Arab Women and the War On Terror

On 4 August, 2010 cover of Time magazine features an Afghan girl with her nose and ear sliced off, under the heading, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan?” The ideological meaning of the cover is self-explanatory, the war on terror is also to liberate Muslim women of oppressive Arab and Islamic ruling.

Arab women have suffered from negative stereotyping in U.S for more than 100 years, but more so after 9/11. This resulted in most Americans seeing the Arab culture as dangerous and oppressive. I will be examining how, when and why these stereotypes have emerged in the media.

Stereotypes are a set of beliefs are about the characteristic of a people. They are product of the process of categorization. Individual is seen as member of a category to which stereotypes can apply, when we categorize. When we categorize people, we draw inferences about them. These inferences are based on knowledge and experience. This prior knowledge is called schema. Schema plays a critical role in Arab stereotypes. Although they all us to quickly make judgment and respond, they play a key role in maintaining stereotypes of Arabs.

Stereotypes are easy to form and harder to change. Stereotypes about Arabs are ingrained in American psyche, recreated and conveyed through cultural means of schooling, parenting, and media. Arab stereotypes have been around for centuries, but the media helps intensify, circulate and create new stereotypes. To see how stereotypes have evolved, one needs to study the work of Edward Said, Orientalism. Orientalism is a way of seeing the Arab world that exaggerates and distorts the differences between east and west. According to Said, orientalism dates back to the time of colonization of the Arab world. Orientalism provided a way of the west to see Arab world as backward, needing of intervention and rescue. Examples of Orientalism include European paintings depicting Arab women as exotic creatures with strange social customs. They are eroticized for the viewing pleasure of European. World fair in Chicago and St. Louis reinforced orientalism to United States. There was a crossing over form European orientalism to American orientalism.

American orientalism maintained the stereotypes of the Arab people as violent, backward and sexually depraved, strengthened by the media in the 20^th century. Said claims that after Islam’s conquest of Syria, Persia, North Africa and Egypt Islam came to represent terror and destruction. The world was divided into “ours” and “theirs”. Fear of the orient grew in the 20^th century’s dominion over the east weakened.

The negative stereotypes were recreated after 9/11. Arabs came to be seen as bombers, belly dancers, and billionaires, bad guys in movies, literature and newspapers. Because of the awareness of Islamphobia and ethnic stereotyping, positive stereotypes have emerged that depict Arabs as victims of hate and prejudice, while at the same time justifying and providing reasons for such hate. Popular movies and newspapers continue to depict Arabs negatively. One of the political cartoons depicts Arab women as suicide bombers, veiled in black burqa with a explosives vest. The message being that both Arab muslim men and women can’t be trusted. They are barbaric, violent race that treats their women as secondary.

            Some of the stereotypes of Arab women include belly dancers and women clad in burqa. Arab women in the Arab television appear with very little clothing, and in sexually provocative ways, while in the western media continue to depict the Arab women in burqa, so it can jump on the band wagon of humanity, with a call to rid her of her oppressive clothing. The other side of this coin embraces the eroticization and exoticism of the women. Arab world and western world differ in their political and social agenda that continues to shape the media’s choice in how the Arab women are depicted in an attempt to form an impression of the viewer that such stereotypes are the norm.

            Western audiences have been primed with the incessant flow of images of the Arab women in black tents that whenever they hear the term, “Muslim Women” that is the image  conjured  in western minds. A simple Google search of the term “Muslim Women” will bring up images of Muslim women in black burqas. One of the cover stories for Foreign Policy was, “Why do they hate us?” depicting a woman covered in black body paint, with only her eyes showing. The article explores Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world, only highlights the worst form of extremism in the Arab countries, concluding that the Arab culture is inherently evil, and all Arab men hate their women. The Arab women has become the field of struggle for power by contested ideologies of the Arab world and the west.

            Such depictions deprive the Arab women of the diversity of culture, heritage and experiences. Defying such stereotypes of oppressed women, Arab women made their presence felt in the Arab spring. The Arab spring toppled dictatorship in Egypt, Tunisia, and other countries. The women widely participated in protests, demonstrations, and on social media networking.

Political scientists have found that gender gaps in political participation exists in all societies, with the women being less active in traditional forms of activism. This gender gap is closing with science, modernization, secularization and with a younger generation in Arab countries.

            Gallup study that 30% of Egypt revolutionary protestors and driving factors were women. Their presence brought attention to the opposition actions. In the Arab spring women were active in providing medical care, protesting along with men on streets, networking on social media and blogging the events of Arab spring.

            Whether women are being depicted as burqa clad or wearing very little clothing, these are both sides of the same coin. Both provide leverage for the war on terror that is very much a gendered war, with the female body being the contested field for an ideological warfare.

