Orientalism and ‘saving’ US state identity after 9/11

Abstract The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 (9/11) radically destabilized the US sense of self and thus necessitated a particular reassertion of state identity that pivots violently on gender and race. This identity draws upon hypermasculinity, a religious code of ethics and the constitutive differences between Self/Other necessitating the persistent and forceful coding, interpretation and targeting of particular actors and politics as Islamic fundamentalist. In particular, 9/11's post-traumatic space requires US participation in an orientalist project that institutionalizes gendered and racialized violence through the infantilization, demonization, dehumanization and sexual commodification of the 'Other'. The US state project to 'save' its identity intertwines religion, ideology and conflict so as to permanently etch within the American psyche a fear/loathing/paternalism regarding the 'Orient' abroad and within. This article proposes a feminist theoretical framework for empirically understanding and recognizing orientalism's logic in US state identity making. Keywords: hypermasculinityideologyorientalismreligionsalvationstate identitythe Other9/11 Notes 1 I use 'Arab/Muslim' to politicize and denote the conflation of Arabs and Muslims into a singular entity. 2 An exception is Agathangelou and Ling (Citation2004). My article and their piece should be discussed in concert, as they both examine the underlying Self/Other difference at play in the US response to 9/11 as well as the significance of making race and gender through neoliberalism and the normalization of boundaries, sovereignty and security. Agathangelou and Ling focus on the transnationalization of insecurity in the 'mirror' politics of the US war on terror and Al Qaeda's anti-US jihad. As such, their interrogation of desire and violence differs from my focus on the logic of orientalism and the specific forms of gendered and racialized violence. Another exception, After Shock: Global Feminist Perspectives (Hawthorne and Winter Citation2003), powerfully catalogues theoretical and activist narratives immediately after 9/11 and must be supplemented by a sustained theoretical discussion on the relationship between power, violence, gender and race.