GENDERED DISCOURSES OF WAR:
DECONSTRUCTING GENDER AND THE WARRIOR MYTH IN
POSTMODERN WARFARE
Jessica Ritchie
Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
May 2011
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies University of Melbourne
Produced on archival quality paper 2
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Abstract
This thesis seeks to integrate a gender theoretical perspective into the study of gender and war. Scholarship on gender and war in the disciplines of history and political science has typically endorsed a binary model of gender whereby ―gender‖ has been conflated with the oppositional and incommensurable categories ―male‖ and ―female.‖ Such approaches have resulted in a lack of critical engagement with the varying roles of men and women in war as they have tended to bifurcate wartime populations into male perpetrators and female victims. In contrast, this thesis employs a poststructuralist feminist approach to uncover the ways in which the Western gender binary is constructed through the mechanisms of postmodern war. I explore the interaction between symbolic and material manifestations of gender through a focus on the sexing of the human body at war. Biological discourse that insists on the ontology of sexual difference combines with gendered war mythologies to construct the warrior as an exclusively male embodied identity. This thesis examines the interaction of these discursive and narrative processes in the postmodern mediascape. Media are a central and constitutive component of the postmodern war machine. They also play a central role in the perpetuation of gender hegemony in the postmodern period, shaping gendered reality in ways that have material implications for men and women. I analyse fictional and non-fictional, and traditional and new media forms, in recognition that these all combine to comprise the postmodern media landscape. I argue that representations of postmodern war in Western media are characterised by an underlying tension between gender conservatism and gender transgression. Media reinforce the male/female binary by constructing the warzone as an exclusively male space and the warrior as an exclusively male identity. Yet through their engagement with the unstable identities that characterise postmodern war— particularly that of the female combatant—media also suggest the possibility of subverting the gender binary in the context of war. New posthuman technologies are changing the nature of both the physical and the virtual battlefield, with potential ramifications for the future of war, sexed embodiment, and the relationship between the two. 4
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Declaration
This is to certify that
i. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the Preface, ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, iii. the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.
Jessica Ritchie 6
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Preface
Parts of this thesis have been published by Monash University Press in History Australia. Ritchie, Jessica. ―Instant Histories of War: Online Combat Videos of the Iraq Conflict, 2003– 2010.‖ History Australia 8.1 (2011): 88–107.
Parts of this thesis are forthcoming in Feminist Media Studies. Ritchie, Jessica. ―Creating a Monster: Online Media Constructions of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic Primary Campaign, 2007–8.‖ Feminist Media Studies 13.1 (2013). 8
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Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge my supervisor, Professor Joy Damousi, for her assistance with this project. Thanks also to Dr Ara Keys and Dr Sean Scalmer for their comments on earlier drafts.
Thanks to Coralie Crocker, June McBeth and Erica Mehrtens for their invaluable help with administrative matters.
I am the grateful recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award and the Helen Macpherson Smith Scholarship which have provided me with funding during the course of this thesis.
Special thanks to Frances and Ross Ritchie, and Joe Shero. 10
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Table of Contents
Introduction 13
Part 1 Deconstructing Gender: The Warrior Myth and the Problem of the Female Combatant
Chapter 1 Gender and Wartime Violence: Theoretical Framework 26 and Literature Review
Chapter 2 Sex and Violence in the Postmodern Military: Constructions 61 of the Female Soldier‘s Body in Military Discourse
Chapter 3 ―Manless and Man-eating‖: Monstrous Amazons and the 87 Warrior Myth
Part 2 Mediating the Sexed Body in Postmodern War: The War on Terror and American Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 4 The Information War on Terror: Constructions of the Heroic 119 Body in News Media Coverage of Afghanistan (2001–) and Iraq (2003–10)
Chapter 5 Writing Gender, Writing the Self: The (Re)construction of the 152 Soldier‘s Body in Combat Memoirs from the Iraq War (2003–10)
Chapter 6 Politics as a Continuation of War: The Posthumanisation of 187 Hillary Clinton during the Democratic Primary Campaign (2007–08)
Conclusion 219
Postscript 227
Bibliography 228 12
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Introduction
...war and masculinity are two mutually dependent myths, merging the technological future, when men would become perfect, with the nostalgic past, when they already were. — Leo Braudy1
Although it is not often acknowledged as such, war is a highly gendered phenomenon. The human trajectory of war—who wages war and against whom; who kills and who does not; who is killed and who is spared; who is raped, sexually assaulted and tortured; who benefits from war and who suffers; who is included in policies regarding the declaration, duration and aftermath of war and who is excluded—is based on the logic of gendered subjects. War is organised around gender, with wartime identities traditionally split along gender lines. The identities of soldier, hero and leader are gendered masculine, while mother, sweetheart, nurse and victim are feminine. Similarly, nations at war consolidate around a belief in their masculine firmness and resolve and their enemies‘ cowardice and effeminacy. War also relies on gender for legitimacy: armed conflicts are waged in the name of ―women‖—from the infamous ―face that launched a thousand ships‖ to the ―liberation‖ of Muslim women under the Taliban regime in the post-9/11 War on Terror—and require men to perform the violence of war out of allegiance to their status as ―men.‖ On individual, collective and national levels, war is always shaped by gender.
This is not to say that without gender there would be no war, but rather that without gender war loses its particular cultural meaning; gender and war are not connected teleologically but conceptually. War does not make sense outside of gender; without gender it ceases to be intelligible, interpretable, denotable. Without gender, in other words, war does not signify. At the same time, gender relies on war for its signification. War is gendered, and war also genders, constructing its subjects as gendered beings around the activities of giving and taking life, of being the agent or the recipient of violence. The two constructs—war and gender—are thus mutually constitutive and determinative. As such, a study of war is necessarily a study of gender, even if this fact is not recognised. War cannot be bifurcated into gendered and non-gendered components, into areas where gender ―matters‖ and others where it does not. Scholarship on gender and war is thus at once requisite and tautological. While it realises the primacy of gender politics in the theatre of war, it also serves to erroneously isolate gendered analyses of war from generic scholarship in the fields of history, political science and international relations.
1 From Chivalry to Terrorism, xxiii. 14
As Joan Scott has noted, ―In its descriptive usage...gender is a concept associated with the study of things related to women,‖ and research in these disciplines often reduces a study of gender and war to a study of women and war.2 Academic interest in women‘s experiences of war began in the 1970s when feminist historians took up the cry of Lysistrata that war is not just men‘s business and argued that women have participated in and been affected by war across cultures and throughout history.3 To a large extent, this scholarship has assumed that women‘s wartime experiences are fundamentally different from men‘s. It has focused on women‘s contributions to war efforts in factories, in hospitals, and on farms, as well as on their material and symbolic roles as mothers, mourners and victims, largely in isolation from the quintessential male experience of soldiering.4 Some feminist historians have recognised the problematics of such segregated analysis. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz argue that research on women in war requires ―a new historical perspective...in which women are studied in relation to men and as part of identifiable gender systems.‖ Such a perspective is necessary to avoid
the pitfalls of isolationism, which stresses the uniqueness of women‘s experience and, because it examines that experience virtually in a vacuum, cannot always explain change in women‘s lives. The study of gender systems also avoids the problems of assimilationism, which, by emphasizing parallels between actions and achievements of women and men, obscures historical distinctions between the two. By insisting that feminine identities and roles—femininity itself—must always be analyzed as part of a system that also defines masculine ones, the study of gender moves women‘s history from the margins to the center of ‗mainstream‘ history. This shift entails nothing less than a rewriting of mainstream history.5
Indeed, there has been an attempt within feminist scholarship to transfer critical focus from ―women and war‖ to ―gender and war,‖ of which this thesis forms part. This new perspective involves an engagement not with the categories ―women‖ and ―men‖ as discrete entities but with the interconnections among categories within gender systems.
2 Scott, ―Gender: A Useful Category,‖ 1057. 3 The heroine of Aristophanes‘s Lysistrata famously asserts women‘s right to participate in the business of war. 4 For some examples, see Gluck, Rosie the Riveter; Grayzel, Women and the First World War; Powell and Westacott, Women’s Land Army; Jim Sullivan, Doing Our Bit; Twinch, Women on the Land; and Tyrer, They Fought in the Fields. 5 Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines, 4. 15
Pioneering international development scholar Cynthia Enloe‘s work attempts to move beyond this isolationist approach by focusing on the gendering of militarism, a process which involves the interrelated constructs of masculinity and femininity. While women have traditionally been excluded from the military as an institution, Enloe argues that they have always and everywhere been subject to militarisation.6 Enloe recognises the structuring role of militarism in wider society; a state‘s military needs ―define the social order‖ which includes ―those gender definitions which bolster ideological militarism.‖7 All women (as well as all men) are involved in and affected by militarism, from the frontline soldier and the politician to the prostitute and the housewife. Although it acknowledges the interrelationship between masculinity and femininity, however, Enloe‘s project nonetheless continues the segregation of gender identities by assuming an ontological connection between militarism and manhood. For Enloe, while militarism affects women, it is an inherently masculine process.8 She argues that women are ―militarized,‖ a claim that assumes a male agentic force that engages in the militarising. By this logic, women do not (and cannot) militarise themselves. Women may be in the military in increasing numbers in contemporary Western societies, but they are not (nor can they ever be for Enloe) of the military.
Existing scholarship on both ―women and war‖ and ―gender and war‖ accepts and endorses the binary model of the Western gender system whereby the human population is split into two categories: ―male‖ and ―female.‖ Gisela Bock‘s argument that ―women and female experience have a history which, though not independent from men‘s history, is nonetheless a history of its own, of women as women‖ assumes a unified category ―women‖ to which the identities of roughly half the human population can be meaningfully assigned.9 In addition, as Enloe‘s work shows, this scholarship assumes a direct relationship between
6 Enloe explains militarism as an ideology, and militarisation as the process by which the ideology of militarism is established and reinforced (―Demilitarization,‖ 23–24). She further defines militarisation as ―a process with both a material and an ideological dimension. In the material sense it encompasses the gradual encroachment of the military institution into the civilian arena.... The ideological dimension is obviously closely linked to this. What we are looking at here is the degree to which such developments are acceptable to the populace, and become seen as ‗common-sense‘ solutions to civil problems‖ (Does Khaki Become You? 9–10). 7 Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? 11. 8 Arguably, every scholar critiquing the military through a gendered lens assumes the inherent masculinity of militarism. According to scholar and peace activist Sara Ruddick, ―Nearly everyone agrees that war is in some sense ‗masculine‘‖ (―Notes toward,‖110). Jacklyn Cock calls the army ―an institutional space for the cultivation of masculinity‖ and war ―the social space for its validation‖ (Women and War, 58). Elisabetta Addis claims that ―the masculinity of the armed forces is reflected not only in the fact that they must be ready to fight, but also in that, in peacetime, they are governed by the twin mechanisms of hierarchy and authority to a much greater extent than any other institution‖ (―Women and the Economic Consequences,‖ 17–18). Dubravka Žarkov writes of ―the masculinist nature of the [military] institution‖ (Body of War, 224). 9 Bock, ―Women‘s History,‖ 105. For another important example, see Joshua Goldstein‘s War and Gender. While Goldstein aims to move away from a study of ―women and war,‖ he nonetheless maintains an oppositional logic, defining ―gender‖ as ―a topic that includes both men and women but ultimately revolves around men somewhat more than women‖ (1). 16
male identity and masculinity and between female identity and femininity. The acceptance of these binaries is problematic in the context of feminist war scholarship because there inheres within them a power asymmetry which renders the female/feminine not simply oppositional but also inferior to the male/masculine. Traditional feminist arguments that war is an exclusively male enterprise and that militarism is an inherently masculine ideology thus reify a gender dualism which, far from challenging women‘s subjugated and victimised position as this scholarship is designed to do, in fact serves to maintain women‘s subordination in the contexts of both war and peace. Women are militarised, as Enloe notes, but we must recognise that, due to gender definitions that posit them as men‘s polar opposites, they are also unmilitarised in detrimental ways that urgently necessitate feminist engagement.
While Enloe critiques militarism through a gendered lens—her focus is on ―the processes of gendered militarization‖—this thesis is concerned with exploring the reverse side of the equation: critiquing gender through the lens of militarism, or the processes of what might be referred to as ―militarised gender,‖ while recognising that war and gender are mutually constitutive constructs. Analysing the ways in which gender is militarised reveals fissures in the logic that war and militarism are inherently male/masculine enterprises. To state that militarism is masculine is to assume that the construct masculine somehow pre- dates militarism, that masculinity causes and/or is realised in processes of militarisation. However, if we accept, as I argue, that militarism also plays a vital role in the construction of gender then gender cannot be viewed as a construct that exists outside the processes of militarisation, through which militarism can be critiqued. As such, the notion of applying a gendered analysis of war and militarism becomes redundant; rather, a critical problematisation of the construct of gender itself becomes the only viable approach.
Taking as its starting point feminist scholarship from the fields of history and political science, this thesis seeks to integrate a gender theoretical approach into the study of gender and war. Its aim is to stretch across disciplinary boundaries in order to reconsider definitions of gender as they have traditionally been understood within these disciplines. In this thesis I use the term feminism to refer to the collection of movements concerned with establishing political, economic, and social equality between men and women. While the term has been subject to multiple interpretations, in this thesis I assume the desire for gender equality as the basis of feminism, although there is obvious disagreement about what constitutes gender equality and how this is to be achieved. This thesis employs a poststructuralist feminist, deconstructionist approach in that it seeks to critique the dualistic epistemology that characterises modernity, specifically the binary logic of gender and the ontology of male and 17
female ―nature.‖10 Poststructuralism is concerned with the role of discourse in the constitution of lived experience, and this thesis examines the ways in which gender is constructed through the discursive and representational mechanisms of war and militarism. Poststructuralism rejects monolithic, essentialist categories in favour of an emphasis on plurality, multiplicity and diversity. Because it does not reduce gender to the male/female binary, poststructuralist feminism enables a critical, reflexive engagement with gender as a construct outside the theoretical paradigm of the Western gender system. As Myra Marx Ferree, Judith Lorber and Beth B. Hess note, ―when the [male/female] dichotomy is no longer taken for granted as obvious and natural, gender itself needs to be explained.‖11 This thesis forms part of the project of explaining gender as both a system and a construct in the context of war.
The adherence to gender as a meaningful basis on which to organise identity assumes a teleological connection between sex and gender. Gender as an abstract concept must be based on some tangible (though not necessarily binary) human difference upon which we can transcribe gendered identity. This tangible difference is inscribed on/in and decoded through the body and is known as sex. It is not enough to question the naturalness of gender; we must also critique the notion of natural sexual difference—and the discourse of biology upon which it is based—in order to understand the processes of gender and identity formation. Following Scott, ―instead of reinscribing the naturalized terms of difference (sex) upon which systems of differentiation and discrimination (gender) have been built,‖ analysis must begin ―at an earlier point in the process, asking how sexual difference is itself articulated as a principle and practice of social organization.‖12 Thus a deconstruction of gender requires a deconstruction of sex, and a deconstruction of sex requires a deconstruction of the body. I will argue that war is not only a highly gendered but also a highly sexed activity. It sexes its subjects through the production and destruction of bodies, through the enacting of violence by and on those bodies, and through the designation of male bodies as killers and female bodies as reproducers. Specifically, I will focus on the body of the combatant, exploring the ways this particular type of body is sexed in the context of war.
