>>>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.
Shouldn't you think about what you would feel in the same circumstances before invoking alleged cultural differences? The central issue is power and powerlessness. After all, you wouldn't want the media to get away with suggesting that, if only those damned Arabs were less sexually conservative, they would have taken the whole "abuse" business in stride and that progressive American men and women would not have taken the same treatment as badly as those backward Arabs did -- a suggestion that is as insulting to Americans as to Arabs.
Also, it's the same imaginary hierarchy of purity and pollution -- which makes the media imagine that sexual torture is more of an outrage to Iraqis than to Americans -- that makes many people think that gay men are less degraded and traumatized by rape than straight men, that prostitutes are less degraded and traumatized by rape than women who are not in the profession, etc.
>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.
As far as orientalist fantasies are concerned, they are ambivalent as to sexuality in "Arab culture" (which the dominant discourse represents as if it were a monolithic entity): on one hand, they attribute more sexual modesty to the Arabs than the Westerners; on the other hand, they often suggest that the Arabs are more feminine and homoerotic than the Westerners. One of the few instances where homosexual intercourse is mentioned in the whole Abu Ghraib torture scandal concerns Iraqi guards' raping Iraqi boys: "NBC News reported the new photos show U.S. soldiers beating one Iraqi almost to death, the rape of boys by Iraqi guards who worked at the prison, a U.S. soldier apparently raping an Iraqi woman, and the inappropriate handling of a dead body" (Craig Gordon, "Rumsfeld Warns of Worse Prison-Abuse Images," May 8, 2004, <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001923329_rumsfeld08.html>). The images of Iraqis presented in the US media imply that they are more homophobic than Americans and more perversely homoerotic at the same time. US soldiers' homophobic or homoerotic desires or behaviors are made invisible.
Also, I recall that, when some of the Guantanamo detainees exposed their torture at the hands of Americans, before photographic evidence from Abu Ghraib emerged, many readers thought that they were making things up, out of their misogynistic Muslim fantasies. -- Yoshie
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