[T]he worldwide advancement of women's
issues is not only in keeping with the deeply held values of the American
people; it is strongly in our national interest as
well.
Since 9/11, the Bush Administration's rhetoric on national
security has been sounding more and more feminist. The invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001 was justified not only in terms of the war on terror
but also in terms of restoring the rights of women mistreated under
Taliban rule. The U.S. government has openly supported the codification of
women's equality and participation in both Afghani and Iraqi interim
governments and constitutions, on the grounds that women's inclusion
in these emerging democracies is essential to our national security. The
U.S. Mission to the United Nations sponsored Resolution 58/142, which
was passed by the General Assembly in December 2003 and expresses a
commitment to women's equal political and economic participation
around the world based on its importance to international security.
Arguing for these policies, Bush Administration officials sound almost
indistinguishable from feminist activists.
Feminists have responded to this new security rhetoric in two ways.
Not surprisingly, many feminists are cynical. They have dismissed the
rhetoric as mere rhetoric, noting that the Bush Administration has a
pattern of saying it supports women's rights, while at the same time
it is actively dismantling feminist political gains, especially in the
areas of reproductive health, AIDS policy, and violence against women.1
For a sampling of feminist views on Bush, see
the collected essays in Flanders 2004c.
One commentator has referred to this as “stealth misogyny”
(
Goldstein 2003). This disjunction between
rhetoric and reality has led numerous feminists and others to be deeply
skeptical of the administration's increasing use of feminist rhetoric
to support its policies abroad.
2 For example:
“Even though Bush used Afghan women's rights to drum up support
for his war, this did not lead to a sustained commitment to Afghan
women” (Bunch 2002).
The concern
is that the Bush Administration is not actually committed to women's
equality and rights, but has cynically used this rhetoric to increase
support for its foreign policy and to win reelection by appealing to women
voters.
3 “Bush has feebly attempted to
use feminism to justify invasion [of Iraq], fantasizing that a
‘democratic’ Iraq would show ‘that honest government,
and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can
triumph in the Middle East and beyond.’ But feminists aren't
buying it; few see reason to hope war will relieve the miserable condition
of the Iraqi people, women included” (Featherstone 2003). She is quoting here from Bush 2002. Laura Flanders examines the cynical use of
women within the Bush Administration in her book (2004a).
What is surprising is that a coalition of feminist groups—the
Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), the Feminist Majority, and
the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO)—has
greeted the Bush Administration's rhetoric on women and security with
praise. In their periodically updated “Global Women's Issues
Scorecard on the Bush Administration,” they have given the
administration grades for its rhetoric about women in Iraq and Afghanistan
that have risen from Bs and Cs in August 2003 to a peak of straight As in
March 2004.4
The grades fell for the first
time to a mix of an A, a B, and a C in June 2004, the last date for which
there is a report (Center for Health and Gender Equity,
Feminist Majority, and Women's Environment and Development
Organization 2004a). The Web page is designed to mimic a
child's report card. This site also reports on the Bush
Administration's performance in other policy areas, in which notably
it has scored less well. Most significant of these are issues having to do
with population control and women's reproductive health, as well as
CEDAW—the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women. In these areas, the Bush Administration has
earned grades of C, D, and Incomplete for its rhetoric.
In their
most recent report, the grades for rhetoric range from A (for “Women
in Political Decision Making in Afghanistan and Iraq”) down to C
(for “Women's Security in Afghanistan and Iraq”). Yet
even they have been deeply skeptical of the administration's
willingness to act accordingly. The Global Scorecard's grades for
what they call the “reality” of the Bush record on
women's issues in Afghanistan and Iraq are strikingly lower than
those for the “rhetoric”: Its grades here have been
consistently Ds, Fs, and Is for “incomplete.”
5 It is my contention that neither of these responses is adequate to a
feminist analysis of the Bush Administration's feminized security
rhetoric. Both reactions rest on a distinction between words and deeds
that obscures the very political work that words do in framing how we see
the world.6
It may be that these feminists
are not actually committed to the idea that words are not deeds, but are
simply using this idea for political purposes. Even in this case, I would
argue that this is politically problematic for feminists because this
rhetoric aims to shape how others should understand the Bush
Administration in terms of words vs. deeds. Regardless, then, of the
assumptions these feminists make about the ontological status of words,
their own rhetoric performs a separation of words from deeds that I
consider to be problematic for reasons I discuss here.
For
example, when we dismiss the Bush Administration rhetoric as a cynical
strategy to get votes, we overlook how it is an indication of the success
that feminists have had in altering security rhetoric in recent years. The
Bush Administration's use of feminized security rhetoric is only
possible now because feminist and other peace activists have been
struggling for decades to reframe how political actors conceptualize
security (
Blanchard 2003;
Grant and Newland 1991;
Peterson
1992; Tickner
1992,
2001). Over the past decade, we have witnessed signs
that their activism is beginning to have an impact. In 1998, the
International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia set a precedent
that found rape to be a war crime. In 2000, the UN Security Council passed
Resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace, and Security,” which draws
an explicit connection between women's rights and international
security. Now, the officials of the most powerful government in the world
seem so conversant with this feminized security rhetoric that their words
often appear to be indistinguishable from those of feminist activists.
Even if we accept the claim that the Bush Administration has been using
this rhetoric only to get votes, we should still see this as a sign of the
progress feminists have made: A neoconservative administration believes
that feminized security rhetoric is viable enough to attract
voters—unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago. If we dismiss the rhetoric as
mere words, then we fail to appreciate the work feminists have done to
make the connection between women and security sound reasonable and
mainstream to our contemporary ears.
Similarly, when we praise the rhetoric of the Bush Administration for
being feminist, we risk missing the work that this rhetoric is doing to
frame women's rights in a particular way. This is why I
refer to it as feminized, rather than feminist—to leave
open the question of whether what sounds at first to be feminist rhetoric
is indeed so. As the diversity and contention within feminist scholarship
demonstrates, there are many different ways of arguing for women's
rights, each of which brings certain political issues to the foreground
while others recede to the back. When we simply accept that this rhetoric
is feminist, we stop asking critical questions: How is it
feminist? How does it frame women's issues? How does it shape which
issues appear salient and which do not? How does it constrain and limit
possible discursive responses?
Neither of the responses that has emerged so far provides the
analytical tools necessary to think about how rhetoric works, since each
participates in the myth that words are not also deeds. Accordingly, we
end up with a Manichaean set of alternative evaluations: Either the
language of the Bush Administration is feminist (and therefore gets good
grades), or it is a cynical co-optation of feminist ideas (and therefore
must be rejected). However, when we think about the framing work that
rhetoric performs, it is impossible to read this as either an unqualified
success or a complete failure for feminism. By shifting our attention to
framing, I hope to open up space to consider successes and failures where
we did not think to look for them before. I want to appreciate how the
Bush Administration rhetoric is a particular kind of response to the
growing influence of feminist ideas about security—and as such, it
represents both a failure and a success.
