COALITIONS AND CONFLICT ACROSS DIFFERENCE
M. Jacqui Alexander and Cynthia Enloe

By Catherine M. Orr

The Saturday Plenary Session made use of the embedded conference theme, “Coalitions and Conflict Across Difference” with a specific focus on women in global contexts. Appropriately, both speakers, M. Jacqui Alexander and Cynthia Enloe, have followed their research interests in gender and justice across national, cultural, geographical, political, and religious boundaries to bring original treatments and points of view to the ways that the global manifests itself in the local and the local connects to the global.

Alexander is co-editor of Feminist Genealogies: Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (with Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!: Feminist Visions for a Just World (with Lisa Albrecht, Sharon Day, and Mab Segrest) and author of the forthcoming Pedagogies of Crossing from Duke University Press. She is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research on memory and Kongo spiritual practices in the Caribbean.

Cynthia Enloe, a trailblazer feminist approaches to international relations, is the author of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (released in a new edition in 2000) and Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives.

Alexander and Enloe, who have spoken on the same platform more than a handful of times, worked in tandem to provide the audience with pointed questions about and specific angles of vision on global landscapes of violence. In starkly differing styles, both speakers impressed upon the audience the importance of being persistent in our questions about the meanings and motivations behind, not just the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq, but all state military campaigns that claim legitimacy in the name of democracy.

Before the plenary began, however, Ana Louise Keating reminded the audience about the memorial service for Gloria Anzaldúa later that evening and offered some thoughtful words about Anzaldúa’s work for and legacy to NWSA. Keating noted how appropriate it is to remember Gloria at a moment when conference goers focus on “coalitions and conflict across difference,” a point reiterated throughout the afternoon.

M. Jacqui Alexander

Alexander stepped up to the podium and began to read. First, she reframed the global theme of the plenary by asking us to substitute the word “empire” for the word globalization. Then, she launched into her argument about the abuses of empire with intensely visual language and carefully crafted metaphors. The speech was more like an extended poem. A web concepts and images built one on top of the other: heteronormative patriotism, epistemic segregation, the West’s apparent “here and now” and the third world’s apparent “there and then.” She announced that we are in a moment where there is little time. “It’s because death ups that stakes. Its curriculum is sudden and dramatic. It pushes us to write with fire.” And indeed, as those in the room witnessed, Alexander’s own writing embodied this creative and deconstructive force.

On Privilege
Alexander next turned to the contradictions of living the privileges of empire. Unlike those who have lost their lives in the “insatiable service of imperialism,” none of us awoke this morning sounds of gunfire and bombs, to the “grief that kills.” This grief visits those whose waking hours are filled with death and hopelessness. She evoked the previous day’s and weeks’ headlines about the US invasion of Iraq and the devastation they described.

“What do lives of privilege look like in times of war?” she wondered aloud. We live with the lie that the state is the one that owns and therefore can dispense “security,” just as we live with the lie that the war in Iraq is over. Such privilege demands that we “continue to believe in American democracy in the midst of an entanglement of state and corporate power that more resembles the practices of fascism than the practices of democracy.” We need to ask questions of ourselves and think about our own positions within empire. “Empire, she stated, “makes all innocence impossible.”

On Segregation
Geographic segregation is a potent metaphor used and enforced by the state. But, Alexander argued, this segregation is also sustained in the knowledge frameworks that we, as academics, enforce: patriot and enemy, citizen and immigrant, secular and sacred, us and them, global and local, theory and practice, embodied and disembodied. These are the concepts that function as our intellectual currency. This, she claimed, is what we need to examine. We must think harder about the “ideological traffic” between and among time periods and across discourses, institutions, and concepts that make use of this segregation.

Her directives to us became somewhat more specific: We must delve into how empire functions to perpetuate the lies about privilege on the one hand and the violence of its own logic on the other. Some questions we might consider are inspired by Alexander’s own recent work in which examines heterosexualization across colonial, neocolonial, and neoimperial formations: How is it possible, she asked, that the “ideological scaffolding” of the modern can be found in the so-called “tradition” of the past? How, for example, did the murderous violence against Panamanian crossdressers by Spanish colonizers of the 16th century find its way into late 20th century discussions in the US about whether homosexuality was compatible with military service? But instead of responding to her own specific provocation, she offered still others. How is welfare heterosexualized? How have we sustained and built what we now call modernity?. What is the relationship between the “then and there” and the “here and now?”

On the Border
At one point, Alexander looked up from her manuscript and realized that her questions and ideas were swirling around our heads. She stopped and asked: “Do we get that? Do you want me to read that again? ” Our nodding heads and supportive but nervous laughter gave her some indication that even though both the form and content of what we were hearing was compelling, there was some amount of difficulty to be had in following her abstracted prose, especially in spoken form. In response, she cut through the verbal layers of her argument: We can come to no automatic, easy, and thereby, disingenuous conclusions that one side or another of these categorical relationships—tradition/modernity, us/them, then/now—are “good” or “bad.” In both her own work and in ours, she argued against the comfort that simplicity might provide.

