch helplessly as even their children suffer nervous breakdowns (Carty, 2008: 267)
Well-intentioned foreign (feminist) solidarity should be no more, and cannot be more,
than solidarity. The subaltern Other cannot be fought for, and the moral responsibility of the

2 Henceforth ME
10