violence

“It was kind of unreal,” the Steamboat Springs, Colorado native said, describing his recent 34th birthday fete at Kandahar Airfield, better known as KAF. “At least for a few minutes, you could pretend you were somewhere else. It was like going back home” (source).

“I was expecting to arrive in a warzone but instead here I am wearing sunglasses in the sun and eating a baguette,” said Dimitra Kokkali, a NATO contractor newly arrived from Brussels. “On my first night I surprised my family by calling them from an outdoor rock concert” (source).

A Time magazine slideshow, titled “R&R at Kandahar Airfield,” uses images to describe how the busiest airport in the world “tries to re-create the comforts of home for the coalition forces in Afgahnistan.” Kandahar Airfield is the busiest airport in the world because all supplies and troops pass through on their way to or from war in Iraq or Afghanistan. At any given time there are about 25,000 service members and civilian contractors at the airfield.

These images of the Kandahar’s “Boardwalk” recreation area are striking for a few reasons. First, they show a blurring of the line dividing the homefront and the warfront. The slide show includes images of service members using FaceBook in computer labs, and eating meals in their fatigues at TGI Fridays.

Second, these images reflect that there is increasing emphasis on how service members are supported and cared for by the military during wartime. These photos show the side of war that is not about fighting and danger—instead, they are about the comfort and making a foreign land where they are fighting as “homelike” as possible.

Third, these show the blurring of the boundary between the military and privately owned businesses. Civilian Contractors are augmenting military personnel during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the inclusion of these civilian contractors in war zones has raised the issues of the safety of civilian workers and the costs of hiring corporations (Contexts).

Finally, as a consequence of the blurring of the boundaries of homefront and warfront, the division between the country of Afghanistan and the military is sharpened. Afghanis (except for those few with security clearance) are not allowed to shop or enjoy the free entertainment on the Boardwalk at Kandahar.  Meanwhile, service members can safely buy souvenirs on the Boardwalk itself.  Afghani culture is commodified as a tourist attraction in this theme park-like Boardwalk setting.

All of these images speak to the changing boundary between the homefront and the warfront, and as a result, changes in how we, as a country, view war. Instead of the images of brutality, death, and chaos that Americans saw in their living rooms on TV during Vietnam, for example, these images show the military taking care of service members who are being entertained, keeping in touch with loved ones, and having fun.

But as this service member describes, walking the Kandahar “Boardwalk” in a warzone is still a jarring experience:

“I couldn’t believe I was in Kandahar eating a double-dipped chocolate ice cream at sunset on a Saturday afternoon,” said Coleman, who was downing a strawberry smoothie from the French bakery behind him, where an Eiffel Tower climbs a wall above picnic tables with fake potted plants.

“It was a surreal experience,” he said, as a jet fighter roared across the sky, letting loose a stream of defensive white flares. “I remember thinking, ‘We’re in the heart of the war-zone. The bad guys are 10 miles away. And here we are eating soft-serve ice cream'” (source).

Wendy Christensen is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College whose specialty includes the intersection of gender,war, and the media.

Abbotsford, Wisconsin’s Mark Prior posted a sign reading “NO NEGRO’S ALLOWED” sign [sic] at the entrance to his strip club.  From the story at NBC (via Racialicious):

“Our mistake is sometimes we look for logic in something that is just plain stupid,” says Dr. Selika Ducksworth-Lawton, an African American historian at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Meanwhile, in Hayden, Idaho, Mark Eliseuson celebrated the first snow with a KKK snowman, complete with noose.  According to KTLA News, Eliseuson took down the snowman after being told that he could be charged with a “nuisance”:

(Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the tip off.)

