http://mattcornell.

org/blog/2013/03/the-torturer-as-feminist-from-abu-ghraib-to-zero-dark-
thirty/

http://mattcornell.org/blog/2013/03/the-torturer-as-feminist-from-abu-ghraib-to-zero-dark-
thirty/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/25/torture-creep/

https://www.alternet.org/story/18740/what_abu_ghraib_taught_me

Zegart’s findings were predicted in 2008 by a Parent’s Television

Council report which observed a significant spike in the depiction of torture on
prime time television—and more critically a shift in which characters were using
torture. Increasingly, it was the “good guys” carrying out the torture. We can
observe what Zegart calls “torture drift” in the changing perception of women as
practitioners of prisoner abuse. In 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prison abuse
scandal made headlines, Americans were shocked to see photographs of female
soldiers engaged in acts of torture and sexual humiliation. And yet, in 2012, the
character of the CIA agent Maya in the film Zero Dark Thirty uses similar tactics
and is praised as a hero and feminist role model.  buscar críticas de 0 dark thirty

The photos and subsequent reports do not simply depict emasculation, but in many
cases, the feminization of male prisoners, as well. Some prisoners were forced to
wear women’s underwear and to simulate so-called “homosexual” acts. There are
reports of prisoners “sodomized” with a chemical light and a broomstick. In one of
the most iconic photos, Lynndie England holds a naked prisoner on a dog leash.
There are also reports that a prisoner was ordered to roll on the ground and kiss
the boots of the guards.

To support this reading, Zurbriggen points to the testimony of Dhia al-Shweiri, a

former prisoner at Abu Ghraib, who told the Associated Press that:
They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. We are men. It’s okay if they beat me.
Beatings don’t hurt us, it’s just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be
shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is
the worst insult, to feel like a woman.

If the male prisoners at Abu Ghraib were feminized, then how should we view the
three women who participated in their torture? Were they imitating male behavior?
Were they taking revenge on Muslim men for the violation of 9/11? How does their
gender matter in an analysis of the scandal?  MASCULINIDADE HEGEMONICA
This analysis does not allow for the possibility that the military cannot be reformed,
and that both institutionally, and within the context of its broader mission,
represents an ethos of masculinized violence and expansive colonialism. There is
no reason to believe that the events at Abu Ghraib were an aberration, either
during the Iraq War or in past military campaigns. Can an institution predicated on
dehumanizing the enemy—on literally preparing soldiers to kill other people—be
truly reformed? None of these problems are likely to change simply with the full and
equal participation of women, or with modest reforms. Ehrenreich herself ruefully
notes that the prison was overseen by a woman, Sgt. Janis Karpinski, while the
occupation was managed by Condoleeza Rice.

President Bush, she reminds us, claimed after 9/11, that “[w]e wage a war to save
civilization, itself.” Language like this has characterized other colonial missions,
which position the West as the civilized opposite of the savage Orient. This
postcolonial analysis of American rhetoric complicates the feminist reading of Abu
Ghraib and the larger project of the War on Terror.

SARAH CONNOR

England stands next to naked and hooded male detainees with a cigarette dangling from
her lips, as she points her forefinger at a prisoner’s genitals while giving the thumbs-up
sign. In another photograph two naked and hooded prisoners face the camera, their hands
above their heads in a gesture of submission. One of them is made to sit on the shoulders of
a third detainee, squatting on the floor, so that his buttocks and genitals touch the bare
back of the other. England smiles at the camera as she points to the genitals of the man and
shows the thumbs up sign again.
England represents the “liberated Western Woman showing her dominance” and
triumph over “brown male bodies.” Deb further argues that white women serve a
special function in the war effort. They must protect the “emancipated status of
American womanhood from the ‘barbaric’ orientalism of Muslim men,” but they
must also “become agents of a transnational sisterhood’ to lure Arab women into
an alliance with the American enterprise.” This special mission, Deb argues, is
inscribed in the images from Abu Ghraib:

…the brutal torture and humiliation of Iraqi men at the hands of the empire’s white women
is projected as a victory of Arab women over Arab men who impose Islamic cultural
markers such as head scarves and veils on their women and it is also a victory for the
American enterprise of messianic imperialism as well as for individual women in the
enterprise who are comrades in torture with military men, and can be as tough as any of
their male counterparts.

The white female torturer signifies the perceived victory of Western feminism over
Muslim misogyny. She achieves equality with her male colleagues by inflicting
violence on Muslim men.

ERIN BRUCOVICH FOR FASCISTS https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-

kelly/erin-brockovich-for-fasci_b_2334324.html

The Torturer as Feminist: From Abu Ghraib

to Zero Dark Thirty
March 2, 2013
Updated below
Here, in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have everything that the Islamic
fundamentalists believe characterizes Western culture, all nicely arranged in one hideous
image – imperial arrogance, sexual depravity … and gender equality.- Barbara Ehrenreich
Zero Dark Thirty is a badass movie about a badass chick who tracks down a
terrorist…directed by a woman! Haha. Women: 1, patriarchy: 0!- Twitter comment
In August of 2012, the Hoover Institution’s Amy Zegart conducted a poll on American
attitudes toward torture, and found that Americans had become more supportive of the use
of torture in the previous half decade. Zegart reported that:
In an October 2007 Rasmussen poll, 27 percent of Americans surveyed said the United
States should torture prisoners captured in the fight against terrorism, while 53 percent
said it should not. In my YouGov poll, 41 percent said they would be willing to use torture
— a gain of 14 points — while 34 percent would not, a decline of 19 points.

