The duality of the modern world, with its disharmony of opposing cultures, gradually pushes one towards the sense that a longtime war has raged in absence of a clearly designated front line. A war, separate battles of which have flared up long before they were understood as parts of a unifying phenomenon. A number of well known events at the onset of the new century have made comprehension necessary, and the need for a peaceful resolution of conflicts between interlinked civilizations urgent. Yet there have been severe challenges to the process of peaceful interpenetration of cultures.
The events at the Iraqi prison facility Abu Ghraib make for one such a striking challenge. The photographic evidence of abuse and humiliation have elicited the strongest reactions worldwide, and one feels urged to investigate the root causes of these events. In one of the photos - the one where female soldier Lynndie England holds a prisoner on a leash - the Dutch artist Bee Flowers saw a projection of the ideas of Julia Kristeva - a direct illustration of two components of the Abject: Horror and the Female.
According to Kristeva, Abject first and foremost signifies the border between the Self and the Other, the border that prevents different entities from dissolving into each other. But the Abject also disrupts the identity of the Self which was formed within an existing order. Socially, it emerges as the opposite to what religion, morality and ideology regard as positive. According to Kristeva, the Abject has since time immemorial been linked to the female: women in all cultures were thought of as bearers of the foul, the sinful and unclean. Woman, in such manner, became the object of religious, moral and ideological exclusion.
Gender hierarchy and gender-typical behaviors are proscribed by institutions of social control and through cultural traditions. The gendered consciousness on the individual level then perpetuates the existing system of relations within the domination/submission oppostion. Traditionally, a significant means of preserving the gender hierarchy, apart from direct violence, is control over the female sexuality, to which end Eastern as well as Western societies have developed a rich assortment of tools. The stability of binary thinking, within which the woman finds herself assigned a status of defective ‘otherness,’ has been successfully challenged only in the Western world (and only so in very recent history) where the definition of a woman's identity has now shifted towards her capabilities to independently affirm herself in professional roles.
Kristeva points to the importance of developing means to legitimize the ‘feminine’ beyond categories of either the elevated or the repulsive. After all, 'abject,' 'unclean' and 'foul' are not qualities as such, but merely denote a situation of exclusion in relation to a border determined by the Subject. If we follow Kristeva’s argumentation through, in the photos of Lynndie England with Iraqi prisoners one indeed sees more than just the obvious fear for the ‘other,’ one sees a mutual and unconscious fear of an alien culture. Here, the inversion of the gender hierarchy, the violation of the traditional positions within the dominant/submissive opposition, reveals the ‘female’ as a functional and effective weapon within this specific cultural context. Symbolically this is expressed by Bee Flowers in the combination of a dagger and a vulva.
Bee Flowers also created the image of the Lynddiebot, a collage personality, a female warrior representing a fragmented contemporary identity patched together from a variety of influences and role models. The Lynddiebots are joined by female soldiers, equipped with highly pronounced female genitals and breasts worn as parts of their armory. These soldiers are the new American weapon, drawing on the fear of the ‘vagina dentate.’ In those works, where Lynddie becomes the central figure, two cultures collide and the works are saturated with references and guiding citations from the history of the feminist movement that has altered the Western world during the past several decades, as well as cultural features of Islamic societies, standing in contradiction and oppostion to those changes. Illustrations of Western and Eastern social models are reduced to imaginary, but no longer unthinkable, ‘inside out’ situations where the traditional gender hierarchy is either reversed or amplified. These cultural contradictions were also emphasized when one of the Abu Ghraib prisoners remarked that “beatings don’t hurt us … the worst insult is to feel like a woman.” Bee Flowers points out how this misogynist statement blurs the border of the opposition oppressor/oppressed and complicates questions of morality and guilt.
Bee Flowers’ work is ideologically neutral and incorporates multiple viewpoints at once: the artist sets up a line of intersection of cultures by collaging both space and ideology. Interestingly, Kristeva has also referred to the Abject as being perverse, since it does not fully correspond to either the prohibited or to the law, but instead circumvents these both, confusing them in order to utilize them, but without acceptance of either.