This poststructuralist focus on the construction and deconstruction of sex in war raises questions regarding the relationship between the body as materiality and the body as
10 For other poststructuralist analyses of gender and war, see Cooke and Woollacott, eds., Gendering War Talk; and Fagan, ―Women, War and Peace.‖ Fagan argues not only that a poststructuralist perspective is vital to an understanding of gender and war but also that ―an analysis of the relationship between gender and war is essential to a post-structuralist perspective‖ of conflict situations (201). 11 Ferree, Lorber, and Hess, ―Introduction,‖ xix. 12 Scott, ―Some Reflections,‖ 79. 18
representational or discursive symbol. As Kathy Davis reminds us, ―Bodies are not simply abstractions...but are embedded in the immediacies of everyday, lived experience.‖ Davis calls for an embodied theory of the body which ―requires interaction between theories about the body and analyses of the particularities of embodied experiences and practices. It needs to explicitly tackle the relationship between the symbolic and the material, between representations of the body and embodiment as experience or social practice in concrete social, cultural and historical contexts.‖13 Particularly in the context of a study of war and violent conflict, it is vital to address the corporeality of the body. War is by definition an embodied activity and, while bodies in war are often conceived of in abstract terms—for example, through the application of generic identities such as ―the enemy,‖ or the division of populations into ―combatants‖ and ―victims‖—physical pain, injury to and destruction of the individual body are central not only to the practice of war but also to its very conceptual existence.
Deconstruction, however, has been criticised as a theoretical application to both feminism and war scholarship because it is perceived as privileging the symbolic nature of the body while ignoring its materiality.14 Yet I would argue that to deconstruct the body is not necessarily to deny its material existence; it is rather about recognising the lived experience of sex without reifying the body as site of essential sexual difference. Men and women may experience their bodies differently, but this cannot and should not be explained by an acceptance of inherent, ontological distinctions between the male body and the female body. Instead, this thesis seeks to interrogate the discursive processes by which men and women come to experience their bodies as different, while recognising that men and women do not always and everywhere have different or oppositional corporeal experiences. This thesis discusses corporal embodiment in tandem with the body in representational form, exploring the interactions between the two. As a deconstruction of the systems of sex and gender, this thesis also concerns itself equally with female and male embodiment, recognising that men also have bodies and male bodies also have sex, and that women and men experience their bodies in relation to one another.
The interrelation between experiential and representational bodies in the context of warfare is encompassed by the concept of postmodern war. Chronologically, postmodern wars are conflicts situated in ―the post-World War II nuclear period.‖15 The second half of the
13 Kathy Davis, ―Embody-ing Theory,‖ 15. 14 See, for example, Kathy Davis who argues that it is necessary to ―validate‖ sexual difference ―in order to do justice to individuals‘ embodied experiences‖ (―Embody-ing Theory,‖15). See also Schott, ―Resurrecting Embodiment,‖ whose call for a feminist materialism follows Firestone‘s Dialectic of Sex, Hartsock‘s ―Feminist Standpoint‖ and O‘Brien‘s Politics of Reproduction. 15 Cooke, ―WO-Man,‖ 179. 19
twentieth century witnessed the end of total war with its mass mobilisations of entire populations, and the beginnings of more isolated, regional conflicts in which traditional distinctions between battlefront and home front, and combatant and civilian, collapse. The concept of postmodern warfare has been used by poststructuralist feminists to illuminate the fluidity of the construct of gender through the challenge it provides to the binary identity structures reified in modern warfare.16 Some feminist theorists (as well as non-feminist scholars of war) have objected to the concept of postmodern war because, like deconstructionist approaches, it has tended to marginalise the material body.17 Indeed, some postmodern war theorists have argued that the material body is disappearing from war as technological advancements decrease the reliance on close combat in favour of long- range weaponry, and as attempts are made to minimise civilian casualties by targeting buildings and infrastructure. While this disembodying of the battlefield in postmodern war theory is highly problematic, the concept of postmodern warfare is nonetheless useful in describing the nature of contemporary conflicts. As I will argue throughout this thesis, bodies (both material and symbolic) undoubtedly remain central to war, but the concept of postmodern war can be used to highlight the changing roles and nature of bodies in war, particularly as concerns their relationship to technology and their gendered embodiment. In any discussion of postmodern war, the material body must be recognised as part of discourse not antithetical to it. As Chris Hables Gray argues, while postmodern war can be recognised as a discourse system, discourse is as much about ―what soldiers do with their bodies‖ as it is about words and images.18 Rather than denying the material experiences of the body, I employ the concept of postmodern war to raise new questions about how the body is experienced, highlighting the need for a new theorisation of the body that takes these changes into account.
The term postmodern war is most typically used to describe wars waged by Western nations with high-tech military forces19 and in this thesis I examine Western approaches to war, concentrating on the regular standing armies of these nations.20 In my use of the term Western I follow Gray, who acknowledges that ―to say ‗Western‘ is not to pretend that there
16 See Cooke, ―WO-Man,‖ for a good example of this approach. 17 See, for instance, Schott, ―Gender and ‗Postmodern War‘.‖ Schott believes the concept of postmodern war detracts from the reality of violence, particularly sexual violence, against women in wartime. 18 Gray, Postmodern War, 95. 19 Coker, for example, argues that the West wages postmodern war while the rest of the world continues to wage modern war. This refers to the ideologies behind the waging (instrumental versus existential) as well as the technologisation (or lack thereof) of weaponry and the composition of fighting forces (Waging War without Warriors). 20 Western nations continue to employ regular military forces to fight postmodern wars, although they often fight against the irregular forces of their non-Western opponents, as in the cases of guerrilla warfare and insurgency in the jungles of Vietnam, the mountains of Afghanistan, and the streets of Iraq. 20
is one West, the Occident, but rather to notice that there is a Western viewpoint that is hegemonic, not only in terms of the rest of the world but even in relationship to different discourses within Europe and the ‗neo-Europes‘,‖ that is, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.21 While I do not argue for a notion of ―the West‖ as homogenous, in this thesis I use it as a term to encompass the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This definition is applied because I maintain that there is an overarching Western gender system that is shared by these nations, despite particular cultural and historical differences between them. This thesis interrogates this Western gender system which, although it does not necessarily play out identically in each nation, I nonetheless argue is distinct from the gender systems of other cultures. Any discussion of non-Western cultures, such as the cross-cultural research cited in Chapter 1, is used to refute notions of gender essentialism but does not form the subject of this thesis. The limitation to regular forces enables a direct engagement with the relationship between military organisation and hegemonic power. Standing armies are sanctioned by the state and thus the way they are organised and the gender policies they apply reflect wider societal and institutional attitudes about legitimate violence and acceptable gendered behaviour. Some theorists have argued for a more global approach to the study of war, particularly for what this can demonstrate about women‘s varying roles and experiences in war.22 However, this thesis is based on the assumption that, while the concept of gender is universal, gender systems (the application and manifestation of gender) vary between societies.
The Western gender system (as explored more fully in Chapter 1) understands gender as a binary of male and female identity categories which are oppositional, hierarchical and mutually exclusive. As such, this thesis is interested in what a study of the Western concept of war can tell us about the Western concept of gender, and vice versa. While my focus is predominantly on the United States (which, as the largest military power in the West, is at time of writing leading campaigns in the two central conflicts of this thesis, Iraq and Afghanistan), I also provide examples from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A cross-national approach between Western nations is illuminating in that, while these countries‘ militaries have similar organisational structures and a history and present of fighting as allies in war and supporting one another‘s military endeavours, there are also some important differences in their military policies regarding
21 Gray, Postmodern War, 109. 22 See, for example, Žarkov who argues that a study of violent conflict in non-Western cultures provides more examples of women‘s acts of violence (through their participation in resistance movements and terrorist groups as well as in military forces) and a wider variety of gendered wartime roles than analysis of Western conflicts alone (Body of War, 221). For general theoretical discussions of the merits of a transnational feminist approach, see Grewal and Kaplan, ―Introduction;‖ Hesford and Kozol, eds., Just Advocacy?; and Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation. 21
gender and their approaches to war. Similarities in gendered military policies and processes of militarisation support the notion of a ―Western gender system‖ that transcends national boundaries, while differences illuminate the varying ways the same system plays out in each nation, challenging ideologies of essentialism. For example, the Canadian and New Zealand militaries have no restrictions on women serving in combat, while the U.S., U.K. and Australian militaries continue to enforce combat exclusion policies.23 However, although the removal of combat bans suggests a willingness to question rigid gender boundaries, this has not necessarily changed popular perceptions of appropriate gender roles and the conflation of men with wartime violence in these nations.
One of the central features of postmodern war is the role of media in its waging and representation. In fact, it can be argued that in today‘s conflicts there is no war without representation, that information and the perception of that information are themselves principal weapons of war. Thus in its exploration of the ways sex and gender are constructed in war discourses, this thesis is concerned specifically with the representational apparatuses of media. Developments in communications technologies have given rise to a particular type of postmodern war known as Information War, whereby the technologically advanced nations of the West use media to control information and to orchestrate war events. In this thesis, however, the term postmodern war encompasses not just war itself and the mechanisms of war‘s representations but also the related processes that serve to keep a society militarised even in times of relative peace. Constructions of the gender binary take place not only in representations of present wars but also in memories of past wars, predictions of future wars, and fictional wars waged in literature, in cinema and on television. This thesis thus applies a broad definition of Western media to encompass television drama, advertising and marketing, cinema, and literature, as well as a more specific focus on news media. My discussion is oriented toward a final analysis of Internet technologies which are becoming increasingly important in the waging and representation of postmodern conflict. Representations of war across cultural media are central to the hegemonic regulation of the gender system as well as the development of a war-ready society. However, Western media representations of war in the postmodern period are characterised by a basic tension that forms the foundation of this thesis. Violent conflict is represented in ways that seek to strengthen the male/female dualism by conceptualising war as an inherently male enterprise. At the same time, media representations create a discursive and material space for transgression of the gender binary through their engagement with fluid and unstable identities at war. As I will show, the tension between boundary collapse and boundary
23 See Postscript for recent developments in the Australian context. 22
reinforcement characterises the relationship between gender and warfare in the situation of postmodernity.
While this thesis focuses on representation across various media, each with their own reception, I do not analyse the reception of war representation. This is not a reception study and its aim is not to deduce the direct impact media representations have on their audiences. Rather, I suggest that media representations of war themselves raise important ideas and questions about the nature and reality of gender and war in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly concerning the virtuality of both war and gender. This thesis is interested in the ways in which gender is utilised and constructed in the mediascape in the context of war and violent conflict. Whether this directly influences the embodied ways men and women experience themselves as gendered beings is beyond the scope of this study. Further study of the reception of the media texts discussed here would obviously deepen understandings of the direct influence of media representations.
This thesis is divided into two parts. Part 1 provides a theoretical challenge to the ontological stability of the Western gender binary by questioning the reification of natural sexual difference within both feminist and military discourses. I argue that gender ideologies in war are based upon an interactive relationship between biology and mythology and these chapters explore how these two discourse systems work in tandem to construct gender essentialism. Part 1 centres on the figure of the violent woman in war, examining the ways she both reinforces and undermines the gender binary. Chapter 1 establishes the gender theoretical framework within which I will develop my argument. This chapter argues that the basis of the Western gender system is the distinction between men as life-takers and women as life-givers, a biological distinction that is culturally realised in what I refer to as the Warrior Myth. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, I deconstruct the Warrior Myth and analyse how it forms the basis of existing scholarship on gender and war. This chapter also discusses the frames through which I will examine gender construction in this thesis, exploring the connections between postmodernity, media and technology in the context of postmodern war. Chapter 1 concludes with a review of the literature on gender and war. While this literature is too vast to address in its entirety, I focus specifically on feminist debates regarding the controversial issue of women‘s violent agency. By interrogating feminist scholarship that denies or marginalises female violence, I will argue the importance of engaging with women‘s positions as both subjects and objects of violence if the subordination and victimisation of women is to be overcome.
Chapter 2 explores sex and gender within the Western military institution. It examines the role of ideologies of gender essentialism in the construction of the female soldier‘s body 23
in military discourse. Debates about whether women should be allowed to serve in combat in today‘s militaries reveal how biology is militarised in the service of keeping women outside the military institution and denying them access to the violence of war. Male and female bodies are constructed as polar opposites on the basis of reproductive function. At the same time, an analysis of military marketing and recruitment material demonstrates military reliance on the female soldier as sexed being, problematising conventional constructions of gendered corporeality. This chapter ends with a discussion of how the female soldier‘s body‘s is rendered monstrous in military discourse in order to marginalise and contain it. However, I will introduce the idea that the very existence of the woman warrior‘s body—and the monstrosity it represents—destabilises boundaries between male and female, and nature and culture, and thus challenges the foundation of the binary gender model.
In Chapter 3 I examine the role of gendered mythologies in the construction and maintenance of the Western gender binary. Through an analysis of the Amazons as ―origin‖ of women‘s wartime violence, this chapter argues that gendered war narratives culturally inscribe biological discourse to reify sexual difference. An exploration of Amazon mythogenesis reveals how the Warrior Myth has been maintained for centuries through complex and ongoing mythologies that denaturalise female violence. This chapter argues that the Amazon has been constructed as the original monstrous female warrior in the postmodern cultural imagination. By locating the Amazon as an originary monster figure, we can explore the tensions that inhere in Amazon mythology and in representations of the woman warrior that have developed out of her mythology. Amazonia is often lauded by feminists as a utopic example of feminine power and autonomy. However, I will argue that this assertion of the feminist potential of the Amazon is problematic because constructions of the Amazon also work in ways that undermine women‘s agency and reinforce the logic of male domination. I will demonstrate how the Amazon has been and continues to be used for both conservative anti-feminist and subversive feminist purposes. An exploration of representations of fictional Amazons in postmodern media at the end of this chapter reveals the ongoing relevance of the Amazon as a figure of cultural preoccupation and demonstrates the complexities of the gender–violence relationship in the postmodern period.
Part 2 explores media constructions of the sexed body in postmodern war in the context of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom, 2001–) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003–10) which comprised part of the Bush administration‘s War on Terror. I discuss the discursive construction of female and male bodies at war, in recognition that both masculinity and femininity are mediated constructs that comprise the Western gender system. An analysis of various media constructions of sex and gender reveals that the Warrior Myth is at once strengthened and undermined by the situation of 24
postmodern war. Chapter 4 explores the construction of gender in news media discourse about Afghanistan and Iraq through an analysis of two American soldiers (one male and one female) who became central players in the media war. Through a discussion of the War on Terror as an example of Information War, this chapter examines the influence of mass news media in the shaping and waging of postmodern war, and the unique and specific implications this has for the construction of sexed bodies in the period of postmodernity. Focusing on the rhetoric of war heroism in media, I demonstrate how heroism is gendered and located in the male body, precluding women from embodying the hero identity. This chapter argues that, in addition to the imperatives of propaganda and entertainment that characterise Information War, mass news media also participate in the construction of broader hegemonic ideologies about gender that stretch beyond the theatre of war, reinforcing the Warrior Myth and the Western gender binary in ways that have disadvantageous material consequences for women.
In Information War, mainstream news media, along with the militaries and governments that control them, represent dominant epistemologies. Alternative perspectives—what Michel Foucault has termed ―subjugated knowledges‖24—are marginalised or erased by the mechanisms of Information War and must find other outlets for expression. Chapter 5 examines one such subjugated knowledge through an analysis of combat memoirs of male soldiers and Marines who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The soldiers discussed here used their personal memories of war to discursively mediate their own masculine bodies and identities by reconstructing their battlefield experiences in explicit opposition to mass media representations. While some soldiers describe their experiences of war as a reinforcement of their masculinity, others find their masculine warrior identity is destabilised on the battlefield. In their focus on the fragility of the male body and the male psyche in war, these memoirs challenge the Warrior Myth by demonstrating that war is not natural to men, nor is it inherently masculine. In illustrating how war ―makes‖ men, they also reveal that war can destroy them. This chapter ends with a discussion of a newly developed form of personal war testimony: the online combat video. These videos point to the Internet as a space where alternative gender identity construction might take place in the context of war.