Additionally, Zegart found an increase in support for a number of specific tactics known to
be used during the Bush era, including waterboarding, intimidation with military dogs and
naked stress positions. Among the reasons for this shift in consensus, she cited the possible
influence of spy movies and TV shows, which have increasingly depicted torture as heroic.
According to her poll, so-called “spy TV watchers” were more likely to support a range of
abusive tactics.

Zegart’s findings were predicted in 2008 by a Parent’s Television Council report which
observed a significant spike in the depiction of torture on prime time television—and more
critically a shift in which characters were using torture. Increasingly, it was the “good guys”
carrying out the torture. We can observe what Zegart calls “torture drift” in the changing
perception of women as practitioners of prisoner abuse. In 2004, when the Abu Ghraib
prison abuse scandal made headlines, Americans were shocked to see photographs of
female soldiers engaged in acts of torture and sexual humiliation. And yet, in 2012, the
character of the CIA agent Maya in the film Zero Dark Thirty uses similar tactics and is
praised as a hero and feminist role model.
This essay argues that since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, popular American television and cinema have participated in the
normalization and justification of state torture. I argue that one of the most prominent
features of this phenomenon is the depiction of women who engage in torture as national
and feminist heroes. In particular, I will analyze the depiction of the CIA agent Maya in the
film Zero Dark Thirty, as well as the marketing of the film and its cultural reception as a
feminist product. This essay will start by looking back at some of the feminist responses to
the Abu Ghraib scandal to inform our present discussion of Zero Dark Thirty as a
“feminist” text.
9/11 & Abu Ghraib As Sexual Violation
In her essay “TV and Torture,” Amy Laura Hall argues that 9/11 was “a mass spectacle of
violation that continues to shape American conceptions of gender, sexuality, and safety,”
and that the felled towers marked the symbolic castration of the West. Hall reads the
subsequent popularity of the TV show 24 with its macho torturing hero Jack Bauer as “a
kind of collective catharsis – a way many Americans sought manageably to endure violation
and also to recalibrate a myth of afflicted, but yet still potent, masculinity.” Hall further
suggests “that the gender politics of such shows may take their form from the same cultural
impulse that led to the ritualized emasculation of Muslim prisoners in places like Abu
Ghraib,” pointing out that sexual violation was a routine feature of torture at the facility.
Following from this analysis, we can interpret some of the tortures at Abu Ghraib as a form
of gender-based revenge for the trauma of 9/11. The photos and subsequent reports do not
simply depict emasculation, but in many cases, the feminization of male prisoners, as well.
Some prisoners were forced to wear women’s underwear and to simulate so-called
“homosexual” acts. There are reports of prisoners “sodomized” with a chemical light and a
broomstick. In one of the most iconic photos, Lynndie England holds a naked prisoner on a
dog leash. There are also reports that a prisoner was ordered to roll on the ground and kiss
the boots of the guards.
In her article, “Sexualized Torture and Abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison: Feminist Psychological
Analyses,” Eileen Zurbriggen notes that many of these scenarios “enact a stylized power
imbalance, with a sexual overtone. As such, these practices align with the sexualized power
imbalance that comprises the prototypical or traditional heterosexual relationship, with man
in a dominant or active role and woman in a submissive or passive role.” To support this
reading, Zurbriggen points to the testimony of Dhia al-Shweiri, a former prisoner at Abu
Ghraib, who told the Associated Press that:
They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. We are men. It’s okay if they beat me.
Beatings don’t hurt us, it’s just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be
shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is
the worst insult, to feel like a woman.

This testimony underscores how the tortures at Abu Ghraib reflected an assumed hierarchy
with American men and women at the top and Iraqi men, occupying the subjugated,
“feminine” role– a system of power relations conveyed most starkly in the photo of Charles
Graner and Lynndie England giving a thumbs up to the camera while standing over a
pyramid of naked and faceless Iraqi male prisoners.

Women Who Torture

If the male prisoners at Abu Ghraib were feminized, then how should we view the three
women who participated in their torture? Were they imitating male behavior? Were they
taking revenge on Muslim men for the violation of 9/11? How does their gender matter in
an analysis of the scandal?

In response to Abu Ghraib, feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich writes that the photos of
Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman participating in detainee abuse
“broke my heart.” She also remarks with ironic horror that they constitute evidence of
“gender equality,” proving that women can be just as sadistic as men. Ehrenreich’s
prescription for change is for women to not simply assimilate into male institutions, but to
“infiltrate and subvert them” by challenging authority. Though Ehrenreich also mentions
the need for continued struggle “against imperialist and racist arrogance,” her prescriptions
fall within a liberal reformist framework. The military can be fixed, the argument goes, if
good men and women question and challenge authority.
This analysis does not allow for the possibility that the military cannot be reformed, and
that both institutionally, and within the context of its broader mission, represents an ethos of
masculinized violence and expansive colonialism. There is no reason to believe that the
events at Abu Ghraib were an aberration, either during the Iraq War or in past military
campaigns. Can an institution predicated on dehumanizing the enemy—on literally
preparing soldiers to kill other people—be truly reformed? None of these problems are
likely to change simply with the full and equal participation of women, or with modest
reforms. Ehrenreich herself ruefully notes that the prison was overseen by a woman, Sgt.
Janis Karpinski, while the occupation was managed by Condoleeza Rice.

