KarMel Scholarship 2007

 

 “Emasculation through

the War on the Terror”

By Jennifer Jackson

 

 

Desciption of Submission: An essay examining the negative influence of the war on terror on gay marriage.

 

 

 

            In the winter 2007 issue of Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, author Bonnie Mann connects two of the most pressing issues in the United States: gay marriage and the War on Terror. Both topics are met with opposing viewpoints, and Mann manages to show the negative influences and consequences homosexuals in America face due to the masculine nature of the current war. Social, cultural, and political factors all make this issue newsworthy, considering the fact that it endangers homosexual rights by associating patriotism with masculinity. Gay marriage has then become more unacceptable to the American public because of the social, cultural, and political constructs including the war.

            It is crucial to this article that Mann’s representation of the notion of the “social imaginary” be first explained. The “social imaginary” was first developed through Charles Taylor’s modification to Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community,” one where parts of the nation bind together as a sort of fraternity, encompassing the nation with the “willingness to die for such limited imaginings…over the past two centuries.” Taylor expands upon this, crediting the spread of the “social imaginary” to stories, images, and legends, and is the repository for “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations (Taylor 106).” In essence, the social imaginary gives only a part of society dominance over the “legitimacy, normalcy, rightness, and [sexual] order (Mann).”

            Mann’s article concerning gay marriage and the War on Terror outlines the modes of emasculation throughout the current war, and the problems that are created for the homosexual lifestyle. A key example Mann uses is the Abu Ghraib scandal, where the “dominant images from the Abu Ghraib prison featured white women sexually humiliating Iraqi men…the strategies of torture and humiliation included the racialized homosexualizing of the prisoners, who were forced to simulate fellatio with one another and photographed repeatedly with their anuses exposed (Mann).” Certainly there are obvious problems with the moral and ethical natures of these pictures, including the fact that it has caused homosexual love to become dangerous and subliminally violent in its association with the war.

The social imaginary, in representation of a large portion of the national media, has created an image of a masculine nation, obsessed with its own impenetrability and homoerotic violence. Subconsciously, the United States has faced dents in its masculinity through the decades. For example, the attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Surely America would feel more masculine after the response of mass destruction by two bombs named “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.” However, America lost again as its failed participation in the Vietnam War has been set up by the social imaginary as the “unmanning” of America. Most recently the attack on September 11, 2001 removed America of “two erect towers penetrated by aircraft used as weapons (Mann).” After this, Mann asks readers to recall a political cartoon of Osama Bin Laden being sodomized by a US bomb in front of the recently pierced twin towers. Of course the social imaginary would be constructed against homosexuality when the United States’ cultural identity has been shaped amongst events such as these.

While the country fights for or against the legalization of gay marriage and pictures of happily wed homosexual couples flood the media, Mann (who herself has a slight liberal bias) recognizes the conservative opinion with the words of Robert Knight, a far Right conservative and draftsman of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. He connects the terror to gay marriage pictures in San Francisco, asking Americans to “imagine how those images of men kissing men outside of SF city hall after being ‘married’ play in the Muslim world…we couldn’t offer the mullahs a more perfect picture of American decadence. This puts Americans at risk all over the world” (2004, 2-3)

            In fact, Americans couldn’t offer the mullahs a more perfect picture of American decadence while pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison are dispersed throughout the Iraqi nation – not to mention that homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Islam, with the severe punishment of the death penalty in most Muslim nations. However, Knight’s idea that homosexuality will bring terror to America is less about what conservative mullahs may think, and more so about how conservative Americans like Knight want the rest of the nation to think. With this aim, conservatives can eradicate homosexual love and give more reason to fight the War on Terror.

            Although Mann presents a well thought out case, her liberal bias does fail to recognize any measures that the government has taken to ensure human rights for all citizens, including those that are homosexual. The military officials that were involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal were highly persecuted, and readers are not informed of the punishment they faced. However, Mann does strengthen her case by emphasizing her views with the incorporation of Taylor’s theory of the “social imaginary,” and the overall association of gay marriage with the American masculinity and the War on Terror.

            Bonnie Mann’s article in Hypatia allows for an anthropological outlook to be asserted on the issue of gay marriage and war. Certainly as a feminist, Mann’s views concern the topics of the social constructs of gender identity, but she appropriately finds the connection between the two issues. At this time in the United States history, it is interesting and incredibly newsworthy to entertain the idea of both homosexual love and the current war as two connective issues.

 

WORKS CITED:

Knight, Robert. “Iraq Scandal is ‘perfect storm’ of American culture.” WorldNetDaily.com. <http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38462. May 12, 2004

Mann, Bonnie. "Gay Marriage and the War on Terror. (MUSINGS)." Hypatia 22.1 (Winter 2007): 247(5). Expanded Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. UC Irvine. 28 Feb. 2007. <http://find.galenet.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A154868078&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=ucirvine&version=1.0>.

 

 

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