The final chapter of this thesis, Chapter 6, extends the discussion of gender and war into the political realm to examine the gendering of political leaders in media. I use the term politics in this context to refer to the organisation of government within a state or polity. In Chapter 6 I am specifically concerned with electoral politics and the processes by which
24 Foucault, Power/Knowledge. 25
societies choose their government leaders, within the context of Western democracies. In postmodern war, the spheres of democratic politics and war are inseparable. Politics is itself militarised, while governments ensure the permanent militarisation of society and control the manipulation of information during war. As commander-in-chief of the West‘s most powerful military, the American president is a highly gendered and militarised role. This chapter centres on media constructions of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary race in 2007–08 to examine how female political candidates fare in the realm of militarised politics. The discussion of media turns to new Internet technologies and the complex roles they play in the construction and representation of gender and war in postmodernity. The Internet is changing the nature of media, shifting control from powerful media conglomerates to members of the general public, requiring new understandings of the relationship between media and gender identity. By analysing digital imagery of Clinton online, I will demonstrate how Clinton was constructed as a posthuman cyborg through an emphasis on her warrior potential; her body was represented as a synthesised hybrid of male and female, and of human and machine. While these representations were designed in order to denigrate Clinton by questioning her femininity, they also create a discursive and conceptual space in which the cyborgian potential of the woman warrior can be realised.
In the Conclusion I turn to the future of war and gender in the twenty-first century. Theories of posthumanism posit a future characterised by the amalgamation of humans and machines in ways that destabilise gender identity and the sexed body. I examine the role technology may play in the renegotiation of the warrior identity and its implications for moving beyond the Western gender binary. The Conclusion is a critical discussion of what a ―post-gender‖ future might look like. I return to the idea that challenging the Western gender binary is only the first step in addressing gender inequality and that we must also engage in a critical destabilising of the construct of gender itself independent of the categories that comprise it. I suggest that scholarship on gender and war must continue to intervene in the gendered discourses of war in order to further understand their role in gender construction and to avoid essentialising sexual difference in the future. 26
PART 1
DECONSTRUCTING GENDER: THE WARRIOR MYTH AND THE PROBLEM OF THE
FEMALE COMBATANT
Part 1 seeks to problematise notions of natural sexual difference by intervening in discourses that claim men as natural warriors and women as natural victims of war. It explores the origins of current Western ideologies regarding gender and violence, how these ideologies have been maintained, and why they have been accepted as ―fact.‖ I argue that scientific theories that reify natural sexual difference work together with mythologies about gender and violence to naturalise wartime violence as an exclusively male behaviour. Female violence is marginalised in biological discourse and this marginalisation is culturally reinforced in the popular imagination through narratives that stress the abnormality of women warriors. I begin by introducing the problem of women‘s violence in both civilian and military settings and stress the need to engage with the violent woman in feminist discourse. While women‘s violence (potential and actual) has been omitted from many studies of war, including studies of gender and war, I argue that an understanding of women‘s complex roles in warfare is vital to an understanding both of war systems and of gender relations in the contemporary period. The recruitment policies of the past four decades have witnessed increasing numbers of women serving in the militaries of Western nations, and policies concerning the incorporation of women into these male-dominated institutions shed much light on ideologies regarding the gender–violence relationship and the anxiety caused by the figure of the violent woman. At the same time, representations of the woman warrior in popular media evidence that these same anxieties exist outside the military institution. Mythologies that denaturalise women‘s war-fighting continue to influence contemporary media representations of warrior women. Yet in fictional appropriations of existing mythologies we see the potential for both reinforcement and subversion of the gender binary. Representations of the woman warrior in the cultural imagination, when analysed alongside policies concerning real female soldiers, demonstrate the continuing difficulties of reconciling womanhood and violence in the postmodern period. 27
Chapter 1
Gender and Wartime Violence: Theoretical Framework and Literature Review
On April 28, 2004, CBS‘s 60 Minutes broadcast photographs that became the defining images of the Iraq War. The pictures documented American soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. Prisoners were stripped naked, cloaked in hoods, and forced to pose in sexualised and demeaning positions, while being intimidated with dogs and the threat of electrocution. All the while, their torturers laughed and joked, snapping photos which they then distributed to friends and family members over the Internet. Of particular public disturbance in the coming days and weeks would be the presence of one female soldier who was to become the face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. 21-year-old Private First Class Lynndie England appears in several of the pictures seemingly relishing the abuse she and her fellow soldiers are inflicting. In one now infamous image, England stands beside a group of naked prisoners, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, pointing her fingers like guns at the genitals of the hooded men. In another, she holds a leash around the neck of a male prisoner who lies helpless on the floor.
The images from Abu Ghraib pose challenging questions for Western feminists in the twenty-first century. How do we explain the violence of England, and her female colleague Specialist Sabrina Harman, within a specifically feminist analytical framework? Should the violence of women during wartime be read as an example of women‘s equality, an indication that women now have equal access with men to violent agency? Is performing abuse and violence during war an act of liberation whereby women fight back against their traditional positions of victimhood? Or were these female soldiers aberrations, monsters who do not represent ―women‖ as a group and whose violence therefore does not count as ―women‘s violence‖? How do we reconcile discussions of women‘s acts of abuse and violence with recognition of the widespread victimisation of women in wartime through mass murder, torture, mutilation, abduction and rape? Does acknowledgement of the perpetration of violence by some women negate the experience of victimisation by others? Was England forced to pose for the photos by her boyfriend, Private Charles Graner, as some commentators would claim, and thus is she more appropriately categorised as a victim than a criminal? Or was she simply doing what she had to do to be accepted in a masculinist military culture?
Current feminist debates about women and violence wrestle with how to study, explain and understand the reality of women‘s perpetration of violence within a paradigm 28
that conceives of gender relations strictly as forceful male domination over the female and does not yet have an adequate rhetoric to articulate deviance from this model. Feminism has an understandably uneasy relationship with women‘s perpetration of violence. There are fears among some feminists that recognition of women‘s acts of violence will detract attention, funding and resources from what is perceived as the more widespread and urgent problem of women‘s victimisation at the hands of men. There is also the belief that portraying women in a negative light by acknowledging their violent potential will result in even greater misogyny and distrust of women among men. Women‘s acts of violence undermine a feminist project concerned with proving that women are deserving of equality within a male-dominated society determined to use any instances of women‘s bad behaviour against them. Yet to continue ignoring the violence of women is becoming untenable in both research communities and the popular consciousness. The proliferation of sensational cases of female murderers such as Aileen Wuornos, Susan Smith and Tracey Avril Wigginton in Western media in the 1990s, along with military examples like Lynndie England, have cemented the place of female offenders in contemporary mythologies of violence and increased the urgency to understand aggressive female behaviour. There is evidence that violence by girls and young women in civil society is currently on the rise.25 Further problematising issues for feminists, however, this increase is often blamed on feminist ideologies that supposedly encourage women to behave like men by asserting their ―right to violence.‖26 Within such a reactionary climate, it becomes both convenient and politically pragmatic for feminist discourse to deny, ignore or minimise instances of women‘s violence.27
The continuing denial of women‘s violence in the twenty-first century is made possible by the widespread belief in a sexual binary that posits men as naturally violent and women as naturally non-violent, a dualism advanced by feminists and non-feminists alike. Women‘s role as reproducers results in an oppositional logic under which the identities of life-giver and life-taker are ideologically incommensurable; women‘s capacity to give life is believed to efface their ability to take life. By this logic, male violence ―makes sense‖ while female violence is inexplicable and can be marginalised as ―not real‖ or not worth understanding. While such essentialism can serve feminist purposes by idealising women for their non- violent natures and drawing attention to female victimisation at the hands of men, it also
25 See Kirsta, Deadlier than the Male, 26–28; and Pearson, When She Was Bad,31–32. 26 See Rebgetz, ―Feminism Blamed,‖ which quotes an Australian researcher attributing the rise in violence by young women to social changes brought about by the women‘s movement. Feminism was also blamed for the abuse by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib (see Oliver, Women as Weapons, 23). 27 For feminist discussions that do engage with female violence, see Chesler, Woman’s Inhumanity; Heberle, ―Disciplining Gender;‖ Kirsta, Deadlier than the Male; Morrissey, When Women Kill; and Pearson, When She Was Bad. 29
poses feminist problems in that it contributes to the maintenance of women‘s subordinate position in society. In fact, the denial of women‘s violence is often propagated for specifically anti-feminist goals by emphasising women‘s vulnerability and weakness. The gendering of violence in contemporary Western societies is based on the idea that men are both the natural predators and the natural protectors of women. This ideology serves as an effective means of controlling women by simultaneously reinforcing their status as victims and their powerlessness to defend themselves from their victimisation.28 Characterising violence as an exclusively male prerogative thus directly assists in the creation and maintenance of power asymmetries that are damaging to women. As such, a feminist engagement with women‘s violence is imperative in a culture where violence both by and against women is prevalent. Such an engagement necessitates a reconceptualisation of sex and gender in a way that challenges the assumption of women‘s non-violent nature.
Gender in Feminist Theory: Gender, Sex, and the Western Gender System
Analysis of the relevance of gender structures in conventionally male worlds only makes sense once we recognize gender not only as a bimodal term, applying symmetrically to men and women (that is, once we see that men too are gendered, that men too are made rather than born), but also as denoting social rather than natural kinds. Until we can begin to envisage the possibility of alternative arrangements, the symbolic work of gender remains both silent and inaccessible. — Evelyn Fox Keller29
28 See Hoagland, ―Moral Revolution,‖ for a discussion of how this logic plays out in American society. Hoagland argues that ―the logic of protection is essentially the same as the logic of predation. Through predation, men do things to women and against women all of which violate women and undermine women‘s integrity. Yet protection objectifies just as much as predation. To protect women, men do things to women and against women; acting ‗for a woman‘s own good,‘ they violate her integrity and undermine her agency‖ (176). Alternately, Meagher and DiQuinzio argue that protection policies often ignore women‘s victimisation at the hands of men and instead maintain that women need to be protected from themselves. In their study of public policies on violence and state intervention in the domestic sphere in the United States and Canada, the authors conclude that those policies designed to ―put women and children first‖ are based on ―a logic of paternalistic treatment of women and children that purports to protect them but almost always disempowers them and sometimes harms them‖ (―Introduction,‖1). They also argue that women are required to ―pay‖ for their protection through deference to male authority and obedience to male expectations of appropriate feminine behaviour. Under the guise of ―liberating‖ women from abuse and violence, such paternalistic logic actually serves to control and subjugate women and justifies oppressive policies that maintain gender inequality. 29 Keller, Secrets of Life, 17. 30
Gender is commonly referred to as a category but I view it rather as a system of categorisation or a system comprised of categories.30 A system is a series of interrelated entities that combine to form a complex, integrated unity; the categories independently do not constitute gender, but as an assemblage they acquire meaning. A gender system is therefore the mechanism by which a society categorises people as gendered beings; it encompasses the ways in which identity is organised around gender classifications. The contemporary Western gender system consists of two oppositional and hierarchical categories: ―male‖ and ―female.‖These categories do not form the basis of all gender systems in all cultures or across all time periods; there are an infinite number of categories that could potentially comprise a gender system. As Jeanne Boydston notes, the construction of gender as a binary opposition is historically and culturally specific to the contemporary Western context.31 Within current Western feminist discourse, it is standard practice to define gender on the basis of unequal power relations; gender is conceptualised as a domain which ―privileges the male over the female.‖32 However, once we recognise that gender systems are not intrinsically constructed around hierarchical dualisms, the argument that power asymmetries inhere in gender becomes problematic. As Gayle Rubin wrote in her seminal essay on sexual systems, ―it is important...to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized.... Oppression is not inevitable in [the sex/gender] domain, but is the product
30 Within the field of gender history, for example, gender is termed a ―category of analysis‖ by Boydston, ―Gender as a Question;‖ Schott, ―Gender and ‗Postmodern War‘;‖ and Scott, ―Gender: A Useful Category.‖ Bock also refers to gender as a ―category‖ (―Women‘s History‖). The term category is frequently used interchangeably to refer to sex/gender itself and to the subsections of sex/gender (male and female). Thus, for example, Judith Butler refers to ―gender categories‖ (Gender Trouble, xxx) and defines sex as a category (Bodies that Matter, 1); Evelyn Fox Keller refers to the ―category of gender‖ and to ―the categories of male and female‖ (Secrets of Life, 16); and Monique Wittig refers to ―the category of sex‖ and ―the categories of ‗men‘ and ‗women‘‖ (Straight Mind, 1–8; xiv). Thomas Laqueur describes ―woman‖ as an ―empty category‖ but also labels ―gender‖ as ―the category‖ (Making Sex, 22). Eve Sedgwick refers to gender, along with race, class, nationality, and sexual orientation, as ―axes of categorization‖ (Epistemology of the Closet, 22). 31 Boydston, ―Gender as a Question.‖ The current moment is characterised by a rigid gender dualism. In spite of greater understandings of and publicity for alternative gender identities (hermaphrodism, transvestism, transgender, intergender) and non-heterosexual orientations (gay and lesbian sexualities, bisexuality, queer, pansexuality), there persists a widespread adherence to a doctrine of binary gender identity. This is evidenced even within the terminology used to describe identities that do not fit within the gender binary. ―Transgender‖ and ―intergender‖ designate a precarious subject position located somewhere between the normative identities of male and female; ―bisexual‖ implies a preference for ―both‖ (two) sexes; a hermaphrodite is both male and female (or neither male nor female). Thus, rather than pointing towards new gender potentialities, the rhetoric of alternative gender identities functions to invalidate and delegitimate both the identities themselves and their potential to undermine, destabilise or subvert the binary gender order. These identities are all defined in relation to the principal binary; or, more pertinently, they are defined against the binary and thus positioned outside gender. The nomenclature of the Western gender system simply creates another binary of male–female/not male–female, of gender/not gender. 32 Cranny-Francis et al., Gender Studies, 1. 31
of the specific social relations which organize it.‖33 This recognition is important for contemporary feminist scholarship because it establishes that the subjugation of women is neither natural nor inevitable within any given system of social order. It also calls into question assumptions about women‘s natural incapacity for violence and their necessary status as victims of male aggression. If gender can be constructed in such a way that women are not necessarily posited as the polar opposites of violent men, then women‘s violence begins to make conceptual sense.
In this thesis I make a distinction between the Western gender system (the male/female binary) and gender as a construct. This is done in deference to the idea that the construct of gender should not be conflated with the particular gender system of any one cultural or historical locality. Yet it is almost impossible to define gender in current Western discourses (including feminist discourse) outside of the male/female binary. In their gender studies text book, for example, Anne Cranny-Francis, Wendy Waring, Pam Stavropoulos, and Joan Kirkby describe gender as that which ―divides humans into two categories: male and female.‖34 This difficulty in defining gender without reference to its component parts evidences that gender does not exist as an ontological entity independent of the culturally agreed upon categories which comprise it. Gender will necessarily take on different definitions in different contexts depending on which gender categories a given society deems consequential. Conflating ―gender‖ with ―male and female‖ assumes the ontology of binary gender, that is, the idea that the distinction between men and women is universal and natural, that this distinction is gender. Importantly, it undercuts the argument that gender is socially and culturally constructed, the very argument that feminists who reify the male/female binary are often trying to make.
Gender is reduced to ―male and female‖ in the contemporary Western gender system because of its epistemological reliance on sexual difference. Gender acquires meaning through its transcription onto sexed bodies, which are binarised according to reproductive function. Biology is the principal discourse upon which such sexual distinctions have been based in the late modern period, with scientific discoveries increasingly serving as ―proof‖ for oppositional gendered corporealities. As Thomas Laqueur has noted, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ―writers of all sorts were determined to base what they insisted were fundamental differences between the male and female sexes, and thus between man and woman, on discoverable biological distinctions and to express these in a radically different rhetoric‖ than they had in the past.35 These ―fundamental differences‖ found their principal
33 Rubin, ―Traffic in Women,‖ 168. 34 Cranny-Francis et al., Gender Studies, 1. 35 Laqueur, Making Sex, 5. 32
location in the reproductive organs; specifically, they involved a reduction of the female sex to the ovaries, which were believed to dictate female nature. Biological imperatives were culturally inscribed in the doctrine of the separate spheres, which translated sexual difference into the political segregation of women from men.36 By the turn of the nineteenth century, scientists asserted that sexual difference—including women‘s principal role as reproducers— was ―solidly grounded in nature;‖ biology became ―the epistemic foundation for prescriptive claims about the social order.‖37 This scientific faith in the naturalness of sexual difference via its fixed location in the body remains the dominant theory of sex and gender today and is the basis of the twenty-first-century Western gender system. Belonging to a single sex category was to become the cornerstone of human identity; anyone (or, more pertinently, anything) that resisted sexual classification occupied the symbolic realm of the non-human. Although there have been significant advances in the fields of anatomy, physiology, and reproductive science which have refuted many of the theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, underlying assumptions about sexual difference remain today. They inform popular understandings of sex and gender, as well as steering the course of academic and scientific research into the relationship between gender and violence in the twenty-first century.