Transnational feminist scholars, such as Basuli Deb and Melanie Richter-Montpetit have
challenged Ehrenreich’s analysis of the events at Abu Ghraib. For instance, in
“Transnational Feminism and Women Who Torture: Reimag(in)ing Abu Ghraib Prison
Photography,” Deb notes the limitations of arguments based in equality, observing:
…in liberal feminist thought, premised on equality, the male remains normative, and
patriarchy is undisturbed as the onus lies on women to enter structures of privilege.
According to this theory, women who control male detainees have successfully reversed the
power inequalities, at least for themselves. Exercising power violently consolidates their
status within patriarchal structures into which they have assimilated.
This assimilation through the mastery of male violence is, as I will argue later, precisely the
method by which the character Maya in Zero Dark Thirty is shown to become the equal of
her male colleagues. Deb’s observation also underscores the problem with a liberal
discourse which elevates individual achievement over institutional change. This analysis
explains how real life figures as diverse as Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and
Condoleeza Rice could be praised as Western feminist role models despite the leading role
they take in pushing occupation and imperialism.
Melanie Richter-Montpetit also challenges Ehrenreich’s focus on gender equality as overly
reductive. Richter-Montpetit suggests that the phenomenon of women-identified soldiers
torturing prisoners “should be located within colonial desires.” President Bush, she reminds
us, claimed after 9/11, that “[w]e wage a war to save civilization, itself.” Language like this
has characterized other colonial missions, which position the West as the civilized opposite
of the savage Orient. This postcolonial analysis of American rhetoric complicates the
feminist reading of Abu Ghraib and the larger project of the War on Terror.
One of the West’s key justifications in recent conflicts has been the need to rescue Muslim
women from oppression by their own culture. In April of 2010, Wikileaks released an
internal CIA report encouraging NATO allies to appeal to feminist concern for Afghan
women’s rights to boost flagging public support for the war. It urged that “Afghan women
could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban” and
suggested “outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share
their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome
pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.” This
document reveals the CIA’s intent to exploit feminist sympathies in the service of war
propaganda.

In July of 2010, while American popular support for the war in Afghanistan was on the
wane, Time magazine ran a cover story featuring a disturbing portrait of a young Afghan
woman whose nose was cut off by Taliban militants. The headline accompanying the photo
put the question starkly, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” Writing for The
Guardian, Priyamvada Gopal observed that the cover was a “cynical ploy” to manipulate
concern for Afghan women to promote an unpopular war. Gopal argued:
Time is not alone in condensing Afghan reality into simplistic morality tales. A deplorable
number of recent works habituate us to thinking about Afghanistan as what Liam Fox,
Britain’s defence secretary, called a “broken 13th-century country,” defined solely by
pathologically violent men and silently brutalised women.

Gopal underscores the pervasiveness of these gendered morality tales in the West’s war
propaganda.

Drawing our attention back to Abu Ghraib, Basuli Deb argues that white female soldiers
have a critical role to play in this narrative of liberation. Deb draws from Gargi
Bhattacharya’s analysis of the Abu Ghraib photos and Lynndie England’s symbolic
function in their staging. Bhattaacharya argues that while leaders like Condoleeza Rice and
Laura Bush pitch the necessity of war, England represents “’the emancipated Western
woman in the war zone itself.” Deb describes two images in detail:

England stands next to naked and hooded male detainees with a cigarette dangling from
her lips, as she points her forefinger at a prisoner’s genitals while giving the thumbs-up
sign. In another photograph two naked and hooded prisoners face the camera, their hands
above their heads in a gesture of submission. One of them is made to sit on the shoulders of
a third detainee, squatting on the floor, so that his buttocks and genitals touch the bare
back of the other. England smiles at the camera as she points to the genitals of the man and
shows the thumbs up sign again.

England represents the “liberated Western Woman showing her dominance” and triumph
over “brown male bodies.” Deb further argues that white women serve a special function in
the war effort. They must protect the “emancipated status of American womanhood from
the ‘barbaric’ orientalism of Muslim men,” but they must also “become agents of a
transnational sisterhood’ to lure Arab women into an alliance with the American
enterprise.” This special mission, Deb argues, is inscribed in the images from Abu Ghraib:

…the brutal torture and humiliation of Iraqi men at the hands of the empire’s white women
is projected as a victory of Arab women over Arab men who impose Islamic cultural
markers such as head scarves and veils on their women and it is also a victory for the
American enterprise of messianic imperialism as well as for individual women in the
enterprise who are comrades in torture with military men, and can be as tough as any of
their male counterparts.
The white female torturer signifies the perceived victory of Western feminism over Muslim
misogyny. She achieves equality with her male colleagues by inflicting violence on Muslim
men.

Maya: The Torturer as Feminist

It is this last observation which informs my analysis of Zero Dark Thirty, which uses a
heroic female protagonist to advance an apologia for torture. The film rehabilitates the
degraded image of “leash girl” Lynndie England by re-imagining the female torturer as a
careerist go-getter. Zero Dark Thirty maps the familiar feminist arc of films like Norma
Rae and Working Girl onto the workplace of the CIA. One critic has dubbed it “Erin
Brockovich for fascists.”

