ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the pervasiveness of both the saviour's and the victim's stances throughout representations of Benazir Bhutto's political career showcases a specific strain of War. This war on the Terror discourse the appeal of which lies in how it frames US interests as progressive, righteous, and, significantly, threatened. The author examination of the hallowing of Bhutto's image involves, first, how the representations rely on saving discourse and its cultural implications. Then, she connects the conventional elements of saving discourse to the War on Terror's concomitant claiming of a victim's role. The seemingly paradoxical conjunction of the saviour's and victim's roles in this narrative of Bhutto's emergence as Pakistan's last best hope for democracy bears affective dimensions that themselves bear gendered implications. The author derives the ideas about saving discourse from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's formulation that the British colonial prohibition on sati in India represents a case of '[w]hite men [saving] brown women from brown'.
