blog post feb 26

The overarching theme in the readings for this week seems to be the potential of the body, through the modern construct of identity through sexuality, as both the weapon and the battlefield of normativity. I found Coco Fusco’s piece to be particularly salient; although she presents a stern critique of modern feminism (particularly feminism in the military), she does so without producing an overly transgressive discourse. That being said, I did find it a bit self-indulgent that she continued to directly address Virginia Woolf throughout her book. In spite of this, her account of female interrogators exemplifies a picture-perfect model of Agamben’s “state of exception,” the terminology Puar utilizes to describe the situation of gender disparities within the temporary and designated spaces that wartime deems inevitable. I find it fascinating that even English, a language not explicitly gendered, has an implicitly gendered nature when functioning in tangible communication. Even when the technology exists to capture, reproduce, and disseminate particular images throughout society (via photographs), the absence of terminology specific to the nature of the interrogation techniques represented in the photos meant they could be easily pushed under the rug.

Another issue that culminated within the readings is the presumption that gender equality should be qualified by the passive vocabulary that women were “granted” access to the very power structures responsible for disseminating the previous patriarchal oppression. The situation of women in the US military struck me as eerily similar to the manipulation of Egyptian women by political agendas both at home and abroad as a synecdoche of social progress; an image that could be easily reproduced and disseminated by Western media as an apparatus for inciting the cultural legitimacy of those once Otherized.