Maidens in Need of Rescue - US Declarations of War. The uncanny coalition of Laura Bush and Jean Bethke Elshtain

This article traces the discursive constructions of gender in the US war against Afghanistan. Its focus is on Laura Bush's presidential address (Nov 2001), the document "What we are fighting for" (Feb 2002) signed by major US intellectuals in support of the war, and some US feminists joining them in the name of liberation of the women of Afghanistan (Jean Bethke Elshtain; Catherine A. MacKinnon; Feminist Majority Foundation). Yet this uncanny coalition between feminism and US patriarchal imperialism goes beyond mere strategic essentialism in which the differences between women are temporarily erased. Insofar as moral natural laws of the American Declaration of independence (1776) constitute their shared symbolic framework, binary oppositions such as male/female, soldiers/non-combatants, ir/regular warfare, civilized/savage are reified. Thus gender inequality by and in times of war results from its specific discursivization and categorization and cannot be attributed exclusively to an incomplete implementation of rights.