Capitalism and Empire’s Flesh: Sexualised and Racialised Torture at Abu Ghraib Prison
By Gabrielle Bridi
Edited by Borna Atrchian and Charlotte Pieper, Peer Reviewed by Sophie Bright
Introduction
Abu Ghraib prison (Abu Ghraib) was a large complex under Saddam Hussein’s rule that was reopened by U.S.-led forces following their 2003 invasion of Iraq (Volle, 2025). In 2004, leaked photographs and investigations, including the Taguba Report revealed systematic abuse and torture of detainees (Taguba, 2004; Volle, 2025). Documented practices included: forced nudity and sexual humiliation; forced imitation of sexual acts with other detainees; torture and assault; photographing and videotaping (Taguba, 2004, pp. 16-18). Seymour Hersh’s (2004) New Yorker article brought these abuses to public attention, marking a critical moment when the hidden violence of the War on Terror (WOT) became visible to global audiences. These spaces are known as black sites which are extraterritorial, clandestine detention centres in legal grey zones used to detain suspected criminals, often associated with their secrecy and use of violence (“black site,” n.d.). The suspension of law in black sites like Abu Ghraib existed within a context of Othering, colonial conquest, and Empire building that ensured access to strategic resources and reorganised markets through militarised governance in the name of security.
This essay examines how racialised and sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib reproduced colonial domination, and how these practices functioned within the broader political economy of U.S. Empire. I argue that sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib prison, an exceptional space in which law operated through its suspension and violence was spectacularised, reproduced colonial logics of domination by staging detainee bodies as sites through which imperial power was asserted and justified. This demonstrates how the WOT merged cultural superiority with the political economy of U.S. hegemony, advancing a moral and economic project that helped secure strategic global resources while reaffirming Orientalist distinctions. Using a combination of discourse and visual analysis, I draw on primary sources, (photographs and an official report) and secondary sources (journal articles and book chapters) to examine the racial and sexual violence at Abu Ghraib and its connection to political economy and U.S. Empire. While photographs and official reports about Abu Ghraib have been analysed, existing accounts often isolate them from political economy and U.S. Empire, and political-economic analyses likewise overlook the visual, territorial, and racialised and sexualised modalities of rule. Alternatively, I treat them as mutually constitutive, showing how territorial legal exception, racialised and sexualised spectacle, and political economy have worked in tandem to sustain capitalism and U.S. imperial rule.
This essay develops a theoretical framework grounded in the state of exception, necropolitics, biopolitics, Orientalism, and political economy to analyse the role of sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib. It situates these practices within a capitalist and imperial context, arguing that sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib asserted Orientalist hierarchies to justify the WOT as a moral, economic, and imperial project extending U.S. hegemony by securing control over global resources and capital.
Theoretical Frameworks
To analyse the power and legality in Abu Ghraib, Agamben’s (2005) the state of exception appears as a judicially produced fictitious lacuna or gap where the application of law is suspended in the name of necessity (war, terrorism, public order). Paradoxically, the law preserves itself by invoking necessity to suspend its own operation in exceptional circumstances, where certain lives or spaces are excluded from legal protection so that legality can continue to function elsewhere as “normal.” Mbembe (2019) extends this through necropolitics, a theory which centres sovereignty’s power to decide life and death and to place certain populations outside ordinary legal protections. Necropolitics then builds on Foucault’s (2003) notion of biopower (the regulation of biological life) by showing how sovereignty —the right to kill—structures contemporary domination by subordinating life to the power of death (Mbembe, 2019, p. 92). The dynamic between the aforementioned concepts stems from colonialism, where sovereignty manifests as the right to kill within territories placed outside ordinary legal protection, or the state of exception (Agamben, 2005).
Building on the conceptualisations offered by Agamben (2005) and Mbembe (2019), Puar (2021) examines how power and death-making operate through sexuality. Her notion of sexual exceptionalism describes how national claims to sexual freedoms and gender equality become markers of cultural superiority, which are then mobilised to promote nationalism or legitimate political violence. Operating bio-politically, sexual exceptionalism reframes incidents of torture and violence against populations targeted for death as a necessary or even redemptive gesture in defence of so-called liberal values.
