A Harvard "education" (in gender studies and US imperialism) for Iraqi students

Iraq's universities were ignored during the long dark night that was Saddam's reign. In that, they share some of the problems faced by Eastern European universities after the Wall fell: aging infrastructures, a cowed and politicized professoriate and student body, and the effects of a generation of isolation from the world's great centers of higher learning.

Therefore, it's heartening to know that some Iraqi students are now able to travel abroad -- something nearly impossible to before -- to be exposed to Western higher education. Or at least, it would be heartening if American schools weren't filled with people who opposed Iraq's liberation, wish America's attempt to allow democracy to flourish there ill, and preach their own form of anti-intellectual orthodoxy (often enforced with speech codes -- see the post just below).

The Harvard Crimson reports that six Iraqi students will attend this weekend's Harvard National Model United Nations (HNMUN). It'll be the first visit of Iraqis to HNMUN in its fifty-one year history, and the first time in thirty-five years that Iraqi students have participated in a "formal academic conference." The $20,000 bill for the visits is being picked up by Harvard, something it normally doesn't do (hat tip, Chrenkoff):

Although HNMUN does offer financial aid to help defray the cost for students that want to participate in the conference, the Iraqi students will be the first delegation to be entirely paid for by Harvard, according to Smith.

“It was a fantastic opportunity for Harvard and IRC [International Relations Council] to step up and demonstrate the diverse ways in which we try to promote awareness on international relations...It was such a fantastic opportunity that we couldn’t pass it up,” said Swati Mylavarapu, president of the IRC.

Aside from the obvious -- why would anyone want to learn about the twenty-first-century UN unless they're planning on a career of money laundering, graft, or the diplomacy of dictatorship -- one might set aside qualms about Harvard's obvious lack of respect for non-pc opinions, even when expressed by its own president. This is, after all, a truly momentous event: free Iraqis flying to the West to taste the long-forbidden fruits of freedom.

Getting full exposure to the typically busy life of a Harvard student, the Iraqi visitors will have a jam-packed schedule during their time in Cambridge.
The students will attend the conference course Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality 1203, “Gender and the Cultures of US Imperialism,” appear at a variety of luncheons and receptions, and participate in a panel discussion open to the entire Harvard community.

Robin Bernstein, the Assistant Director of Studies and Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, is an interdisciplinary scholar of American culture whose areas of specialization include performance studies, literature, queer theory, racial formation, and the history of childhood. A former member of the editorial board of Bridges, a journal of Jewish feminist culture and politics, Bernstein is the co-editor of Generation Q, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and author of a children's book entitled Terrible, Terrible! Her third book, an anthology entitled Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theatre, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Bernstein's current book project, entitled "Racial Innocence: White Supremacy and the Performance of American Childhood," uses performance theory to analyze the ways in which white supremacists of the nineteenth century deployed ideologies of childhood to structure and power large-scale racist projects, including slavery and the post-Reconstruction disenfranchisement of African Americans.

Prof. Bernstein's home page provides more information and links, as does her resume. Her links page lists many GLBT sources as well as academic and research-oriented sources. Her upcoming book, Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, isn't out yet from the University of Michigan Press, but it does contain an essay by this performer, who comes recommended by the United Nations Development Fund for Women. He/she describes him/herself as:

Through her many experiences, including growing up first generation of Haitian parents , being seen as a woman and perceived as a Black man on the streets of NY and all over the world, transsexual, drag queen, gay man, gender-illusioning woman, and more, she continues to explore how society’s conventional gender roles, sexual norms, and concepts of beauty are repressive and oppressive and have caused needless suffering.

Here is a bit of the syllabus for Prof. Bernstein's course to be attended by the Iraqi visitors at Harvard:

We will use the methods of Cultural Studies to consider US imperialism not only as a military venture, but as a cultural project. Cultural Studies is (to offer a very condensed definition) an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the creation and flow of power and resistance, especially through ordinary people’s uses of mass-marketed products. The field of Cultural Studies enables us to consider imperialism not as a narrowly defined governmental venture, but rather as a sprawling set of practices in which many, if not all, people participate. These practices include performances on stage and screen, tourism, holiday rituals, and the writing and reading of literature (both “high” and “popular”). One may look for imperialist practices not only in military units, but in World Fairs, museums, and schools.

