This weeks reading Puar discusses the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Because of the photographs that Puar mentions in the reading, Abu Ghraib was seen as a representation of mistreatment of prisoners by the US troops. Puar argues that the torture of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib is exceptional because of how it has been constructed by American political leaders and media. In the reading Puar draws on photographs that were taken at Abu Ghraib, including a picture of a pyramid of nude men, which is a very infamous picture today ’’ Iraqi prisoners are arranged naked in human pyramids, simulating both the feminized prone position, anus in the air, necessary to receive anal sex, and the ‘activo’ mounting stance of anal sex’’.
President Bush claimed that the prison guards ’‘Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people’’, but Puar argues that American exceptionalism has been used to seperate the prison guards actions. Puar argues that the sexual torture against the Iraqi priosoners was a method of punishment, to attack the priosoners cultural morals. Towards the end of the reading Puar asks us to consider’’ whether these acts of turture really reveal anything instrinc or particular to American Culture’’?
Both readings mention Patai’s The Arab Mind, which is a book where he writes about the perceptions of muslims and he takes on arab ideas of shame and honor. He also shows that Arabs are not more repressed than Westerners.
This was a great summary of the two readings. Puar makes a number of points that link to the overall civilized/backwardness binary that we have been tracing all semester. Specifically, Puar says, “Reinforcing a homogenous notion of Muslim sexual repression vis-à-vis homosexuality and the notion of modesty works to situate the United States, in contrast, as a place free of such sexual constraints, thus confirming the now-liberated status of the formerly repressed diasporic Muslim” (92). In this instance, not only is the U.S. able to position themselves as a modern and liberated state, they are also able to warn of the dangers still lurking in Muslim communities (sexual repression, but with perverse and homophobic undertones).
ReplyDeleteQureshi elaborates specifically on Raphael Patai’s book “The Arab Mind”, and the connection to Orientalist knowledge that persisted more than 30 years after the release. Patai provides several assertive characteristics of Arab men and women with no real evidence but great authority. Among his examinations is the study of Arab men that depicts even the infant Arab boy as being raised with only two character-forming mechanisms: overt sexuality or fierce brutality. It is important to trace this examination the Patai provided and link it to knowledge production and power.