Feminist scholars in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have traditionally accepted the naturalness of sex, and the assumption of biological difference has determined the parameters of the majority of feminist theory and activism. Firstly, it has resulted in the widely accepted sex/gender distinction, whereby sex is believed to be biological (a priori, unchangeable) while gender is posited as social (constructed, open to adaptation). Thus feminists argue that while anatomical difference is fixed, the translation of this difference into systems of oppression is socially constructed and therefore susceptible to change. Secondly, it accounts for the according of epistemological significance to the universal categories ―male‖ and ―female‖ within feminist discourse, and the belief that there is a homogeneous group known as ―women,‖ the members of which are united by their common status as Other to men and by their systematic oppression. Finally, the acceptance of the male/female binary as natural has driven the principal feminist goals of minimising sexual difference by proving that women are not inferior to men and are capable of performing many or all of the same tasks (liberal feminisms) or, alternately, of emphasising sexual difference and/or arguing for the superiority of the female over the male (radical/lesbian/difference feminisms).
The acceptance of natural sexual difference within contemporary feminist discourse is problematic for several reasons. The employing of the universal category ―women‖ has
36 Ibid., 175–81; 195. 37 Ibid., 6. 33
been criticised in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by Third World and non- white feminists for allowing middle-class white feminist academics to speak on behalf of all women without recognising between-group differences due to race, class, nationality or religion.38 The binary distinction between male and female on the basis of reproductive function has also been challenged by lesbian-feminists whose identities problematise sexual distinctions that assume heterosexual subject positions, giving rise to Monique Wittig‘s famous claim that ―lesbians are not women‖ because they exist outside of the heterosexual matrix.39 Most pertinent to this thesis, the feminist belief in the male/female dualism facilitates systems of oppression which rely upon sexual difference for their existence. The endorsement of binary sex enables male dominance over the female; as Wittig notes, by accepting ―that there is a ‗natural‘ division between women and men, we naturalize history, as we assume that ‗men‘ and ‗women‘ have always existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible.‖40The theory of binary sex thus ensures the maintenance not only of oppositional difference but also of hierarchical difference. It legitimates the oppression of women by men by constructing such oppression as inherent in the natural order.
An interrogation of nature as the origin of sexual difference is thus vital to the current feminist project of ending women‘s subjugation. Poststructuralist feminism, within the context of postmodernity, provides the theoretical tools to intervene in the scientific discourses that have reified the sexual binary. This thesis accepts as a premise Donna Haraway‘s assertion that nature ―cannot pre-exist its construction;‖ it is an artifact which, like de Beauvoir‘s ―woman,‖ is not born but made.41 Biology, the logic upon which sex is constructed, is thus not a natural given but rather ―a social discourse open to intervention.‖42 To argue that nature is constructed is not to write against the materiality of the lived body;43 as Judith
38 For seminal works by non-white feminists, see Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class; hooks, Ain’t I a Woman; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, eds., Third World Women; and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other. Butler also challenges the category ―women‖ as the subject of feminism in her foundational text Gender Trouble (see especially pp. 2–8). 39 Wittig, Straight Mind. Butler has also argued that ―the regulatory norms of ‗sex‘ work...in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative‖ (Bodies that Matter, 2). See also Rich, ―Compulsory Heterosexuality.‖ 40 Wittig, Straight Mind, 10–11. 41 Haraway, ―Promise of Monsters,‖ 65. 42 Haraway, ―‗Gender‘ for a Marxist Dictionary,‖ 134. See also Haraway, How Like a Leaf, 151. 43 As noted in the Introduction to this thesis, recognising the materiality of the body is particularly important in a study of violence and war. To imply that bodies are entirely discursively constructed is to relegate to the linguistic realm the pain and trauma experienced by the body in acts of torture and violence. As Elaine Scarry has argued, pain has a silencing effect; it ―does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned‖ (Body in Pain, 4). The violence of war acts upon (modifies, destroys, reconfigures) the materiality of the human body outside the 34
Butler contends, construction does not need to be understood as an artificiality that precludes the material.44 Nature is not the immaterial product of discourse; asserting the constructedness of nature is not to ―dismiss it, undialectically, as a wholly linguistic construct...but to relieve it of its inertia and objectivity, to problematise its usual conception as a purely physical world estranged from human involvement, and to thus highlight its ongoing ‗enmeshedness‘ in and with the practical projects of the human social world.‖45 Nature is thus a materiality which cannot be separated from the cultural and linguistic processes that give it meaning and define its boundaries.
In keeping with this intervention in the logic of natural sexual difference, Butler has hypothesised that ―sex‖ (traditionally received as natural) may be ―as culturally constructed as gender.‖ Rather than naturalising sex, Butler asks whether sex (like gender) might be historicised. ―Does sex have a history?‖ she asks. ―Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction?‖46 Laqueur goes about the task of charting this history, arguing that sex is indeed ―made‖ and that this making is politically motivated. Laqueur‘s work demonstrates that sex ―is situational; it is explicable only within the context of battles over gender and power.‖47 For these reasons, it is useful to think of sex/gender, following Eve Sedgwick, as ―a problematical space rather than a crisp distinction‖ between prediscursive sex and discursively constructed gender.48 This thesis is located in this sex/gender space; its subject is ―sex and war‖ as much as it is ―gender and war.‖
For poststructuralist feminists, the same cultural and linguistic processes that produce gender also produce sexed bodies which are received as ―natural‖ within the Western gender system.49 Butler argues that the construct of sex materialises male and
realm of language and discourse. The inability to describe pain using language means that, in spite of the fact that ―the central activity of war is injuring,‖ violence is often omitted from discourses of war (Scarry, Body in Pain, 12). Thus, in asserting that bodies are constructed within the context of war it is imperative not lose sight of the material existence of those bodies and their lived experiences of and engagements with acts of violence. 44 Butler, Bodies that Matter, xi. Indeed, this notion of construction and materiality as mutually exclusive reifies another problematic binary between nature and culture/technology whereby the materiality of the natural world is modified and acted upon by the cultural processes of construction, which operate on a plane entirely separate from, but in necessary constitutive opposition to, the material (see Bodies that Matter, 4). 45 Lancaster, Trouble with Nature, 291. 46 Butler, Gender Trouble, 9. 47 Laqueur, Making Sex, 11. 48 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 29. 49 Arguing that sex and gender are both constructed by the same discursive processes is not to argue, as Butler suggests, that they are the same thing (Gender Trouble, 9–10). Sex may be as constructed as gender, but each is constructed in different ways and to different (though interconnected) ends. Nira Yuval-Davis takes a similar approach to the relationship between sex and gender: ―Gender should be understood not as a ‗real‘ social difference between men and women, but 35
female bodies which do not signify independent of their categorisation; sex ―is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls.... ‗Sex‘ is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time.‖50 Bodies are sexed in ways that naturalise male dominance and female subordination. Wittig notes how women have been ―distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call ‗natural,‘ what is supposed to exist as such before oppression. Distorted to such an extent that in the end oppression seems to be a consequence of this ‗nature‘ within ourselves (a nature which is only an idea).‖51 Central to this oppressive process is the distortion of female bodies as reproducers. Within the heterosexual matrix, the imperative to reproduce constitutes a sexual contract which binds women to men in the same way the worker is tied to his/her employer. The construction of childbearing as the natural function of women reduces women to their bodies, to sex, and forces both a dependence on and an obligation to men.52 At the same time, theories of reproductive difference serve to preclude women from violent embodiment.
The Western Gender System and the Warrior Myth
Recording women‘s presence and engagement at the front is crucial in order to counteract some of the distortions that have always been necessary to construct the age-old story of war as men‘s business. The challenge that gender studies present to the analysis of war is to narrow the gap between reality and myth.... By placing gender at the center of an analysis of war, we begin to question the [Homeric war] myth: the mystique of the unquestionable masculinity of soldiering, of the essential femininity of peace advocacy. We unlock a closed system in order to reveal the dynamic of gender constructions.
as a mode of discourse which relates to groups of subjects whose social roles are defined by their sexual/biological difference as opposed to their economic positions or their membership in ethnic and racial collectivities. Sexual differences should also be understood as a mode of discourse, one in which groups of social subjects are defined as having different sexual/biological constitutions. In other words, both ‗gender‘ and ‗sex‘ can be understood as modes of discourse, but with different agendas‖ (Gender and Nation, 9). 50 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 1. 51 Wittig, Straight Mind, 9. 52 Ibid., 5–8.The female body continues to be constructed as reproductive vessel in spite of the fact that many women are incapable of conceiving, that men play a necessary role in the reproductive process, and that technological advancements are gradually amalgamating female reproduction with laboratory technologies. 36
— Miriam Cooke53
Scientific discourses that reify natural sexual difference are transmitted culturally through gendered mythologies. In the case of war, this naturalisation occurs in what I refer to as the Warrior Myth. The Warrior Myth is the predominant war myth of contemporary Western cultures and it forms the basis upon which sex and gender are constituted in both military and civilian contexts. The myth states that men are society‘s natural warriors and that, historically, only men have participated in war-fighting; conversely, it states that women (as men‘s polar opposites) do not, have not, cannot and should not participate in combat. The Warrior Myth relies upon the gender binary to make sense while at the same time functions to preserve the gender binary; by insisting on a universal, ahistorical gendered warrior/not- warrior duality, the myth erases historically and culturally specific definitions of gender based on models other than binarism. In so doing, it naturalises a binary gender order grounded in the antithetical bodies of women as life-givers and men as life-takers. The Warrior Myth simultaneously militarises gender in service of the gender binary and binarises gender in the service of militarism.
I use the concept of myth here to refer to a collective narrative that is widely accepted by a given population as being true. A myth is not simply a false narrative; its truth value is less important than its perceived truth value. As William Blake Tyrrell notes, myths are constructed in response to ―conflict and tension in the social order‖ and their purpose is ―the diminution of anxiety and resolution of conflict.‖54 Myth in this context does not refer specifically to stories from the past (in the sense of ―ancient mythology‖). Mythology as a concept contains but is not limited to ritual, folklore and legend; folktales and legends are not themselves myth, rather they form component parts of a wider mythology. Nor does my usage conflate myth with ideology as in some poststructuralist theory. Myth as I utilise it has a temporal component: myth may be seen as the process through which ideology is reached; it constitutes a continuation of meaning from past to present and into future. Myth also has a causal component; it seeks not only to state that things are but also to explain why things are.
The Warrior Myth entails an epistemological connection between history and nature whereby each concept is used as ―evidence‖ for the other. Myth‘s function is to simultaneously dehistoricise and naturalise; to borrow from Barthes, myth ―transforms history into nature.‖55 Under this logic, the ―fact‖ that only men have fought historically in combat is
53 Cooke, ―WO-Man,‖ 177–78. 54 Tyrrell, Amazons, xiv. Tyrrell employs a more specific definition of myth than I do here, defining a myth as a story with a coherent narrative. 55 Barthes, Mythologies, 129. 37
used as proof that men are natural warriors, while the concomitant ―fact‖ of the inherent male warrior nature supports the idea that historical war-fighting was the exclusive task of men. The Warrior Myth thus becomes an explanation, rationalisation and legitimation for a continuing ideology of male warriorhood. Myth ―purifies things,‖ writes Barthes;
it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification.... In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.56
By essentialising gendered behaviour, the Warrior Myth ―abolishes the complexity of human acts‖ by asserting that only men can be violent and warmongering (and, consequently, that all men are violent and warmongering), and ignores the contradictions represented by the female warrior and the male pacifist or victim. The naturalisation of the male warrior identity relies upon explanatory logic that is ultimately tautological: men are warriors not as a function of social systems of hegemony or gendered power relations, but because, simply, men are warriors.57
Adherence to the Warrior Myth is prevalent in general studies of violent conflict in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as in scholarship on gender and war. It is used to explain women‘s purported historical absence from warfare and, consequently, to advocate for the continued exclusion of women from the combat branches of today‘s militaries.58 In his essay ―The Argument against Female Combatants,‖ for example, Jeff M. Tuten supports his position using the logic of the Warrior Myth.
Pre-twentieth century man seems never to have seriously questioned the reservation of war for the male sex.... It was accepted that men were the hunters while women were the keepers of the home and the bearers of children. Men had the hunting instinct while women‘s driving instinct was maternal. Men were aggressive while women were passive. In short, the innate emotional differences between the sexes suited men for war while ruling women out.
56 Ibid., 143. 57 Barthes identifies tautology as a principle rhetorical figure of myth (Ibid.,152–53). 58 See Chapter 2 of this thesis for further discussion. 38
So, too, in the minds of our ancestors, did physical differences. Patently, women were smaller, weaker, slower, and had less physical endurance than males. All these attributes were essentially disqualifying in the era when all combat was characterized by strenuous physical activity.
Thus, for the five thousand years or so that we know about, women were not only excluded from combat but this exclusion was also accepted as right and natural. If someone had questioned this historic, unwritten exclusion policy, one can easily imagine the reply: ‗Women‘s unsuitability for combat is made apparent by the fact that they have never engaged in it. Thus, a posterior, women are unsuited for combat.‘59
Clearly, the Warrior Myth serves the purposes of writers who oppose the equality of women in the military as well as those with more general anti-feminist aims. Historian Martin van Creveld, writing in the 1990s and 2000s, for example, relied heavily on the Myth to support his anti-feminist statements regarding gender and war.60 However, many contemporary feminist authors also accept the Warrior Myth in their assumptions that binary gender identity is the natural system of social order. These authors do not simply draw on the Warrior Myth; they participate in the mythopoeic process, constructing the myth as they employ it. It is imperative therefore that feminist scholarship begins to deconstruct the Warrior Myth in order to prevent the continuing reification of gender binaries that ultimately serve anti-feminist purposes. That is, feminist scholarship must not continue to endorse a gender model that prevents gender equality by presuming the ontology of essential sexual difference. The situation of postmodernity, and the postmodern mediascape, provides the perfect context for this deconstruction to take place.
Postmodern War, Media, and the Body: The Changing Nature of Warfare
This is the ultimate logic of postmodern war: the militarization of everything. — Chris Hables Gray61
In this thesis I explore the construction and deconstruction of the Warrior Myth within the representational space of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Western media. Media is a fundamental tool in the perpetuation of gender hegemony, constituting a forum in
59 Tuten, ―Argument against Female Combatants,‖ 239. 60 See van Creveld, Men, Women and War and ―Armed but Not Dangerous.‖ 61 Gray, Cyborg Citizen, 62. 39
which mythology and ideology can be presented as ―truth‖ to the public. Feminist media scholars have recently applied a Gramscian approach to media hegemony, arguing that media is used by dominant groups to control subordinate groups not by direct oppression but by ―gaining public consent.‖62 As Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner write, ―Media texts never simply mirror or reflect ‗reality‘, but instead construct hegemonic definitions of what should be accepted as ‗reality‘. These definitions appear to be inevitable, ‗real‘ and commonsensical.‖63 The postmodern world is a mediated world, and media is becoming increasingly important in the production of reality and the construction of identity in the contemporary period.64 News media in particular play a central role in the construction both of ideologies of gender and of understandings of war, shaping and altering lived experience through text and imagery. News, writes Lynne Y. Edwards, ―is a metalanguage; its meaning and, therefore, the meaning of our reality come from the specific arrangement of its elements.... As our cultural scribes and repositories of knowledge, journalists and the institution of the news media play a role in defining social and political discourse and, by extension, our social and political reality.‖65 News plays such an important part in constructing reality and identity because of its accepted status as definitive truth; what one reads or watches in the news is presented to them as what ―really‖ happened.