In the following section, I situate my argument within the
interdisciplinary literature on framing. I then analyze the Bush
Administration's feminized security rhetoric by showing how it draws
not only on feminist ideas about women's rights but also on
discourses of respect for women and democratic peace. I conclude by making
some suggestions about how these two feminized frames have shifted the
terms of discourse on women's rights in the United States, and how
feminists might effectively respond in this climate to the
administration's policies on women at home and abroad.
FRAMING REALITY
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our
own reality. And while you're studying that
reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how
things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
—A senior Bush adviser in a 2002 interview with Ron
Suskind (2004)
I assume in this analysis that how issues of women's rights and
equality are framed matters—and it matters even more when the
framing is being done by the spokespeople for the world's most
politically, economically, and militarily dominant state. Rhetoric is
never merely rhetoric; it constructs a particular (if incomplete)
worldview that enables us to see certain connections, yet occludes others.
Like a picture frame, the rhetorical framing of political issues shapes
and contextualizes the perspective of the audience.
This idea of “framing” has been theoretically elaborated
in a number of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and political
science.7
While scholars have not reached consensus about how
precisely to define the term, they converge on the basic idea that frames
are conceptual structures that enable us to make sense of information by
selectively presenting it from a particular viewpoint. This concept
primarily has been used to explain how journalists frame stories in mass
communication (
Iyengar 1991) and how surveys
frame questions in social science research (
Kahneman
and Tversky 1984), although the concept broadly understood has
relevance to a variety of applications. For example, Robert Entman
describes framing as a feature of “a communicating text”
(
1993, 52). This suggests that the analysis of
framing may be helpful for understanding speeches, protest signs,
literature, advertisements—in short, anything that we can
characterize as a text.
The empirical literature on framing confirms my contention that frames
do matter because they affect audience perceptions.8
However, this does
not mean that when issues are presented to us in a particular way, we
simply adopt that perspective uncritically. Rather, as researchers have
noted, we respond to frames on the basis of our existing perspectives.
9 For example, Pan and Kosicki write that frames
“will interact with individual agents' memory for meaning
construction” (1993, 4). See also Entman 1993, 53.
Accordingly, we should not
expect that the Bush Administration, nor any other source of framing
discourse, will succeed at imposing a single perspective on its audience.
Different people will respond to the same framing rhetoric in different
ways.
10 One surprising finding is that
“political knowledge and sophistication, whether narrow or broad, do
not insulate one from the effects of framing … but rather seem to
promote framing effects” (Nelson, Oxley, and
Clawson 1997, 235).
Drawing on this work, I characterize
frames as constructions that
enable a particular view of the
world but do not guarantee that audience members will adopt it.
While to this extent I follow the general trends of the literature, I
also add to it an account of an aspect of framing that has been largely
undertheorized: its dialogicality.11
I
should note that I do not expect that my theoretical addition of
dialogicality would be controversial to many scholars of framing. Indeed,
some research seems to presuppose certain elements of dialogicality as I
present it here: that framing rhetoric takes place in an existing context,
and that it shapes options for the future. Nonetheless, to my knowledge
these aspects of framing have not been explicitly theorized until
now.
Rhetorical frames are introduced into an existing discursive
context in which other frames are already operative. Like interlocutors in
a dialogue responding to what the other says and how it is said, agents
attempting to frame an issue respond to the framing discourse that has
preceded them. This response is neither identical with nor wholly
unrelated to what has come before. Rather, it makes use of and redeploys
existing modes of discourse. Indeed, even where a frame is intended to
construct an entirely new issue for an audience, it is intelligible as a
frame only insofar as it builds on narratives and ideas already in
currency.
12 This idea does find articulation
in the literature on framing in the idea of “cultural
resonance.” This is the notion that frames must resonate with
“words and images highly salient in the culture, which is to say
noticeable, understandable, memorable, and
emotionally charged” (Entman
2003, 417, emphasis in original).
We might think of this
in terms of how William Sewell has described human agency: as “the
capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts” (
1992, 18). In political discourse, we use existing
rhetorical frames, but we also transform them as we apply them to
different situations.
13 In this way, frames
that aim at opposing worldviews may not be mutually exclusive: One frame
may transform and thereby co-opt the discourse of another, blurring
distinctions between them. This is an important feature of framing
discourse that is often occluded by the neatly oppositional examples used
in the literature, which give the impression that there are always only
two possible ways to frame an issue. The classic case of this is Kahneman and Tversky 1984. Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson
also give an example of this while discussing different ways of framing
the conflict in the former Yugoslavia (1997,
222). This dyadic thinking sometimes seems to be a feature of our thinking
about framing: Competition over how to frame an issue or a situation is
often described as if there are only two competitors. For example, Entman
writes, “Successful political communication requires the framing of
events, issues, and actors in ways that promote perceptions and
interpretations that benefit one side while hindering the
other” (2003, 417, emphasis added). I
can see no reason to presume that such competition will always be
restricted to only two parties.
Furthermore, influential framing rhetoric does more than just respond
to what has come before: It also shapes the discursive context to which
future actors will have to respond. Clever framing disarms opponents by
making likely lines of attack seem illegitimate or morally questionable.
Consider how opposition to Senator Eugene McCarthy's witch-hunt was
immobilized for a long time by the rhetorical threat of being named
un-American. Or consider how opponents of abortion reframed their position
as pro-life, a frame which has the effect of placing pro-choice activists
on the moral defensive. Even the most hegemonic of discourses never
completely forecloses alternatives, but it does help to shape the terrain
for resistance. Accordingly, attention to dialogicality shows that framing
rhetoric does work, not just by placing limits on how we view the world
but also by placing limits on how our interlocutors may respond to our
worldview.
This dialogical understanding of frames can help us to analyze the
Bush Administration's feminized security rhetoric as a kind of
political action that aims to shape how Americans think about women's
rights. It accomplishes this by drawing on an already existing feminist
rhetoric of women's rights. However, I hypothesize that the Bush
rhetoric on women is not a straightforward repetition of feminist
discourse (whether cynical or sincere); rather, it represents a
different way of framing women's issues. We should not
presume that just because this rhetoric often sounds familiar, it is
necessarily feminist. The Bush Administration, as I argue here, makes use
of existing discourses of respect, democratic peace, and feminism; yet it
alters each of these discourses by combining them in novel ways and
extending them to new contexts. Accordingly, we should not assume that the
administration's use of the rhetoric of women's rights will look
exactly like preexisting modes of feminist discourse: We should expect to
find differences.
However, many political actors might attempt to reframe women's
rights without achieving any results. What makes the Bush
Administration's rhetoric worthy of study is the likelihood that it
has had and will have significant influence over how women's
rights and equality are framed. This is likely since, at least within
American public discourse, the Bush Administration has enjoyed a kind of
hegemonic authority to set the terms for discussion of women's rights
and status—because of its access to media, political, and budgetary
resources. While this authority is not unchallenged, we can expect that
the executive branch has the opportunity to shape how many Americans think
about women's rights and feminist issues.14
Entman 2003 makes a similar
argument about the influence of the administration in framing 9/11 and
the war on terror.