I will not analyze the entire film, which encompasses over a decade of the War on Terror,
culminating in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Instead, I will focus on the staging of the
film’s torture scenes, specifically the power relationships and the depiction of Maya, the
film’s protagonist.

Zero Dark Thirty opens with a black screen and an audio montage of real 911 calls placed
during the attacks on the World Trade Center. The most prominent voices are those of
women in fear. This gendering of the trauma is significant, because it sets the stage for a
female hero to gain vengeance on behalf of women, even though as Amy Laura Hall notes,
“the victims of the 9/11 murder were overwhelmingly male.”

Two years later, the film transports us to the staging of that revenge, a CIA black site where
Ammar, a beaten and bloodied terror suspect is surrounded by men in balaclavas. Dan, a
handsome and imposing white male interrogator bursts into the room and speaks the first
scripted words of the film, “I own you Ammar. You belong to me.” The masked men
proceed to beat Ammar while Dan yells abuse. The other masked figure, Maya, who (in
later scenes) the other agents derisively call “The Girl,” stands at the back of the room,
silently watching. In sadomasochistic terms, Dan is the master, and this is dungeon. Dan’s
claim of ownership, as the film soon shows us, applies equally to “The Girl” Maya and to
the prisoner Ammar.

Dan and Maya step out of the cell and into the sunlight, to give Ammar time to contemplate
his predicament. Maya takes off her mask. She appears to be in her late 20s, has pale white
skin and long red hair. She’s slender and conventionally feminine in appearance. She unzips
her overcoat, revealing a pantsuit, a kind of symbolic shortcut to signify a woman’s
eagerness to be taken seriously in a man’s world. Dan mocks, “You’re rocking your best
suit for your first interrogation.”

“Just so you know, this is gonna take awhile,” he says. “He has to learn how helpless he is.”
Dan suggests they take a coffee break, but she insists that they continue with the
interrogation. He says that she can watch from a TV monitor. Maya opts to return to the
interrogation room, unmasked. She doesn’t want to be a spectator. She wants to be like Dan.
Maya becomes in this moment both an audience surrogate and a symbol of women’s
equality. When she passes the threshold again, she’ll also be a party to torture. By this
strategy, we also become complicit.

What’s significant in the staging of the subsequent torture scenes is that Maya is not simply
an audience surrogate. She is also a mirror for Ammar’s psychological and emotional
distress—her actions and expressions matching his. In this way, though we are shown the
brutality of torture, our focus is redirected from the suffering of the victim to that of the
perpetrator. In his analysis of the film, Slavoj Zizek argues that this serves an ideological
function, noting that “our awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human
cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological
complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty.” This
observation is supported by the film’s widespread popularity with liberal film critics, who
have praised the film’s moral nuance.
Zero Dark Thirty’s strategy is made all the more effective by giving the audience a female
identification figure, because it takes advantage of the widespread cultural perception of
women as more empathetic to the suffering of others. When Maya learns to master her
feelings and accept the necessity of torture, she becomes more powerful and successful. In
this way, the film explicitly links Maya’s increasing comfort with torture to her personal
empowerment, and models this attitude for the viewer.

The Torturer as Feminist: From Abu Ghraib

to Zero Dark Thirty
March 2, 2013
Updated below
Here, in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have everything that the Islamic
fundamentalists believe characterizes Western culture, all nicely arranged in one hideous
image – imperial arrogance, sexual depravity … and gender equality.- Barbara Ehrenreich
Zero Dark Thirty is a badass movie about a badass chick who tracks down a
terrorist…directed by a woman! Haha. Women: 1, patriarchy: 0!- Twitter comment
In August of 2012, the Hoover Institution’s Amy Zegart conducted a poll on American
attitudes toward torture, and found that Americans had become more supportive of the use
of torture in the previous half decade. Zegart reported that:
In an October 2007 Rasmussen poll, 27 percent of Americans surveyed said the United
States should torture prisoners captured in the fight against terrorism, while 53 percent
said it should not. In my YouGov poll, 41 percent said they would be willing to use torture
— a gain of 14 points — while 34 percent would not, a decline of 19 points.

Additionally, Zegart found an increase in support for a number of specific tactics known to
be used during the Bush era, including waterboarding, intimidation with military dogs and
naked stress positions. Among the reasons for this shift in consensus, she cited the possible
influence of spy movies and TV shows, which have increasingly depicted torture as heroic.
According to her poll, so-called “spy TV watchers” were more likely to support a range of
abusive tactics.

