Dangerous Brown Women in the U.S. National Security Imaginary: Constructing Threat, Making Empire

Powerful nations like the United States justify maintaining their disproportionate military power by pointing to imminent threat from international enemies. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. has cast the role of enemy Other upon a variety of nations, from Iraq and Yemen, to Russia and China. This enables the U.S. to garner support for military actions from foreign invasions to domestic surveillance, and weapons buildup from drones to advanced missiles. In this talk I focus on a specific arena of the U.S. weapons arsenal—biological (i.e., germ) weapons. In the public imagination, germs are primarily thought of as needing to be controlled and eliminated (especially during a raging pandemic), but germs have also been weaponized and used in warfare. Like many other nations, the U.S. developed its biological weapons arsenal in World War II, and has maintained it in some form ever since. This talk examines U.S. reinvestment in its bioweapons arsenal during the war on terror—on the basis of national defense against potential bioterrorism/biological warfare attacks. I will discuss how U.S. government and media used Islamophobic discourse constructing an Arab/Muslim terrorist—in particular an Arab female bioterrorist figure—to stoke fear of an attack and thereby justify the enhancement of the U.S. biological weapons arsenal.

Gwen D’Arcangelis is associate professor in Gender Studies at Skidmore College. Her work centers on the socio-political dimensions of science, medicine, and public health. She has written articles dissecting the construction of white scientific masculinity in U.S. national security discourse, critiquing gendered Orientalism in the U.S. news media during the 2003 SARS disease scare, and highlighting the extraordinary nurse activism during the war on terror. Her newly released book, Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility, examines the gendered, raced, and imperial features of U.S. focus on bioterror and germ threats.