War and Gender/Gender and War symposium I
November 1, 2002

Cynthia Enloe, miriam cooke, and Paul Lerner were the
panelists for a mini-symposium on gender and war at the Center
on Friday, November 1. Turnout was excellent for the three speakers, all of whom looked at the complex relationship between conflict, theories of gender, and concrete historical and social situations.

Sooke, chair of the department of Asian and African Languages and Literature at Duke University, spoke on the changing conception of women’s jihad among Islamic feminists. Although the reputation of the women who fought with Muhammad was long available as inspiration, cooke noted that specific conflicts such as the Algerian war of independence (1954-62) empowered Muslim women as political actors. Subsequently, Islamic feminists used such historical moments as arguments for the value of female participation in increasing the effectiveness of political movements and reducing levels of violence. These thinkers believed, moreover, that if conditions of national emergency justified women’s participation, women might have the opportunity to progress socially in more normal times as well. The events of 9/11, however, by publicizing a kind of binary thinking in which Islamic women are either victims or terrorists, almost certainly represent a serious setback to Islamic feminism.

Lerner, who teaches European history at the University of Southern California, discussed the gendering of trauma by German doctors from the 1880s to the 1920s. In 1889 the new German national insurance system recognized the trauma that may result from work-related accidents as a legitimate disability. But this diagnosis quickly produced discomfort in the medical community, which saw the very act of applying for a pension as feminizing, because it removed men from the world of work and action. Although such trauma diagnoses constituted barely one percent of all pension claims, doctors considered them a severe enough problem that they saw warfare as a kind of shock cure. When World War I proved a far greater source of trauma, Michael Geyer psychiatrists attributed shellshock to soldiers’ internal weakness rather than to the violence of war, and developed therapies based on removing patients from “female” influence rather than attending to their symptoms. Thus war provided an occasion for reinforcing gendered binaries, with disturbing consequences for the reconstruction of German society after 1918.

Enloe, a political scientist from Clark University, addressed the largely unacknowledged policy of encouraging prostitution around United States military bases. The issue has produced considerable protest from activists in Okinawa and South Korea. Military officials have typically responded, in effect, that a necessary part of a good soldier’s identity is a certain amount of sexual adventuresomeness. During the Gulf War, however, as Enloe explained, US policy makers bowed to pressure from a Saudi government concerned about its conservative insurgency by preventing prostitution in the vicinity of US bases there.

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Center for 21st Century Studies

Daniel J. Sherman, Director