In particular, as a right-wing administration
with a reputation for social conservatism, the current government may have
the capacity to influence citizens who would not give credence to
arguments for women's rights coming from feminist organizations or
leftist politicians. While there is no reason to suppose that the Bush
Administration rhetoric will be uniformly influential on Americans, there
is reason to suppose that it can have some effect on how many citizens
view their world. The coalition behind the Global Scorecard, for instance,
has seemingly accepted this rhetoric as feminist.
When we examine the Bush Administration's words from the
perspective of framing, then it is clear that these are not mere words
but, rather, a form of political action—one that aims to change how
we think about women's rights. Consequently, separating criticism of
words from criticism of deeds, as many feminists have done, is an
ineffective response. We need to reveal that these words are
deeds—that the Bush Administration is engaged in the very political
act of shifting the discursive terrain for women's rights. As the
official quoted at the beginning of this section states, “we create
our own reality.” Insofar as this is the reality in which feminists
now find themselves, we need to analyze its logic as fully as possible.
Accordingly, in the remainder of this essay I engage in interpretive
analysis of the Bush Administration's feminized security rhetoric in
order 1) to reveal how it frames women's rights, and frames them in a
way that is different from what came before; and 2) to contest it by
identifying what kinds of responses it renders ineffectual and what kinds
it enables.
A METHODOLOGICAL NOTE
Before turning to the analysis of the Bush Administration's
rhetoric, I should clarify the methodology I have used to identify it.
First, by the term “Bush Administration” I mean to refer to a
collection of individuals in prominent positions in the executive branch
under President George W. Bush: These include Bush himself, First Lady
Laura Bush, cabinet members, and other top executive branch officials and
political advisers. I focus on the leadership because I assume that of all
the people working in the administration, these few will have the greatest
access to the media to convey their message, and they will be perceived as
the most authoritative by their audience. In short, I expect the
leadership of the administration to have the greatest influence on how
citizens frame their world.
I take the statements of these officials as indicative of the position
of the administration as a whole. I do not presume anything about the
intentions of any particular individual, about whether he or she is a
sincere or cynical advocate of women's rights.15
I find it entirely plausible to believe that some (if not
all) among the Bush Administration do believe in the importance of
women's rights in and of themselves, rather than simply as a
rhetorical tool to achieve policy and electoral goals. The question, then,
is—regardless of their intentions—what is the effect
of the particular way in which they frame women's rights and its
relation to national security?
I find it reasonable to suppose
that most if not all public comments made by these people have been
approved as representing the position of the administration: They are
spokespeople for the administration and so can reasonably be expected to
be expressing a somewhat coherent, consistent, and coordinated position on
the issues—regardless of their individual motives or beliefs about
the language they use. Indeed, the rhetorics used by these officials are
consistent enough that it is either extraordinary chance that they are so
coordinated or they really have intentionally coordinated with one
another.
This feminized security rhetoric has become commonplace in the
administration, so much so that it is typical for an official who gives a
speech about American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan or about the U.S.
policy of promoting democracy around the world to draw the connection to
the pursuit of women's rights. Accordingly, I have focused my
attention here on speeches and other texts that are focused on
women's issues or that announced new policies or initiatives
regarding women. These include a variety of official and public documents
produced throughout Bush's first term in office, from both before and
after September 11, 2001. I have examined documents posted on
whitehouse.gov, the official White House Website (such as speeches by the
President and the First Lady, policy reports, and press briefings); op-eds
and other opinion pieces written by members of the Bush Administration;
interviews and quotations reproduced in the media; and other policies and
public speeches available from additional sources (such as former UN
Ambassador John Negroponte's speeches before the Security
Council).
The majority of these texts are attributed to President Bush, Laura
Bush, or former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The most surprising
absence from these texts is Condoleezza Rice, who served as National
Security Adviser during Bush's first term in office. As a woman in
charge of national security, we might suppose her to be an obvious choice
to be a spokesperson for this rhetoric. However, where she has talked
about the relation of women's rights to national security, it has
been only as a passing reference in a speech focused on some other matter
(e.g., Rice 2002). She is often mentioned in
speeches as an example of the success of women's rights in the United
States,16
This was a part of Laura
Bush's stump speech on the 2004 campaign trail. As a sample, see
L. Bush 2004.
but she was never the one
who introduced any new policies or initiatives on women. Rather, Laura
Bush is the woman who most frequently represented the administration on
women's issues. Rice's relative silence about women may be due
in part to her role as National Security Adviser. For example, at the G-8
Summit in 2004, she attended the meetings, while Laura Bush hosted a
separate event about women's issues for the other wives of world
leaders (
Rice 2004).
However, having Laura Bush be the primary female spokesperson for
women's rights may also be a strategic choice on the part of the
administration.17
This conjecture is
supported by the fact that none of the other women in Bush's cabinet
during his first term acted as spokespeople for women's
rights.
Whereas Dr. Rice is a single, childless, and ambitious
career woman, Mrs. Bush is a wife and mother who quit her job to raise her
children. She has evidenced no career aspirations at odds with those of
her husband. Through her role as First Lady acquired by virtue of her
marriage to the president, she literally embodies the notion that
women's primary identification should be with her family.
Consequently, she seems comparatively nonthreatening as an advocate of
women's rights since her personal choices to date seem to correspond
with relatively traditional gender roles.
TWO RHETORICS OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS
When I began to examine how the Bush Administration was framing
women's rights issues in relation to national security, I realized
that there is not one but multiple rhetorical strategies at work. This is
because Bush and his spokespeople draw upon different preexisting
discourses to express a commitment to women's rights: first, a
discourse of chivalrous respect for women, which reinforces the
administration's contrast between the civilized world and the
barbaric Taliban and Hussein regimes; and second, a discourse of
democratic peace, which reflects the administration's policy of
seeking to build democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. I distinguish two
different rhetorics, corresponding to these discursive sources. While
these rhetorics are often used separately, they are also frequently
deployed in the same speech or statement. Consequently, I feel justified
in treating them as if they are each different components of the same
overall framing strategy.
These two rhetorics share one very important feature in common: They
both position Americans as superior to some particular others in terms of
their treatment of women; accordingly, both rhetorics motivate and justify
intervention in other countries in the name of women's rights.
However, whereas the rhetoric of democracy clearly positions women's
rights as a national security concern, the rhetoric of respect draws no
similar connection. This is significant because it means that, in the
current political climate in which national security is of prime
importance, the rhetoric of democracy is much more rhetorically powerful
in making women's rights a central (rather than a marginal) concern
in U.S. foreign policy. I treat each of these rhetorics in turn.
The Rhetoric of Respect
Respect for women is a Bush Administration foreign policy
priority.
—“U.S. International Women's Initiatives
Fact Sheet,” March 8, 200418
There was little discussion of women's rights by the Bush
Administration before September 11.19
The
Bush campaign in 2000 used the slogan “W stands for women” to
capture Bush's support for women's rights. This support does not
seem to have translated into any meaningful discourse about women's
rights until after 9/11. See Flanders's analysis (2004b). The slogan has also been used in the 2004
campaign.