Because of its emphasis on objectivity and unemotionality, and because of its location in the public sphere, news has often been conceptualised as a ―masculine‖ genre.66 Recent research has shown that men are deemed to be more reliable news sources, with ―expert‖ opinions typically being sought from males, particularly on ―hard news‖ items like politics and foreign and military policy.67 This stereotype, coupled with the tendency to view ―masculine‖ media genres like the news as more important and valid than ―feminine‖ genres (such as gossip magazines or television dramas), has significant implications for the construction of gender identity and representations of the sexed body in media, as well as for representations of the relationship between gender and war. However, media technologies are rapidly developing, with real-time, online, and interactive media changing the mediascape in which gendered realities are configured. At the same time, media in the twenty-first century is becoming central not just to the representation of war but also to its waging. Media technologies have even been referred to as weapons of contemporary war.
62 Carter and Steiner, ―Introduction,‖ 2. See also Ross and Byerly, ―Introduction,‖ 3. 63 Carter and Steiner, ―Introduction,‖ 2.For others who discuss the perpetuation of gendered mythologies in media, see Byerly and Ross, ―Introduction;‖ Carter, Branston, and Allen, ―Setting New(s) Agendas;‖ Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity; and Ross and Derman, eds., Mapping the Margins. 64 See Grodin and Lindlof, eds., Constructing the Self. 65 Edwards, ―Victims, Villains, and Vixens,‖ 14. 66 See Fiske, Television Culture, 284. 67 Carter, Branston, and Allen, ―Setting New(s) Agendas,‖ 5–6. 40
Thus, in order to understand the construction of gender and the sexed body in the context of today‘s conflicts, it is imperative to develop an understanding of media discourse and communications technologies, and their role in the changing nature of war.
The period of postmodernity has witnessed significant developments in the nature of warfare as waged by Western nations. World War II saw an end to modern war which was characterised by industrialised total warfare where whole populations were mobilised to the war effort.68 The most significant factor in bringing about the end of modern war was the development of weapons capable of annihilating entire populations, thus making total war impossible. The most significant of these was the nuclear weapon—labelled the ―ultimate weapon‖ by Paul Virilio69—but chemical and biological weapons have also contributed to the change in how war is waged. The ever-presence of such ―superweapons,‖70 both real and imaginary, is the cornerstone of the new type of war. As the Cold War progressed through the second half of the twentieth century, the world‘s two superpowers continued to expand nuclear arsenals which they could not actually utilise.71 As a result of the nuclear stalemate, and since ―warfare, and the credible threat of resorting to it, is still at the core of state power,‖72 in the 1970s the United States military initiated what has been referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) to develop weaponry and a concomitant style of warfare that could be waged in the post-nuclear period.
Michael Ignatieff notes how changes to public perceptions of war following World War II impacted the progression of the RMA: ―The only way to get ahead in a nuclear stalemate lay in developing conventional weapons that the other side did not possess.‖ However, to ―make the use of these weapons politically and morally acceptable, it was essential to increase the precision of their targeting; to minimize the collateral or unintended consequences of their use; and to reduce, if not eliminate, the risk to those who fired them, by keeping them as far away from the battle-line as was consistent with accuracy.... War that
68 Gray dates modern war, as distinct from ancient war, from the 1500s to the mid-twentieth century. He argues, ―Modern war can be differentiated from ancient war by its commitment to technological and scientific innovation, its acceptance of the complete mobilization of a society for war, its belief in the fundamental usefulness of war as a political instrument, and the combination of these factors in a drive for total war‖ (Cyborg Citizen, 55). This dissection of war, and the society that gives rise to it, into three eras or types is common: Gray‘s ancient, modern and postmodern periods are paralleled by Heidi and Alvin Tofflers‘s agricultural, industrial and information ―waves‖ of warfare (War and Anti- War, 9–10) and Paul Virilio‘s conceptualisation of three ages characterised by weapons of obstruction, weapons of destruction, and weapons of communication (Pure War, 195–96). 69 Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 31–32. See also De Pauw for a discussion of the significance of nuclear weapons in ending unlimited war (Battle Cries and Lullabies, 231). 70 Gray, Cyborg Citizen, 55. 71 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 164. 72 Castells, Rise of the Network Society, 456. 41
could actually be fought had to be as bloodless, risk-free and precise as possible.‖73 The RMA thus witnessed the development of precision weaponry, able to be fired on enemy targets from massive distances with great accuracy, in order to ensure U.S. troops were exposed to limited risk while also minimising civilian casualties on the other side. In addition to precision guidance, computers and communications technologies revolutionised warfare in the decades following the Second World War.74 For Sarah Maltby, the RMA amounts to the reliance on ―information and communication technologies such as computers, electronic communication and global communication.‖75 Computers, with the help of satellite technology, increase the information available to commanders and can also ―improve coordination among military units and separate military services.‖76 The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have thus been characterised by limited warfare which is highly computerised and technologised. The need to maintain public support for war has also seen the expansion of media as a platform for both selling and waging the new wars.
There is a general consensus among theorists that World War II marked a shift from modern, industrial, total war to a new type of warfare waged by Western nations. However, there has been disagreement over how best to define and label this new warfare and what constitute its most distinctive features. There have been many attempts to theorise war in the post-nuclear period. Paul Virilio put forward the concept of pure war—defined as a state of permanent warfare, where war becomes not the execution of conflict but its ―infinite preparation‖ and can no longer be distinguished from peace—in the 1980s, but later determined that twenty-first-century war might best be labelled impure war, characterised by asymmetry of fighting forces, global conflict, and deterrence aimed at civilian as well as military populations.77 Heidi and Alvin Toffler define the new type of war as Third Wave war, which followed on from the industrial warfare of the Second Wave (dating from 300 years ago to roughly the present moment).78 The symbol of the Third Wave is the computer; information, intelligence and communication are the primary weapons of war. The idea that information (and specifically information management) is itself a weapon of war is epitomised in the concept of Information War, a term often used to describe the Iraq War.79 Ignatieff refers to war at the turn of the twentieth century as virtual war, which requires virtual
73 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 164. 74 Ibid., 171. 75 Maltby, ―Introduction,‖ 2. 76 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 171. 77 Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 104; 8–9. Virilio cites the post-9/11 Patriot Act in the U.S. and the detaining of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay as examples of such deterrence. 78 Toffler and Toffler, War and Anti-War, 9–10. See also Toffler, The Third Wave. 79 For further discussion of Information War and media, see Chapter 4 of this thesis. See also Lewis et al., Shoot First; Tumber and Webster, ―Information War;‖ and Webster, ―Information Warfare.‖ 42
consent and virtual mobilisation of populations.80 In the virtual age, war becomes a spectacle played out on television and computer screens. Troops fire long-range weapons at enemy targets they cannot see with the naked eye while civilians watch the conflict on the nightly news from the comfort of their living rooms. James Der Derian also acknowledges the partial relocation of war waging from the battlefield to the screen in his concept of virtuous war. Virtuous war is characterised by its tendency to ―clean up‖ the battlefield, keeping the blood and violence of war hidden from the public eye through the use of virtuality which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, making war fighting appear like war gaming.81 Christopher Coker has extended this idea of virtuality in his concepts of humane war, post- material war, and posthuman war.82 Coker argues that the West is trying to make war more humane by replacing human soldiers with machines and human targets with non-human ones. Similarly, Douglas Kellner‘s idea of technowar ―provides a bridge from modern to postmodern war as it substitutes technology for human skills and action.‖83
While drawing on the ideas of all these theorists, I have chosen the term postmodern war to describe the type of warfare discussed in this thesis. This decision is based on the imperative to conceptually locate these wars in the context of postmodernity, with its inherent features of the collapse of grand narrative, the prioritisation of simulation and the image, and structural and identity fragmentation. Fredric Jameson was the first to use the term to describe the Vietnam War, and others have adopted it in reference to the First Gulf War, the Kosovo crisis, and other late-twentieth-century conflicts.84 The most extensive theorisation of postmodern war comes from Chris Hables Gray, who emphasises the centrality of information to both the postmodern period and postmodern war.85 I follow Gray‘s focus on information, while not necessarily adopting all the tenets of his theory, and view the concept of postmodern war as particularly useful in that it encompasses the representation of war as well as its waging. Postmodern war entails not just armies, weaponry, strategy, and the fighting of wars on literal battlefields but also broader ideologies of militarism and processes
80 Ignatieff problematically refers to wars in the pre-virtual period as ―real wars,‖ a characterisation which dematerialises the human and infrastructural damage that continues to take place in today‘s conflicts(Virtual War,195). 81 Der Derian, Virtuous War. 82 Coker, Humane Warfare; Waging War without Warriors; and Future of War. 83 Kellner, ―From Vietnam,‖ 227. James Gibson also refers to technowar in Perfect War. 84 There is disagreement over which conflict qualifies as the ―first‖ postmodern war. While Jameson (―Postmodernism,‖ 84) and Gray (Postmodern War, 158) cite Vietnam as the turning point, Kellner argues that Vietnam was rather a ―dirty old neo-imperialist modern war‖ (―From Vietnam,‖ 217). Ignatieff argues that Kosovo was the first conflict that could truly be considered postmodern (Virtual War, 112). But it is the First Gulf War that is most widely referenced for its postmodernism (see Baudrillard, Gulf War; and Gray, Postmodern War, chapter 2). For Toffler and Toffler, the Gulf War ushered in the Third Wave of post-industrial warfare (War and Anti-War,64–80). Kellner argues that the Gulf War was not a war at all but a ―cyberspectacle,‖ although he agrees that it can be considered postmodern because of its location within a ―hyperreal media space‖ (―From Vietnam,‖ 217–18). 85 Gray, Postmodern War, 22. 43
of militarisation. The United States has been at the forefront of the development of postmodern war. During the 1980s and 1990s the U.S. vastly outstripped both the Soviet Union and Europe with its military capabilities, emphasising military technology, particularly posthuman technologies which amalgamate humans with machines, to a greater extent than other nations.86 The United States‘s propensity to fight postmodern wars, including its permanent militarisation and ongoing war preparation, means it takes a central place in this thesis. The U.S. has also been instrumental in the utilisation of media technologies in its war efforts, and I will use the term Information War to describe this particular strategy of postmodern war, with specific reference to the use of media propaganda and information management by the U.S. government regarding the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.
Thus far I have focused on theories that emphasise the technological advancements of postmodern war, but it is also important to recognise the political context in which this new type of warfare developed. Philip Hammond provides an ideological basis for postmodern wars, which he argues are responses to a post-Cold War ―crisis of meaning‖ in the West.87 Western governments use limited, high-tech wars to instil a sense of meaning in an otherwise purposeless postmodern society. For Hammond, advances in weapons and communications technologies are not the defining causal features of postmodern war but rather develop out of this meaning vacuum.88 This idea of war as an attempt to access meaning and purpose is useful in explaining the postmodern proliferation of militarism across cultural and political realms, which results in highly militarised societies in times of peace as well as war. Ideologies of war and militarism must be woven into the very cultural fabric in order to secure a constant state of war readiness and to ensure support any time conflict may be deemed necessary. Heidi and Alvin Toffler argue that in the Third Wave ―how we live our daily lives...is deeply influenced by...wars of the present, past, or future.‖ They note the significance not just of ―real‖ wars but of imaginary ones as well: ―Not surprisingly, imagined wars grip our minds. Knights, samurai warriors, janissaries, hussars, generals, and G.I. Joes parade relentlessly through the pages of history and the corridors of our mind. Literature, painting, sculpture, and movies picture the horrors, heroism, or moral dilemmas of war, real and unreal.‖89The concept of postmodern war encompasses ―the interweaving of the waging and writing of war,‖90 in other words, the relationship between the experiential and the discursive that constitutes the theoretical and methodological approach of this thesis. For
86 Igantieff, Virtual War,166–68; and Coker, Waging War without Warriors, 61–62. 87 Hammond, Media, War and Postmodernity, 59. 88 Hammond argues that other theorists of postmodern war have ignored the political context in which it developed, tending to favour technological developments as the defining, originary features of postmodern war (Ibid., 21). 89 Toffler and Toffler, War and Anti-War, 4. 90 Schott, ―Gender and ‗Postmodern War‘,‖ 21. 44
Gray, it is discourse that gives postmodern war its coherence, that ―hold[s] the system of postmodern war together.‖91 Discourse is necessary not just to document or convey war to a passive public but also to create and constitute war, to ensure its continued existence and significance in postmodernity.
In the postmodern period, war discourses in the form of narratives and images are most often produced and distributed in media. Media play a dual role of propagating ideologies of militarism during peacetime and selling war when it breaks out. The relationship between war/military and media—known as the military–media complex—has a long history but has taken on a new dimension in postmodernity.92 Because the moral and political justifications of today‘s wars are unpopular, they must be sold to the public in such a way as to minimise the apparent danger to troops and loss of life on both sides. Mainstream media outlets—that is, print and broadcast services owned by large corporations that constitute the primary news source for the majority of media consumers—are utilised at once to sanitise the violence of war and to turn war into a spectacle full of meaning to make it more palatable to a cynical postmodern audience. In a television culture, the media image is particularly important in this creation of war–as–spectacle and also plays a special role in the construction of reality in postmodernity. In addition to print and broadcast media, the media forms of cinema and fictional television programmes are used in postmodern society to perpetuate ideologies of militarism. Of course, like media in general, the media image has been used to represent and construct war since the invention of the camera.93 A new and important development in the relationship of the media image to war, however, is that of live television coverage (beginning with the Vietnam War) which critics have argued contributes to the ―illusion‖ that what audiences are watching is ―real‖ and assists in the transformation of war into spectacle due to a lack of in-depth and considered analysis.94 The increasing digitisation of imagery (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6) has also resulted in an increased blurring of fact and fiction, a state Jean Baudrillard has called ―hyperreality.‖ Images and simulations become as or more important than actual events ―because they become events in and of themselves,‖95 leading to Baudrillard‘s famous and contentious claim that ―the Gulf War did not take place‖ because of its location within a virtual space.96
91 Gray, Postmodern War, 170. 92 For an extended discussion of the history of the military–media complex, and its role in postmodern war, see Chapter 4, pp. 122–29 of this thesis. 93 For a discussion of the history of cinema and the camera in twentieth-century war, see Virilio, War and Cinema. See also Cochrane, Western Front. 94 Kellner, ―From Vietnam,‖ 219. See also Der Derian, Virtuous War, xv; Hoskins, Televising War, 5; and Thussu, ―Live TV.‖ 95 Gray, Postmodern War, 47. 96 Baudrillard, Gulf War. 45
Theories about virtuality, technology, and the sanitisation of war hinge on new conceptualisations of the role and nature of the body in war. Theorists of postmodern war have argued that the material body is being removed from the battlefield as technological advancements increase the use of long-range weapons and as the targets of military strikes shift from people to buildings and infrastructure. Virilio argues that soldiers are ―disappearing in the technology and automation of the war-machine.‖97 His theory of pure war assumes that soldiers are being and will continue to be surpassed by machines: ―Pure War no longer needs men, and that‘s why it‘s pure. It doesn‘t need the human war-machine, mobilized human forces.‖98 In what he regards as the first postmodern conflict, Ignatieff notes how NATO soldiers in Kosovo seldom saw their targets and face-to-face combat was rare.99 Coker also argues that the advent of humane, post-material warfare has seen the increasing removal of the body from the battleground.100
In contrast, I argue that the idea that the body is becoming less important, relevant or present in war is incorrect and is largely based on analysis pre-dating the recent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. forces and their allies. Analyses of postmodern war that focus on the First Gulf War and Kosovo emphasise the use of aerial campaigns, long-range warfare and ―smart‖ bombs, which resulted in extremely limited military casualties on the U.S. side. Focusing on the two more recent conflicts as I do in this thesis illustrates the continuing and complex presence of bodies in war. Even before these conflicts, Der Derian questioned the idea of the disappearing body, noting that, for all the talk of ―clean‖ or ―humane‖ wars by Western governments and militaries, countless enemy combatants and civilians continue to by injured and killed in contemporary conflicts.101 Strategic decisions to target infrastructure instead of making direct hits on people save lives in the short term but lead to long-term suffering, illness and death, as damage to power lines, water supplies, roads and sewerage systems has civilian as well as military consequences. Nor, as I will demonstrate in later chapters, has advanced military technology protected thousands of Coalition troops from death, injury and trauma in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the nature of these conflicts means ground combat remains a common battle strategy.102 Thus, when discussing the technological dimension of postmodern war it is important to recognise the
97 Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 33. 98 Ibid., 180 99 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 4. 100 See Humane Warfare; and Waging War without Warriors. 101 Der Derian, Virtuous War. 102 These wars also challenge the prediction by some war theorists that new technology would lead to short wars—what Castells has called ―instant wars‖ (Rise of the Network Society, 454–61)—lasting only a few days or weeks. The Iraq War officially came to an end after seven and a half years, making it longer than either World War, while the war in Afghanistan has been proceeding for longer than the two World Wars combined. 46
continually developing relationship between technology and the body, rather than assuming the former is surpassing the latter. Theories about the postmodern battlefield should not be constructed around the absence of bodies but instead around different conceptualisations of the body as compared to modern war.