See also our post on race-themed parties at colleges and universities and our post on The Compton Cookout.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The illuminating 3:49 minute video below, borrowed from Michael Shaw’s BagNews, features photographs taken by New York Times photojournalist Mike Kamber while he was embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq. Narrating the images, Kamber discusses the censoring of his photos by the U.S. and the ethics of documentary photography.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In this video we see people trampled at a 4am opening of a North Buffalo Target on the Friday after Thanksgiving. There is an analysis to be made here, and it involves something about American materialism and the orgy of consumption that is called “Christmas.”   But I would be happy if we would just stop calling sales “Doorbusters” given that, y’know, sometimes people actually break down doors and people die.

Via Blame it on the Voices.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Abby Kinchy, Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Richard M., and Alana B., who blogs at Pecan Pie, sent us a link to a post by Maya at Feministing about an anti-domestic violence PSA from South Africa. The group that created the ad, People Opposing Women Abuse, set up an experiment of sorts. A man first played drums loudly in his townhouse, quickly leading to multiple complaints by neighbors about the noise and a written warning. On a different night, the group loudly played a tape of what sounded like a violent dispute between a man and a woman.  The reaction? Watch:

Aside from the obviously horrifying implications about domestic violence, I think it’s an interesting illustration of what people feel comfortable intervening or complaining about. As Maya points out in the original post, we all  like to think we would immediately be at the door or on the phone with police, but many of us have, at one point or another, encountered a situation where we didn’t know whether to intervene or not:

…I once sat in a subway station in Manhattan late at night and watched a man try to get a sobbing, drunk woman to leave with him. I hesitated, not sure what to do. A few minutes later the police arrived; someone had acted, but it wasn’t me. Just last week, I saw a man aggressively slap a woman’s butt as she walked past in my neighborhood. I looked the other way, and she didn’t say anything either. I ignore sexual harassment—directed at me or others—pretty much every day.

I suspect what is going on here is a mixture of factors: that we put violence between partners into a different, less serious category than, say, a fist-fight between strangers at a bar, an unwillingness to intervene in what many think of as a private family matter, and fear about our own safety if we get involved or call authorities, among others.

For a thorough discussion of the so-called “bystander effect,” and the complex reasons people may not report behavior they find inappropriate, check out this article (free of charge) from the Journal of the International Ombudsmen Association.

An anonymous frequent reader sent in this Calvin Klein jeans ad that has been removed from billboards in Australia after the Advertising Standards Bureau banned its display on the grounds that it implies sexual assault. I’m putting it after the jump because it might be triggering for some people.

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Concerns about the use of full-body scanners at airports have been in the news repeatedly in the last week or so, though polls show high levels of support or at least tolerance for them among the American public. The major issue appears to be concerns about privacy, since the scanners provide an image of a person’s body through their clothing, which can be quite detailed, though others also mentioned health concerns and whether or not the scanners actually increase safety.

Amanda C. pointed out that the organization Fly with Dignity, which opposes the use of scans, has three rotating images on their website homepage, two of which clearly connect the scanning process with the idea of women being groped, complete with their tear-stained, distraught faces as they go through a pat-down (the alternative to a scan):

Apparently when trying to make a point about being degraded or victimized, men don’t make suitable subjects.

Amanda finds it disturbing that they’re equating pat-downs (your option if you refuse a full-body scan) with sexualized violence (and using images of traumatized women to do so).

Gizmodo has released a gallery of leaked images from body scans, if you’d like to see some examples (here’s a fuller story about the images—thanks to Alll for the tip.)

Thoughts? Is sexual molestation a legitimate metaphor here?

Gizmodo posted an image created by Kamel Makhloufi based on the most recent data on the war in Iraq posted at WikiLeaks. The image divides deaths into categories illustrated by colors. Blue = U.S./Coalition forces, light green = “host” deaths (that is, members of the Iraqi government), gold = civilians, and gray = insurgents. On the left they’re arranged by totals; on the right, as the deaths have been distributed over time:

Of course, as the Gizmodo post points out, this doesn’t tell us who did the killing, so we don’t know what % of the civilians were killed by Coalition forces vs. insurgents. But it is a stark reminder of how much of the burden of war generally falls on non-combatant civilians.

Thanks to Jeff H. for the link!