In Bush Junior's discourse, the “Oriental Other” was either emphasized as feminine and infantile (Afghan and Iraqi men, women, and children) or barbaric, beastly, and toxically masculine (al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein). Thus, once again both “Others” embodied qualities maintaining an essential gendered inability for self-determination. Bush Junior, like his father, was discursively constructed as the sole player granted agency in the international arena: The toxic masculine villains were creatures of nature who simply acted through bodily impulses rather than through rational and strategic logic and thus had to be controlled by Bush Junior.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial and feminist theory on how imperial powers rhetorically justify intervention by constructing colonized/othered subjects as incapable of self-rule. SEED: Potential essay angle on the rhetorical continuity of gendered dehumanization across American presidential administrations and wars.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 47