Zegart’s findings were predicted in 2008 by a Parent’s Television Council report which
observed a significant spike in the depiction of torture on prime time television—and more
critically a shift in which characters were using torture. Increasingly, it was the “good guys”
carrying out the torture. We can observe what Zegart calls “torture drift” in the changing
perception of women as practitioners of prisoner abuse. In 2004, when the Abu Ghraib
prison abuse scandal made headlines, Americans were shocked to see photographs of
female soldiers engaged in acts of torture and sexual humiliation. And yet, in 2012, the
character of the CIA agent Maya in the film Zero Dark Thirty uses similar tactics and is
praised as a hero and feminist role model.
This essay argues that since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, popular American television and cinema have participated in the
normalization and justification of state torture. I argue that one of the most prominent
features of this phenomenon is the depiction of women who engage in torture as national
and feminist heroes. In particular, I will analyze the depiction of the CIA agent Maya in the
film Zero Dark Thirty, as well as the marketing of the film and its cultural reception as a
feminist product. This essay will start by looking back at some of the feminist responses to
the Abu Ghraib scandal to inform our present discussion of Zero Dark Thirty as a
“feminist” text.
9/11 & Abu Ghraib As Sexual Violation
In her essay “TV and Torture,” Amy Laura Hall argues that 9/11 was “a mass spectacle of
violation that continues to shape American conceptions of gender, sexuality, and safety,”
and that the felled towers marked the symbolic castration of the West. Hall reads the
subsequent popularity of the TV show 24 with its macho torturing hero Jack Bauer as “a
kind of collective catharsis – a way many Americans sought manageably to endure violation
and also to recalibrate a myth of afflicted, but yet still potent, masculinity.” Hall further
suggests “that the gender politics of such shows may take their form from the same cultural
impulse that led to the ritualized emasculation of Muslim prisoners in places like Abu
Ghraib,” pointing out that sexual violation was a routine feature of torture at the facility.
Following from this analysis, we can interpret some of the tortures at Abu Ghraib as a form
of gender-based revenge for the trauma of 9/11. The photos and subsequent reports do not
simply depict emasculation, but in many cases, the feminization of male prisoners, as well.
Some prisoners were forced to wear women’s underwear and to simulate so-called
“homosexual” acts. There are reports of prisoners “sodomized” with a chemical light and a
broomstick. In one of the most iconic photos, Lynndie England holds a naked prisoner on a
dog leash. There are also reports that a prisoner was ordered to roll on the ground and kiss
the boots of the guards.
In her article, “Sexualized Torture and Abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison: Feminist Psychological
Analyses,” Eileen Zurbriggen notes that many of these scenarios “enact a stylized power
imbalance, with a sexual overtone. As such, these practices align with the sexualized power
imbalance that comprises the prototypical or traditional heterosexual relationship, with man
in a dominant or active role and woman in a submissive or passive role.” To support this
reading, Zurbriggen points to the testimony of Dhia al-Shweiri, a former prisoner at Abu
Ghraib, who told the Associated Press that:
They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. We are men. It’s okay if they beat me.
Beatings don’t hurt us, it’s just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be
shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is
the worst insult, to feel like a woman.

This testimony underscores how the tortures at Abu Ghraib reflected an assumed hierarchy
with American men and women at the top and Iraqi men, occupying the subjugated,
“feminine” role– a system of power relations conveyed most starkly in the photo of Charles
Graner and Lynndie England giving a thumbs up to the camera while standing over a
pyramid of naked and faceless Iraqi male prisoners.

Women Who Torture

If the male prisoners at Abu Ghraib were feminized, then how should we view the three
women who participated in their torture? Were they imitating male behavior? Were they
taking revenge on Muslim men for the violation of 9/11? How does their gender matter in
an analysis of the scandal?

In response to Abu Ghraib, feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich writes that the photos of
Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman participating in detainee abuse
“broke my heart.” She also remarks with ironic horror that they constitute evidence of
“gender equality,” proving that women can be just as sadistic as men. Ehrenreich’s
prescription for change is for women to not simply assimilate into male institutions, but to
“infiltrate and subvert them” by challenging authority. Though Ehrenreich also mentions
the need for continued struggle “against imperialist and racist arrogance,” her prescriptions
fall within a liberal reformist framework. The military can be fixed, the argument goes, if
good men and women question and challenge authority.
This analysis does not allow for the possibility that the military cannot be reformed, and
that both institutionally, and within the context of its broader mission, represents an ethos of
masculinized violence and expansive colonialism. There is no reason to believe that the
events at Abu Ghraib were an aberration, either during the Iraq War or in past military
campaigns. Can an institution predicated on dehumanizing the enemy—on literally
preparing soldiers to kill other people—be truly reformed? None of these problems are
likely to change simply with the full and equal participation of women, or with modest
reforms. Ehrenreich herself ruefully notes that the prison was overseen by a woman, Sgt.
Janis Karpinski, while the occupation was managed by Condoleeza Rice.

Transnational feminist scholars, such as Basuli Deb and Melanie Richter-Montpetit have
challenged Ehrenreich’s analysis of the events at Abu Ghraib. For instance, in
“Transnational Feminism and Women Who Torture: Reimag(in)ing Abu Ghraib Prison
Photography,” Deb notes the limitations of arguments based in equality, observing:
…in liberal feminist thought, premised on equality, the male remains normative, and
patriarchy is undisturbed as the onus lies on women to enter structures of privilege.
According to this theory, women who control male detainees have successfully reversed the
power inequalities, at least for themselves. Exercising power violently consolidates their
status within patriarchal structures into which they have assimilated.
This assimilation through the mastery of male violence is, as I will argue later, precisely the
method by which the character Maya in Zero Dark Thirty is shown to become the equal of
her male colleagues. Deb’s observation also underscores the problem with a liberal
discourse which elevates individual achievement over institutional change. This analysis
explains how real life figures as diverse as Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and
Condoleeza Rice could be praised as Western feminist role models despite the leading role
they take in pushing occupation and imperialism.
Melanie Richter-Montpetit also challenges Ehrenreich’s focus on gender equality as overly
reductive. Richter-Montpetit suggests that the phenomenon of women-identified soldiers
torturing prisoners “should be located within colonial desires.” President Bush, she reminds
us, claimed after 9/11, that “[w]e wage a war to save civilization, itself.” Language like this
has characterized other colonial missions, which position the West as the civilized opposite
of the savage Orient. This postcolonial analysis of American rhetoric complicates the
feminist reading of Abu Ghraib and the larger project of the War on Terror.
One of the West’s key justifications in recent conflicts has been the need to rescue Muslim
women from oppression by their own culture. In April of 2010, Wikileaks released an
internal CIA report encouraging NATO allies to appeal to feminist concern for Afghan
women’s rights to boost flagging public support for the war. It urged that “Afghan women
could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban” and
suggested “outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share
their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome
pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.” This
document reveals the CIA’s intent to exploit feminist sympathies in the service of war
propaganda.

