Claudia Brunner: "Sex and suicide bombers"

This from Ha'aretz, and I was led to it by Martin Kramer's excellent website. "The writer," we learn, "teaches political gender studies at Vienna University and is writing her PhD dissertation on gender as a category of knowledge . . . ." The real subject of this post is how and what you have to write to get a Ph.D. these days. Kramer asks "Is this a parody?" Here is Brunner announcing the aims of her article:

Instead of asking myself why a woman decides to become a suicide bomber or whether it is her own decision or not, I wanted to move from the micro level of looking for motivations and personal circumstances to a macro level of discourse analysis within debates on women suicide bombers: How do sex and gender appear in these debates, which discursive positions do make use of it, in what ways, and for what aims? And how can these elements contribute to a larger understanding of what is often conceived as an insoluble antagonism (suicide bombing plus a woman performing it)?

She detects certain patterns in discourse about female suicide bombers:

Adult women are described by their first names and as girls, their personal and sexual life is at the core of most of the explanations, and they are often described as patriarchally suppressed individuals who are neither aware of nor politically determined for their crimes; these elements are unlikely to be applied in writings on men.

Brunner's big insight seems to be that stereotypes about the Palestinians are actually sexist stereotypes about women:

Writing on suicide bombing as an isolated "phenomenon" is often associated with irrationality, immorality, emotion, anarchy, chaos, weakness, privacy, and other labels that one is quite familiar with when thinking of ideas of femininity in general, regardless of the biological sex of the perpetrators. Suicide bombing, in an imagery of the uncontrollable non-state actor that not only the citizens of Israel, but the very idea of the nation state has to fear, has become not only a real threat in everyday life in many regions of the world, but also a discursive frame in which the difficult task of re-establishing the rationality and legitimating of the use of (pre-emptive and repaying) force against its potential agents are being reorganized.

In that context, occidentalist representations enable Western analysts to conceive (potential) suicide bombers as "the other" and construct walls between "us" and "them," and gender seems to constitute a major implicit logic in that binary construction of orientalist stereotyping.

And exactly how are we supposed to benefit from this insight?

This clear distinction on a symbolic level is supposed to save the rationality of physically and discursively manifest "wars on terror," and it needs the irrational, the unmoral and the non-self-determined, but patriarchally suppressed other in order to maintain its legitimacy.

It is exactly in this respect that one can doubt the long term efficacy of such a dichotomy, because it not only applies to the specific other that really and intentionally threatens potential victims of suicide bombings, but also to the generalized other, the Palestinian people who by that construction necessarily remains irrational, unmoral, chaotic, weak, barbaric and therefore the enemy. And peace, you do not make with enemies.

There you go. Now you know why we haven't made peace with the Palestinians (and also Al-Qaida?) yet. If only we could avoid "orientalist stereotyping." Update: We seem to have a test-case for Brunner's theories.