Women's rights were generally mentioned only on
ceremonial occasions celebrating women (e.g., G. W.
Bush 2001e), they were usually mentioned by Laura Bush
rather than her husband, and they were mentioned as an achievement that
had successfully occurred in the past.
20 Laura Bush on one occasion says: “For our girls,
women's suffrage is ancient history. They've never known the
inequalities that women had to endure and overcome a couple of generations
ago. That's why it's so important for us to be vigilant in our
remembrance, and vocal in our celebration of women's
history—because we owe the great women in our past for the
opportunities that we enjoy today” (L. Bush
2001b).
The primary message of these early speeches is
that women's rights have already been achieved in the United States;
gender inequality no longer exists. Insofar as women's rights are
today only imperfectly enjoyed, this is simply a function of a lack of
enforcement of the existing laws.
21 Bush
notes that “my 2002 budget requests increased funding for Federal
initiatives to combat violence against women and to continue the
guarantees of basic civil rights and liberties for women” (2001d, emphasis added). He also notes that
women's equality is not yet achieved, but he does so with such a
positive spin that there does not seem to be any need for activism or
radical change. The tone is one of reassurance: We are already on the
right track, even if we haven't reached complete equality between the
sexes: “More than 150 years later, we are closer than ever to
realizing Margaret Fuller's dream. Women account for nearly half of
all workers. Today, women are ‘captains’ of their own
destinies, and they will continue to help shape our Nation's future.
Women hold 74 seats in the United States Congress, more than at any time
in our country's history, and women own more than 9 million
businesses employing more than 27.5 million workers. Through their
tireless service on a daily basis, the women of our Nation have woven the
fabric of families and communities. They contribute immeasurably through
faith-based and community organizations” (G. W. Bush 2001d).
No new laws, no new rights are
necessary. Consequently, the women's movement is always referred to
in the past tense—women struggled once upon a time for their rights,
and inequality is a matter of the past (G. W.
Bush
2001e;
L. Bush 2001b). Suffrage is an
achievement that we should all be proud of, but there is no continuing
need for women to organize and struggle for rights—at least in the
United States. Indeed, reading through the statements by the president and
the First Lady during the first 233 days of the administration, one might
never know that the women's movement is still quite active.
Immediately after 9/11, this narrative of women's rights as
already achieved in the United States appears in Bush Administration
discourse in the context of a rhetoric of respect for women. Our
respect for women at home should motivate us to care about the status of
women abroad.22
This logic of American
superiority justifying foreign intervention is at work, for example, in a
speech given by Lynne Cheney that expresses the idea of respect in the
language of the desert. She stated, “The United States is a land
where women are free, and we are defending the freedom of our daughters as
well as our sons against a foe that has decided that women do not even
deserve to go to school” (Cheney
2001).
This rhetoric predates 9/11, but it does not
seem to have been explicitly connected with women's rights until
afterward.
23 The rhetoric of respect is tied
to the Bush Administration's faith-based initiatives. Pre-9/11,
it emerges in discussions of faith-based groups that are teaching boys to
have respect for women. See, for example, G. W. Bush 2001b, 2001c.
After
September 11, the recognition of women's rights is figured as a sign
of respect for women. Civilized nations and civilized peoples respect
women, and therefore treat them with dignity and recognize their rights.
The United States clearly respects its women since it has for almost a
century now recognized women's rights. Afghanistan, by contrast, did
not respect its women under Taliban rule. Accordingly, Afghanistan was
uncivilized and needed to be brought under control and domesticated. This
rhetorical strategy works, then, by redeploying an existing conservative
narrative of chivalry: Those who respect their women are civilized; those
who do not are barbarians.
24 The connection
between respect and civilization has often been made without specific
reference to respecting women. Consider one of Bush's major speeches
in the months following 9/11: “This new enemy seeks to destroy
our freedom and impose its views. We value life; the terrorists ruthlessly
destroy it. We value education; the terrorists do not believe women should
be educated or should have health care, or should leave their homes. We
value the right to speak our minds; for the terrorists, free expression
can be grounds for execution. We respect people of all faiths and welcome
the free practice of religion; our enemy wants to dictate how to think and
how to worship even to their fellow Muslims…. We wage a war to save
civilization, itself. We did not seek it, but we must fight it—and
we will prevail” (G. W. Bush
2001a).
Laura Bush delivered a key speech that connected this rhetoric of
respect to U.S. national security policy on November 17, 2001, in the
first presidential radio address to the nation delivered in full by a
First Lady.25
She had on previous occasions
joined her husband in giving the address. While much has been made about
the historic nature of this event, it really was not a new role for Laura
Bush. Certainly the fact that she was the sole speaker performatively
underscores the content of her speech: that Americans, and the U.S.
government, and the Bush Administration in particular, already respect
women. Indeed, George W. Bush respects women to such a degree that he will
allow his wife to perform a (relatively symbolic) presidential task in his
stead.
In her brief speech, Bush catalogs the horrible acts
committed or threatened by the Taliban against Afghani women: “Women
have been denied access to doctors when they're sick. Life under the
Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays of joy are
outlawed—children aren't allowed to fly kites; their mothers
face beatings for laughing out loud. Women cannot work outside the home,
or even leave their homes by themselves” (
2001a). Yet she is quick to tell us that this
disrespect is a characteristic of the Taliban regime in particular, not of
Islam in general, which we learn is a civilized religion that emphasizes
respect for women: “Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid
education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull
out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women
and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty,
carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control” (
2001a). The Taliban have shown themselves to be
uncivilized not only because they have harbored terrorist organizations
but also because they lack respect for women.
Listening to her speech, we learn that we should therefore equate the
struggle for women's rights with the war on terror: “The fight
against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of
women” (2001a). We are instructed by her
model to feel a kind of instinctual, natural outrage at the Taliban. This
is what her example of having one's fingernails pulled out does: It
elicits a visceral revulsion, a kind of Rousseauean pity at the pain of
another.26
It also suggests that one of the
rights we should be fighting for is the right of women to wear nail polish
without fear of persecution. While I do not mean to trivialize the
violence women have faced for a variety of “crimes” having to
do with their personal appearances, I think it is worth noting that the
crime in question here is that of conforming to a particular standard of
female beauty associated with feminine weakness and vulnerability. This
example, then, reinforces the notion that women should have the right to
beautiful nails—a symbol that resonates at least in the West with
the fragile femininity that requires a chivalrous, male
protector.
We should do more than just feel outrage, however. We
should also speak out about it. We should speak out against the Taliban,
which is to say that we should speak out in support of the U.S. military
action against the Taliban. This is what civilized people do: Like
chivalrous knights in shining armor, they rush to the aid of defenseless
women and children everywhere: “Civilized people throughout the
world are speaking out in horror—not only because our hearts break
for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan
we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.
All of us have an obligation to speak out” (
L.
Bush 2001a). Here the language of respect enters the picture:
“We respect our mothers, our sisters and daughters. Fighting
brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific
culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity—a commitment
shared by people of good will on every continent” (
L. Bush 2001a). Unlike the Taliban,
we
respect our mothers, sisters, and daughters. This is a sign that
we, unlike they, are civilized people.