      

Necessary Silence

     Leadership today is solely equivalent with social dominance and extroversion, but it's leadership in solitude that has historically led to the greatest inventions and revolutionary ideas.
     Solitude becomes necessary for rearranging any existing field of knowledge or creating new field of thought. Contemporary society is based on group think, while most creatives and inventors find solitude necessary for optimal performance
      I support the open source culture and crowdsourcing platforms, but these platforms require the work of introverts to truly make it flourish. The rules of the game that apply online don't translate so neatly into real life. The same people thriving on these platforms of open source culture, if grouped in a single room would fail to create anything revolutionary. Group think is not always the solution for every circumstance. 

Prisoners Of The Past

After an experience is "over" and we move ahead down the river of time, what remains are these synaptic linkages that shape and filter our present experiences and sensations. Drawing on these implicit elements from the past, the brain- our associational organ and anticipation machine- continually readies us for the future.

Implicit only memories and other cutoffs in the mind could be at the root of hyper arousal symptoms and; of numbing, disconnection from bodily sensations. Drawing on these implicit elements from the past, the brain - our associational organ and anticipation machine- continually readies us for the future.

Implicit only memories and other cutoffs in the mind could be at the root of hyperarousal symptoms and explosive emotions of numbing, disconnection from bodily sensations, and feelings of being "unreal"; and of various forms of reexperiencing the original trauma, including flashbacks and recurrent, distressing fragmentary recollections of the event while awake.

Sleep phenomena such as nightmares and REM disturbances are also key features of PTSD, and they offer us another window into the phenomenon of implicitly encoded traumatic memory fragments erupting into our lives years after the event with terrifying power. Before memories can be fully integrated into the cortex as part of permanent, explicit memory, they must go through a process called "consolidation," which seems to depend of the rapid-eye-movement (REM) phase of sleep. For many people with PTSD, REM sleep is interrupted, which may be a further explanation of why their traumatic memories remain implicit and are experienced as nightmares during sleep or re experienced as symptoms while awake.

Attachment betrayals and traumatic experiences produce impairments to integration. In domain of memory, this results in implicit puzzle pieces remaining in disintegrated creating re experiencing events, In the domain of memory, this results in implicit puzzle pieces remaining in disintegrated form. These implicit only pieces of the past intrude on the present, creating reexperiencing events, avoidance, and numbing.This fragmented memory needed first to be integrated into explicit memory and then incorporated into a much larger sense."

