Presidential Address Heroes, Warriors, and Burqas: A Feminist Sociologist’s Reflections on September 111

My presidential address looked back at the gendered imagery of American heroes and warriors, Muslim terrorists, and oppressed Islamic women as they appeared in comparatively sophisticated media sources in the first 6 months after September 11. The imagery was conventionally gendered, but the actions of women and men reported in the same sources showed multiple gendering— heterogeneity within homogeneity. Making this multiplicity of gendering visi-ble blurs and undermines gender lines and the inequities built on them. The social constructions of heroism, masculinity, and Islamic womanhood are core parts of the gender politics of September 11, a politics deeply embedded in the current debates over the causes and consequences of terrorism and war. KEY WORDS: September 11; gender; masculinity; terrorism; Islamic feminism. When I chose the theme for the 2002 annual meeting—The Sociolog-ical Future is Now!—I planned in my presidential address to talk about how, since the millennium, we were morphing into global time, postmod-ern bodies, and multiple genders. But after September 11, the millennium seemed—well, a millennium ago. Postmodernism had become the clash of the fundamentalist religious world with what I thought of as my human-ist, secular, modern world, and multiple genders had gone the way of the burqa.3 The sociological future was indeed now, but it wasn’t the brave new 1This paper was presented as the presidential address at the Eastern Sociological Society Annua