Indeed, postmodern war theorists who question the assumed disappearance of the material body argue that it is rather the discursive body that has gone missing from war.103 The concealing of the dead and injured body is a key feature of Information War.104 Since Vietnam, the U.S. government and military have tended to emphasise machines and de- emphasise bodies in war rhetoric. Even the post-materialism of the First Gulf War, a conflict which is widely regarded by theorists as being highly machine-oriented with minimal human casualties, has been challenged. Kellner contends that the replacement of people by machines was an ―illusion‖ presented to the American public to sell a war that was supposed to be ―bloodless and antiseptic‖ but in reality was nothing of the sort as collateral damage remained high.105 Similarly, John Taylor argues that the bodies of Gulf War troops were ―made to disappear in the British newspapers‖ and the war was represented ―as something acted out by machines rather than on the bodies of people.‖106 Andrew Hoskins argues that the disappearance of the discursive body has been most pronounced in the Iraq War, which ―probably more than any other conflict in history, fundamentally disconnected the machinery of warfare from the bloody consequences of its use.‖107
Yet even this argument that the body is missing from postmodern war discourses assumes a particular kind of body. While theorists have focused their attention on the absence of the dead or injured body, there has been very little discussion of the sexed or gendered body in postmodern war discourses. Once we shift our focus to sex and gender, we find evidence of the symbolic body everywhere. Indeed I will argue that, while the body– as–casualty has increasingly been disappearing from media discourse regarding war, the sexed body remains of utmost importance to representations and constructions of war in media in the postmodern period. Although Hammond does not include a discussion of gender in his argument that the postmodern period constitutes a ―crisis of meaning‖ for Western societies, I argue that a gender crisis is a central impetus of postmodern war, as of postmodernity itself.
103 Der Derian, Virtuous War, 215; and Gray, Postmodern War, 46–47. 104 For further discussion, see Chapter 5 of this thesis. 105 Kellner, ―From Vietnam,‖ 221. 106 John Taylor, Body Horror, 158. 107 Hoskins, Televising War, 10. 47
Some theorists of postmodern war have identified changes to gender roles as a defining feature of postmodern war and the postmodern military. These changes began to take place in the last of the modern wars. With the increasing use of aerial bombing in the First and Second World Wars, combined with widespread occupation, the lines between battlefront and home-front and between combatant and civilian—distinctions traditionally conceptualised as masculine versus feminine—blurred, as women increasingly became casualties of war.108 Women were also called upon to help the war effort and to serve as members of the armed forces.109 Since the 1970s, women have been recruited into the militaries of Western nations in increasing numbers and there are now more women serving than ever before, weakening the alignment of soldiering with masculinity and providing an important challenge to the Warrior Myth. Ignatieff argues that, since the end of the draft in the post-Vietnam period, soldiering has been professionalised and ―masculinity has slowly emancipated itself from the warrior ideal.‖110 For Gray, fragmentation of gender identity is a central feature of both postmodern war and postmodernity in general. In particular, Gray notes how the technological advancements of the postmodern military have blurred gender distinctions, with machine technologies complicating the ontology of the human body in warfare.111 Posthumanist approaches to war, which theorise the symbiotic amalgamation of organic and mechanised entities on the postmodern battlefield, provide an important challenge to the logic of sexual difference. As the distinction between human and machine blurs, so does the distinction between man and woman.112
Ignatieff and Gray view changing gender roles as a peripheral characteristic of postmodern war, just one of many features of the new type of warfare. In contrast, Miriam Cooke places gender at the centre of her analysis of postmodern war and the challenges it provides to existing war mythologies. For Cooke, who argues for the emancipatory potential of postmodern war,
Whereas wars previously codified the binary structure of the world by designating gender-specific tasks and gender-specific areas where these tasks might be executed, today‘s wars are represented as doing the opposite. Postmodern wars highlight and then parody those very binaries—war/peace, good/evil, front/home front,
108 For discussions of the blurring of gender boundaries during the World Wars, see Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War; Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines; and Melman, Borderlines. 109 See Escott, Our Wartime Days; Gluck, Rosie the Riveter; Grayzel, Women and the First World War; Merryman, Clipped Wings; Powell and Westacott, Women’s Land Army; Jim Sullivan, Doing Our Bit; Twinch, Women on the Land; and Tyrer, They Fought in the Fields. 110 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 188. 111 Gray, Cyborg Citizen; and Postmodern War. 112 For more on posthumanism and the cyborg, see Chapter 6 of this thesis. 48
combatant/noncombatant, friend/foe, victory/defeat, patriotism/pacifism—which war had originally inspired. This challenge to binary modes of discourse and epistemology entails semiotic transformations. It reveals that both gender and war are highly fluid and negotiable structures within which meanings are constantly constructed and deconstructed. Postmodern wars participate in undermining a system of meanings that had been in place until the outbreak of the nuclear revolution.113
Cooke discusses the discursive construction of the gender binary, arguing that postmodern war provides a context for more complex gender analysis by dispelling the old myth of men- at-war and women-at-home. The Warrior Myth has been the dominant mythology of war for centuries, but in the postmodern period we witness the potential for its collapse.
However, while postmodern war does provide a material and symbolic space for the blurring of gender boundaries and for reconstructions of the sexed body, I argue that the focus on the subversion of gendered war mythologies precludes an exploration of the ways the discourses of postmodern war reinforce traditional gender categories. As such, I argue in this thesis that postmodern war is distinguished by a tension between binary gender identity collapse and reinforcement. Exploring this tension in media discourse is the principal focus of this thesis and will involve a study of representations of numerous gendered figures at war, including male soldiers and male and female civilians. Such an exploration, however, finds its logical starting point with an analysis of the ultimate contradiction of postmodern war: the female combatant. As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, examples of women‘s militarised violence such as that perpetrated by Lynndie England provide the greatest challenge to the logic of sexual difference but also to feminists trying to make sense of women‘s acts of violence.
The remainder of this chapter examines debates concerning the figure of the violent woman. Recognising the existence of female violence (as potentiality and actuality) is the first step to challenging the Western gender binary and the Warrior Myth. This involves an understanding both of women‘s violence itself and of the diversity of women‘s roles in war. I will begin by arguing for the feminist necessity of engaging with female violence and of avoiding marginalising or explaining away women‘s aggressive acts. Recent research among human and animal populations is starting to undermine beliefs in women‘s innate non- violence and to challenge assumptions about natural sexual difference. I will then turn to feminist literature on women‘s roles during wartime, which is divided between a focus on
113 Cooke, ―WO-Man,‖ 182. 49
women‘s pacifism and victimisation and a growing awareness of the importance of studying women‘s agency within the context of war.
Women, Men, Violence and War: Literature and Debates
A critical engagement with violence is a crucial feminist project because dynamics of gender and violence maintain power relations within society. Violence is an assertion of power on multiple levels. Most directly, those who use violence gain power over those they are committing violence against. Ingo Schröder and Bettina Schmidt also note how, through the performative nature of violence, perpetrators obtain additional power over those who never directly experience their violence but who witness it or are aware of it: ―violence as performance extends its efficacy over space and time and gets its message across clearly to the large majority of people who are not physically affected by it.‖114 In this way, the acts of a minority of violent men against a minority of female victims extend control by association of all men over all women. Some perpetrators use violence to prove their power to themselves. Psychotherapist Theodore Nadelson cites an example of a U.S. Gulf War veteran who raped a fellow female soldier just before going into combat. Nadelson concludes that ―the intense anxiety felt by the man initiated the need to reverse the terror of meeting a possibly over- powering force by subordinating another, thus proving that ‗I am not weak, you are.‘‖115 Sexual violence of this kind acts as an assertion of individual power but also of the power of the group, creating identification on the basis of ―them‖ (women) and ―us‖ (men) whereby ―their‖ powerlessness is necessary for the establishment and maintenance of ―our‖ power.116
The constitutive relationship between violence and power is circular: those who perpetrate violence obtain power while those with power control violence. Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil highlight this process when they argue that ―violence itself participates in the definition of violence.‖117 Those with power are able to decide which behaviours are labelled ―violence‖ and which are not, whether a certain type of violence is ―legitimate,‖ when violence is carried out and against whom. To extend Skurski and Coronil‘s argument further, defining violence as an exclusively male behaviour can itself be viewed as an act of violence against women, as it directly contributes to women‘s victimisation. While understanding male violence against women is a crucial project, privileging women‘s experiences as victims over their other experiences serves to perpetuate and reinforce the stereotypes that led to that
114 Schröder and Schmidt, ―Introduction,‖ 6. 115 Nadelson, Trained to Kill,154. 116 Schröder and Schmidt refer to violence used in this way as a ―strateg[y] of social closure‖ which involves ―defining ‗us‘ and ‗them‘ as clearly and diametrically opposed entities‖ (―Introduction,‖ 14). 117 Skurski and Coronil, ―Introduction,‖ 6. 50
victimisation in the first place. Alix Kirsta argues that the insistence that women are only the victims of violence and never its perpetrators has resulted in a ―victim culture‖ in which women are stereotyped as vulnerable and helpless.118 Gendering violence male effectively disarms women; it puts women in a position where they are vulnerable to male violence but unable to protect themselves with physical force, thus increasing the likelihood that they will be successfully perpetrated upon. As Martha McCaughey notes, due to gender stereotypes that begin in childhood, women ―are not as likely as men to have developed a relationship with their bodies as agents, as instruments of action.‖119 This makes women less capable of using their bodies as weapons in self-defence.120 Further, Kathleen Ferraro has argued that, far from causing female victims to receive more sympathetic treatment, the insistence that women are the inevitable victims of violent men results in ―cultural notions of deservedness‖ whereby violence towards women is seen as normal and natural.121 Naturalising male violence effectively legitimates it; if it is natural for men to behave violently then male violence is inevitable and hence, on some level, justifiable.
In spite of this ideological legitimacy, however, the violence of civilian men is regulated today by social and legal conventions that deem most instances of male violence unacceptable.122 Of course, judgements about which acts of violence are legitimate and which are not are made in a highly subjective legal discursive space and involve variables such as provocation, sex of the victim,123 and consequences of the violence, but the majority of violence in civil society is considered reprehensible. Violence committed by militaries, on the other hand, is by definition legitimate violence, sanctioned by the state and by international law. Not all forms of military violence are deemed justifiable; the committing of war crimes and atrocities, such as the killing of unarmed prisoners, is unlawful, although the reality is that most such crimes go either unreported or unpunished. Yet the basic acts of violence deemed criminal in civil society—namely murder and assault as well as, in many cases, rape—are legitimated when carried out by militaries during times of war. It is the exclusive male access to the legitimised violence of war that is most instrumental in the maintenance of gendered power relations and that forms the impetus of this thesis. The
118 Kirsta, Deadlier than the Male, 4. 119 McCaughey, Real Knockouts, 40. 120 See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, for a theorisation of the institutional and ideological disciplining of the body. For a gendered application, see the seminal essay by Iris Marion Young, ―Throwing like a Girl,‖ in Throwing like a Girl. 121 Ferraro, ―Dance of Dependency,‖ 89. 122 For a comprehensive discussion of the ways in which the law genders legitimate violence male, see Peach, ―Is Violence Male?‖ 123 For example, Peach notes how in the American legal system men who kill their wives‘ lovers receive more lenient treatment than women who kill their abusive male partners (―Is Violence Male?‖ 60). The fact that legal systems are male-dominated institutions means that it is men who ultimately get to decide which instances of violence are legitimate and which are not. 51
refusal to allow women to enter the combat branches of most militaries, coupled with the continuing insistence that women are the natural victims of war, results in the problematic scenario in which only men have access to legitimate violence. The message of combat exclusion policies is clear: while there are certain circumstances where it is permissible and desirable for men to commit lethal violence, it is never acceptable for women to do so. Such a distinction gives male members of society privileged access to violence which can be used to control and subjugate women in times of both war and relative peace.
To argue that women have a right to violence, including lethal violence, is not to condone the use of unnecessary or excessive force. Nor, as McCaughey points out, is it to suggest that women should harness violence as a systematic tool for gaining dominance, or that they can ―kick and scream their way out of oppression.‖124 It is, however, to recognise that giving women the same material and ideological access to violence as men is essential not only for women‘s survival but also for overturning social systems based on women‘s subordination. It also provides women with legitimate access to a fuller range of emotions and behaviours—anger, aggression, physicality, competition, energy, adrenaline—that constitute the human experience. Studies and testimonies of women who do engage in aggressive and violent behaviour have begun to illuminate women‘s experiences as violent agents. Rene Denfeld, one of the first women to compete as an amateur boxer in the U.S., writes of her feelings of intense fear when she first entered the ring to spar with a man, followed by her intense pride in her performance. (Tellingly, Denfeld notes that novice male boxers experience the same emotions.) She finds the experience of fighting both men and women empowering and addictive, continuing to box past the one-year deadline she has set herself to avoid serious injury.125 Through her self-defence practice, Martha McCaughey views the performance of violence as transformative to gendered subjectivity and embodiment. She concludes that learning how to ―jab, punch, poke, pull, kick, yell, stomp, shoot, and even kill with my bare hands...transforms the way it feels to inhabit a female body. It changes what it means to be a woman.‖ For McCaughey, self-defence ―constitutes an intervention in the discourses of sex difference which fuel male violence against women.‖126 In matching male violence with violence, Denfeld‘s sparring with male boxers has a similar effect. In a broader sense, the mere recognition of women‘s violent agency intervenes in the logic that maintains cultures of male domination. Recently, behavioural research has begun to take seriously women‘s capacity for violence and to address the need to examine female aggression in order to develop a complete understanding of human behaviour.
