1ac myth 1ac -critical Introduction of us armed Forces Aff

The war on terrorism is gendered – it creates a divide between the helpless female civilian and male combatant and paints all Muslim men as terrorists

The war on terrorism creates an us/them dichotomy in which we must destroy the feminized, uncivilized, and barbaric Other – this justifies military expansion and reifies the hyper masculine posture of America.

The War on Terror is an ideal example of gendered militarism – military expansion is just another method to remasculinize the nation in the name of freedom and democracy.

The U.S.–led “war on terror” exemplifies how identity investments, ideological commitments, and militarized practices interact. Some argue that George W. Bush’s forceful response to the 9/11 bombings involved not only his outrage and claim to military leadership but also his desire to establish a hypermasculine image of himself and the United States. It is well-known that Bush had personal reasons for enhancing his militarist (manly) identity. He had avoided serving in Vietnam, was invested in the image of being a “guy’s guy,” and arguably hoped to redeem his father’s failure to oust Saddam in the First Gulf War. For many Americans, the identity and power of the United States had been feminized by its defeat in Vietnam, made more humiliating by losing to a people stereotyped as ethnically/racially inferior. Feminization anxiety was also fueled by the increasing visibility of women in politics and the workplace and the growing strength of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) political movements. A yearning to remasculinize the nation (Jeffords 1989) was already present and readily tapped by Bush and his advisers as the nation responded to 9/11 and its spectacular demonstration of U.S. vulnerability to penetration by foreign men. The war story the Bush administration immediately cultivated featured fanatical terrorists inexplicably committed to destroying freedom, democracy, and (implicitly Western) civilization by any means. Enemies this irrational and unpredictable could only be defeated by drawing an absolute line between good and evil and adopting the strongest possible measures to eliminate those deemed evil. Feminization operates here to construct enemies as so absolutely different from “us” that the only viable strategy is their annihilation. Those who were fearful, were skeptical, or actively opposed Bush’s strategies were rendered unequivocally suspect—unpatriotic, anti-American, naively (irrationally) out of touch, or quite simply unmanly (lacking the guts to do what must be done). In this instance, feminization operates to deny absolutely the rationality of dissenters or any cogent reasons for critique. Dissenters are simply and irredeemably discredited: unwilling to stand up for their country, ungratefully abandoning the United States and freeloading on its military power, and/or failing to grasp real-world politics. Those seeking debate and diplomacy are feminized—cast as behaving like cowardly women and undermining U.S. interests by wimping out of military action. In effect, dissidents become a less stark but ultimately an equally threatening enemy: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” And as enemies, those who are against us lose any claim to inclusion, respect, or (apparently) rights.

Paternalism

The east is framed as backwards and unimportant. This ethnocentric view silences women’s issues even though it’s based on the myth that we are liberating them. We should be skeptical of further attempts at intervention

! – War and Colonialism

The West constructs an idealized feminine that is passive, pure, and maternal… which is what justifies war to “save the brown women from the backwards brown men”… reifying European norms of femininity and justifying colonial expansion via unchecked war powers.

Peterson 10 [V. Spike: You should know who this is… but. Professor of International Relations at the School of Government and Public Policy. Former fellow at the Gender Institute and London School of Economics. “Gendered Identities, Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and Militarism” Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives edited by Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via. Praeger security international, Santa Barbara]

At the same time—and complicating simplistic models of gender—the development of European nationalism and normalization of bourgeois respectability produced an idealized model of femininity: pure, dutiful, and maternal. This superficial valorization of femininity is contradicted by the practices it invoked. Romanticizing the maternal feminine did less to empower women than render them perpetual dependents. Feminine virtue and morality were best ensured by confining these qualities—and (bourgeois) women—to a private sphere of domesticity and assigning men the public-sphere responsibility of defending and protecting feminized dependents. Rather than empowering European women, the idealization of bourgeois (heteronormative) femininity became a tool for disempowering non-European men. The patronizing and protectionist logic of bourgeois norms provided imperial governments with a moral, and rational, justification for militarized colonization. In this war story, the barbarity of “other” men was proven by their (allegedly) oppressive treatment of women, and this demanded the rescue of victimized females by honorable, civilized men. In short, the protection of idealized femininity (to paraphrase Spivak’s [1987] apt analysis) justified wars by white men to save brown women from brown men. The crusading rhetoric and protectionist logic obscured colonial government agendas, and it resurfaces with particular vengeance and new complexities in contemporary militarism and war.4

! – Extinction

Patriarchy is the root cause of their impacts – Western civilization is premised on militarized notions of insecurity and conquest which guarantees global instability and leaves us on a collision course with extinction.