Cultural Studies opens unique avenues by which to consider issues of gender. Analyses of imperialism based in military history or international relations often focus on men as colonizers and conquerors, women as victims. In contrast, this course’s focus on culture opens the following questions:

1. How has gender affected the experiences of colonized people (and how has the experience of being colonized affected those people’s genders)?
2. How has gender affected the experiences of colonizers (and how has the experience of colonizing affected those people’s genders)?
3. How has gender functioned as part of the ideologies and strategies of American imperialism?
4. How has gender functioned as part of the ideologies and strategies of anti-imperialist activism and resistance?

These four questions constitute the heart of this course.

The reading assignment for yesterday, Thursday, included (copied from the online syllabus): Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 237-291. (SB); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995)

Future readings are eclectic and range from the writings of Davy Crockett and Henry Clay to (again, straight from the syllabus) Lynda Boose, “Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’: From the Quagmire to the Gulf.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 581-616. (SB); and Yifat Susskind, “One Year Later: Women’s Human Rights in ‘Liberated’ Iraq.”

The latter, available here, paints a bleak picture of post-war Iraq and blames America for the low quality of living conditions there, especially as they impact women. It somehow fails to mention the rape rooms, mass graves, and totalitarian regime that Coalition troops overthrew.

All of this adds up to an attempt to leave the six visiting Iraqi students with the impression that America, liberator of their country, is in fact a racist, sexist, homophobic land. They will learn, in effect, just how awful life here really is, as seen through the eyes of one of the world's most prestigious institutions.

But will they believe it? At the very least, the danger exists that they will speak with media, here or abroad, and tell of what they learned in this course. So armed, anti-American media in the Arab world can bombard its audience with news from the belly of the beast on just how horrendous life here is. Or, conversely, they may seize upon such a class to demonstrate our ostensible degeneracy to an audience already propagandized by decades of anti-Western bile.

Let's hope that our Iraqi visitors find the presentation of life at Harvard to be so at odds with the world they observe around them, and with the nature and generosity of their hosts while they're in America, that the conclusions they draw will be more enlightened than the ideology of some Harvard professors. Let's hope, that is, that they ask themselves: how could a people so vicious sacrifice blood and treasure to free us from Saddam? If they draw the logical conclusion, they will have a leg up on many Harvard students and professors who, never having experienced real tyranny, spend their lives imagining themselves victims of the freest society on earth.

Update: Peter Schramm at No Left Turns has posted a thoughtful comment on my post:

It is . . . very silly or worse to put such people through this pseudo-sophisticated claptrap (e.g., "Gender and the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism"). Other things aside, it doesn’t do anything for the Iraqis: It doesn’t engage them in conversation, it doesn’t teach them anything. I had some experience (well, perhaps a lot of experience) in doing such things with Estonians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, et al) and the simple truth I learned is this: Begin at the beginning and let those thinkers who are the most clear on the ends and methods of republican government talk for themselves. They read Jefferson, Madison, and so on. They almost always focus on why human beings have a right to rule themselves and, once that is reasonably assumed, what do they do with that awesome power? Is there a limit to it? And why should folks who have asserted their right to govern themselves limit their own power by, for example, dividing their own power? Everything else--the flaws and imperfections (chattel slavery, bad or disputable decisions), the things most difficult to understand (e.g., that it is individuals who have rights rather than nations or tribes or groups) is eventually made clearer. You start at the beginning, in other words, and then you go from there. You don’t start where the Left intellectuals have led us because you never are able to work it backwards; they have killed the clarity and the naivete of the beginning. This isn’t rocket science.

I think ordinary human beings can think about these matters pretty clearly, and the thinking has to be done naturally, without the overlay of the PC that pretends depth and nuance. When people start thinking about the foundations of self government, they want to start from scratch, better to get to know the minds of Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln--and have conversations with them--than with professor Robin Bernstein, the Assistant Director of Studies and Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, or Peter Schramm for that matter. I have done this in many different settings here and abroad, and I have found that it works every single time.

Update II: Little Green Footballs has linked to this post, and they have a lively discussion going on at LGF's incomparable comments board. This comment is especially apt. Perhaps you didn't know it, but water is a feminist issue.

I cringe whenever I hear the phrase "gender studies". Here is the Harvard lesbian teacher Robin Bernstein--->>

Welcome to my website. I am the Assistant Director of Studies in the Program of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. My two published books include Terrible, Terrible! (a children's book) and Generation Q (a co-edited collection of essays by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered youth). My third book, an anthology entitled Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theatre, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.

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