White women’s torture-sex acts expressed forbidden desire while reasserting white supremacy over Arab men

Evidence

If there is any specific aspect of gender that may be glimpsed in what white women such as Lyndie England did, it is perhaps, as Susan Willis has suggested, in white women enacting desire for Arab men, ostensibly to humiliate them, but accomplishing at the same time a crossing of both racial and gender boundaries. The transgression serves, paradoxically, to remind white men that they are not the only objects of white women’s sexual attention. White women at Abu Ghraib might have been, as Willis put it, ‘playing their poor Southern white boys against racial others of forbidden desire’ and coming as close to miscegenation as white supremacy will allow. Yet the joke, in the end, was on the Arab men, and it is more likely that it is in the spirit of cheering on the lynching and drawing of racial boundaries through hostility and fascination that we can better read the white women’s actions. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 183