Clark 4 [Mary E.: professor of biological studies at Berkeley, "Rhetoric, Patriarchy & War: Explaining the Dangers of ‘Leadership’ in Mass Culture,” http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4005307/Rhetoric-patriarchy-war-explaining-the.html]

I begin by questioning the notion that patriarchy is a "natural" or "inevitable" form of human society. By "patriarchy" I do not mean a community or society where males hold political positions as spokespersons for the whole and often are adjudicators of local disputes. This "male function" is common in tribal and indigenous societies. But men's power over others is severely limited and generally held only at the pleasure of the entire group, especially the elder women. (4) Patriarchies, rather, are those much larger societies where not only is there gender dominance; they also are highly class-structured, with a small, powerful elite controlling the rest of society, A short history of these entities is necessary to understand today's dilemma. Rigidly controlled patriarchies have evolved and disintegrated at many times and in many places in the past few millennia of human existence-which, being the era of written history, is the condition of humankind most familiar to us. But, as I have argued elsewhere (5) this was an unknown political condition throughout earlier human existence, when small, egalitarian, highly dialogic communities prevailed. Even today, small remnants of such societies still exist in comers of the planet that escaped the socially destructive impact of Western colonization. Modern Western "democracies" are, in fact, patriarchal in structure, evolving out of the old, male-dominated aristocracies of late-Medieval Europe. Those historic class/caste hierarchies were legitimized by embedded religious dogma and inherited royal authority. Together, church and monarch held a monopoly of physical and economic power, creating politically stable, albeit unjust, societies. During the gradual development of the religious Reformation, coupled with the Enlightenment's concept of the "individual citizen," emerging egalitarian ideas threatened to destabilize the social coherence of patriarchal regimes. At the same time, principalities and dukedoms were fusing into kingdoms; kingdoms, in turn, were joining together as giant nation states. The United Kingdom was formed of England, Wales and Scotland-each a fusion of local earlier dukedoms. City States of Italy fused rather later. Bismarck created the "Second Reich" out of diverse German-speaking princedoms in the 1870s. And, adding to this growth in the sheer size of patriarchies there was a doubling of populations every couple of generations. Nation-states emerged as "mass cultures," with literally millions of persons under the control of a single, powerful government. The centralized physical power possessed by most of these several industrializing European nations matched or exceeded that of ancient Rome. To achieve coherence of such societies demanded a new legitimating force to create a broad base of support among giant, diverse populations. The erosion of the belief that classes were a god-given, "natural" state of affairs was hastened by the introduction of low-cost printing and rapidly growing levels of literacy (both necessary to underpin the new Industrial Age). These politically equalizing forces unleashed a host of social discontents that had to be controlled. The old religious threats of damnation or excommunication were fast losing their force, and new legal systems circumscribed the absolute powers of monarchs to control social behavior. This very cacaphony of voices threatened the stability of the new giant states. The "solution," of course, was to take control of the public dialogue, to define the legitimate "topics of conversation." This is the primary role of political "leadership" in today's mass societies, and that leadership uses two major tools to wield its influence: rhetoric and the mass media. I suggest, then, that the high potential for internal instability in giant patriarchal states is a primary factor in setting the stage for today's global insecurity and the extreme militaristic rhetoric that exists both within and between nations. Before continuing this discussion of patriarchy's dangers, I would note that, although in modern Western patriarchies the domination of women by men is less evident as women have gained increasing political and economic status, women with such status tend to assume the "shoulder pads" and "language" of men when it comes to political and economic institutions. Women like Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, Golda Melt, Israeli Prime Minister; Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations; Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State; Margaret Thatcher, Britain's Prime Minister; and Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's Security Advisor, come readily to mind. (Thatcher cites the following terms the media applied to her: Iron Lady, Battling Maggie, and Attila the Hen. (6)) The glass ceiling in the corporate world has proved harder to crack, however, so fewer well-known examples exist there of powerful females. (Katherine Graham, who became publisher of the Washington Post after the death of her husband, was one of the few powerful women who to her credit, did not adopt the patriarchal mode.) Hence, I regard the Western nations' politico-economic world view as very much in accordance with that of historical patriarchies, with perhaps one or two Scandinavian exceptions. I thus conclude that the language of international politics today is "gendered" by the political insecurity experienced by leaders of earlier patriarchies, and that the presence of women in such governments has little effect on the framework of public dialogue. (I recall hearing Geraldine Ferraro, when running for Vice-President in 1984, assure an interviewer that she would not hesitate to push the "nuclear button" if necessary.) Hence, it is not our X and Y chromosomes that are at issue here; it is the gendered world view that underpins our institutions and frames our behaviors. As long as those in power "think" in this patriarchal box, we will live in a globally-armed camp, where war-leading even to the annihilation of our species-is a constant, real possibility.

Counter-narrative Solves

Endorsing a counter-narrative to the violent liberation politics of current American politics helps establish a more inclusive vision of feminism against structural violence.

