This Book is an examination of American media discourses pertaining to democracy and
feminism in Iraq and Afghanistan during the U.S.-led military conflicts. The major focus is the
relationship between the representations of gender and democracy. The project scrutinizes the
ways that gender norms have influenced perceptions of democracy and the ways that democracy
has influenced what are believed to be acceptable gender behaviors. Through an analysis of texts
from both news media and popular media, this Book asks how
stories of Iraqi and Afghan women are presented and how gender, looked at through a
performative lens, reveals something that is otherwise unspoken in our conceptions of
democracy. I focus on three representations of rituals that are deemed democratic and
investigate the way these representations portray democratic and gendered rituals during
wartime.
I pursue a close textual analysis of three case studies-the photographs of the Iraqi
election of 2005, the 2007 book Kabul Beauty School, and the blog Baghdad Burning-
concluding that they offer three distinct instances of gendered, ritualized democracy. In the first
case study chapter, which examines photographs after the 2005 elections in Iraq, the images are very focused on markers of both democracy and femininity. The captions and uses of the
photographs suggest that the two themes are seen as complimentary. The second case study,
which is a memoir about the beauty industry in Afghanistan, is explicitly about female
empowerment and less obviously about democracy promotion. By contrast, the third case study,
which looks at a popular blog written by an Iraqi woman, contains recognizable discussions of
democracy but an emphasis on gendered bodies is not readily apparent. Analysis of these texts
allows for a better understanding of the interplay between these rituals and behaviors.