In July of 2010, while American popular support for the war in Afghanistan was on the
wane, Time magazine ran a cover story featuring a disturbing portrait of a young Afghan
woman whose nose was cut off by Taliban militants. The headline accompanying the photo
put the question starkly, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” Writing for The
Guardian, Priyamvada Gopal observed that the cover was a “cynical ploy” to manipulate
concern for Afghan women to promote an unpopular war. Gopal argued:
Time is not alone in condensing Afghan reality into simplistic morality tales. A deplorable
number of recent works habituate us to thinking about Afghanistan as what Liam Fox,
Britain’s defence secretary, called a “broken 13th-century country,” defined solely by
pathologically violent men and silently brutalised women.

Gopal underscores the pervasiveness of these gendered morality tales in the West’s war
propaganda.

Drawing our attention back to Abu Ghraib, Basuli Deb argues that white female soldiers
have a critical role to play in this narrative of liberation. Deb draws from Gargi
Bhattacharya’s analysis of the Abu Ghraib photos and Lynndie England’s symbolic
function in their staging. Bhattaacharya argues that while leaders like Condoleeza Rice and
Laura Bush pitch the necessity of war, England represents “’the emancipated Western
woman in the war zone itself.” Deb describes two images in detail:

England stands next to naked and hooded male detainees with a cigarette dangling from
her lips, as she points her forefinger at a prisoner’s genitals while giving the thumbs-up
sign. In another photograph two naked and hooded prisoners face the camera, their hands
above their heads in a gesture of submission. One of them is made to sit on the shoulders of
a third detainee, squatting on the floor, so that his buttocks and genitals touch the bare
back of the other. England smiles at the camera as she points to the genitals of the man and
shows the thumbs up sign again.

England represents the “liberated Western Woman showing her dominance” and triumph
over “brown male bodies.” Deb further argues that white women serve a special function in
the war effort. They must protect the “emancipated status of American womanhood from
the ‘barbaric’ orientalism of Muslim men,” but they must also “become agents of a
transnational sisterhood’ to lure Arab women into an alliance with the American
enterprise.” This special mission, Deb argues, is inscribed in the images from Abu Ghraib:

…the brutal torture and humiliation of Iraqi men at the hands of the empire’s white women
is projected as a victory of Arab women over Arab men who impose Islamic cultural
markers such as head scarves and veils on their women and it is also a victory for the
American enterprise of messianic imperialism as well as for individual women in the
enterprise who are comrades in torture with military men, and can be as tough as any of
their male counterparts.
The white female torturer signifies the perceived victory of Western feminism over Muslim
misogyny. She achieves equality with her male colleagues by inflicting violence on Muslim
men.

Maya: The Torturer as Feminist

It is this last observation which informs my analysis of Zero Dark Thirty, which uses a
heroic female protagonist to advance an apologia for torture. The film rehabilitates the
degraded image of “leash girl” Lynndie England by re-imagining the female torturer as a
careerist go-getter. Zero Dark Thirty maps the familiar feminist arc of films like Norma
Rae and Working Girl onto the workplace of the CIA. One critic has dubbed it “Erin
Brockovich for fascists.”

I will not analyze the entire film, which encompasses over a decade of the War on Terror,
culminating in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Instead, I will focus on the staging of the
film’s torture scenes, specifically the power relationships and the depiction of Maya, the
film’s protagonist.

Zero Dark Thirty opens with a black screen and an audio montage of real 911 calls placed
during the attacks on the World Trade Center. The most prominent voices are those of
women in fear. This gendering of the trauma is significant, because it sets the stage for a
female hero to gain vengeance on behalf of women, even though as Amy Laura Hall notes,
“the victims of the 9/11 murder were overwhelmingly male.”

Two years later, the film transports us to the staging of that revenge, a CIA black site where
Ammar, a beaten and bloodied terror suspect is surrounded by men in balaclavas. Dan, a
handsome and imposing white male interrogator bursts into the room and speaks the first
scripted words of the film, “I own you Ammar. You belong to me.” The masked men
proceed to beat Ammar while Dan yells abuse. The other masked figure, Maya, who (in
later scenes) the other agents derisively call “The Girl,” stands at the back of the room,
silently watching. In sadomasochistic terms, Dan is the master, and this is dungeon. Dan’s
claim of ownership, as the film soon shows us, applies equally to “The Girl” Maya and to
the prisoner Ammar.

