On the margins: Women, national boundaries, and conflict in Saddam's Iraq

This article explores how the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein manipulated gender constructs in its nationalist and political discourses to maintain its authoritarian power in an environment of external and domestic conflict. It charts a relationship between war and the sexual objectification of Iraqi women, who came to be objectified as symbols of the nation and social markers of its boundaries in regime propaganda during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). A sexualized political discourse that conflated external threats to territory with sexual threats to Iraqi women was used by the regime to unite the nation with a potent sense of belonging and galvanize it to battle. This sex/threat paradigm was in turn played out on women's bodies as the regime began controlling their sexuality as a means of patrolling the symbolic borders of the nation, imagined as an endogamous space with Saddam as the head of the national family. Following the Gulf War and the revolt of minority groups against the regime, I look at how the regime sought to re-establish control over its restive population following the 1991 Gulf War by advocating a strict code of morality, accompanied by overtures to Islam and tribalism. Women viewed to have breached the national moral order were targeted for violence by the regime, which in encouraging violence toward women sought to deflect internal violence and tension away from itself.