01 March 2011By Maya Mikdashi
I find myself intermittently infuriated and nauseated
by the news coverage of the sexual assault on a female
CBS reporter in Tahrir Square during the celebrations
the day that Husni Mubarak resigned. This coverage has
ranged from the disappointing silence of Al-Jazeera to
the blatant racism of Fox News. What actually happened
that day to Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent
for 60 Minutes, is not yet known and I have no
interest in speculating over the lurid details of a
sexual and physical assault, particularly while the
victim remains in recovery. In this post, I want to
focus on how much of the coverage of this "affair" has
revealed the ways in which female bodies are a site
that marries Islamophobia to Sexism. This marriage, in
turn, reproduces one of the most enduring colonial
tropes; the native (and in this case, foreign) woman
who needs to be rescued from uncivilized and
misogynist men.[1] Cue the- oh so civilized and
feminist military invasions and/or occupations of
British controlled India, and US controlled
Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to being a discourse
that is used to legitimate war, this use of female
bodies (and increasingly, gay bodies) as a mark of
civilizational status has also been cynically
mobilized to continue colonial projects in apartheid
South Africa and contemporary Israel.
But let's get back to Tahrir Square. Or actually, to
New York City, where in the subway on my way to class,
a woman with pursed lips was reading the hyperbolic NY
Post, which many consider the perfect subway reading
material because you can pass the time without fear of
getting engrossed and missing your stop. For two days
last week, the Post (which is owned by the same parent
company as Fox News) ran the same picture on its front
page, with an only slightly modified headline.
These headlines may be composed of only one and
three words, respectively, but in fact they are highly
coded and dense messages that convey multiple layers
of meaning. What we "read" in them includes statements
such as 1) Arab men are sex crazed animals 2) Blonde
and beautiful women should know better than to
surround themselves by these sex crazed animals, 3)
See? Those revolutionaries you were celebrating are
all potential rapists- they hate women. The use of the
words "animals" and "beasts" to describe the male
protesters at Tahrir square, who are all rendered
potential rapists within this discourse of the sex
crazed Muslim/Arab mob, highlights what is perhaps an
uncomfortable truth about political discourse in the
United States today. In the contemporary US, it is
socially acceptable to vilify Arabs and/or Muslims,
just as it is OK to be outspokenly racist against this
group of people. We have seen the normalization of
this racialized discrimination in many instances, most
recently during anti-Muslim discourse unleashed over
the planned Islamic center near the World Trade Center
Site.
The coverage of the vicious attack against the CBS
female reporter also reveals how sexual assault can be
packaged into a commodity in order to sell both
newspapers and Islamophobic/Sexist ideologies. Perhaps
more critically, it reveals how the assault of a white
woman by brown men demands international attention,
while the daily assaults on brown women by brown men
and on white women by white men almost never
constitute "news." Immediately after word of "the
assault" broke, right wing commentators gleefully used
it as evidence of how they had been right about Islam,
about the dangers posed to the "free world" by the
Egyptian uprising, and how somehow, this female
reporter got what she deserved and /or should have
known better. The vitriolic commentator Debbie
Schlussel perhaps said it best . . . "As I've noted
before, it bothers me not a lick when mainstream media
reporters who keep telling us Muslims and Islam are
peaceful get a taste of just how "peaceful" Muslims
and Islam really are. In fact, it kinda warms my
heart. Still, it's also a great reminder of justhow
"civilized" these "people" [or, as I like to call them
in Arabic, "Bahai'im" (Animals)] are; . . . And yet
they still won't admit that THIS. IS. ISLAM. Lara
Logan was among the chief cheerleaders of this
"revolution" by animals. Now she knows what Islamic
revolution is really all about."[2]
Even Bill O'Reilly, that staunch feminist who was
sued in 2008 for sexual harassment in the workplace
and later settled the case out of court, chimed in,
asking the question, "Is the danger to women
journalists in the Muslim world worth the risk?" For
her part, as if revealing a secret she was privy to
because she is a woman, fellow right wing commentator
Michelle Malkin said of the attacks on Logan: "It's
monstrous, and as many women in particular will tell
you, this is business as usual for many parts of the
Middle East." In fact, what most feminists (male and
female) will tell you is that sexual assault and
sexual harassment has much less to do with culture or
geography than it does with the uneven distribution of
power (and the normalization of those power
relationships) within patriarchal societies.