124 McCaughey, Real Knockouts, xii. 125 Denfeld, Kill the Body. 126 McCaughey, Real Knockouts, 2; xv. 52
Women and Violence: Developments in Behavioural Research
As established above, natural sexual difference is the defining principle upon which contemporary scientific theorisations of sex and gender are based. The logic that male and female bodies are ontological opposites, combined with the belief that male bodies are predisposed towards violence, has resulted in a neglect of female violence in scientific research since early studies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a resultant failure to engage with it in cultural and political realms. Research into human violence in the fields of psychology, behavioural science, sociology and anthropology has been influenced by and has helped to maintain the popular belief that women are not violent beings. While researchers today typically focus on the behaviour of aggression, this term is often used interchangeably with violence. Kaj Björkqvist and Pirkko Niemelä, for instance, define aggression as ―an act done with the intention to harm another person, oneself, or an object.‖ Aggressiveness, in contrast, is defined as a personality trait that predisposes a person towards violent behaviour.127 Due to the widespread belief that women are not naturally inclined towards violence, research into human aggression and aggressiveness has almost entirely focused on male subjects. Indeed, early twentieth-century studies of violence typically made no reference to gender at all, due to the logic that males supposedly have no gender identity. Human violence and male violence were taken as synonymous.128
Some of the earliest studies into aggression did recognise women‘s capacity for violence, but the tendency to modify ―violence‖ with the adjective ―female‖ and to study women‘s violence separately from men‘s reveals how women‘s violence was set apart from violence proper, which was perceived as an exclusively male behaviour. In 1895 ethno- criminologists Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero published The Female Offender, a meta-analysis of European studies of female criminality. By analysing the body compositions of female violent criminals, the authors concluded that the female offender was anatomically deviant from normal womanhood. Violent women ―approximate more to males...than normal women;‖ they are characterised by masculine features such as broad jaws, deep-set eyes, and facial down ―so long as to resemble a beard.‖129 The violent woman was constructed as a monster whose body constituted a horrific combination of male and female corporealities, conforming to stereotypes that yoked violence to manhood. That the site of the violent woman‘s aberrance from normal womanhood was her body cemented the essentialism of
127 Björkqvist and Niemelä, ―New Trends,‖ 4. 128 For studies in which ―human‖ and ―man‖ are conflated, see Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness; Gurr, Why Men Rebel; Montagu, ed., Man and Aggression; Storr, Human Destructiveness; and Toch, Violent Men. 129 Lombroso and Ferrero, Female Offender, 28; 89–91. 53
male violence. Violence could be committed by women while remaining located within a ―male‖ body.
As studies like Lombroso and Ferrero‘s show, women have been performing acts of violence since the earliest days of behavioural and criminological research. In spite of this, scholarship on aggression today, concerning both human and animal populations, continues to focus almost exclusively on male perpetrators. The absence of females from the literature on violence must be seen not as an indication of the fact that women are not violent but rather of the continuing perception that women are not naturally disposed to violence. As Douglas P. Fry and Ayala H. Gabriel argue, ―research on aggression is an outcome not so much of what is out there ‗in the nature of things‘ but a reflection of how western scholarship (in the broad sense of the term) constructs its categories. It has constructed aggression as a stable (male) category, has paid little attention to female aggression, and has produced theories on aggression from male-centered research.‖130 Björkqvist and Niemelä agree that the apparent evidence of significant sexual differences in aggression produced by many studies is largely due to cultural bias among researchers which predisposes them to focus on male perpetration: ―The male prototype is...the warrior, while the prototype of the female is the self-sacrificing mother, and scientists maintain, like everybody else, the favorite myths of their culture, seeing females, whether mice, primates, or humans, in accordance with their own cultural stereotypes.‖131 For example, in a study published in 1992 Jeffrey H. Goldstein notes that high activity levels among male children, manifested in behaviours such as rough- and-tumble play, have been misinterpreted as aggression and used as evidence that boys are more aggressive than girls.132 David Adams argued in 1992 that research on aggression in rats has skewed results in favour of male aggression because it has been conducted in laboratory settings; female rats are more likely to aggress in wild settings.133 This cultural bias has resulted in a predominant focus on male violence which in turn reinforces the belief that violence is an exclusively male behaviour. Such oversights have led to the construction of a scientific discourse that confirms the naturalness of male violence while denying women‘s violent potential.
While some researchers do not recognise women‘s capacity for violence at all, others acknowledge that women can be violent but do not regard this as worthy of study. On behalf of all the contributors to his 1994 edited collection Male Violence, evolutionary psychologist John Archer introduces women‘s violence only to render it marginal and insignificant: ―We
130 Fry and Gabriel, ―Preface,‖ 165. 131 Björkqvist and Niemelä, ―New Trends,‖ 5. 132 Jeffry H. Goldstein, ―Sex Differences,‖ 9. 133 Adams, ―Biology,‖ 22. 54
acknowledge that females are quite capable of aggression, and may even be violent in some cases. But we do not let this side-track us from the much greater social problem of male violence...by over-emphasizing the relatively unusual, but highly newsworthy, cases of the seriously violent wife, the female sexual abuser of children or the woman serial killer.‖134Women‘s perpetration of violence is reduced to a minor nuisance, the study of which would impede the book‘s overriding evolutionary hypothesis regarding sexual difference. Violence committed by women is nothing more than a sideshow to the main event of male aggression. Media outlets are influenced by such conclusions in their representations of criminal women. Women‘s violence in popular media is often explained away, minimised or otherwise rendered invisible. In 2003 Australian sociologist Belinda Morrissey analysed the representation of female murderers in legal and media discourses and concluded that women who kill are depicted in ways that deny their rational, human agency: as inhuman monsters, as victims led astray by bad men, or as pathological.135 Such representations contribute to a cultural belief that violence perpetrated by women is not serious or is so uncommon as to make an understanding of it unnecessary.
Archer‘s argument that women commit far fewer violent crimes than men is difficult to dispute; statistics from around the world indicate that men are indeed ―primarily responsible for the vast majority of serious crimes.‖136 One reason for this could be that women‘s violence is rendered invisible because it takes place mostly in the privacy of the home, or is not reported as much as men‘s violence and thus disappears in silence. Or what you see may indeed be what you get: women may not perform violent acts with the same frequency or force as men do. However, the relative paucity of women‘s criminal violence should not be used as an argument that women cannot be violent, or that they are essentially less violent than men; nor should it serve to support the claim that women are not entitled to the expression of violence, aggression and anger on a par with men. Recent research has shown that, while there may be qualitative gender differences in aggressiveness (that is, men and women may express aggression in different ways, with male aggression more likely to result in serious bodily harm), quantitative differences are more difficult to substantiate. B. Ann Bettencourt and Norman Miller challenged previous studies which claimed women were less aggressive than men. By introducing provocation into their 1996 experiment, Bettencourt and Miller found that women were only less aggressive in the absence of provocation; when provoked, women displayed equal levels of aggression to men.137 In a 2007 study Hannelore Weber and Monika Wiedig-Allison took this
134 Archer, ―Introduction,‖ 4. 135 Morrissey, When Women Kill. 136 Flowers, Male Crime and Deviance, vii. 137 Bettencourt and Miller, ―Gender Differences.‖ 55
research further, showing that upon provocation women were in fact more likely to react with aggression than men.138 Anne Campbell (2006) and Carol Tavris (1982) each separately reviewed the scientific literature on anger—the emotion that precedes and accompanies violence—and reported that no consistent sex differences could be found.139 In those cases where minor sex differences have occurred, women have actually been shown to experience and express more anger than men.140 Leslie Brody resoundingly concluded in a 1997paper that ―our [Western scientific and cultural] stereotype that men express more anger is simply wrong.‖141 These studies show that women are emotionally and psychologically as able as men to commit violence and that aggressiveness is an equally ―natural‖ aspect of their personality.
Further, cross-cultural analyses reveal that in certain cultures women‘s perpetration of violence is anything but a sideline act. H. B. Kimberley Cook‘s nine-month study, published in 1992, of the San Fernando community in Margarita, Venezuela, reveals that women‘s violence can be widespread and dangerous. The violence in this community was not restricted to a handful of ―aberrant‖ women but was rather a collective behaviour specifically aligned to womanhood. While men and women experienced roughly equal levels of aggressiveness in this culture, women‘s aggressiveness was more likely to result in serious violence than men‘s. In a community characterised by male absence, transience, and unreliability, women were required to be ―the stable, reliable figures, ultimately responsible for their own survival and that of their families. Their importance was reflected in the central roles they assumed in social and economic matters.‖ Cook noted that this centrality allowed Margariteno women to use violence as a form of acceptable social control. Women in the community fought with other women in the street, typically over challenges either to their authority or to their (or their children‘s) paternity. They were also violent towards men who show disrespect or behaved in otherwise unacceptable ways. One woman told Cook, ―If a man bothers me, I slap him in the face or hit him over the head with a bottle. Once my woman friends and I threw a guy on the ground because he was being disrespectful‖. Another acknowledged that if ―[my husband] ever disrespected me, I would wait until he slept and throw boiling oil on him‖. The men of San Fernando accepted women‘s use of violence as a means of social control. Cook observed that ―Margariteno women expressed aggression with a socially recognized authority that went largely unquestioned. The use of verbal and physical aggression by women was not considered
138 Weber and Wiedig-Allison, ―Sex Differences.‖ 139 Campbell, ―Sex Differences;‖ Tavris, Anger. 140 Campbell, ―Sex Differences,‖ 240. 141 Brody, ―Gender and Emotion,‖ 386. 56
abnormal. A woman‘s physical strength and ability to defend herself were a source of pride and were central in the self-concept of women.‖ In this society, violence was not considered anathema to femininity but rather was a principal constitutive component; young girls were told that if they wanted to be ―real‖ women, they must learn to be strong and tough, not submissive and weak as girls in Western societies are taught.142
That real womanhood is defined as passive non-violence in one culture and aggressive violence in another demonstrates the constructedness of nature as a gendered concept. The behaviours that are deemed to be natural or real for each gender are not universal but culture-specific. Within this context, the notion that women are not naturally violent loses its stability; women‘s violence is unnatural only so far as it is perceived and constructed as such by the culture in which it is displayed. The overturning of the logic that women are naturally non-violent is a necessary first step towards understanding the gendered workings of war and violent conflict and questioning the functionality of binary gender as a system of categorisation. Given that the dualism of women as life-givers and men as life-takers underpins the structure of gender in contemporary Western culture, the argument that it is not unnatural for women to be violent has the potential to undermine the entire gender system. Once we recognise that female violence is no less natural than male violence (or, perhaps more to the point, that male violence is no less culturally constructed than female violence) we can begin to explore the actions of women during wartime in ways that recognise the nuances of human behaviour without marginalising women‘s violence as an aberration or reducing it to something inauthentic or ―not real.‖ Such recognition opens new channels of feminist investigation rather than closing them on the basis of essentialism and reductivism and enables us to address the feminist questions posed above, to make sense of the violence of women in war while resolving some of the contradictions and problems that these questions pose when they are contained within essentialist paradigms. This intervention into the gender binary is a necessary next step in scholarship on women and violence in the context of war.
Women and War: Research Trends and Priorities
While critical analyses of female violence can provide important feminist insights into the experiences of women in war, a large proportion of feminist scholarship in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has focused on what is often conceptualised as women‘s unique political position outside war. As bearers and nurturers of life, women are believed to have a special propensity towards pacifism and a particular interest in the creation and maintenance of a peaceful world. Prominent peace educator Betty A. Reardon, for example,
142 Cook, ―Matrifocality and Female Aggression,‖ 157; 153; 154; 156. 57
argues that violence is men‘s way of being, while justice, humanity and peace are ―another way,‖ a female way.143 Similarly, historian Harriet Hyman Alonso conceives of peace as a ―women‘s issue.‖144 Sara Ruddick explicitly connects motherhood with pacifism, arguing that ―everyday maternal thinking contrasts as a whole with military thinking.‖ In the tasks of loving, disciplining and teaching their children, ―mothers have been preparing themselves for patient and conscientious nonviolence.‖ While mothers are not necessarily intrinsically peaceful, Ruddick sees a basic contradiction between military and maternal aims which produces a source of resistance to warfare among mothers.145 Taking an ecofeminist approach, Dorothy Dinnerstein‘s 1989 essay ―What Does Feminism Mean?‖ reads as an apocalyptic prediction of a future of male domination over women and the earth. She argues that men engage in the parallel activities of waging war and exploiting Mother Earth‘s resources out of a profound hatred of women. The dichotomy established here is clear: men wage war against women, and only women (specifically feminist women) can stop them by bringing about peace.146
Pacifist women‘s rights activists argue that, because wartime violence targets women, women will never achieve equality and freedom unless conditions of international peace and security can be created.147 They draw a straight line between institutionalised violence and violence against women and argue that the elimination of ―coercive power-over privilege systems of domination‖ is the primary goal of both feminism and pacifism.148 In societies where violence is an instrument of power, men will continue to dominate and subjugate women; thus the total eradication of violence of all kinds is a necessary feminist aim. For pacifist feminists, militarisation and war equates to the rape and exploitation of women, bereavement from the loss of male loved ones, impoverishment and the necessitation of prostitution, unwanted pregnancies, and the injection of resources into the
143 Reardon, Women and Peace, 2. 144 Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue. 145 Ruddick, Maternal Thinking,150; 156. 146 Mary Daly expresses a similar view in Gyn/Ecology where she writes that the ―organized aggression/violence of males filled with fear of their own emptiness and weakness is carried out against women in concrete acts of rape, dismemberment, and murder. These acts of violation/violence are expressions of the War State‘s essential identity as a State of Rapism, in which all invasions, occupations, destructions of ‗enemy territory‘ are elaborations upon the theme of rape/gynocide‖ (361). Feminist peace scholarship is prolific. Other writings include Cockburn, From Where We Stand; Cockburn, Space between Us; Early, World without War; Gioseffi, ed., Women on War; Harris and King, eds., Rocking the Ship of State; Lamb, Levy and Reich, Wounds of War; Oldfield, Women against the Iron Fist; Porter, Peacebuilding; Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace; Warren and Cady, eds., Bringing Peace Home; Whiltsher, Most Dangerous Women; and Zwerman, ―Mothering on the Lam.‖ While twentieth-century feminists have embraced pacifism, Braudy notes how women have historically been considered as encouraging war and it was not until the twentieth century that femininity came to be aligned with peace (From Chivalry to Terrorism, 210). 147 See, for example, Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue, 6; and Reardon, Women and Peace, 1. 148 Warren and Cady, ―Feminism and Peace.‖ 58
military institution which could be better spent on programs that benefit women. ―In a very physical sense,‖ Alonso writes, ―the presence of the military, whether or not in an actual war situation, has always been bad news for women.‖149 Such arguments are based on the logic that women are the natural, inevitable victims of war and never its benefactors, and the concomitant view that all men necessarily benefit from the violence of war.
An important component of the pacifist feminist project is research into specific instances of women‘s victimisation during war. The aim of such research is to give a voice to those women who have traditionally been silenced and whose devastating experiences are often not officially recognised. It is carried out particularly among victims from developing and non-Western nations who are doubly silenced by gender and ethnicity (and often further silenced by poverty). The majority of studies have focused on genocidal rape in the Balkans, mass rape in Second World War Europe, and sexual slavery in Asia.150 While rape and sexual violence are prioritised in these studies, women are also the victims of murder, torture, displacement, deprivation, and other forms of violence during war. Research on women‘s wartime victimisation is crucial to challenging the assumption that in times of conflict ―females have generally received better treatment and fared better than males.‖151 Victim narratives testify to the fact that losing one‘s life in battle is not the only sacrifice made in war, nor is battle the only authentic wartime experience. The experiences of female war victims are as real, as significant and as deserving of recognition as those of male soldiers who are wounded and die in service to their country.
