Invasion Narratives After 9/11: The Bush and Obama Regimes

Abstract

At the beginning of the 9/11 security state under the Bush administration, its patriarchal tendencies were by no means difficult to discern. As feminist scholar Iris Marion Young argued, this masculinism has always been a salient trait of security regimes; writing in Hypatia in 2003, she said the security state, whose origins she traced back to Hobbes’ Leviathan, comes to embody “a logic of masculine protection,” that reduces citizens to the roles of helpless women and children (223–225). Others had noticed this too, with feminist media scholar Jayne Rodgers saying, “the heroic myth was based on restoring [myths of] gender, as well as social and political order” (207). The myths represented icons of “action man and passive woman” (208). Earlier in 2001 in The American Journal of International Law, Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin had written that “the role of women police and firefighters” had been given “strikingly little exposure” by the media. Indeed, most of the White House response to the attacks was provided by men, while head of the National Security Council Condoleezza Rice played a “relatively limited overt role in responding to the hijackings” (600). Meanwhile, of 50 commentaries on 9/11 appearing in The New York Times, only 2 were written by women (601). Such hegemonic gendered hierarchical thinking, according to these two writers, made violence the easy option over discussion and diplomacy (604–605). Discussion of to what degree America’s imperial or colonial involvements abroad in the past may have contributed to this situation was not encouraged as 9/11, and the war against an invasive enemy essentially became a man’s game.