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Hilary Harris
Griffith University
www.army.gov.au:
A “First World” military imagines its relationship to “Third World” civil societies
This paper examines one aspect of the post-Cold War interventionist mission for Western militaries, the constabulatory function of peacekeeping. Specifically, it looks at the uses to which that function is put by the Australian Army in its on-line inscriptions of itself as both a media and consumer commodity. A growing understanding in Western feminist (and feminist-allied) research, such as Barbara Ehrenreich's and Mary Kaldor's, holds that contemporary war is becoming “de-gendered” in the sense that women increasingly occupy the once all-male category of actual combatants. While acknowledging the rising number of women combatants, this paper nonetheless argues that “gender” remains an indispensable category in terms of analysing how Western publics are encouraged to understand the participation of their militaries in the “new” wars, wars the putative mission of which is to save the failing states and societies of “the non-West.” Employing anti-racist and postcolonial feminist analyses, the paper reads the particular strategies of spectacularisation at work in the Army's visual imaging of its relationship to the civil societies of “Third World” countries. The paper concludes that the Army's recourse to the images and ideologies of a masculinised West and a feminised South and East in order to “sell” its mission to the Australian public seriously undermines the credibility of the nation's peacekeeping mission: to assist people in securing viable, vigorous and independent civil societies of their own making. Hence, that imaging strategy also raises serious questions about recent applications of the peacekeeping image by some Western governments, such as Australia's, in their representations of the War in Iraq (as well as the larger War on Terror) as the latest and, perhaps, greatest articulation of a non-imperialist interventionist ethos.
Bio: Hilary Harris is Lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Griffith University. She has engaged in fieldwork regarding human trafficking and war in Southeast Asia, and regarding “whiteness” and war in Japan. Exploring the intersections among feminist, queer and postcolonial theories in relation to anti-racist whiteness studies, her most recent publication is “Desert Training for Whites: Australian Road Movies” in Terra Re-cognitions: New Essays in Australian Studies (UQP, forthcoming).
<h.harris@gu.edu.au>