Grounding social practices in systemic forces, political economy is understood as “the relationship between “capitalist” and “territorialist” “modes of rule or logics of power,” the interconnections between the control and accumulation of capital and the control and expansion of territory” (Arrighi, as cited in Spencer, 2018, p. 192). Accordingly, colonialism, Empire, and capitalism are inherently intertwined (Spencer, 2018; Bhambra, 2020). The political economic perspective frames Abu Ghraib: rather than treating American exceptionalism and imperialism as merely moral claims, it situates them within an economic project. The use of Orientalist imaginaries, and the production of ‘necessary’ legal grey zones and the violence they enable, were legitimising strategies that mobilised nationalism, difference, and fear, as mechanisms for maintaining wartime policies which extended U.S. hegemony by securing control over strategic resources and capital.
Ultimately, these theoretical frameworks depict Abu Ghraib as an exceptional space (Agamben, 2005), wherein sovereign power decided life and death (Mbembe, 2019), and violence was justified as a necessary protective mission so that legality could appear to normally function elsewhere (Agamben, 2005). The use of sexual violence in this space worked dually: to create the exceptional space, and consequently, to maintain claims to cultural superiority and promote nationalism through the (re)production of Orientalist imaginaries (Puar, 2021). Orientalism (Said, 1978, 2004) describes the discourse that provides the moral and cultural justification for U.S. imperial violence as a civilising/liberating project. These ideological formations disciplined noncompliant states, protected extraction infrastructure, and opened markets through privatisation and financialisation (Spencer, 2018; Zabcı, 2010). Accordingly, resource access and capital flows were reordered in the name of security, bringing imperial violence to capitalist accumulation. Thus, the use of sexualised and racialised torture at Abu Ghraib was a means of subjugation and domination.
Sexualised and Racialised Tortue at Abu Ghraib
The colonial logics of sexualised torture as a means of domination is revealed in C. L. R. James’ (1989) discussion of its use by colonisers against enslaved peoples in Haiti. Torture methods included: whipping; iron collars to prevent movement and eating; hitting the buttocks with hot wood; pouring substances onto bleeding wounds; mutilation of limbs, ears, and genitalia; pouring burning wax or boiling sugar on slaves; packing slaves with gun powder and detonating them; and tying their hands and arms to four posts on the ground to force them on all fours (James, 1989, pp. 12-13). James characterises the use of torture as paradoxical: “To cow them into the necessary docility and acceptance necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it is this that explains the unusual spectacle of property-owners apparently careless of preserving their property: they had first to ensure their own safety” (James, 1989, p. 12). James’ analysis explains the logics of torture; although it may physically weaken persons treated as property, it is deployed as a necessary means of maintaining power and ensuring the master’s safety. Many of the torture methods he describes resemble those at Abu Ghraib, particularly physical assault, pouring chemicals and liquids on individuals, attention to genitalia, and forcing prisoners on all fours. The continuity of torture methods serves as reminder that the means by which domination and control are achieved, while appearing to have changed, remain eerily similar to those used in the past. This genealogy reveals that sexualised violence has long been integral to the logics of racial capitalism and Empire. Recognising past and present violence is crucial for understanding capitalism and colonialism as ongoing processes that mutually reinforce one another (Allina-Pisano, 2012; Bhambra, 2020). While in Haiti, violence was a means of dominating subjugated bodies for their labour and thus capital accumulation, sexualised torture in Abu Ghraib reproduced colonial logics of domination by making subjugated bodies unworthy of respect. Their subjugation was rendered necessary to safeguard the security and authority of the capitalist imperial project, including the protection of extraction infrastructures and integration into private markets.
The use of torture extended beyond maintaining domination. Torture was enabled by the discursive production of subjects who endured violence and dehumanisation as “enemies of the state” (Banwell, 2020, p. 116; p. 124). Torture was consequently cast as a necessary and legitimate means of securing safety (James, 1989) for the “West” and its values. The suspension of law (Agamben, 2005) and sovereign power over life and death (Mbembe, 2019) were framed as a redemptive means of defending and spreading liberal values against a putative threat (Banwell, 2020; Bhattacharyya, 2008; Richter-Montpetit, 2007). Torture also functioned to (re)assert the U.S. as Self in response to “emasculating” and power-challenging events, notably 9/11 and Iraqi resistance (Richter-Montpetit, 2007). This rests on Orientalist dichotomies: “Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values — the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma — there would have been no war” (Said, 2004, p. 872). Further, it reproduced Orientalist dichotomies, perpetuating the “East” as dangerous and threatening and the “West” as safe and liberatory, thereby legitimising violence and civilising missions (Banwell, 2020; Khalid, 2017). Sexualised, gendered, and racialised torture (Richter-Montpetit, 2007) extended these imaginaries, operating through pre-existing and continually reproduced hierarchies (Bhattacharyya, 2008). The Muslim body was produced as a legitimate object of torture situated outside the law’s protection and mobilised to affirm a U.S. self-image as sexually liberated and morally advanced. Orientalist dichotomies constructed the “East” as sexually constrained, modest, and backward against a rational, progressive, and sexually liberated “West.” Ultimately, Orientalist dichotomies produced dual claims to exceptionalism: national and sexual (Puar, 2021). Puar (2021) states:
[T]he violence of the United States is an exceptional event, antithetical to Americanness, and thus by extension, U.S. subjects emerge as morally, culturally, and politically exceptional through the production of the victims as repressed, barbaric, closed, uncouth, even homophobic, grounding claims of sexual exceptionalism that hinge on the normativization of certain U.S. feminist and homosexual subjects. (p. 113).
