Gender and US Interests in the Middle East
Posted by Ruppert on January 20, 2007
The most interesting aspect of McAlister’s analysis of the shaping of United States’ interests in the Middle East to me was her exploration of the ways in which normative ideas of marriage and gender played a part in the shaping of the policy of “benevolent supremacy” where the US was the leading world power, but did not act like a colonial power. McAlister asserts early in the first chapter that the various cultural products which she thinks about along with more formal expressions of policy in the Middle East like NSC-68, utilize “language of gender to suggest that American world power would produce a well-ordered international family.” (P. 47)
McAlister argues that normative notions of marriage and gender were at the heart of the policy of “benevolent supremacy.” In her analysis of the biblical epics, McAlister asserts that the national groups struggling against slavery upheld the norms of the family in the United States, while the dominant powers like the Romans were portrayed as displaying non-normative ideals of gender and sexuality. Relating nations through the lens of a gender ideology served the United States in legitimizing their presence in the Middle East by aligning themselves against colonial powers, but also inscribing upon the nations Western ideas of family. “While the mobilization of gendered sexuality seems to be a privatization of politics, it also works to make the right ordering of private life into a political statement.” (P. 77) The various cultural productions which McAlister analyzes served as both an articulation of the mainstream notions of gender relations within the United States while simultaneously asserting that the US had power in shaping the politics of gender and family in other nations.
Intrinsically related to the gender constructions of power, was the use of racial ideologies in furthering the notion of “benevolent supremacy.”: “By bringing together racial liberalism, the re-inscription of women’s subordination in marriage, ideologies of Judeo-Christian heritage, and the struggle for supremacy in the third world, the discourse of benevolent supremacy used representations of the Middle East to construct a vision of US National power fit for the dawn of the American Century.” (P. 93) The linking of both racial and gender ideologies in the formation of a nationalist ideal is not new with US wielding power in the Middle East. Last semester, Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization traced the interdependency of gender and racial notions in the rationalization and justification of vastly different notions of what American civilization should look like. Similarly, as McAlister explains the reason “benevolent supremacy” worked as the guiding principle for American interests in the Middle East was because it was so flexible in its construction. The gendered and racial notions of colonial and various nationalist people were not set in stone though the biblical epics of the time certainly put forth an ideal construction of the relationship between the various powers using both gender and race in this pursuit. However, as McAlister goes on the explain in the next chapter on African American Cultural Politics, there were more ways to interpreting racial and gender relations than the dominant ideology put forth in the biblical epic films that were her main focus in the first chapter.
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:16 am
I’d like to pick up on Jessica’s mention of cultural politics and Bederman’s argument about adapting discourses to improve the viability and the acceptability of a cause’s position. In Manliness and Civilization, Bederman details how Ida B. Wells adapts the existing discourse on manly (possibly manful– I should clarify this) behavior in the late 19th and early 20th century when advocating against the widespread lynching of African Americans. Given the prominence of the manliness discourse at that time period, Bederman argued, Wells tailored her anti-lynching message to appropriate terms from this discourse and therefore blend concepts of gender and racial formation.
Similarly, McAlister’s identification of civil rights leaders’ use of Biblical rhetoric–particularly Exodus imagery–altered the prevailing discourse about America, the “benevolent superpower” whose cause saw representation in films such as The Ten Commandments, to broaden the imagery to include the domestic struggle of African Americans looking to loose the bonds of segregation.
However, Said’s description of Orientalism helps explain why some of the rhetoric of African American activists failed to captivate white America. While 1950s American popular culture, drawing upon a long tradition of imagining one’s self in the Holy Land and description about the region, reaffirmed the providential image of America and its association with Israel (in both the Biblical and political sense), it naturally drew a distinction with the “other”: Ancient Egypt. Egypt, a distinctly “Eastern” civilization, was the inspiration for Afrocentric thinking; while a powerful image for blacks, it runs counter to the projection of America as the liberated, chosen people. Additionally, the rise of the Nation of Islam introduced another distinctly Eastern element: the concept of Islam. For a nation that was still struggling to live up to William Herberg’s essay, “Protestant-Catholic-Jew”, the addition of Islam to an already contentious subject only solidified the movement’s “Orientalism.”
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Much like Jessica, I was interested in the section detailing America’s notion of “benevolent supremacy.” Earlier in the text, Said’s views on Orientalism were mentioned, and I think that they have significance in this instance. By depicting the Middle East as culturally inferior, American intervention abroad became more palatable to the American people. By using popular culture as a tool of foreign policy, the idea of “benevolent supremacy” was not looked upon as self-interested paternalism, but rather as morally acceptable, and even something of a noble cause.
Bederman described the importance of the idea that if a culture was inferior, superior people had an obligation to trample it and remake it in their own image. In building off of this idea, Orientalism and benevolent supremacy tied together in order to provide a basis for American foreign policy in the Middle East for years to come.
January 27th, 2007 at 3:06 am
I too was intrigued by the combination of politics and gender subjugation in the particularly Chapters 1 and 2. Often there is an entanglement of religion and socio-politics, all of which reinforces democratic (U.S.) hegemony as well as masculinity. For example, Epic Encounters states, “the language of NSC-68 suggests slavery as a sexual and gender perversion” (McAlister 67). It would be hard to guess that NSC-68, a document so inherently political, could relate to social issues such as stagnant gender constructions.
Politics and the NSC-68
Foremost, NSC-68 endorses the United States as a political granter of democracy. This statement is contradictory because a democracy is supposedly a socially and politically liberated institution. However, an imposed democracy does not necessarily constitution freedom of any sort. In fact, this weakens and limits the institution’s open ethics. In addition, a U.S.-defined government begs the question: How free democracy is in reality? The Atlantic Charter took further steps towards democracy that the U.S. does not control, but was quickly rescind by Winston Churchill for all-control purposes. While NSC-68 reaffirmed the U.S’s political hegemony, this hegemony would not be completely without the input U.S. media. The media’s connection to the public and political sphere perpetuated the NSC-68’s gender binary of masculine superiority and feminine inferiority. McAlister specifically connects cinematic/medium, NSC-68 and socio-politics. An example is the 1956 release of the movie Ten Commandments (McAlister 74). While the Ten Commandments’ theme centers on oppressed Hebrews expatriation, there is also a focus on the strong oppressed woman. The oppressed woman submits to the lead oppressor. A movie such as Ten Commandments promotes strength and capacity amongst oppressed groups, but assures the audience that civil strength is not applicable to all. There remains a weak link and this link is the women. The oppressed woman has a sexual demeanor that is liable, not necessarily to fall in love, but become tied to the oppressor through the confines of marriage. The woman also signifies trepidation for the oppressed because her relationship with the oppressor places her group in jeopardy.