Iraqi women’s narratives of identity and security: challenging dominant knowledge

This thesis examines narratives of Iraqi women in relation to US representations of them and in relation to their experiences of US foreign policy since 2003. Specifically, it asks: How do Iraqi women’s narratives disrupt existing knowledge about Muslim women since 9/11? Scholars of Feminist International Relations (IR) have argued that US narratives since 9/11 have represented Muslim women as in need of saving in order to justify the US ‘War on Terror’, in particular with regards to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Whilst these scholars have sought to deconstruct and oppose this discourse as disempowering to Muslim women, they have often not considered Muslim women’s own narratives and how these relate to dominant discourses about them. This serves to reproduce binaries of dominant/subordinate, powerful/powerless that underpin dominant relations of power and hegemonic epistemologies. This thesis is based on original data in the form of semi-structured interviews with 19 Iraqi women of different religious and class backgrounds, who are predominantly refugees from the conflict in Iraq and based in Jordan. Drawing on postcolonial feminist approaches and Feminist Security Studies, this thesis analyses these interviews as narratives of identity and security. The first substantive chapter considers the degree to which Iraqi women’s own narratives relate to US discourses about them. Towards this end, the chapter deploys Stuart Hall’s decoding theory and an intersectional approach to reveal that Iraqi women articulate a pluralistic positionality towards the US, premised on a complex relationship that endorses as well as contests elements of their representation. Individual women negotiate multiple positions towards different issues as expressions of their self-identity. Their narratives indicate both resistance and (re)negotiation within a hegemonic framework. This ambivalence disrupts dominant knowledge about Iraqi women yet is unacknowledged in the vast majority of the literature. The second substantive chapter considers Iraqi women’s narratives of their experiences of war, conflict, violence and displacement since 2003. Drawing on Feminist Security Studies and intersectionality, the chapter reveals the central concern of security and how it is constituted by as well as constitutive of self-identity. The chapter emphasizes that self-identity is constructed not only in relation to gender but also class and religious and ethnic background. Therefore, the chapter highlights that there is no unified conceptualization of security, and this differs between women according to their different self-identities. In this way, the chapter contributes to deessentializing Muslim women’s experiences and disrupting hegemonic knowledge as well as further extending feminist understandings of the links between security and identity. Overall, this thesis argues for the significance of women’s narratives as sources of alternative knowledge production, challenging the binary epistemology and essentializations of dominant knowledge about Muslim women