Thus, the production of the subject as an inferior Other and a threat to civilisation enabled and legitimised the use of torture in private aginst detainees.
Domination was enacted not only through physical coercion but also through the eroticisation and spectacularisation of subjugated bodies. Violence and its rationale became a spectacle through photographs, testimonies, and media coverage. By 2004, disturbing images depicting the violent abuses occurring at Abu Ghraib became accessible to global audiences (see Appendix). Despite these images being unintentionally leaked and the controversy that followed, their visible notoriety has played a role in the production of detainees as dehumanised Others, who existed outside the law's protection, and inferior to the liberatory West. Figure 1, depicting two naked men detainees forced to imitate sexual positions, has illustrated the U.S. soldiers’ authority and the production of Muslim bodies as legitimate objects of violence and dehumanisation. The sexualised violence sustained sexual exceptionalism and Orientalist binaries by casting the Muslim body as sexually deviant, and the “East” as a site of suppressed sexuality in contrast to a sexually liberated “West” (Puar, 2021, pp. 87-88). Figure 2, showing naked men detainees piled on top of one another with soldiers posing in the background, has extended this dehumanisation. A visual contrast has emerged between the detainees on top of one another, creating an unstable structure, and the soldiers standing tall and proud, over them. The photograph has thus served as a visual representation of physical domination and imperial assertion, while reproducing Orientalist binaries. According to Banwell (2020), this type of photograph challenges gender hierarchies under American exceptionalism: women soldiers seem to transcend the presumed authority of men by subjugating Iraqi men, who are cast to the lowest stratum of the hierarchy (pp. 124-126). Figure 3 has extended this, depicting a woman soldier holding a naked man detainee on a leash as he lays on the floor. This has converted the more passive domination occurring in Figure 2 into overt instrumental control, placing the detainee at the soldier’s will. Through this act, the soldiers (re)established themselves as white Self while (re)producing the detainees as Other, thereby (re)producing U.S. Empire (Richter-Montpetit, 2007, p. 51).
According to Puar (2021) there is a distinct link between photography and its relationship to dehumanisation: “These photos not only depict the techniques of the torture; they also depict how both process (the photographing) and product (the pictures) are shaming technologies and function as a vital part of the humiliating, de-humanizing violence itself” (p. 107). In other words, the violence is insufficient on its own; rather, the immortalisation of the violence through photographs serves its own necessary purpose in the dehumanising process. Building on this, Richter-Montpetit (2007) sees the distribution of these photographs as evidence of the presumed moral righteousness of the colonial and civilising mission (p. 53). This relates to Said’s (2004), argument that media images capture public attention, exploiting fear and insecurity (p. 876), ultimately securing public support. The photographs, however, do not disappear; they are immortalised – trophies (Richter-Montpetit, 2007, p. 50) – archived and recirculated beyond the control of their victims (Bhattacharyya, 2008). The photographs are akin to the material immortalisation of hunting experiences, through photography and taxidermy, meant to perpetually regenerate and reaffirm the hunter’s masculinity long after the conquest (Jones, 2024, pp. 274-275). Thus, their ability to reaffirm the white Self and (re)produce the Oriental Other has extend long after the torture took place.
The photographs also established a relationship with external viewers who became participants in the violence (Bhattacharyya, 2008). The spectacularisation of violence thus normalised torture for global audiences while reinforcing a “with us or against us” division. Representations of violence not only served to globalise U.S. imperial culture, but also reminded viewers where power resides and the retaliation that resistance risks. The spectacle of torture has thus functioned as both a medium of domination and a warning, helping to sustain the moral and geopolitical order of Empire (Bhattacharyya, 2008).