Ayotte and Hussain ‘5 (Kevin, Assistant Prof. Comm. CSU Fresno, and Mary, Lecturer in Comm. CSU Fresno, NWSA Journal, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil”, NWSA, 17(3), Fall, Ebsco)

The expansion of “security” in feminist international relations beyond the confines of realist definitions of nation-state interest was a prerequisite for taking seriously the myriad gendered practices that oppress both women and men throughout the world. The neocolonialism in many Western representations of third-world women demonstrates the extraordinary power of discourse to shape our understanding of the world. As has been argued in this essay, the epistemic violence inflicted on Afghan women through the U.S. appropriation and homogenization of covering practices makes possible (and more likely) the continuation of physical and structural violence against women in Afghanistan. The argument at hand has sought to identify the irreducible diversity of women’s lived experience “against the grain of ‘public’ or hegemonic history” in order to challenge dominant political discourses that have elided Afghan women’s agency as subjects (Mohanty 1991a, 38–9). Of course, counter-memory cannot nostalgically long for some lost “truth” of women’s experience, but it can add texture to the always already woven tapestry that is the discursive representation of women. We close this essay by offering an alternative representation of covering practices in Afghan society. In contrast to the epistemic violence wrought by representations of burqa-clad Afghan women on the Feminist Majority Foundation website, Kensinger describes the image of Meena Keshwar Kamal, founder of RAWA, on the latter organization’s website. Kamal’s image accompanies a counter-hegemonic discourse that requires viewers to confront Afghanistan’s neocolonial cold war history with both the Soviet Union and the United States (Kensinger 2003, 8). The RAWA website also represents a far more effective call for the elimination of imposed covering. The RAWA argument contextualizes covering practices within and across cultures, noting that they are not unique to Afghanistan, Islam, or the third world. “[F]undamentalists” are identified as the root cause of the oppression of women. Through the use of inclusive language to explicate their position on “[t]he Islamic hejab (veil),” RAWA avoids the myopic fixation on the burqa, a particular regime, or geographic locale, as is characteristic of many U.S. representations of Afghan women (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan n.d.). RAWA’s discourse thus opens up possibilities for transnational solidarity with women subjugated by diverse forms of “fundamentalism” independent of covering practices. The criticism in this article should therefore not be read as a condemnation of U.S. interest in gender equality in Afghanistan, but as a call for support of the experience and knowledge of indigenous activists working toward this goal. This reflexive alternative to uncritically speaking for others will be more productive when conducted as a collective enterprise with those others, “by which aspects of our location less obvious to us might be revealed” (Alcoff 1995, 112). Against the portrayal of Islamic women in the United States post9/11, RAWA’s website also accurately presents covering as a cultural, rather than religious, issue. When forcibly imposed, the burqa becomes a misogynistic instrument of terror designed to objectify women, relegating their social status to that of “chattel” by making them literally invisible in the Afghan public sphere. Although a call is issued for “rejection of the veil as a symbolic form of resistance,” by recognizing and respecting the personal nature of individual women’s decisions regarding covering, the social meaning of such practices is acknowledged in a fashion that preserves the agency of Afghan women while challenging the structural power at work through imposed covering (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan n.d.). RAWA thus seeks to empower women through advocacy shaped by their shared experience of gender relations in Afghanistan (Brodsky 2003). The RAWA website also emphasizes the gendered Taliban policies that target men, “a subtlety that disrupts any inclination to see the situation as simply one of Afghan men against Afghan women” (Kensinger 2003, 12). Although men cannot become members, male supporters play a vital role in RAWA, recognizing that it is “not only a woman’s organization” (Brodsky 2003, 203). Philosophically and strategically, RAWA’s vision and ongoing practice are consciously grounded in the struggle for democracy for all Afghans (194). Because of the cultural constraints on Afghan women’s mobility and participation in activities outside the home, the support of men is vital. As one RAWA member explains, “[w]e are not anti-male. We also can’t work without men” (193). Perhaps even more important than the elimination of the Taliban, raising the consciousness of Afghan men is one of the organization’s greatest achievements and essential to their long-term goals (218). RAWA’s activism, on multiple levels, thus avoids Spivak’s concern about Western discourses that position white men as “saving brown women from brown men” (1999, 284). The reductive representations of burqa-clad Afghan women in U.S. media and U.S. governmental discourse have inflicted their own sorts of violence—epistemic, physical, and structural—on the bodies of Afghan women. In addition to shedding light on the consequences of certain U.S. discourses that purport to rescue Afghan women from gender oppression, the analysis herein also demonstrates the need for a synthesis of materialist and poststructuralist approaches to feminist international relations theory. Critical attention to the material conditions experienced by women is necessary not only to identify the physical and structural violence inflicted on the bodies of women, but also to trace the diversity of women’s experience that is flattened by many Western feminist discourses about third-world women. The insights of poststructuralism also demonstrate that the categories so often attributed to women are not essentially fixed, yet are frequently positioned as such by the very language we use with the most altruistic intentions. Both theoretical “poles” contribute to this analysis, and it is only by the refusal of both for the critical space in between that a more reflexive feminist praxis becomes possible.

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