This rhetoric obviously was politically useful at the time; it helped
to demonstrate that the Bush Administration was not anti-Muslim, only
antiterror; it also helped to construct an image of a natural solidarity
among “civilized peoples” who ought to support a U.S.-led war
on terror. This language does so not only by drawing a distinction between
civilized and uncivilized people but also by calling for a vague course of
action: respect for women. Laura Bush does not specify a catalog of rights
that women do or should have; she simply calls for respect. This
is a language that is not threatening to those U.S. allies who do not
themselves fully recognize women's rights but who do claim to respect
women.27
Karen Hughes, at the time a
counselor to the President, gave remarks in a press briefing that are
typical of the Bush Administration rhetoric on Muslim countries at the
time. In response to a question about the treatment of women in countries
like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, she said: “Well, first of all, I would
encourage you not to make a comparison. No other countries, for example,
don't allow nine-year-old girls to be educated or to learn to read.
And in many other Muslim countries, women are, in fact, greatly respected.
And women in most of those other countries have the opportunity to work
outside the home and to be—certainly, none of those other countries
forbid women or little daughters at 9 and 10 years old from literally
learning to read” (Hughes, Conlon, and Lenkowsky
2001).
In other words, this language of respect is only
contingently connected to women's rights: There are lots of ways to
respect women, only some of which include recognizing women as
rights-bearing subjects.
However, this language of respect is also consistent with other ways
of conceptualizing women. As I have been suggesting, Laura Bush invites us
to imagine ourselves as the chivalrous masculine protectors who must
defeat the misogynist enemy and show Afghani women the respect that the
Taliban refuses them. Women are victims, vulnerable, in need of
masculinist protection, here embodied in the figure of the United States,
which is willing to intervene and protect them from the indignities
suffered at the hands of the Taliban.28
I
take this language of “masculinist protection” from Young 2003.
Women are identified with the
family: They are mothers, sisters, and daughters—rather than
citizens.
29 This is, of course, reinforced
by the fact that it is the president's wife who delivers the
message—rather than the president himself, or the secretary of state
or defense, or even (if it must be a woman) a female cabinet
member.
They are conduits of civilization and culture: The
Taliban
men are uncivilized, but there is no corresponding
concern that the Afghani women are also uncivilized. Rather than being a
radical rhetoric in unconditional support of women's rights, the
rhetoric of respect is only contingently related to rights, and it
reinscribes traditional gender roles of chivalrous male protectors
rescuing female damsels-in-distress.
Not only is this rhetoric contingently connected to rights but it is
also only contingently connected to national security. In other words, in
an era immediately following 9/11 in which security concerns dominated
and legitimated all kinds of political programs, women's rights were
being framed in terms having little or nothing to do with security. We can
see this by looking at the September 2002 “National Security
Strategy”—the document that outlines the Bush doctrine of
preemptive war. It contains only three passing references to gender in 35
pages of text.30
These include references to
the importance of educating children—male and female, and
to fathers and mothers who “want their children to be
educated and to live free from poverty and violence”—the first
in Bush's introductory remarks and the second on page 3 (“National Security Strategy”
2002).
The most important of these is found in a list of
eight “nonnegotiable demands of human dignity” that the United
States must “champion”: the rather ambiguous demand of
“respect for women” (
2002, 3).
Although respect for women is nonnegotiable, it makes no other appearance
in the document. The message is that national security is not really
related to respect for women—or to women's rights—in any
significant way.
31 Indeed, protecting
women's rights is not mentioned at all in the four action points
suggested in response to these eight demands.
The failure of the
Taliban to respect women simply demonstrates how uncivilized they are; the
Taliban do not pose any particular threat to the United States on account
of disrespecting women. The fight against terrorism may also be a fight
for the rights and dignity of women, but according to the logic of this
rhetoric, it is simply unclear whether supporting women's rights
would be an effective way to fight terrorism.
The Rhetoric of Democracy
Ensuring women's rights benefits individuals and
their families, strengthens democracy, bolsters prosperity, enhances human
rights and advances religious tolerance. It is at the core of building a
civil, law-abiding society, which is an indispensable prerequisite for
true democracy. The advancement of issues of concern to women has been a
long-standing American goal. This administration has intensified that
pursuit.
—Under Secretary for Global Affairs Paula J.
Dobriansky32
The connection between supporting women's rights and achieving
national security is made explicit in the second rhetoric: a rhetoric that
relates women's issues to the creation of stable democracies around
the world. The framing logic of this rhetoric differs from that of respect
in several important ways. First, whereas the rhetoric of respect was only
contingently connected to women's rights and a conception of women as
rights-bearing citizens, the rhetoric of democracy is unmistakably a
rhetoric of women's rights. Second, this rhetoric ties women's
rights directly to U.S. national security. This has the effect of making
women's rights an issue that (rhetorically, at least) is central to
U.S. foreign policy. This is the kind of language that has earned the Bush
Administration's rhetoric on Iraq and Afghanistan good grades from
feminist groups for over a year: it is a rhetoric that takes women's
rights seriously.
As an example of this rhetoric, consider an op-ed entitled
“Women in the New Iraq.” The article was written by Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and appeared in the Washington
Post on February 1, 2004. Wolfowitz begins by discussing a new
women's center in Iraq dedicated to women's rights. Soon,
however, he gets to his main point: democracy. The women he met on his
recent visit to Iraq want to protect their rights. Yet, by his account,
these women want their rights not so much for themselves but because they
understand that women's rights are necessary in order to create and
maintain democracy in Iraq, and in order to make the world as a whole
safer. While in Iraq, Wolfowitz met with a delegation of women leaders,
who “told us that if Iraq is to become a democracy, women
must have an equal role and more women should be included in Iraqi
governing bodies and ministries.”33
Paul D. Wolfowitz, “Women in the New Iraq,”
Washington Post, 1 February 2004, sec. B. Emphasis
added.
These women have numerous concerns, among them being a
concern “that if women are not involved [in drafting a new
constitution for Iraq], women will not be guaranteed equality under
the law,” but this concern is hardly the most important one for
Wolfowitz. As he notes, “they also pointed out that we are now
engaged with Iraqis in seeking
a far greater prize: a chance for
lasting change in the region that will help make our country and the world
safer.”
34 Wolfowitz clearly agrees with the logic of this delegation as he
reports it. Women's rights are not to be protected qua rights, but
rather because they are an important indicator of the democratization of a
state: “A government that does not respect the rights of half its
citizens,” Wolfowitz continues to write in language that evokes
feminists all the way back to Mary Wollstonecraft, “cannot be
trusted to safeguard the rights of any.” It is because we need to be
able to trust other governments to be democratic (that is, to respect the
rights of all of its citizens) that we need to make certain that they
recognize women's rights. This, he tells us, is the rationale for
U.S. policy and funding to support women's rights in Iraq. President
Bush himself, Wolfowitz reminds us, made the connection between
women's rights and Iraq policy clear in his State of the Union
address in January 2004, when he said that “our aim is ‘a
peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.’