Thus, the sexualised and racialised torture at Abu Ghraib asserted and justified imperial power. Sexual torture employed colonial logics of domination, as documented in Haiti (James, 1989). These practices maintained power and (re)produced Self/Other hierarchies, demonstrating how domination continues to operate bodily. The violence occurred in exceptional spaces (Agamben, 2005) where the law was suspended and all actions were framed as necessary to protect liberal values against threats and to advance civilisation. The torture also reinforced Orientalist imaginaries, justifying the methods employed and upholding U.S. exceptionalism and claims to moral superiority. The spectacularisation of violence, immortalised in photographs and media coverage, has extended dehumanisation and Orientalist dichotomies indefinitely. Widespread dissemination guaranteed international audiences, normalising torture and signaling where power resides, thereby sustaining Empire. Violent practices can be situated further within political economy, showing how racial and sexualised violence intersects with capitalism and Empire.
Political Economy of Abu Ghraib
While Orientalist imaginaries are key to legitimising imperial violence (Banwell, 2020; Khalid, 2017; Said, 2004), an ideological framing alone is insufficient to understand the WOT and sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib must be situated not only within the ideological terrain of Orientalism and imperial violence, but also within the material conditions of occupation. This requires distinguishing between the prison’s function within the occupation and the later public disclosure of the photographs. The leak of the images may indeed have damaged U.S. claims to moral legitimacy; however, this does not negate Abu Ghraib’s role within the imperial apparatus before and during the occupation. As a detention, interrogation, and intimidation site, Abu Ghraib helped produce the conditions through which occupation could be administered. Its violence contributed to the pacification of Iraqi society, the disciplining of resistance, and the consolidation of a security order within which privatisation, resource control, and market recapturing could proceed. In this sense, Abu Ghraib served capitalism as part of the coercive infrastructure required to secure the broader neoliberal and imperial reorganisation of Iraq.
Following Arrighi (qtd. In Spencer, 2018), Spencer (2018) interprets the WOT not merely as an ideological project, but as a strategic response to managing the U.S.’ post-1970s crisis of hegemony. Arrighi (qtd. in Spencer, 2018) traces this crisis to the late 1960s when profitability declined due to new labour militancy, intensifying global competition from Europe and Japan, and post-war capitalist restructuring that eroded manufacturing. Following the Vietnam war, the U.S. moved into a trade deficit and transitioned from one of the world economy’s net creditors to a net debtor. The U.S. sustained global dominance by absorbing capital from the surplus economies of Japan, West Germany, South Korea, the Gulf States, and later China. Capital inflow then bought U.S. Treasury bonds and financed corporate borrowing that funneled into Wall Street where it turned into new financial instruments and consumer loans (Spencer, 2018, p. 199).
The 1970s to 2008 saw an effort by U.S. policymakers to counteract long-term stagnation and prolong hegemony through three strategies: first, redirecting capital flows toward the U.S. market; second, pursuing a global effort to free capital from the constraints of working-class gains; third, suppressing nationalist and communist regimes in the Global South that aimed to regain control of their domestic resources. Thus, imperialism functions as a necessary instrument of U.S. hegemony. (Spencer, 2018, p. 200). Following this logic, the WOT functioned to secure political and military authority, control the supply and price of oil, and discipline noncompliant regimes (Spencer, 2018, pp. 191, 201). Spencer (2018) states, “[t]he war in Iraq was, quite simply, a strategic decision by policy makers to extend US control of the world economy” (p. 202).