“How many more must die,” Alexander implored, before we understand that we are fundamentally interdependent? That which divides us—and kills us—are the very constructs we use to attempt to understand our world. Then, once again, Gloria Anzaldúa’s name was evoked. Alexander bordered on the performative: “Gloria: Your death was tragic, not only because you died alone. But we relied on you, as artists, to provide our sanity. And we kept asking for more, while you dealt with the terror, the reality, as you said, of a disease that could cost you your feet, your eyes, your creativity, the life of the writer that you worked so hard to build, life itself. We demanded more. It’s quite a pact to make without any accountability at all. You had no health insurance. You, who wrote about the borderlands that we appropriated to signify how queer we were . … We consumed without digesting. You taught us. The question is: what did we learn?”

This haunting juxtaposition, of Anzadúa’s gift to us and our subsequent use of it, made for the most ponderous moment in Alexander’s densely rich and heartfelt exposition.

After the rousing applause for Alexander quieted, Cynthia Enloe stepped out from behind the podium, and with microphone in hand, began a plain-spoken, extemporaneous talk about empire’s women. She asked: What have we learned and not learned about empire building?

Cynthia Enloe

Where Are the Women?
“The good news is that no society that was ever colonized was colonized easily,” Enloe noted optimistically. Empire building is full of mistakes and questions and confusions, especially on the part of the colonizer. One of the greatest confusions is about masculinity and its relationship to women on both sides of the colonial divide. Questions about gender, she argued, are completely missing from the “great texts” on empire.

A case that makes the point is the now well-documented abuses of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Graib prison at the hands of US military personnel. What led up to the events of Cell Block A “needs a feminist curiosity,” argued Enloe. We should ask: what created these events and how are we complicit in it?

Enloe shared with the audience that her method of investigation is to continually pose the question: “Where are the women?” Lindy England (the leash-toting MP) and Sabrina Harmon (both reservists) are the first who come to mind. But there are other the women who are not pictured in newspaper accounts: Capt. Carolyn Wood and General Barbara Fast, who both chose the military as a career and who both served in Afghanistan. Then there is General Janice Karpinski, a reservist, who was in charge of the MPs of Abu Graib. Then there is the ex-wife of Charles Graner, the soldier at the center of the scandal. She gives us a sense of his marital politics “imported” from his work in US prisons. He is an abusive violent former husband. Given his well-documented abuse of her and his actions at Abu Graib, Enloe wondered, what is considered an appropriate question to ask a potential military recruit?: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” If we put Graner’s ex-wife in the picture, she asked, what can we learn?

The Value of Liberal Feminism
Enloe asked us to think about the women who have been laying the ground work for the investigation of Abu Graib: Liberal feminists inside the Pentagon. “Don’t ever underestimate liberal feminism,” she warned. “Don’t ever underestimate what it’s like to say the word ‘rape’ or ‘domestic abuse’ inside the Pentagon!” So much of the time, we separate ourselves from liberal feminism claiming that our own feminism “goes deeper.” But too often, it’s the liberal feminists within institutions like the military who are on the front lines, asking the hard questions of the men in charge, Enloe informed the audience.

Then there are women in Afghanastan and Iraq, who should not be “mushed together,” because in these two countries, women live in very different social and cultural contexts. Yet, these are the women who must take back the men who have been imprisoned and abused in the name of our democracy. “What are these women suppose to do to restore the self esteem of their men?” Enloe demanded. What is expected of them by other women and men in their families and their communities? What questions are they not suppose to ask? The restoration of masculine self esteem is so often the job that is given to women. But it is a job that rarely benefits women themselves. To understand imperialism, we have to know what happens in militarized families in militarized societies all over the world.

Until we take women seriously, both the named and the unnamed, we won’t know how imperialism works. Abu Graib is not an anomaly. Feminist curiosity is required to get to the bottom of this. This is the tip of a very deep iceberg. It will take all of us to do this sort of investigation. We have to learn how to read “boring memos” and “UN speak.” Enloe’s final plea: “Don’t think that because women aren’t mentioned that feminists don’t have something to say.”

Each in her own way, M. Jacqui Alexander and Cynthia Enloe shifted the burden back onto the audience and demanded, what Enloe called, “the third speech” of the plenary. A number of audience members asked questions, exchanged ideas with the speakers, paid homage to Anzaldúa and others we have lost recently, and made their own demands of the gathering. The prominent theme throughout was the need for us to keep asking the difficult questions of ourselves and those who speak in our name.