”35
We can now trace out the reasoning that leads Wolfowitz to support
women's rights in Iraq. First, it is essential to our national
security that other countries democratize. The peace that Bush refers to
in the State of the Union address is, as he himself notes, a democratic
peace (G. W. Bush 2004). In other words, the
Bush Administration is appealing to a long-standing view whose roots can
be traced back to Immanuel Kant ([1795]
1991) that democracies will not go to war against one another. The
presumption made by Wolfowitz and others is that only if countries like
Iraq are democratic can we expect that their leaders will not seek to go
to war with the United States and will not harbor terrorists. Accordingly,
the security of the United States requires the creation of democracies to
replace failed and dictatorial regimes around the world. Second,
Wolfowitz's argument rests on certain assumptions about what counts
as a democracy. Most importantly, a democracy is a form of government that
respects the rights of all of its citizens—whether male or
female. Therefore, it is in the interests of U.S. national security to
support women's rights in Iraq in order to make sure that the new
Iraqi government is indeed a democratic one.
Women's rights are then best understood as an instrumental good,
according to the logic of this rhetoric. They are instrumental first in
securing democracy: A state that recognizes women's rights is a
democratic state. In turn, then, women's rights are instrumental in
securing U.S. national security. Yet the rhetoric often sounds more
idealistic, as if Americans ought to be committed to ensuring women's
rights as a good in and of themselves. We can see this when we look at the
larger context of the quotation Wolfowitz takes from the State of the
Union address. Bush stated: “America is a nation with a mission, and
that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to
dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic
peace—a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man
and woman. America acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side,
yet we understand our special calling: This great republic will lead the
cause of freedom” (G. W. Bush 2004).36
Emphasis added. Many commentators suggested
after Bush's second inaugural speech that he was unveiling a new
direction for his second term in office: encouraging the spread of
democracy around the world. However, it is clear from this, as well as
from much earlier speeches by Bush and other members of the
administration, that this doctrine of democratic peace was well
established long before January 2005.
Here, Bush speaks
idealistically of freedom and rights as if they are ends in themselves.
Yet he simultaneously reaffirms the realist premise that if rights are
important, it is because international peace
requires the
recognition of rights: Even as Americans lead the cause of freedom, they
do so with the aim of creating a democratic peace.
In fact, it is characteristic of this rhetoric connecting women's
rights to democracy that it conflates idealist and realist positions on
rights. Consider Laura Bush's remarks on efforts to promote
women's human rights globally on March 12, 2004: “For a stable
world, we must dedicate ourselves to protecting women's rights in all
countries. Farahnaz Nazir, founder of the Afghanistan Women's
Association, said, ‘Society is like a bird. It has two wings. And a
bird cannot fly if one wing is broken.’ Without women, the goals of
democracy and peace cannot be achieved. Women's rights are human
rights, and the work of advancing human rights is the responsibility of
all humanity” (G. W. Bush and L. Bush
2004).37
She continues:
“President Bush is firmly committed to the empowerment in education
and health of women around the world. The President knows that women are
vital to democracy and important for the development of all countries. And
he has three very strong women at home who won't let him forget
it.” Her words fill the function of reassuring the listener that
George W. Bush is committed to women's rights both politically and
personally—a part of the rhetorical strategy which I discuss here.
Her comments also paradoxically signal that the president needs three
women at home to keep reminding him of the importance of women's
rights. As with the rhetoric of respect, Laura Bush's remarks serve
to remind us of the familial role of women, even as she is speaking of
women's rights.
Women's rights are human
rights—but we must dedicate ourselves to protecting them
for a
stable world.
The argument epitomized by Wolfowitz's op-ed is only one version
of the rhetoric of democracy. I have identified three different arguments
that connect women's rights to democratic peace, and it is in these
arguments that we can see the tremendous influence of feminist activism on
the Bush Administration. All three are present in the quotation with which
I began this section: “Ensuring women's rights benefits
individuals and their families, strengthens democracy, bolsters
prosperity, enhances human rights and advances religious tolerance.”
The first argument is the Wolfowitz argument: Where women's political
rights to vote and participate in self-government are recognized, there we
can be assured is a democratic government. This claim is as old as the
movement for women's suffrage.
The second line of argument takes the recognition of women's
rights—political, social, and economic—to be necessary for
sustainable prosperity. As George W. Bush notes, “The economic
empowerment of women is one effective way to improve lives and to protect
rights. Each year for the past five years, the United States government
has provided an average of $155 million in small loans, micro-loans. About
70 percent of those benefit women. It turns out the world is learning what
we know in America: The best entrepreneurs in the country are women. In
America, most new small businesses are started by women. With the right
help, that will be the case around the world, as well” (G. W. Bush and L. Bush 2004).38
Similar evidence is also cited in the UN Resolution on
women's political participation. Three of the clauses read as
follows: “Affirming that the empowerment and autonomy of
women and the improvement of their political, social and economic status
are essential to the achievement of representative, transparent and
accountable government, democratic institutions and sustainable
development in all areas of life,
“Affirming also that the active participation of women,
on equal terms with men, at all levels of decision-making is essential to
the achievement of equality, sustainable development, peace and democracy
…
“Recognizing also that women's full and equal
participation in the political process and decision-making will provide a
balance that more accurately reflects the composition of society, is
needed to strengthen democracy and promote its proper functioning, plays a
pivotal role in furthering women's equal status, and contributes to
redefining political priorities and providing new perspectives on
political issues” (United Nations General
Assembly 2003).
Entrepreneurial women, in turn, are the
sign of a free market economy, which is itself taken as a stand-in for a
democratic government. The connection between women's enjoyment of
their rights and general prosperity—while it is not always linked to
free market economics as it is here—has been well established.
39 Indeed, feminist Katha
Pollitt makes a very similar argument in her criticisms of Bush's
policies.
40 Katha Pollitt's articles in
The Nation, which are critical of the Bush Administration's
policies toward women, draw on the same kind of data. She writes, for
example: “Where women are healthy and well educated and
self-determined, you can bet that men are too, but the situation of women
is not only a barometer of a society's general level of equality and
decency—improving women's status is key to solving many of the
world's most serious problems” (Pollitt
2002). She takes her argument perhaps a bit further than the Bush
Administration would, by arguing that aiding women also would alter the
gender inequality of the family: “Recognizing and maximizing
women's key economic role would have a host of benefits—it
would lessen hunger, improve women's and children's well-being,
improve women's status in the family, lower fertility” (2002).
