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IN her book, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media
published by Columbia University Press last year, Ms. Kelly Oliver,
a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, makes an
extended discussion of Adriana Cavarero’s position that in the
West, technology has become a criterion for distinguishing
legitimate and sanctioned violence from illegitimate and horrifying
violence.
High tech weapons allow armies to engage in mass
destruction allowing precision targeting to minimize enemy and
civilian casualties. But in reality targets have been missed, if
they are not actually aimed at civilian sites, causing civilian
casualties. Dr. Kelly quotes Cavarero in a yet to be published book
on Hororrism:
“The body, as such, the mere body transformed
into a mortal weapon appears instead as totally irregular and, so to
speak, disloyal, illegitimate, treacherous. This . . . depends on
the scandal of lethal weapons that consists of bare and
non-technological bodies. As Rim suicidal Salah al Riyachi claims,
her body is the weapon, it is her body that explodes in a thousand
killing splinters. She doesn’t think of her body as an instrument
that carries and utilizes weapons. Like in a case of a trooper
carrying a rifle or a warrior carrying a sword. She thinks of her
body as the weapon. This is totally anomalous in the Western
tradition concerning war. And it is particularly upsetting for a
type of war in which in which technology aims at replacing,
covering, and neutralizing the traditional role of fighting
bodies.”
“Cavarero concludes,” Dr. Kelly says, “
that within the Western political cannon, ‘only technology is
allowed to claim the correct and legitimate status of weapon.”
The basic instinct for self-preservation of the
enemy that is exploited in basic defensive strategic no longer
applies. How does one defend oneself from an enemy who is not afraid
to die and actually sacrifices his life?
Dr. Kelly gives a succinct summary of
Cavarero’s position, which deserves an extended quotation:
“Cavarero’s analysis suggests that, unlike
technology, the body particularly the female body and more
especially the maternal body, is horrifying when it becomes a
weapon. Her work shows how the Western metaphor of the body politic
has traditionally excluded the female body which is associated with
‘flesh, contingency and becoming,’ while simultaneously
idealizing the male body, which is constructed on an abstract image
of proportionality, perfect balance, and timeless stability.’
Because warriors are traditionally male, Cavarero argues that
‘female bodies performing as weapons make the old, notorious
connection between politics and war looking extraordinarily
anomalous, not only from a feminine perspective but especially from
the perspective of traditional political thought.’ Yet, given the
traditional between bodies and women, and the further association
between women’s bodies (perhaps especially material bodies and
dang, contra Cavarero, the uncanny effect of women suicide bombers
is not anomalous but in fact in a sense, exemplary of the greatest
imaginable danger—mother/women who have power over life and death.
“If as Cavarero argues, ‘bare,
non-technological, so to speak natural bodies . . . appear
illegitimate and politically incorrect’ when they become weapons
of war against technological weapons that conceal the role of the
body in war, then the bodies of suicide bombers are bound to evoke
at least within the Western imaginary, our fear of ‘natural
bodies.” Given the well-documented historical associations between
the body, nature and women, the fear of natural bodies usually
evokes fear of female or maternal bodies. Moreover, bodies of
suicide bombers make manifest the tension between bodies and
technology in the modern imaginary; that is to say, these bodies do
not stay within the realm of nature, but their political meaning
explodes into the scene of Western politics. The horror of these
bodies is not just that bodies are associated with nature—as
Cavarero argues—but also and moreover that these bodies explode
that stereotype by making the body and life itself into political
actions.”
Women suicide bombers are not a recent feature.
There was also a high rate of women suicide bombers among the Tamil
Tigers of Sri Lanka. A German journalist (Cristoph Reuter)
attributes the high rate of participation of women (close to 60
percent of Tamil suicide bombers) to the ‘modern emancipation of
Tamil women’ and their being accorded the same rights and military
duties as men’—to women’s liberation—and to the practical
effectiveness of women bombers. Dr. Kelly cites their capacity “to
conceal bombs under their clothes by, for example, passing
themselves off a pregnant. It’s a division of labor by gender: the
exploding belt worn by suicide assassins which the LTTE (Libertion
Tigers of Tamil Eelam) had managed to perfect over the years, was
even originally developed specially for the female body.”
opinion@manilatimes.net
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