Women in Politics Week: "The Women of Qumar": Feminism and Imperialism in ‘The West Wing’

CJ Cregg (Allison Janney) in The West Wing

 

“The Women of Qumar” originally aired on November 28th, 2001, approximately two months after the first American airstrikes in Afghanistan. That timing is crucial to consider when looking at how this episode presents an imagined Middle East. Though The West Wing is often billed as optimistic counter-history and as an antidote for the policies and politics of the Bush administration, the show’s Qumari plot line is much more of a fictional transcription of current events than it is a progressive alternative. Most importantly, in creating Qumar as a fictional country meant to evoke the worst American fears and prejudices about life in the Middle East, Aaron Sorkin effectively packages and sells many of the motivations behind the current war in Afghanistan in the guise of progressive entertainment.

Nancy McNally (Anna Deavere Smith) CJ Cregg (Allison Janney) in The West Wing

A kind of “I speak for all women” conviction is displayed by Press Secretary C.J. Cregg in this episode, whose conversation with National Security Advisor Nancy McNally (Anna Deavere Smith) suggests her belief that all other female members of the administration share her perspective. Her suggestion that all-out militarism is an appropriate reaction to the gender-based oppression experienced by the women of Qumar is troubling on several levels. First, it contributes to a “savior” narrative which glosses over the very real existence of gender-based violence and oppression in North America and paints Middle-Easterners as explicitly violent, backwards, and misogynistic. Second, since Qumar is a fictional amalgamation of various imagined versions of Islamic countries in the Middle East, it’s implicit in C.J.’s argument that Islam is a chief factor in these women’s oppression — a loaded assertion which makes troubling assumptions about the experiences of Islamic women, particularly with regards to personal agency and faith.

It’s also worth noting how convinced C.J. is that the United States will one day be at war with Qumar. “This isn’t the point, but we will. Of course we will. Of course we’ll be fighting a war with Qumar one day and you know it,” she tells Nancy. And by the end of the fourth season, the United States and Qumar will be at the brink of military conflict, but it won’t be because America has stepped in to nobly rescue the women of Qumar from their religion and culture — it will be the end result of a series of events set in motion by President Bartlet’s authorization of the extrajudicial assassination of the Qumari defense minister, Abdul Shareef. 

“The Women of Qumar” won Allison Janney an Emmy, and contains what is perhaps her most impassioned speech on women’s issues. It’s framed as a look at C.J.’s personal, emotional side and seems largely intended as character development — but as the Qumari plot line becomes more and more important throughout the next two seasons, C.J.’s initial framing of the issues becomes more integral to the show’s moral stance on militarism and foreign policy. Her outbursts in this episode seem intended to garner emotional support and lend legitimacy to the Bartlet administration’s foreign policy, which tends to favor intervention and unilateral strikes and which often betrays a belief in the inherent moral superiority of the United States as a kind of self-appointed global police. Rather than presenting C.J.’s perspective as a morally ambiguous mobilization of feminist rhetoric in the service of imperialism and militarism abroad, her speech in this episode is glorified as a noteworthy example of her personal feminist politics. 

In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, “I would like to suggest that the feminist writings I analyze here discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/re-presenting a composite, singular “Third World Woman” — an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.” In “The Women of Qumar,” this amalgamating force is literally employed as a plot device, one which creates an archetypal Third World Woman and then invents an amalgamated nation around her.

One of the most troubling moments in C. J.’s conversation with Nancy is her statement, “Apartheid was an East Hampton clambake compared to what we laughingly refer to as the life these women lead” – a statement that paints this amalgamated, fictional country (which refers back to viewers’ hazy imaginings of the Middle East as a whole) as a region so backwards, so violent, and so primitive that no women’s life there could possibly be worth living. In addition to erasing the diversity of Middle Eastern women’s experiences, C.J.’s words here suggest that she considers herself, as a white feminist, to be an authority on deciding whether or not the lives of racialized women are “real” lives. Given that many of these women would experience drastically increased violence and displacement as a result of an American investigation, her implicit suggestion here that the current “worth” of the lives of the women of Qumar is something for Americans to decide and for Americans to wager with is particularly problematic.