Meanwhile, the US State Department continues to issue
statements urging the Egyptian government to find Lara
Logan's attackers. While The US State Department is,
arguably, only doing its job by trying to protect its
citizens and reporters, we should hardly rush to
commend the state department's stance on women's
rights. After all, Egyptian activists have been
fighting for years against the sexual harassment that
was pervasive under the US allied Mubarak regime.
Furthermore, America's most important Arab ally, Saudi
Arabia, is not exactly known for its belief in gender
equality or equity. The messages, again, are unspoken
but clear: The US State Department will not tolerate
gender discrimination and violence by its enemies, but
it will tolerate gender discrimination and violence by
its friends. Similarly, the United States will use the
plight of women to invade Afghanistan and Iraq (once
those regimes stop playing nice with the Americans),
but will remain silent about increased levels of
violence and discrimination against women in US
occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and within the borders
of United States itself.[3]
Sexual harassment and abuse is a problem for many
women in the Middle East. In fact, it is one of the
most effective ways of regulating and policing
gendered codes of behavior in countries such as
Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. But as anyone
actually interested in furthering the cause of bodily
rights can tell you, sexual harassment and abuse is a
problem for women and a technology of gender policing
(which too-often has violent results for gender
variant people) not only in the Middle East, but also
in places like Europe and North America. Furthermore,
sexual assault is not what would "naturally" happen
when a woman appears within a large group of Arab men
(a subtle way of blaming the victim), just as sexual
assault is not what "naturally" happens when women
begin joining traditionally male institutions such as
the US military, where a CBS report has revealed that
one in three female soldiers will experience sexual
assault while serving in uniform. The stark
differences between the reporting on the sexual
assault of a US journalist and the seemingly endemic
(and seemingly condoned) sexual abuse in the US
military highlights the cynical ways in which women's
rights have been used by sexist and patriarchal
institutions and societies to bludgeon other sexist
and patriarchal institutions. In the case of Egypt and
the larger Muslim world, it speaks volumes as to the
racist deployments of the culture concept. As Lila Abu
Lughod has pointed out, while culture is highlighted
as causality for racially (and culturally) coded
groups of people, for differently coded peoples
culture is spoken of as something innocuous that you
can step in and out of, like a pair of pants.
Therefore, while the sexual assault of Lara Logan can
be attributed to the "misogynist culture of Islam,"
the sexual assault of 1 out of 3 women wearing the US
military uniform is always only the result of deviant
behavior by deviant individuals. While rampant[4]
domestic violence in the Arab world is due to the
devaluation of female life within Arab and Muslim
"culture", the fact that there are approximately 4.8
million instances of domestic violence a year in the
United States says nothing about that society. While
the vicious sexual assault on a female reporter can be
used to discredit a popular and democratic uprising,
the 600 rapes and/or sexual assaults that occur on
average every day in the United States should not
invite us to critically rethink the state of our
union. This is not the logic of feminism or justice or
human rights. It is the logic of racism, sexism,
power, and war.
[1] Gayatri Spivak has most famously analyzed this
colonial trope, coining the term "white men saving
brown women from brown men."
[2] On the other end of the spectrum, Nir Rosen, a
journalist known for his courage in reporting the news
from the Middle East in a tenor almost unheard of in
mainstream media, revealed in a series of tweets about
Logan the level to which misogyny is normalized across
the political spectrum in the United States. However,
the disproportionate attention his comments have
received when compared to the just as, if not more
offensive comments of Schlussel or O'Reilly highlights
the ways in which the very real problem of misogyny
and racism in the media has been hijacked politically
to discredit "unpopular" stances such as Rosen's
strong record of being against the policies of Israel
and against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
[3] For an extremely provocative rethinking of the
ways in which violence against women is discursively
constructed to promote US interests, see Lila Abu
Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"
[4] There a are no reliable statistics on the rates of
domestic violence in the Arab world, and in fact most
studies that use statistical analysis urge readers to
assume the numbers are much larger due to the fact
that much physical and sexual abuse is not reported.
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