This political-economic history established the conditions in which the WOT, and thus Abu Ghraib, operated, linking militarised domination to the management of global capital. The war’s racial and sexual violence must be understood through Orientalist imaginaries, the production of Iraqi subjects as “enemies of the state” (Banwell, 2020, pp. 116, 124), and the spectacularisation of violence to global audiences, legitimising the war efforts abroad. These violent campaigns are cast, not as unjust harms against people, but as essential actions against perceived threats to safety and liberalism that legitimise political claims to aggregated power. For example, Bush’s post-9/11 referral to himself as the Commander in Chief of the Army which, Agamben (2005) says,
must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible. (p. 22)
The blurring of peace and war also appears in the normalisation of “pre-emptive war strategies,” whereby the military can act without any overt threat against states that have been constructed as “evil” or “threatening.” Thus, conflict becomes everlasting, with no hope for respite, ultimately maintaining the conditions of control over global resources and capital flows, and paving the way for the expansion of neoliberalism (Zabcı, 2010, pp. 93-95). In the case of Iraq, this was done by integrating their economy into global markets through private revitalisation and restructuring. This includes: the privatisation of Iraqi state industries, particularly oil; moves towards financialisation, such as modernising stock exchanges, giving the central bank independence in pursuing monetary policy, and issuing credit; establishing new currency; creating legal frameworks compatible with privatisation, production, and distribution; and altering tax and tariff systems (USID/US Treasury document titled “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth”, as cited in Zabcı, 2010, p. 95). Fisk (2007) notes that oil was often left out of discussions about Iraq, despite being “the all-important and dominating factor in this illegitimate conflict” (p. 958). Further, the protection of southern Iraqi oilfields was a top concern (Fisk, 2007, p. 958). In line with this, keeping Iraqi oil accessible to international companies, and achieving private control over profitable oil fields, ultimately allowed more control over oil prices (Zabcı, 2010, p. 97). This, coupled with free market ideology, are forms of capital accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004), reflecting extractivism (Chagnon et al., 2022). The subjugation of racialised bodies for the geopolitical management of capital thus illustrates how race and finance are intertwined and essential to the development and persistence of capitalism and Empire (Kish and Leroy, 2015; Robinson, 2021).
Sexualised torture thus (re)produced the ideological foundations necessary to legitimise practices motivated by political-economic interests. It spectacularised imperial violence, portraying the U.S. as a victim engaging in morally righteous endeavours by defending liberal values and pursuing a civilising mission. This mission was legitimised by mobilising Orientalist dichotomies, but also served to reinforce them through U.S. exceptionalism and the dissemination of photographs which immortalised imaginaries of the “East” as backward, conservative, and sexually suppressed, the ideological opposite of the so-called liberatory, civilised, and sexually foreward “West.” Their global dissemination also played a role in desensitising audiences to violence, normalising punitive domination, and signalling where power resides and what resistance risks. Thus, spectacle turns coercion into common sense, legitimising action driven by political-economic interests, and connecting racialised hierarchy to market rule.
Conclusion
Situated within the post-1970s capitalist crises of accumulation and the extension of U.S. hegemony through control of global resources and capital, Abu Ghraib was not incidental, nor the mistreatment inflicted by a few individual actors; rather, it was an exceptional space in which sovereignty suspended law in the name of security, allowing sexualised and racialised violence. Through Orientalist imaginaries and the spectacle of violence, Abu Ghraib’s abuses were framed as necessary to protect liberal values and spread civilisation. Such justificatory frameworkers legitimised the wider imperial project, disciplining noncompliant states, protecting extraction infrastructures, and reopening markets via privatisation and financialisation. Abu Ghraib thus represents a convergence of colonial logics of domination, American exceptionalism, subjugation over Oriental Others, the spectacularisation of violence, and the management of capitalist crises, revealing the inherent connection between imperialism and capitalism.
Such analysis exposes the intentionality of persistent war and exceptional spaces, and the violence they inflict for the benefit of capitalism and Empire. Ongoing attempts to neglect this aspect of Abu Ghraib serve to uphold the legitimising tones of Orientalist imaginaries, relying on stereotypes and spectacle to justify past and current forms of domination over people and the extraction of resources. Acknowledging Abu Ghraib as an instrument of a moral narrative about security and liberation to justify economic strategy aligns coercive power with market objectives. This recentres attention from the existence of individual misconduct towards racial governance and accumulation, situating Abu Ghraib within the function of U.S. hegemony. Accordingly, Abu Ghraib was not an outlier, but a manifestation of a system where security logics reallocate access to resources and markets. These outcomes warrant rethinking the structural systems that uphold such sites and what it takes to dismantle them.
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Appendix
Figure 1
Naked men detainees imitating sexual positions (originally published in The New Yorker).
From The images that shamed America (The Guardian, 2004).
https://www.theguardian.com/gall/0,8542,1211872,00.html.
Figure 2
Naked men detainees piled on top of each other (originally published in The New Yorker).
From The images that shamed America (The Guardian, 2004).
https://www.theguardian.com/gall/0,8542,1211872,00.html.
Figure 3
Naked man detainee attached to a leash that is held by a soldier (originally published in The Washington Post).
From The images that shamed America (The Guardian, 2004).