Janet L. Larson

Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson's War’

Abstract Charlie Wilsons War (2007), Mike Nicholss film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIAs proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilsons war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the films emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy systems loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlies war’ continues to matter because Americas second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace womens rights and lives.

WHERE IS THE WOMAN IN THIS TEXT? FRANCES POWER COBBE'S VOICES IN BROKEN LIGHTS

I N 1864 FRANCES POWER COBBE jumped into the still-churning waters of Essays and Reviews (1860) and Colensos Pentateuch (1862) with a book that put the case against an infallible Revelation even more frankly than these men had liked or dared. Broken Lights , her main contribution to the mid-Victorian Bible wars, went through at least eight editions and, next to her Duties of Women (1881), was the “most successful” of her books ( Life 2: 370). Identifying “Frances Power Cobbe” on the title page as the “Author of an ‘Essay on Intuitive Morals,’ ‘The Pursuits of Women,’ etc.,“ the material object in a strangers hands left no doubt that here was a work by a woman who had written on likely female subjects. Yet the table of contents, which lays out a schema of Churchmens positions on the Bible questions of the hour, yields no clue that a feminist advocate wrote this book. Even in perusing its discussions of high theological matters, most readers would not have suspected, as I will argue, that the analyses of these mens positions are colored by Cobbes distinctive “womans perspective” (Caine 147), and that public and personal gender issues are being negotiated through its modes of discourse and argument.