Dan and Maya step out of the cell and into the sunlight, to give Ammar time to contemplate
his predicament. Maya takes off her mask. She appears to be in her late 20s, has pale white
skin and long red hair. She’s slender and conventionally feminine in appearance. She unzips
her overcoat, revealing a pantsuit, a kind of symbolic shortcut to signify a woman’s
eagerness to be taken seriously in a man’s world. Dan mocks, “You’re rocking your best
suit for your first interrogation.”

“Just so you know, this is gonna take awhile,” he says. “He has to learn how helpless he is.”
Dan suggests they take a coffee break, but she insists that they continue with the
interrogation. He says that she can watch from a TV monitor. Maya opts to return to the
interrogation room, unmasked. She doesn’t want to be a spectator. She wants to be like Dan.
Maya becomes in this moment both an audience surrogate and a symbol of women’s
equality. When she passes the threshold again, she’ll also be a party to torture. By this
strategy, we also become complicit.

What’s significant in the staging of the subsequent torture scenes is that Maya is not simply
an audience surrogate. She is also a mirror for Ammar’s psychological and emotional
distress—her actions and expressions matching his. In this way, though we are shown the
brutality of torture, our focus is redirected from the suffering of the victim to that of the
perpetrator. In his analysis of the film, Slavoj Zizek argues that this serves an ideological
function, noting that “our awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human
cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological
complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty.” This
observation is supported by the film’s widespread popularity with liberal film critics, who
have praised the film’s moral nuance.
Zero Dark Thirty’s strategy is made all the more effective by giving the audience a female
identification figure, because it takes advantage of the widespread cultural perception of
women as more empathetic to the suffering of others. When Maya learns to master her
feelings and accept the necessity of torture, she becomes more powerful and successful. In
this way, the film explicitly links Maya’s increasing comfort with torture to her personal
empowerment, and models this attitude for the viewer.
In the next scene, Dan submits the beaten and bound Ammar to a series of questions about
his connection to Al Qaeda. Maya watches at a distance, arms folded. When Ammar refuses
to give up information, Dan signals to one of the masked men to prepare Ammar for
waterboarding. The camera cuts away to show us Maya’s distressed expression. She folds
inward, shields her eyes and grimaces as Ammar is forced onto the ground and a rag placed
over his face. Dan barks at her to grab a bucket and to fill it with water (fetching the water
is perhaps coded here as “women’s work”). Frightened, she follows his commands. As Dan
waterboards Ammar, Maya kneels nearby averting her gaze.

In a later scene, we see Maya passed out on a cramped sofa and rudely awakened at dawn
by the Muslim call to prayer. The film immediately cuts to Ammar who is chained in a
stress position while being bombarded with deafening heavy metal music. The comparison
is subtly made here that Maya, like Ammar is suffering for her work. The parallel also
offensively equates Maya’s cultural disorientation in a Muslim country with Ammar’s
torture via the weaponized use of Western rock music.

Dan and Maya return to Ammar’s cell. She has traded her pantsuit for a pair of jeans and a
plain top, signifying an increased willingness to get her hands dirty and a shift away from
using masculinized clothing worn to earn male respect. Dan switches off the music and
helps Ammar into a chair. In parallel action, Maya is shown taking a seat. Adopting a “good
cop” approach, Dan offers a sobbing Ammar food and drink. Maya watches with pity. Dan
proceeds with the interrogation, but Ammar tells him a lie. Maya, dreading what will come
next, averts her eyes. Dan threatens to subject Ammar to another waterboarding and
demands information. Ammar refuses and Dan explodes, kicking the chair out from under
him. Mirroring this, Maya jumps out of her own chair.
Dan hoists Ammar to his feet, and grabs his head, directing his eyes at Maya. “You see how
this works?” he asks rhetorically, a question directed equally at both Maya and Ammar.
Then the gender dynamics implicit in Ammar’s torture are made explicit. Dan pulls down
Ammar’s pants taunting “you don’t mind if my female colleague checks out your junk, do
you?” Dan then humiliates Ammar by observing that he’s “shit his pants.” He suddenly
leaves the cell, barking at Maya “you stay here!” The distinctly sexual nature of this scene
recalls Zurbruggen’s observation that the incidents at Abu Ghraib depicted a “sexualized
power imbalance” reflecting the “traditional heterosexual relationship, with man in a
dominant or active role and woman in a submissive or passive role.” Here, both Maya and
Ammar have been constructed as submissive, feminine subjects, in a hierarchy under Dan’s
hyper-masculine authority.

With Dan gone, Ammar turns his head to Maya and begs her for mercy. “Your friend is an
animal. Please help me.” An eerie calm settles in Maya’s face. She walks toward Ammar
and tells him flatly, “You can help yourself by being truthful.” Maya’s empathetic
connection to Ammar has been broken. Dan returns with a dog collar, and places it around
Ammar’s neck. While there is no evidence that dog collars were used in the CIA’s torture
program, the image automatically recalls the infamous photo of Lynndie England holding a
naked Iraqi prisoner on a dog leash. Though the film invokes this charged image of a
woman holding a man on a leash, Maya never takes the lead. England’s apparent delight
while participating in torture (though notably not in the leash photo) is a form of female
transgression that would likely undermine our identification with Maya and make the
sexually-charged nature of these scenes too explicit. It would also derail the film’s depiction
of torture as a grim, but necessary tool in the CIA’s arsenal.

