Nature vs Culture

Oliver suggests that our fear and fascination with suicide bombers is their use of the body as weapon. She asserts that the use of the body directly correlates to our conceptualization of imperialism and colonialization—we believe that the use of the technological weapons are of a good and civilized variety, as opposed to the emotionally driven/irrational/primitive weapon of the body. Oliver discusses the use of the word “terrorist” to denote the “bad guys with technology” as opposed to the liberated Western fighters, who are known as “heroes.” In regards to attitude of good people having technology and bad ones using their body, “It also suggests that we feel somehow threatened by bodies themselves; that bodies used as weapons are especially uncanny because they conjure a deeper ambivalence we feel about our own bodies as well as the bodies of others. …Within the history of Western thought bodies are figured as finite, inconsistent, even irrational, and so they have been conceived of as opposed to civilization and culture.” (128) Bodies are conceived of as lesser than technology, being the epitome of civilization:“…bodies are imagined as part of nature and therefore never completely assimilated into culture, while politics is imagined as the most organized form of culture, which removes us from the realm of nature altogether.” (130)

         The dominance of culture over nature is at play here. Not only do women’s bodies reflect the “natural,” but the “other”—Palestine in this case—also reflects the “natural” and “other”: “…real flesh and blood bodies have been associated with women and excluded from the realm of the properly political while properly political bodies are seen as male bodies.” (131) The issue of the body as a weapon crosses these standardized boundaries of bare bodies versus technology. “Yet what is most remarkable about these bare bodies is that they are not bare; they are not natural; they are not innocent. Rather, they are armed and dangerous…they are more than the return of the repressed natural body within Western politics. What is more dangerous than a natural body is a body that won’t stay put, a body that moves between nature and culture, a body become a political statement.” (130-1) This ambiguity surrounding the body of female suicide bombers is intriguing. They have successfully employed their body as a weapon by combining nature and culture. They are willing to kill their own bodies in order to kill others. This is a huge threat to Western countries where “saving one’s own ass” may be the goal, while simultaneously killing as many others as possible, pushing a button from afar. “Indeed, what these women suicide bombers make manifest that unsettles Western politics is the way in which the body is always political; there is no bare body, no natural body.” (131)