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How America Justifies Its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity and Sovereignty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Bonnie Mann
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Abstract

The lies about the reasons for the U.S. war against Iraq provoked no mass public outcry in the United States against the war. What is the process of justification for this war, a process that seems to need no reasons? Mann argues that the process of justification is not a process of rational deliberation but one of aesthetic self-constitution, of rebuilding a masculine national identity. Included is a feminist reading of the National Defense University document Shock and Awe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , Fall 2006 , pp. 147 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Hypatia, Inc.

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