Intersections (Dec 2019)
Commemorating Compassion, Countering Containment: The Female Wars on Terror Witnesses of Helen Benedict’s and Lynsey Addario’s Transcultural Narratives
Abstract
This article analyzes representations of female Wars on Terror witnesses by Helen Benedict and Lynsey Addario. In their narratives of U.S. soldiers and Arab refugee lives, both criticize effects of (counter-)terrorist warfare and argue for transcultural compassion. Benedict’s documentary novel Sand Queen (2011) unsettles the categories of Oriental terrorist and U.S. hero, as a military sexual assault survivor and an Iraqi refugee interact. Journalistic photographs from Addario’s series for The New York Times (“Women at War”; 2010) and National Geographic (“Veiled Rebellion”; 2010) document the suffering experienced by female soldiers and civilians. These counter dominant Wars on Terror discourses by complicating the gender stereotypes underwriting the U.S. defense melodrama and its anti-colonial resistance. Through field research, including interviews, Benedict and Addario strive toward “authentic” reports of war, but their documentary aesthetics anticipate receptions that sensationalize pain and commodify colonial power asymmetries. This article also asks if demanding that subaltern woman testify to oppression commemorates depoliticized compassion or further precludes the participation of “others” from political spheres.
