Representing and Othering Oriental Women After 9/11: An Analysis of Body of Lies

Introduction

Following the 9/11 attacks, images of veiled Oriental and (so-called) Muslim women diffused through media in the United States and Europe. The “war on terror” had been launched in the pretext of saving and liberating these women, who are considered as the victims of patriarchal domination that has its origins in Islam (Abu-Lughod, 2013:95). These political and military concerns, along with these images, have participated in the reproduction of gender and race relations. In this article, I consider these concepts as social constructions. Thus, gender and race are not considered as independent realities, but they are considered as the results of the social relations that generate them and as the essential elements that configure the categories of perception and judgment. I consider race as the concept referring to a social group bases on the existence of a real or imagined origin (Bereni et al., 2012); and gender as social roles attributed to women and men by the society it also refers to the cultural, social, political and even economical distinction between social roles.

In the post-9/11 era, Hollywood displayed newly reconstructed gender and race relations throughout the world. The Pentagon organized a meeting with filmmakers, screenwriters, and producers to rethink cinema's role in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and to use the cinema for patriotic ends (Brodesser, 2001). White House had also met Hollywood directors and screenwriters to discern common interests in promoting shared ideological values ​​in the post 9/11 world (Miller, 2007). In this regard, it was not only a question of justifying the “war on terror” but also of explaining it to the public. In this respect, Hollywood played an ideological role in the reproduction and reconstruction of Oriental (so-called) Muslim women's images and their otherness in the post-9/11 era. As a huge cinema industry, Hollywood reaches an audience of millions of people all over the world. The importance of Hollywood movies derives from their impact on the perceptions of their audience. According to bell hooks, the cinema is a powerful instrument in the construction of otherness; it even plays a central role in this process (hooks, 1992:5). In this sense, Hollywood has a special place in the production of a new racial epistemology. Thereafter, the race is not defined by origin and genealogy, but by appearance (Staszak, 2011:3). In a sense, Hollywood renders “race” visible. Considering these and having a postcolonial feminist approach, in this article, I will attempt to show how Hollywood movies have participated in the reconstruction of the otherness of Oriental women after the 9/11 attacks through the analysis of Body of Lies. Noting that it is one of the few movies which had a commercial success among the movies dealing with Islamic terrorism, Body of Lies is critically acclaimed for its relevance to the consequences of the “war on terror” (Cettl, 2009: 51). The director of the movie (Ridley Scott) and the two famous leading actors (Leonardo DiCaprio and Russel Crowe) participated in this success. It is also interesting for the analysis of Oriental (so-called) Muslim women for introducing novelties to their representations. In this article, “(so-called) Muslim women” is used as a term to underline the perception of Oriental women by Neo-Orientalist representations. Even though, anyone does not ask them if they are Muslim or not, these women are considered Muslim because of the geography in which they live. This shows the reductive point of view of Neo-Orientalism. For this analysis, my theoretical grounding is in postcolonial feminist theory. As a form of feminism, postcolonial feminism has developed as a response to the postcolonial movement, which fails to address gender inequalities, and to the second-wave feminist movement, which focuses only on women's experiences in the Occident. Here, it is important to clarify that the term postcolonial is not considered as a temporal period that refers to the end of colonialism because taking it thus denies the current influence of neo/colonialism (McClintock, 1995:295). I use this term rather to refer to the current of thought, which criticizes the modes of perception and representation of colonized/subalterns. In this regard, post-colonialism offers an ontological opening for sociologists through a plurality of perspectives. Colonial oppression sometimes engenders the glorification of pre-colonial culture, where the structures of domination relationships disadvantaged for women. However, this can lead to unequal power relations between the sexes. In order to avoid such a problem, it is important to introduce gender into the postcolonial discourse.