The third line of argument is a bit more subtle. It connects the
recognition of women's rights to a secular society—which in the
context of Afghanistan and Iraq means a society governed by secular rather
than sharia law. Dobriansky suggests, for example, that ensuring
women's rights also ensures religious tolerance. The
institutionalization of women's rights is in direct contradiction
with the imposition of sharia law; therefore, the support of women's
rights and political participation is a way of supporting secular
government, government that tolerates a variety of religions. This, again,
is a claim made by feminist activists, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
In all three of these logics, women's rights are taken to
represent democracy: whether these rights signal women's political
participation, women's social and economic participation, or the
absence of sharia law. Indeed, the Bush Administration goes so far to
connect women's rights and democracy that they are often treated in
speech as if they were synonymous: The one stands for the other. Speaking
on global women's human rights, George W. Bush tells us that
“[t]he advance of women's rights and the advance of
liberty are ultimately inseparable” (G.W. Bush
and L. Bush 2004). And so, in his remarks, Bush slides back and
forth between talking about women's rights and talking about
democracy, as if he is always talking about the same thing. I quote from
his speech at length to show how he constantly shifts from women to
democracy and vice versa—as if they really were the same:
By radio and television, we're broadcasting the message
of tolerance and truth in Arabic and Persian to tens of millions of
people. And our Middle East Partnership Initiative supports economic and
political and educational reform throughout the region. We're
building women's centers in Afghanistan and Iraq that will offer job
training and provide loans for small businesses and teach women about
their rights as citizens and human beings. We're active. We're
strong in the pursuit of freedom. We just don't talk a good game in
America [sic], we act.
In Afghanistan, the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council is
developing projects to improve the education of women, and to train the
leaders of tomorrow. You heard Laura talk about her deep desire to help
train women to become teachers, not only in the cities, but in the rural
parts of Afghanistan. We'll succeed. We'll follow through on
that initiative. We're pursuing a forward strategy of
freedom—that's how I like to describe it, a forward strategy of
freedom in the Middle East. And I believe there's no doubt that if
America stays the course and we call upon others to stay the course,
liberty will arrive and the world will be better off.
The momentum of freedom in the Middle East is beginning to
benefit women. That's what's important for this conference. A
free society is a society in which women will benefit. (G. W. Bush and L. Bush 2004)
What are the rhetorical effects of equating democracy with
women's rights in this way? To begin with, this way of framing
women's rights has the effect of occluding the fraught relationship
between real democracies and women's rights. Even a cursory look at
the history of democracy shows that there is no necessary connection
between democracy and women's rights: Most democracies have not
recognized women's rights, or at least have only partially done so.
Furthermore, the elision of women's rights with democracies makes it
difficult to see any tension within contemporary states between the
realization of democracy and the realization of women's rights.
Bush's words are also very reassuring to Americans. His equation
of women's rights with democracy means that if the United States has
already successfully achieved women's rights, then it must be a
democracy; and if the United States is a democracy, then it must already
recognize women's rights. He accomplishes this in his speech through
a variety of techniques. First, he begins by showing his audience that
women are present in the highest levels of U.S. government. He makes a
point of introducing all of the female cabinet members, as well as other
women serving in the administration who are present at the meeting. (Three
of the women he mentions are his sister, Dick Cheney's daughter, and
Donald Rumsfeld's wife, all of whom hold their positions arguably
because of patronage and nepotism—but he shows no trace of irony in
referring to these women as examples of women's rights and democracy
at work.) He demonstrates that women have arrived in the United
States—just look at how many of them he can show us! We are
reassured that women can rise to the top and that, therefore, we must live
in a democratic society.
Next, just as Laura Bush listed the train of Taliban abuses against
women in her radio address, George W. Bush reminds us of what women
suffered under the Taliban and Saddam Hussein—and that they no
longer suffer because of U.S. military intervention. By contrast, his list
of abuses reminds us that women in America really do seem to enjoy their
rights after all. In the United States, we know that women and girls can
become educated. In the United States, women can already receive the
training to become teachers. In the United States, we do not have rape
chambers or torture chambers. In the United States, women are not forced
to wear the burka or to stay in at night. The United States seems to be an
egalitarian paradise by comparison with these oppressive
regimes—what could women have to be concerned about here? Therefore,
his narrative reassures us that women in the United States have their full
rights—there is no additional work necessary to achieve
them—and consequently, the United States must be a democracy.
Correspondingly, this narrative motivates us to be concerned about
women's rights and democracy abroad. We are liberators,
agents of civilization, progress, democracy; because we have already
achieved these things for ourselves, we must now bring them to others. In
a new way, this rhetoric lands us in the same place as does the respect
rhetoric: We need to act as masculinist protectors of women's rights
around the world. We can see this in a story that Bush recounts of being
hailed by an Iraqi woman (and member of the Iraqi Governing Council) as
“my liberator,” just before she burst into tears. Her tears
provoke laughter from Bush's audience—a gentle laughter. Yet
when he admits that he himself cried in response, he is greeted with
enthusiastic applause.41
A transcript of
this speech is available at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040312-5.html.
A Webcast is also available from this page.
This is the
appropriate response to the rhetoric of democracy: We must feel compassion
for those around the world who do not have rights or democracy, and we
must be motivated to bring it to them—for the sake of national
security.
SHIFTING THE FRAME
Now that we have taken a closer look at the logic of the Bush
Administration's feminized security rhetoric, we can turn to
analyzing what this way of framing women's rights does.
Recall that frames are sources of meaning; they help us to structure and
make sense of our world. Consequently, the successful reframing of an
issue alters how many people perceive it. It creates, as the Bush official
suggested to Ron Suskind, a new reality. How we perceive
“reality” in turn affects our priorities, our allegiances, and
our decisions. So what kind of a reality is created by this rhetoric?
I suggest that it can be captured by two narratives.42
I take my understanding of narrative from
Patterson and Monroe 1998. They describe
narratives as the stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the
world. Narratives differ from frames in that frames do not require a
narrator. In other words, narratives are stories that reflect my
self-understanding.
The first of these is a narrative of
masculinist protection. We are superior to you (because we are civilized,
or because we have a democracy), and therefore we must take on the role of
your protector. We will go to war against those who would hurt you, and we
will bring you civilization and democracy. As Ann Tickner (
2001, 57) suggests, a variant of this narrative has
long been used to motivate military forces: Men must fight wars in order
to protect innocent women and children. Here, the feminization of the
victims of the Taliban and of Saddam Hussein serves to masculinize and
justify U.S. military actions. The second narrative is that of
international women's liberation. Women's rights were achieved
for Americans long ago, and so there is no need for feminists to agitate
for them at home. The work to be done is to be done abroad. Even if there
are still problems that American women face—for example, sexual
harassment, domestic violence—these are nothing compared to the
atrocities that women suffered under the Taliban and in the rape camps of
Saddam Hussein. So our attentions are best directed toward liberating
women in other countries.
Both of these narratives are problematic from a feminist perspective.
The first is troubling because it trades on notions of men as protectors
and women as victims that feminists have long criticized. In particular,
by casting the United States as a protector, it obscures the many ways
that our military actions increase the insecurity of women in the
countries where we wage war and try to install democracy.43
Tickner 2001
describes many ways that militarization and military action increase
women's insecurity in the stated interest of national
security.
The second is disturbing because it undercuts the
motivation for domestic activism. Feminists clamoring for rights at home
are more likely than not to be seen as privileged whiners who cannot
appreciate how good they have it, in comparison to the brave women of Iraq
and Afghanistan who struggle against true adversity.