Source: Mindsight by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D

Responses to Female Leadership in group settings

         Competent assertiveness by a woman in mixed- sex discussions elicits non-verbal cues of negative affect from others that is misinterpreted as evidence of poor contribution. Female leaders receive fewer pleased responses and more displeased responses from fellow group members than male leaders offering the same contributions. For women, it seems that simply offering a substantive contribution is enough to elicit others' displeasure.  There is a discrepancy between considered and automatic expectations for women. Considered expectations are egalitarian, but automatic expectations are still dominated by traditional stereotypes. For example, in mixed sex task discussions there is an implicit expectation for women to defer to men. Thus a woman who speaks out violates these tacit expectations, and this violation causes negative effect.
       Participant's interpretation of other group member's behavior is based on schemata containing the attributes of familiar categories of situations, persons, and behavior ( Calder, 1982; Cantor and Mischel 1979; Fiske and Taylor, 1984; Miller, 1984; Pfeffer, 1977; Schank and Albeson, 1977). The interpretation occurs automatically, before the evidence registers as a conscious perception (Bargh, 1984; Campbell, 1967; Lewicki, 1986; Nauta, 1971; Rock, 1983) The same action can be seen as "good" to explain a desired event or "bad" to explain undesired one.  Mandler (1982) proposed that discrepancies between expectation and evidence  that require major revision of "basic" schemata produce negative effect. Women's dominance produces such a "basic schema incompatibility" to co-participants. It violates both their leadership and gender schemata, which require men as leaders and women to be status-subordinate and deferent to men. ( Bartol and Wortman, 1979; Bem, 1981; Deaux and Lewis, 1984; Schein, 1973, 1975).
        Positive and negative affect produce facial expressions commonly interpreted as pleasure and displeasure, although correlations are not perfect ( Ekman, Friesen, and Ancoli, 1980; Russell and Bullock, 1986). Private cognitive reactions to intellectual authority by women are often negative (Eccles, 1983). The same competence and assertiveness accepted in a man caused a woman to be rated unattractive ( Horner, 1972), cold ( Porter and Geis, 1981), or undesirable as a group member.
      Because women's leadership is unexpected, it evokes negative affect in observers that is visible to other group members.  Because conscious expectations are egalitarian, the true cause of the affect is unrecognized.  Thus, the affect cues are attributed to a more socially plausible cause, with misattribution to more plausible causes, has been documented ( Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). Competent, assertive women would elicit more negative facial expressions from naive group members that would equally competent, assertive men.
For women, it appears that simply offering a substantive contribution is enough to elicit other's displeasure.
       Previous research (Brown and Geis, 1984; Butler, 1984) has shown that displeased expressions by fellow group members cause a leader's contribution from the same leader's contribution to be rates less valuable than the identical contribution from the same leader embedded in cues of approval. Thus, in natural situations, women's leadership may be devalued because it receives less positive or more negative nonverbal affect responses than men's contributions of the same objective quality. This study supports a more social interpretation of the devaluation of female leaders than earlier ones based on private bias. It does not diminish the importance of private stereotypes; rather, it provides evidence of their translation into affect cues that serve as a social-situational mechanism capable of arbitrarily raising or lowering the perceived value of identical performances.If affect cues serve as a nonverbal communication of group consensus about the quality of contribution, they could create or eliminate biased evaluations regardless of elevator's private biases. This would create a self-fulfilling prophecy (Snyder, 1984). Biased expectations of the majority cause the behavioral affective responses, which then produce the differential evaluations of men's and women's contributions to support initial expectations.
 Hiring, salary, and promotion, including promotion to a formal leadership position, often depend on recognition as an emergent leader. Training women to be "more assertive" (or less assertive) will not eliminate discrimination. Instead, increasing positive reactions and decreasing negative ones appears to more effective.  Examples include (a) providing cues of positive affect toward woman's contributions (Brown and Geis, 1984; Butler, 1984), (b) legitimizing women's leadership by authority endorsement (Brown and Geis, 1984; Eskilson and Wiley, 1976; Isaacs, 1981), and (c) increasing the number of female authority role models in the social environment (Cohen, Lockheed,and Lohman, 1976; Gies, Boston, and Hoffman, 1985; Heilman and Martell, 1986).
Source:  Nonverbal Affect Responses to Male and Female Leaders: Implications for leadership Evaluatoins  by Dore Butler and Florence L. Geis

Richard Sennett on the Fall of Public Man

"The best things in Western cultural tradition, in Sennett's view, derive from the conventions that once regulated impersonal relations in public. These conventions, now condemned as constricting, artificial, and deadening to emotional spontaneity, formerly established civilized boundaries between people, set limits on public display of feeling, and promoted cosmopolitanism, and civility. In eighteenth-century London or Paris, sociability did not depend on intimacy. "Strangers meeting in the parks or on the streets might without embarrassment speak to each other." They shared a common fund of signs which enabled people of unequal rank to conduct a civilized conversation and to cooperate in public projects without feeling called upon to expose their innermost secrets. In the nineteenth century, however, reticence broke down, and people came to believe that public actions revealed the inner personality of the actor. The romantic cult of sincerity and authenticity tore away the masks that people had worn in public and eroded the boundary between public and private life. As the public world came to be seen as a mirror of the self, people lost the capacity of detachment and hence playful encounter, which presupposes a certain distance from the self.
       In our time, according to Sennett, relations in public, conceived as a form of self-revelation, have become deadly serious. Conversation takes on the quality of confession. Class consciousness declines; people perceive their social position as a reflection of their own abilities and blame themselves for the injustice inflicted on them. Politics degenerates into a struggle not for social change but for self-realization."

Narcissism in Contemporary Society

In a narcissistic society- a society that gives increasingly prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits- the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist's inner life. A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion life in the past was in any important way better than the life today. Having trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present. Current critical dogma equates every such reference to the past as itself an expression of nostalgia. As Albert Parr has observed, this kind of reasoning "rules out entirely any insights gained, and any values arrived at by personal experience, since such experiences are always located in the past, and therefore in the precincts of nostalgia.
                                                                             - Christopher Lasch

How to Break a People

To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn't. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you can press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You can use caprice to fracture a people's faith in ancient things-earth, forest, water, air.
   Once that is done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you're all they have. They will love you even when they despise you. They will trust you even they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They will have to. What else can they do? There's no higher court to redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the world. You are God.
    Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.
    This cold, contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic sounding constitution. It's wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, or despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilization has had access to weapons like these.
   Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb-almost without knowing it-we are being broken.
    Big Dams are to a nation's "development" what nuclear bomb are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link-the understanding-between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.
   Can we unscramble it?
   Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways...
                                                                               -The Cost of living, Arundhati Roy