>Doug wrote:
>
>>Isn't this a story of how two cultures - both deeply religious and
>>anxious about sexuality - are meeting in explosive ways?
>
>Presumably, you are amongst the least religious and sexually anxious
>Americans. Imagine that you are subjected (by a foreign military
>which have the power of life and death over you) to the same
>treatment to which Iraqi detainees were subjected. Would you find
>yourself less degraded and traumatized than they were?
I have no idea. But I don't think it's mere Orientalism to say that Arab/Muslim cultures are full of anxieties about the feminine and the homoerotic. How else do you explain the veiling of women? And I certainly know that it's not Occidentalism to say the same about American culture - that a bunch of professional torturers emerging from an anxiety-ridden dominant power would get a special thrill out of torturing the people it hopes to colonize in these particular ways.
Doug