Yet even as the Bush Administration rhetoric frames women's
rights in these objectionable ways, I do not believe that we should simply
condemn it, for there are also reasons to celebrate this feminization of
security. I celebrate this rhetoric not because it is feminist (as the
Global Scorecard coalition seems to think), but rather for the perverse
reason that it represents the co-optation of feminism. The Bush
Administration's repeated insistence on its record of standing up for
women's rights demonstrates how feminists have successfully reshaped
the worldviews of many Americans over the years. Appeals to women's
rights are no longer treated as completely marginal, nor are they voiced
primarily by members of the Democratic Party. Rather, Bush—a very
socially conservative Republican—ran for re-election in 2004 in part
on his record of pursuing women's rights in Afghanistan and Iraq.44
See the campaign's official 2004 “W
stands for women” page at
http://www.georgewbush.com/women/. The Republican National
Convention in 2004 also featured a special “W stands for
women” event, at which various female family members of Bush and
Cheney spoke of their record. According to one report, the event focused
upon “boasting of President Bush's character, his appointments
of women to high positions and his decisions to wage war in Afghanistan
and Iraq” (Enda 2004). Furthermore, in the
presidential and vice presidential debates, both Bush and Cheney mentioned
the administration's achievements for women's rights in
Afghanistan. For transcripts, see Commission on Presidential Debates 2004a, 2004b.
As
uncomfortable as some of his policies may make feminists, we have to allow
ourselves to recognize the gains we have made in framing women's
rights as an important political issue for the Left and the Right.
We should also be heartened by the Bush Administration's ability
to co-opt feminist concerns, because this suggests that we, in turn, might
co-opt their concerns for feminist ends. Rhetorical frames, as I have
argued, are transposable. Our worldviews are not fixed once and for all,
but may be shifted. Just as the Bush Administration has lifted elements of
feminist rhetoric to suit its own agenda, we in turn can lift pieces of
its rhetoric and redeploy them in new contexts for feminist ends. This, I
expect, is a difficult process, especially since feminist groups have
considerably less influence and power than the office of the president.
Nonetheless, I believe that we need to embrace the struggle to frame
women's rights in a feminist way as an important political activity.
This is an activity in which many feminists are already engaged, but it is
an activity that is devalued and undermined when feminists themselves
insist upon drawing a stark division between words and deeds.
What my analysis suggests is that the more effective strategies of
resistance will be those that respond to and directly contest the shift in
the rhetoric of women's rights effected by the Bush Administration.
For example, if we are told that women's rights are instrumentally
valuable for national security, then feminists might do well to reframe
their demands in terms of security. In other words, the Bush rhetoric
gives women's groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the United States a
powerful lever to use against Washington's foreign policy. Insofar as
women's rights are seen as instrumental to national security, they
have a kind of centrality and rhetorical purchase in the war on terror
that they have not had in the past—especially with a conservative
administration. If feminists can frame their concerns as concerns about
security, they may be able to expand their domestic audiences. The
feminist scholarship in international relations on the concept of security
provides an example of what this might look like: It aims to replace a
notion of state security with one of personal security for
women—that is, security from war, from domestic violence, and from
rape (e.g., Tickner 1992, 2001).45
She also
includes economic and environmental security in her
resignification.
To demonstrate that many women in the United
States lack this personal security is to undermine the Bush logic that
women at home no longer have anything to complain about, for it reveals
the continuity between our grievances and those of the women of
Afghanistan and Iraq.
46 In fact, one of the
organizations that has deployed this kind of rhetorical strategy to great
effect is the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq. For more on
how this organization is contesting the Bush Administration's
rhetoric of women and security, see Ferguson
2005.
Yet mainstream feminist activists in America have
been surprisingly reluctant to take advantage of the power of security
discourse. Insofar as they have made use of it, they do not seem to make
any attempt to resignify or challenge the dominant understanding of
security.
47 The Global Scorecard is a good
example of this failure to interrogate the meaning of security. The
commentary on the F that the Bush Administration received for the reality
of the security situation for women and girls in Afghanistan and Iraq
distinguishes between “personal security” and
“security,” with the latter referring to a conventional
understanding of security as the exercise of sovereign authority and of
the state's monopoly over violence. See Center for
Health and Gender Equity, Feminist Majority, and Women's Environment
and Development Organization 2004b.
Another approach might be to resist the Bush Administration's
framing of women's rights by redeploying the rhetoric of democracy.
Recall that part of the logic of this rhetoric is that the recognition of
women's rights and the realization of democracy are equivalent. Why
not take this equation seriously and use it to examine democracy in the
United States? If a democracy is a government that recognizes women's
rights, then can we say that the United States is truly democratic? After
all, if we restrict our notion of equal rights to political rights,
American women are significantly behind women from other countries.
Consider that Iraq and Afghanistan have equal rights provisions written
into their constitutions, and they have quotas for female representatives
that far exceed the current percentage of women in Congress.48
Both countries' constitutions include
equal rights statements, as well as quotas for women in the legislatures
as high as 25%. See the Global Database of Quotas for Women,
http://www.quotaproject.org.
The administration has
supported these attempts to institutionalize women's
rights—abroad. Why not leverage the administration's record of
supporting women's rights in new democracies in order to pressure it
to support similar provisions at home: an Equal Rights Amendment and
legislative quotas?
49 Barbara Ehrenreich
makes a related argument in an editorial calling on John Kerry to counter
Bush's efforts at machismo on the campaign trail with a greater
commitment to feminism (“The New Machismo: Feminism,” New
York Times, 29 July 2004).
Furthermore, we could use the rhetoric of democracy to critique
Bush's domestic policies regarding women. Insofar as his domestic
policies undermine women's rights, the logic of his own rhetoric
would suggest that they simultaneously undermine democracy in the United
States. So, for example, we might argue that the administration's
underfunding of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) encourages the
violation of women's rights. Since American women's security in
their own persons is denied by a government that does not actively seek to
eradicate gendered violence, women cannot be expected to enjoy citizenship
equally with men. Accordingly, the United States under Bush's rule,
while it aspires to be democratic, is actually wide of the mark.
Both of the rhetorical strategies I have only briefly outlined here
refuse to accept the Bush Administration premise that feminism at home is
irrelevant. Yet they do so in ways that importantly acknowledge the power
of words to shape our way of seeing the world. They contest and redeploy
the dominant framing rhetoric by transforming it anew into a rhetoric that
is feminist.
My analysis does not point to a wholly new strategy or course of
action for feminists. Indeed, it confirms the value of some of the actions
that many feminists are already taking. It helps us to understand better
why we should be engaged in rhetorical struggles over the framing of
women's rights in relation to national security. This struggle is
difficult—but we should be heartened by the power and influence
feminism has had in framing public discourse, given that Bush clearly
thinks he needs to talk about women's rights in order to woo women
voters. We should also be heartened by the example that the Bush
Administration gives us of how the terms of discourse can be shifted
through co-optation and transposition. Understanding that the Bush
Administration's rhetoric neither wholly embraces feminism nor
completely rejects its accomplishments gives us reason to be
optimistic—cautiously optimistic—that we, too, can
again have a significant impact on how women's rights are framed, at
home and abroad.