The Middle East appears so frequently in popular culture as a simplistic amalgamation of stereotypes that the practice has earned a name on TV Tropes. The site writes that this trope, “Qurac”, has three main iterations — an Arabian Nights version, a version featuring a tin-pot dictator, and “Jihadistan”. In all three, Middle Easterners are depicted as fanatical, violent, and greedy. The West Wing employs this practice again by inventing “Equatorial Kundu,” a “generic” African country experiencing civil war. In both cases, the insertion of fictional countries into real-world geography allows the writers to include what they consider to be “typical” Middle Eastern and African storylines, without being held accountable for perpetuating harmful stereotypes by any one real-world country or government.

CJ Cregg (Allison Janney) in The West Wing

The use of mainstream feminist rhetoric to justify and legitimize war hits painfully close to home, since The West Wing’s Qumari plot line was airing alongside the mobilization of this rhetoric in real time to advocate for an American presence in the Middle East. This rhetoric, which framed the war as an effort to liberate Middle Eastern women from the oppression of veil and Taliban alike, continues to thrive today — in the third presidential debate, both President Obama and Governor Romney displayed more enthusiasm for women’s issues when they fit into a narrative of militarism abroad than when they tied in to domestic issues. It’s worth noting that when asked directly about the gender pay gap and other women’s issues in the second debate, both candidates shied away from the question to refocus their energies on the economy — but though no questions about women’s issues were raised during the foreign policy debate, both were happy to offer unsolicited analysis of the U.S.’s responsibility to “protect” women’s rights abroad via drone strikes and continued American presence. 

In the political context in which these episodes aired, the mobilization of imperialist feminism is not just a monolithic and over-simplified representation of feminist politics, but also a troubling repackaging of war in an otherwise-progressive show. 

More broadly, Aaron Sorkin has been criticized throughout his career for his tendency to “[create] one-dimensional female characters in male-dominated settings,” as Ruth Spencer wrote in The Guardian. Though The West Wing brought us Allison Janney’s fantastic portrayal of C. J. Cregg, it’s also rife with women who waver between being genuinely-realized characters and caricatures of strong women in politics — for example, Amy Gardner and Abigail Bartlet. When it comes to representing feminist politics, The West Wing tends to funnel women’s issues through one character and one character only in any given episode — and given that character is more often than not Amy Gardner, the show’s representation of feminist advocacy in politics becomes limited. 

In addition to C. J.’s speech, “The Women of Qumar” is also notable for the introduction of Amy Gardner, played by Mary-Louise Parker, who would frequently act as the face of the show’s feminism throughout the rest of its run. When Amy is introduced, she’s arguing with Josh about legalizing sex work, a conversation in which she dismisses Josh’s concerns about “creat[ing] more criminals in a criminal environment” and disregards questions of women’s ability to unionize, access social services, health care benefits, and exert a degree of control and regulation within their industry. Amy often seems to be convinced that she speaks for American women as a whole and knows what’s best for them, a conviction which is rarely problematized by a show which by and large neglects to present contrasting feminisms or delve into any women’s concerns beyond the discourse of white mainstream feminism. Though she and Josh often fight over women’s issues, their conversations more often devolve into flirting than they do into substantive engagement with the issues at hand. In “The Women of Qumar,” Josh’s suggestion that her desire to police sex work is at odds with a belief that the government should stay away from women’s bodies is a compelling and worthwhile discussion, but one which is, disappointingly, left to fall by the wayside in favor of their interpersonal chemistry. 

The issues raised here point to a larger issue with the way feminist politics are represented in the show — a tendency to engage with feminism on a surface level and a failure to adequately inhabit its complexities and contradictions. And by privileging a certain brand of white mainstream feminism and by failing to place that feminism in any sort of critical context, The West Wing’s foray into political feminism is, for the most part, a missed opportunity.

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Pauline Holdsworth is a fourth-year English student at the University of Toronto, where she is the Editor-in-Chief of The Strand. She also covers women’s issues for Campus Progress. You can follow her on Twitter at @holdswo.