BM

Military Femininities Notes

Introduction: Women in the U.S. Military

  • Historical and Theoretical Considerations

Autobiographies and Gender

  • Gender is produced through institutions and discourses.
  • These institutions and discourses seek to divide and differently authorize persons as ‘men’ and ‘women’ (Gilmore 17).

Citizen-Soldier and Republican Mother

  • The performative understanding of identity implicit to civic republicanism applies to gender as well as civic identity.
  • Practices constitutive of citizen-soldiers also construct masculinity.
  • Exclusion of female individuals from these same practices contributes to the dominant construction of ‘femininity.’
  • Women traditionally engage in practices constitutive of ‘republican motherhood’ rather than citizen-soldiers (Snyder 3).

Military Femininities

  • No hegemonic military femininity.
  • Different military femininities are constructed in different autobiographies.
  • Radical: Change the genre of war autobiographies.
  • Conservative: reproduce and use certain generic tropes, structures, and narratives.
  • Imperialism

Imperialist Discourses

  • Rely on certain metaphors or tropes to portray the superiority of (white) European or American characters (Shohat and Stam 137).
  • Colonial and gender discourses intersect in ways that produce unstable and contradictory subject positions (166).
  • A Western female character can simultaneously constitute ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ identity and alterity.
  • In the imperial narrative, a Western woman can be subordinated to Western man and yet exercise domination over non-Western men and women (Shohat and Stam 166).

Narrative of Rescue/Captivity Narrative

  • The Western imaginary has metaphorically rendered the colonized land as female to be saved from her environmental disorder.
  • It has also given prominence to more literal narratives of rescue, specifically of Western and non-Western women – from polygamous Arabs, libidinous Blacks, and macho Latinos (Shohat and Stam 156).
  • Appear in British and U.S.-American imperialist discourses.
  • Special significance in U.S. because of captivity narratives and its place in the Frontier Myth (Slotkin 14).

“One of the Boys?”: Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More Than You

  • “No one has ever written that book—about what life is like for the 15 percent. Don’t count Jessica Lynch. Her story meant nothing to us. The same goes for Lynndie England. I’m not either of them, and neither are any of the real women I know in the service” (Williams 15).
  • Guys bond through competition. They play football games, they play video games. They verbally spar. They throw rocks at one another. Guys like to try and establish hierarchy. They jockey for who’s on top. Now, I can play that game
  • Maybe it sounds like they were jerks who hated girls and liked to talk us down. . . . They were and they weren’t.
  • Passing as a narrative assumes that there is a self that masquerades as another kind of self and does so successfully; at various moments the successful pass may cohere into something akin to identity (Halberstam 21).
  • Williams tries to set herself apart from other incompetent female soldiers.
  • Sorting out able soldiers from unable ones (Schwär 199).
  • Lauren is a tiny person. She’s perky and cute, . . . But she’s tough when she needs to be. And she backs me up. Did I also mention that she’s the one on our team with the most serious looking weapon?
  • As female hero/soldier she came to reflect the US’s ‘civilized’ and emancipated culture in contrast to a carefully constructed image of the middle east as barbaric (Kumar 299).
  • The extension and maintenance of U.S. empire has depended on strategies that both terrorize and protect civilians. A contradiction which structures military masculinity echoes tensions which structure American empire (Belkin 49).
  • guns amplify sexualized power, projecting masculinity and violence, which encourages dehumanization and degradation, while also allowing the possibility for subversion and negotiation (King 87).
  • “After I got to 2nd Brigade’s BSA [Brigade Support Area] in November, Zoe and I were always together. We were together each day all day. When my aunt sent me cross-stitch, Zoe and I cross-stitched together. Something to do with our hands while we talked. The quietly good joy of being able to talk with somebody I loved. Someone who could talk to me about smart things. No more throwing rocks and talking about boobs; Zoe and I discussed issues and ideas” (245; orig. emphasis).
  • Wives of army officers in the nineteenth century American West relied on their ingenuity and the company of other women for support and information about fashions, patterns, and cutting and sewing techniques

Citizen-Soldier and Republican Mother: Shoshana Johnson’s I’m Still Standing

  • Shoshana Johnson's experience as a soldier and a mother.
  • Personal narrative of being alone during childbirth.

Black Military Femininity

  • “My hair needed attention in a bad way. The braids were coming loose and the extensions were pulling out. I knew I looked a mess, and while that may seem like a trivial thing to think about while one is a prisoner of war, it had a lot to do with how I felt about things. My hair, my everything, was out of control” (145).
  • Hairstyles can be linked to identity, social status, health, and sense of purpose in African American culture (Rooks 7).
  • Hairstyles may be seen as both individual expressions of the self and as embodiments of society’s norms, conventions and expectations (Mercer 112).
  • hair— as visible as skin color but also the most tangible sign of racial difference—takes on another forcefully symbolic dimension.
  • racism is conceived as an ideological code in which biological attributes are invested with societal values and meanings, then it is because our hair is perceived within this framework that it is burdened with a range of negative connotations (Mercer 113).