Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask what the torture produces. Borrowing and revising a question that Catharine MacKinnon posed about genocide (‘What is the sex doing in the genocide?’1) I ask: What is the sex doing in the torture?

As many feminists have pointed out, the 9/11attacks on US soil catalysed an urgent quest to reassert US national manhood, a desire that had played an important part in US politics since the humiliating loss of the Vietnam War and that was reinvigorated by the events of 11 September 2001.2 But it is common for these analyses to focus on ‘national manhood’ as a psychological project.3 Susan Faludi’s influential account, for example, envisions national manhood as a fantasy through which the nation convinces itself of its invulnerability in response to a kind of traumatic psychic wounding and the primal fear of annihilation that accompanies it. But aggressive capitalist imperial aspirations and naked bellicosity are not reducible to psychological phenomena, even though the psychic figure of wounded national manhood is central to their operations. Here I show that ‘national manhood’ is essentially a justificatory operation that necessitates an ontological project.4 Because ‘national manhood’ cannot, properly speaking, be said to exist, it is constantly forced to borrow its ontological weight from something else. This process of borrowing does not operate exclusively at the level of collective national fantasy, but through a material process of production – that is, through an apparatus.

As I have argued elsewhere,5 gender structuresmultiple dimensions of human existence, from theway we live our bodies to how we imagine ourselves socially, to practices of language. Gender is not reducible to the individual subject’s experience of it, but it is one of the central nodes of meaning through which a social order gives me my place in being. The social constitution of gendered existence does not diminish in the least the sense of reality it founds for the individual subject, who most often lives gendered identity as both profoundly real and essential: to herself-understanding, to his sense of social location, to patterns of intersubjective belonging – which is to say lived gender collects ontological weight in the body and the person of the individual subject.6 In fact, gender infused in flesh and blood, in the most viscerally experienced corporeality of subjects, is the raw material upon which the apparatus works to acquire weight for something that is far lighter – the manhood of the nation. In so far as it is successful in its attempts to annex this ontological weight from elsewhere, ‘national manhood’ acquires the force to justify the aggressive movement of capital accompanied by thousands of soldiers in humvees, spectacular aerial bombardment, and the more or less wanton destruction of others’ lives. This relation between the apparatus and lived gender is not new, though it reinvents itself for the specific historical moment – but it is rarely analysed.

[…]

Notes

1. Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Genocide’s Sexuality’, in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2006.

2. Examples include: Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2007; Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, eds, After Shock: September 11, 2001, Global Feminist Perspectives, Raincoast Books, Vancouver and Washington DC, 2003; Zilla Eisenstein, Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy, ZedBooks, London, 2007.

3. Faludi’s The Terror Dream is the most stark example. Other feminists whose work has been instrumental in problematizing masculinity in its relation to nationalism and militarization, and whose work has influenced my own, have not sufficiently understood or articulated the productive aspect of this relation, other than as a motivator for individual soldiers and citizens. Enloe emphasizes the policymakers’ ‘angst’ over not appearing manly (see Cynthia Enloe, ‘Masculinity as a Foreign Policy Issue’, in Hawthorne and Winter, eds, After Shock, pp. …