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Femina Sacra: The `War on/of Terror', Women and the Feminine

Cristina Masters

School of Politics, University of Manchester, UK

This article inquires after women with whom we have seemingly become intimately familiar in the `war on/of terror'. On one hand, it asks after women such as Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, examining how US female soldiers have been represented in the `war on/of terror'. On the other hand, it also inquires after some women we do not know at all — women who have largely remained faceless, nameless, figural, reduced to the snapshot of the veil — the women on behalf of whom this war is claimed to be waged. In so doing, it asks the question: What do any of these women have in common? The article explores how women in the `war on/of terror' have in common their silence, erasure and radical exclusion, in varied degrees, from politics. This has been effected through particular representational politics wherein women have been written over and against one another — American women over and against Afghan and Iraqi women, Jessica Lynch over and against Lynndie England. Accordingly, we fail to make connections across difference, and never ask after that which appears at the margins of the text, at the edges of the screen, on the borders of the photograph. This article, therefore, seeks to ask after these margins, edges and borders. It seeks to ask after femina sacra.

Key Words: femina sacra •sexual violence •war on/of terror • sovereign power

Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 1, 29-49 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0967010608100846
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