Professors and researchers from several countries gathered at the Faculty Center on Friday to discuss the meaning of “terror” and its relationship to gender in a conference hosted by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.
Panelists spoke about diverse topics that fell under a general theme on how social conceptions of gender and sexuality affect the ways fear and acts of terror are used and represented by governments and in media.
For example, Lori Allen, a lecturer in contemporary Middle Eastern politics and society at the University of Cambridge, spoke about mothers of martyrs in the Palestinian intifada.
She argued that because Western media portrayed those women as callous for rejoicing after their sons’ deaths, Palestinian nationalist efforts sought to emphasize and feminize their grief.
Kathleen McHugh, director of the center, said the collaborative efforts were meant to produce an “engaged, substantive discussion.”
McHugh, also a professor of English and cinema and media studies, said panelists were invited to present works in progress; their papers were circulated beforehand among some of the audience members, as well as to informed respondents who participated in each panel and posed questions about the research presented.
Purnima Mankekar, the associate director of the center, worked with McHugh for the past nine months to organize Friday’s conference. She said she chose “Gender of “˜Terror'” as the unifying theme because of the timeliness of terror as an idea and the relative lack of academic work examining its relationship with gender.
“We both felt there was a real gap in the literature,” Mankekar said. “Gender has always been central to the way terror is articulated. … In order to speak sensibly about terror we need to take gender seriously.”
April de Stefano, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Women, said the center hosts a conference with a different topic each year. The conference last year focused on gender and science.
This year’s conference was divided into three panels: “The State/Civil Society,” “Mediation” and “The Law/Citizenship.” De Stefano said panelists chose their own topics within the broader themes.
The research presented varied from the political uses of grief after atrocities, to the dichotomy of “good” and “bad” Muslims, to the “shock and awe” of viral videos on the Internet.
Paola Bacchetta, associate professor of gender and women’s studies at UC Berkeley, discussed the presentation of Saddam Hussein’s medical exam, which was shown Dec. 14, 2003, and its effects on audiences in the United States.
Speaking during the mediation panel, Bacchetta called footage of the medical exam an example of “the spectacularization of U.S. queerphobic xenophobia,” discussing the suggested rape of Hussein with the repeated entry of a wooden tongue depressor into his facial orifices and the video’s fixation on his mouth and ears.
Specifically, Bacchetta argued that the video was an example of American society’s normative exclusion of foreigners and those who fall outside of heterosexuality. She proposed that Hussein was set up as barbaric and inferior to the dominant American examiner and soldiers in the ways that the film portrayed him.
At the end of the day, Bacchetta said she was very impressed with the conference, also stressing the importance of building intellectual communities.
“I did learn a lot from the others on my panel, and I learned from the entire conference. I thought it was a brilliant conference,” she said, adding that she also benefited from having her own work discussed and questioned by the other participants and the audience.
One such audience member who posed questions was Tara Leederman, a fourth-year English student who is planning to write a senior thesis on Japan in the age of terror.
“They’ve been absolutely phenomenal. It was really edifying,” she said, adding that since there are few classes on the topic of terror, the conference was one of the best resources available to her.
“I’m surprised by the breadth of what they’ll cover ““ they’ll talk about anything and everything,” Leederman said, specifically citing a reference Bacchetta made to the TV show “South Park” in her analysis of Hussein’s medical exam.
Leederman said she also enjoyed the focus on new media, since academia does not always treat media studies as a valid field.
“In some way, it takes some cojones to get up there and talk about the Internet and to be taken seriously,” she said.
McHugh and Mankekar both said they thought the gender of “terror” conference was a success. They said they hope to work with the panelists to publish the papers presented as a book to bridge the gap in research that inspired the conference.