Do You Wear ''Camo''? Feminists Globalize Demilitarization

Do You Wear Camo? Feminists Globalize Demilitarization

The Women of Color Resource Center (WCRC) isn't what most experts think of as a site of research on militarization and demilitarization. But that oversight may be due to many militarization experts' narrow views of ''expertise.'' The WCRC is an energetic organization located in downtown Oakland, California, that develops programs for Asian- American, African-American, Native American, and Latina women in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As the director of the WCRC's small antimilitarism project, Christine Ahn wanted to find a topic that would engage these young women in thinking about their own possible complicity in the processes of militarization. In 2004, she began mulling over the meanings of ''camo.''

Camo is the popular nickname for the fashion of turning the military's camouflaged designs into tank tops, shorts, pants, knapsacks, even condoms. Ahn wondered whether the many young people she knew who were buying and wearing this ''hip'' fashion -- her peers -- had thought about the implications of their style choices.

Christine Ahn went into action. She organized what might have been the first-ever antimilitarism fashion show. In late May 2005, the WCRC took over the refurbished theater in downtown Oakland. By 8:00 p.m., the lobby and the theater were alive with displays, music, performers, and the conversations of a lively audience. Christine Ahn had invited a wide array of Bay Area groups -- ranging from young male hip-hop fashion designers to Code Pink, a network of feminist peace activists. They were all crowded into the lobby, displaying their wares and talking with other attendees. Inside the theater, the show was about to begin. The lights went down, and the disc jockey started to spin her records.

The master of ceremonies was a tall African-American woman, herself a performance poet. She was soon joined by local rappers talking about war and peace. The stage began to fill with camo. There was camo casual wear, there were camo ball gowns.

Then there were ''blasts from the past.'' One participant told the story of khaki -- how khaki wasn't coined by the Gap but was an Afghan word to describe the distinctive color of that country's stark hillsides, which the British imperial army adopted for their own uniform colors but only after their red-coated troops were defeated in their initial efforts to subdue the region's less dramatically attired tribal fighters. Khaki as Americans know it has its roots in military conquest.

The lights then focused on a well-known and longtime Bay Area Latina activist who strode to the front of the stage wearing a classic 1940s outfit -- hat, gloves, brass-buttoned coat, and pumps -- all in patriotic red, white, and blue. She was followed by a slender young woman wearing nothing but a bikini. The audience cheered. Then the poet MC told them that the bikini was created by a designer who wanted to exploit the international popular interest in the US atomic bomb testing in the Pacific, which rendered Bikini, an island, uninhabitable. The audience uttered a collective gasp.

That was the goal of Christine Ahn and her WCRC colleagues. She didn't want to lecture these California women and men about what to think about the camo in their closets. She hoped instead that the fashion show would start them thinking and developing their own thoughts about militarization and about their own personal relationships to militarization.

Militourism

Thousands of miles away, in Turkey, other local activists were organizing their own innovative event -- one they hoped would raise ordinary civilians' consciousness about the dailyness of militarization and generate new awareness of that often invisible process. They didn't choose a fashion show. These Turkish activists, women and men, many of them feminists and anti-conscription activists, instead organized a militarism tour. They called their event ''Militourism.''

Taking people on bus and walking tours around Istanbul and Ankara, they pointed out buildings where every day some small or major strand of militarized Turkish life was woven. Most of these places were the sort that civilians passed every day without noticing and without thinking about what was going on inside, about what was being done there in their names, for their protection, for the ''good of the nation.''

It is not as if Turkish women and men are unconscious of the central role that the military has played since the 1920s in shaping both public policy and national myths of unity, modernity, masculine duty, and the secular state. The Turkish military has made itself too prominent to be overlooked. Yet the organizers of the annual Militourism events wanted to make even clearer to their fellow citizens that both the military and practices of militarized living were more diverse and more ''ordinary'' than perhaps even the reader of the daily newspapers realized.

Invasive Textbooks

In Israel, a small group of middle-aged Jewish women (and now several young women and men in their new youth group) have come together, one by one, and call themselves New Profile. Out of their concern that children's lives were becoming militarized, they tried to build bridges with Israeli academics involved in the country's educational system. It has turned out to be hard work.

They also decided to take their messages about militarism into modest local sites. These women created a traveling exhibit to reveal how ideas about soldiering, about the country's recent past, about the military's centrality in Israeli life are even inserted into primary school children's education. The exhibit isn't flashy. It was assembled by the New Profile women themselves by looking at what their own children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews were being shown in schools and in contemporary children's books.

They mounted their findings on five-foot-high folding boards. The women have to be able to carry these boards around the country, to Haifa and Tel Aviv, as well as to Jerusalem, and assemble the exhibit without fuss. A New Profile member sits by the exhibit wherever they get permission to set it up -- in schools, in local community centers, at conferences.

She doesn't lecture the people who come to look at its images and captions but is there to answer any questions or just to engage in conversation. At first glance, some people who come think that the exhibit is in praise of the military. Only on closer inspection do they see the problematic relationships and ideas being revealed. There is a guest book, too, in which anyone who comes to look at the exhibit can share their own reactions. Underlying the New Profile modest exhibit is an ambitious goal: to inspire their fellow citizens, especially their fellow Jewish citizens (15 percent of Israel's citizens are non-Jews, mostly Palestinian Israelis), to weigh the costs of having created or consented to such a deeply militarized public culture.

Dialogues for Disarmament

A fashion show, a tour, a small display of children's books. These are not the usual activities for analyzing militarization or laying out the steps for demilitarization. But the San Francisco, Oakland, Istanbul, Ankara, Tel Aviv, and Haifa activists who created these events did so because they had become convinced that if militarization took myriad and often unnoticed forms, then demilitarization would start only when the invisible became visible, when the naturalized was made problematic.

Members of each group believed in the power of ideas -- ideas about what is stylish, what is normal, what is educational. They believed that popularly held ideas -- not just interests, policies, or institutions -- were the source of militarization. Thus, all of these people working for demilitarization had become convinced that only through raising new questions in the minds of their fellow citizens could fresh conversations begin -- conversations that might eventually turn into pressures for demilitarization.

In Afghanistan one of the principal critiques articulated by local Afghan women's groups is that the US occupying forces and their superiors in Washington depended heavily on the male commanders of the regional militias (referred to as the Northern Alliance) in their military invasion to topple the Taliban regime, without taking into account how militarized and patriarchal those commanders were.

Consequently, now, with the new constitutional system's legislature and president (and his cabinet) struggling to exert their civilian authority, those conservative militarized commanders (often called ''warlords'') remain entrenched in positions of power as governors, police chiefs, and the dominant bloc in the newly elected legislature. One member of the new legislature, Malai Joya, a twenty-seven-year-old woman already active in a local women's organization, won a seat in the 2005 national elections. What made her famous among Afghans was her standing up in the new legislature in December 2005 to denounce those male legislators who were ''criminal warlords… whose hands are stained with the blood of the people." In the wake of her public denunciation of the patriarchal and militarized warlords, principal players in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Malai Joya was subjected to death threats.

Demilitarization efforts in so many countries -- both developed and developing, both war-torn and war-waging -- have been resisted by those individuals and groups who have realized -- even if they do not say it out loud -- that pushing a demilitarization process beyond tokenism would require dismantling patriarchal structures, not only in the public realm, but in the private sphere as well. Genuine, lasting, and thoroughgoing demilitarization, in other words, would have to alter the relationships between women and women, between women and men, between men and men, and between women and men and all the influential institutions of society -- schools, legislatures, religious organizations, corporations, the media, the military, the offices of prime ministers and presidents.