As Dan walks Ammar around the room, Maya shrinks into the darkness of the corner. Dan
bombards the prisoner with questions about the date of a future attack. Ammar begins to
babble random days of the week. Dan forces Ammar into a small wooden box and gives
him a final chance to give up the information. The film cuts to a tight shot of Ammar’s face
as he babbles. This time, rather than shrinking away in fear, Maya moves toward Ammar.
Her face is utterly calm and focused, as Dan slams the door shut.

Maya is no longer the timid new girl. She survives this sadistic ordeal, inflicted as much on
her as on Ammar. She has chosen to break her identification with Ammar and becomes
more powerful, more mature, more masculine. It is significant that Dan’s torture scenario
depends on Maya’s gender to complete its meaning. Maya’s ability to master her emotions
and participate in the sexual humiliation of Ammar becomes a benchmark in her
development as a feminist hero.

Laura Sjoberg’s comments on Abu Ghraib are instructive here:

…the sexual abuse of Iraqi men by American women communicates (whether it was
intended to or not) a disdain for Iraqi masculinities so strong that subordinated American
femininities are the appropriate tool for their humiliation. Sexual torture is certainly about
power, but were it only about power, there are plenty of non-sexual ways to express power
over people. Sexual torture is about comparative sexual power; here, the sexual power of
American masculinities and militarized/masculinized femininities over their understanding
of Iraqi masculinities.

Drawing from Sjoberg, I read Maya as an example of this militarized and masculinized
femininity. Her role in Dan’s scenario demonstrates her power over Ammar by
underscoring her submission to Dan. Ammar’s humiliation is derived from the message that
he is less than a woman, at the very bottom of this hierarchy of power relations.

When torture is deemed necessary, she relies on male violence as an extension of

her authority. In one scene, a detainee evades her question and she taps a guard
on the arm, to command him to punch the prisoner. In another she orders and
calmly supervises the waterboarding of a detainee. Curiously, her costuming also
suggests a return to female signification. In some scenes, she wears a dark wig as
a disguise. In others, she wears a headscarf, which could be read as a symbolic
identification with the Muslim women for whom Maya and other militarized Western
women are presumed to be seeking vengeance. Maya still suffers emotional
exhaustion from her work, but she is able to hide it from others. After waterboarding
a prisoner, she seeks out the privacy of the restroom, rips off her wig, stares into
the mirror and hyperventilates while clutching the edges of the sink.

By contrast, her former superior Dan becomes impotent, unable to conceal the
psychological toll the work has had on him. He informs Maya that he can no longer
stand to look at naked men, and that he will be taking an office job in Washington
DC. Maya has now surpassed Dan as an equal and has become a superior field
agent, setting her on the path to the eventual location and killing of Osama bin
Laden. There is no trace of “The Girl” left in Maya. Basuli Deb, reflecting on Abu
Ghraib argues “that the tortured body of the male detainee became the very
territory on which militarized femininity negotiated with militarized masculinity for
the recognition of military women as soldiers and not women soldiers.” If we apply
this reading in relation to Zero Dark Thirty, Maya’s success as a feminist hero can
be seen finally as predicated on her success as a torturer of Muslim men’s bodies.

Bigelow took to the pages of the LA Times to defend her film. She began by
declaring herself a “pacifist” and arguing that the film’s depiction of torture is not an
endorsement, implying that the movie is intended as a kind of Rorschach test for
the audience’s moral and political sensibilities. In spite of these assertions, Bigelow
finished her column by paying tribute to “the brave work” of “professionals in the
military and intelligence communities” and reminded readers that bin Laden wasn’t
defeated by superheroes, but “by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as
they sometimes (emphasis in the original) crossed moral lines…” We should note
the inherent contradiction here. Bigelow asserts that her film does not take a
position on torture, but continues to praise those who did the torture as heroes.
Whether intentional or not, Bigelow is acknowledging the extent to which her film is
an apologia for torture.

With the film mired in controversy and the Academy Awards approaching, the
filmmakers began to advance another narrative—that Zero Dark Thirty was a story
of female empowerment. Recalling his research for the film, Boal told an
entertainment reporter that “the thing that surprised me the most was the role of
women in this story … I think it’s ironic that … al-Qaeda was in some sense
defeated by the spectre that they feared most … a liberated, Western woman.”
Boal’s comment echoes Ehrenreich’s claim that the Abu Ghraib photos would most
upset fundamentalist Muslims because they represent “gender equality.” In both
cases, the Orientalist notion at work is that “liberated” and “Western” are the
assumed opposites of “oppressed” and “Muslim.” Where President Bush once
remarked of Islamic fundamentalists, “they hate our freedom,” this new, more
liberal message can be summed up as “they hate our women’s freedom.”

In his analysis of the film, David Bromwich notes:

The propaganda value of the female protagonist in a film like this should not be neglected.
When Bigelow won her academy award, it was widely treated not only as a feminist triumph
but as a special and “gendered” sort of vindication. After all, the director’s chosen subject
was the male subject of war. She had beaten the men at their own game. And that is what
Maya is seen to do in the hunt for Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/torture-zero-dark-
thirty_b_2512767.html

Deb proposes:

…that framing ethical transnational feminist responses to women who torture enemy men is
an act of responsibility to the politics of feminism. It is an attempt to deter torture in the
name of women’s emancipation, an attempt to stop imperialism from marching under the
banner of women’s rights, and an attempt to intervene in a liberal feminist politics that
advocates for the unconditional empowerment of individual women.