Yet, while research on women‘s victimhood remains a vital feminist task, there is a tendency in this scholarship to view women not as subjects who are victimised but rather as ―passive objects of injustice,‖ a process known as victimism.152 Victimism in the context of
149 Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue,9. 150 Studies on women‘s experiences in these regions include, but are not limited to: Balkans: Allen, Rape Warfare; Askin, War Crimes against Women; Thomas and Ralph, ―Rape in War;‖ Nikolić- Ristanović, Women, Violence and War; and Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape. Europe: Grossmann, ―Question of Silence;‖ Hedgepeth and Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women; and Lilly, Taken by Force. Asia: Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women; and Yoshimi, Comfort Women. 151 Van Creveld, Men, Women and War, 29. 152 Hoagland, ―Moral Revolution,‖ 185; my emphasis. In her discussion of rape, Kathleen Barry helpfully elaborates on the definition of victimism and the problems of applying the ―victim‖ label to women who experience sexual assault: ―A woman who has been sexually assaulted often finds she can only be understood if she takes on the role of victim; she is assigned a victim status and then seen only in terms of what has happened to her.... Victimism denies the woman the integrity of her humanity through the whole experience, and it creates a framework for others to know her not as a person but as a victim, someone to whom violence was done. Assigning this role extends the terrorism of the act of sexual violence by continuing to rob her of her humanness, an act begun by the rapist.... Once one has been raped, one is not ever again a nonvictim. Victimism is an objectification which establishes new standards for defining experience; those standards dismiss any question of will, and deny that the woman even while enduring sexual violence is a living, changing, growing, interactive person‖ (Female Sexual Slavery,44–45). 59
warfare is a function of the belief that, while men ―do‖ war, war ―happens to‖ women; male and female war experiences are segregated on the basis of agency.153 Men are the agentic subjects of war, leading, fighting, planning and strategising, while women are the objects upon which the violence and destruction of war are acted out. I have demonstrated how this belief that women are the inevitable victims of war can promote women‘s victimisation but, ironically, it can also work to increase the victimisation of men. Male civilians are often the victims of wartime violence. For example, while there has been a lot of attention dedicated to the targeting of women (especially in the context of genocide) due to their reproductive potential, young civilian men are also often specifically targeted by enemy troops because of their status as potential soldiers.154 Policies based on the logic of ―innocent women and children‖ deny the right of male civilians to protection from violence. Indeed, as R. Charli Carpenter argues, adult men are not typically regarded as ―civilians‖ at all and hence often do not receive the protection of civilian immunity; men are automatically assigned the identity of soldiers even though many men do not serve militarily during war. Due to the dualistic gendering of wartime identity, distinctions between men and women are given primacy over distinctions between civilians and combatants. While soldiers are not supposed to target civilians under the international conventions of war, this often amounts to policies that spare women and children, regardless of their status as combatants or civilians.155 This differentiation between men–as–soldiers and women–as–civilians has also resulted in strategies on the part of peacekeeping and humanitarian organisations which have preserved the lives of women—for example, evacuating women, children and the elderly
Dubravka Žarkov discusses the problems of defining women as victims through a ―discourse of vulnerability‖ which encourages them not to fight back against rapists and thus increases the likelihood of rape occurring. She goes on to argue against the construction of a sisterhood based on victimisation: ―It is clear that both peacetime and wartime rape theorizing would benefit from the deconstruction of the naturalized link between femininity and victimization, as the deconstruction of male power and female powerlessness allows for envisioning different relations between men and women. But, then recognizing and reconstructing different experiences and meanings of rape would also allow for envisioning different relationships among women. This would require leaving behind the assumption that rape as a crime unifies all women, creating a global sisterhood in rape. Feminist sensitivity to differences among women‘s experiences has to be extended to the experiences of rape‖ (Body of War, 179; 183). 153 For instance, Rosemary Ridd begins the edited collection Caught up in Conflict: Women’s Responses to Political Strife by asking, ―What happens to women in periods of political conflict...?‖ (―Powers of the Powerless, 1; my emphasis). The book title emphasises women‘s passivity: women are ―caught up‖ or swept away by conflict that is somehow separate from them; they ―respond to‖ conflict that is created and maintained by others. Such rhetoric denies women‘s agency in times of war. 154 Adam Jones has documented the specific targeting of young Tutsi males in the Rwandan genocide to prevent them from joining the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Jones argues: ―The clear evidence of a gendering targeting of males casts into severe disrepute the many subsequent attempts to rewrite history to depict women as the principal targets of the genocide.... The general trend in discussions of ‗gender‘ and human rights...tend[s] to take women‘s disproportionate victimization as a guiding assumption, indeed as a virtual article of faith‖ (―Gender and Genocide,‖ 111–12). 155 Carpenter, ‘Innocent Women and Children’, 2. 60
from besieged cities and leaving adult men behind—while failing to protect male non- combatants from the violence of war.156 This lack of recognition of the atrocities committed against civilian men during war amounts to a human rights abuse that privileges female life over male life.
Recently, scholars of gender and war have begun to look beyond the dualism of male soldier and female victim to explore the complexities of gender roles in conflict situations. In an early study Jean Bethke Elshtain questioned the yoking of men with war and women with peace, a dichotomy she referred to as ―Just Warriors‖ versus ―Beautiful Souls.‖ She argued that the persistent belief in this dichotomy prevents researchers from exploring divergent experiences, such as those ―of pacific males; of bellicose women; …of martial fervor at odds—or so we choose to believe—with maternalism in women.‖157 Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark note how the insistence that war is a male-created activity of which women are only victims ―has resulted in insufficient recognition of women‘s involvement and participation, both unavoidable and deliberate, in violent conflicts, and of the de-linking of women from passive, peaceful stereotypes.‖158 This inability to recognise women‘s active participation in conflict means that women are largely excluded from (and have their needs ignored in) reintegration projects, peace-building, and restructuring after conflict has ended. Haleh Afshar and Deborah Eade‘s edited collection Development, Women, and War attempts to ―explode some prevalent myths, including the assumption that the war front is separate from the home front or that women are always victims in times of conflict.‖159Meredeth Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya have written about what women do in war,160 while Rita Manchanda‘s edited collection on women and war in South East Asia bears the subtitle ―Beyond Victimhood to Agency.‖161 However, it is important not to reduce women‘s wartime subject positions to either victims or agents; as Ronit Lentin observes, studies of women‘s experiences of war must ―address victimhood and agency in tandem,‖ acknowledging both and privileging neither.162 Further, Afshar and Eade note how women may participate in war efforts but that this is qualified by the fact that they ―seldom have a
156 See Carpenter, ‘Innocent Women and Children’. 157 Elshtain, Women and War, 4. 158 Moser and Clark, ―Introduction,‖ 4. 159 Afshar and Eade, ―Introduction,‖ 2. 160 Turshen and Twagiramariya, What Women Do in Wartime. 161 Manchanda, ed., Women, War, and Peace. 162 Lentin, ―Introduction,‖ 5. Nicole Ann Dombrowski makes a similar observation in her edited collection Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent. She argues that ―histories celebrating women‘s service in the armed forces of any country must be placed alongside those of women victimized by war‘s violence on all sides of a conflict.‖The articles in her collection ―try to present a historical trajectory that pairs women‘s experience as victims of war with women‘s engagement as agents, on behalf of themselves or their countries‖ (―Soldiers, Saints, or Sacrificial Lambs?‖ 2; 5). 61
choice about whether they are indeed victims or active participants.‖163 If women‘s participation in wartime violence is forced under penalty of death, for example, then what appears to be agency must be recast as victimisation. Women‘s relationship to violence in war should never be reduced to another binary of passive victims/powerful actors.
Conclusion
This thesis forms part of the attempt to redress the bifurcation of men‘s and women‘s wartime experiences of war into perpetration and victimisation by exploring the ways this binary is constructed and the subsequent potential for its deconstruction in the context of postmodern war. Following Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, I believe that ―breaking the nexus (real or assumed) between military service and masculinity on the one hand and pacifism and femininity on the other‖ will serve both feminist and anti-militarist goals by ―weaken[ing] the social pediments on which militarism rests.‖164 A study of postmodern war reveals that, at both discursive and experiential levels, gendered experiences of war are complex and multifaceted. The remainder of Part 1 entails an exploration of women‘s experiential and representational violence in the context of war through an analysis of the figure of the female combatant. Of course, fighting as soldiers is not the only way women display agency in times of war. Women participate in war in diverse ways, including joining unarmed resistance movements, acting as spies and informants, and working as prison guards. Nor am I suggesting that female soldiers necessarily stand as symbols of women‘s liberation and power; a soldier (male or female) is not an autonomous agent but is rather acting within the confines of a highly standardised and controlled military institution. However, the violence of the female combatant positions her as a figure unique in her potential to destabilise conventional assumptions about binary gender formations. If a woman can at once use her body to give life and to take it (whether this constitutes agentic behaviour or otherwise), then notions of natural sexual difference become problematic.
163 Afshar and Eade, ―Introduction,‖ 3. 164 Cooke and Woollacott, ―Postscript,‖ 321. 62
Chapter 2
Sex and Violence in the Postmodern Military: Constructions of the Female Soldier’s Body in Military Discourse
For postmodern war theorists, the defining feature of this new type of warfare is technology. ―Smart bombs,‖ ―cyber-warriors,‖ ―AI,‖ ―C4I2‖: this is the rhetoric of war in the twenty-first century.165 Postmodern war theory renders a schism between technology and nature. Technology is posited as a replacement for nature, with the substitution of machines for men resulting in the removal of the human body from the postmodern battlefield. Nature seems to play no part in the theatre of war. Gray, for instance, argues that there is an ―erasure of nature as a category‖ brought about by ―doctrines of cyberwar, which move most of the action into simulated terrain and human consciousness.‖166 Alternately, technology is cast in the role of nature‘s destroyer, wiping out ecosystems, poisoning the earth, water and air, obliterating homes and communities, as in ecofeminist critiques of violent conflict.167 Either way, technology/culture reigns supreme while nature is relegated to a realm outside of or antithetical to war.168 However, a broader analysis of postmodern war discourses reveal that technology and nature should not be viewed as mutually exclusive categories. Nature is everywhere in the discourses of war, which draw heavily on the discipline of biology for war‘s justification, and the technology–nature relationship forms the basis of the symbiotic connection between machines and bodies that characterises postmodern conflict. Virilio has documented the late twentieth-century ―militarization of science,‖ by which he is referring specifically to ―the development of science as technoscience.‖169 Yet the discourse of science encompasses both technology and nature; indeed, science may be conceptualised as an attempt to theorise the relationship between the two. Thus if ―science‖ and ―technology‖ are militarised, so too is ―nature.‖
This chapter explores the body of the female soldier in experiential and discursive forms and its relationship to nature and science in military discourse. In spite of the material capacity of both men and women to inflict and experience pain, male bodies are typically characterised as the effecters of violence (the weapons of war) while female bodies are viewed as the receivers of violence (the victims of war), a duality which is made most visible when the situation is reversed. In the case of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in
165 C4I2 is a military abbreviation that stands for ―Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, and Interoperability.‖ 166 Gray, Postmodern War, 175–76. 167 See Chapter 1, p. 56 of this thesis. 168 For a detailed discussion of the history of the relationship between nature and war in the twentieth century, see Russell, War and Nature. 169 Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 205; 187. 63
2004 which opened Chapter 1, international media struggled to make conceptual and linguistic sense of a female torturer and male victims. What words were appropriate to describe this unthinkable, unspeakable act? Was torturer Lynndie England a woman? A man-woman? An animal? A monster?170 Although her material body remained unchanged, England lost her femaleness linguistically in her act of inflicting torture, through her role as agent of pain. Conversely, due to their status as victims of torture (particularly sexual torture) the biological men were emasculated in representation. Their relationship to violent agency (whether they were agents or receivers of violence) modified their bodies discursively, although anatomically and chromosomally they of course remained unaltered.171 This process of unsexing and re-sexing relies upon the logic of nature. The reductive belief that women are the natural victims of male violence results in constructions of the bodies of violent perpetrators as male, regardless of their biological sex.
Constructions of England‘s sexed body were further problematised by the fact that she fell pregnant to fellow prison guard Charles Graner, her maternity made glaringly visible by media photographs showing her pregnant in uniform and holding her baby during her hearings.172 That a female body could at once inflict violence and produce life was abundantly clear. Nonetheless, binary distinctions between man–as–killer and woman–as– reproducer continue to inform military discourse. Biology sexes the female body not simply in the sense that it assigns it to the sex category ―woman‖ but also in the sense that it constructs the female body as sex. In this chapter I examine constructions of the female– soldier–as–sex in two military contexts. Firstly, I will explore marketing and recruitment campaigns which use images of the female body to entice recruits. The postmodern military utilises a wide range of media outlets, including television, magazine and Internet marketing, not just to sell war to the public but also to shape its self-image and to construct the soldier identity. I explore representations by the United States military, as well as two strikingly similar recruitment campaigns launched by the Australian and New Zealand armies in 2007, which focus specifically on images of the sexed body of the female soldier. Secondly, I investigate the combat exclusion policies of the U.S., U.K. and Australian militaries which construct the female body as unsuited for combat, relying on the logic of natural sexual difference to associate women with reproduction and thus to disassociate them from violence. As I will demonstrate, in these recruitment campaigns and combat exclusion policies the reduction of the female body to sex sees women simultaneously banned from
170 See Bourke, ―Torture as Pornography;‖ Flynn, ―Witch;‖ Knight, ―Small-Town Girl;‖ and Riddell, ―New Monster in Chief.‖ 171 For another contemporary example of this representational phenomenon in media, see the discussion of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Chapter 6 of this thesis. 172 See Enloe, ―Wielding Masculinity,‖ 515–16; and Miller, ―Motherhood.‖ 64
the business end of war and essential to the business of constructing soldiers in the postmodern period. However, by simultaneously occupying the roles of life-giver and life- taker, the female soldier‘s embodied experience disrupts the gender binary and the idea of natural sexual difference upon which it is based. Integration and recruitment policies reveal the tension of trying to reconcile these supposedly incommensurable roles, a tension that ultimately renders the postmodern female soldier monstrous.
Gender Things: Constructions of the Female Soldier in Military Marketing and Recruitment Campaigns
Figure 1. The U.S. Army strikes a precarious balance between allowing for gender inclusivity while retaining a tough, ―masculine‖ image.173
The utilisation of the female body in recruitment drives is an established strategy of Western militaries. Long before women comprised a significant presence in the armed forces, their images were being evoked to incite young men to fight the good fight. During the First World War in Britain, women and children were depicted in recruitment posters as victims of German brutality whom British men must protect by enlisting; women‘s bodies came to
173 This advertisement also illustrates the intersection of racial and gender identities in military marketing, prompting the question of whether a black woman more persuasively signifies strength (masculinity) than a white woman. Image available from http://www.goarmy.com/goarmy.html#/?marquee=education (accessed October 17, 2008). 65
represent the vanquished, the conquered, both literally and symbolically.174 In the quest for volunteers, women were assigned the role of sanctioning male soldiers: ―Women of Britain say ‗Go!‘‖ was a popular recruiting slogan. The motif of the woman‘s body as the grateful and yielding reward for the male soldier, waiting with the promise of sexual gratification at war‘s end, was also used to entice men to enlist. Military propaganda has encouraged women to make bodily contributions to war efforts through both manual labour (see, for example, the figure of Rosie the Riveter in the Second World War) and reproductive labour (to replenish populations devastated by war). Yet, while some women have historically been called upon to serve militarily, such as with the creation of the WAC (Women‘s Army Corps) and the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the United States in World War II, they were never deployed to warzones and their role was always to assist and support male soldiers. Today, military recruitment is complicated by the fact that women take on the dual roles of protector and protected, of she who incites to go and she who goes herself. Woman is both soldier and soldier‘s reward. Her body is simultaneously that of a fighter (she has the potential to be ―Army Strong;‖ see Figure 1) and that of a sexual plaything; she is at once military agent and object.
In contrast to earlier constructions of the armed forces as an institution in which masculinity was forged, postmodern militaries now promote gender-neutral opportunities for scholarships and career advancement, friendship, challenge and fun as their major selling points.175 On the U.S. Army‘s recruitment website, videos of soldiers describing their experiences are balanced between male and female subject positions; further, many of the women featured are employed in traditional male jobs such as fire fighting. Aware of the negative publicity of the military as a place of gender inequality, one female soldier assures concerned potential recruits that ―stereotypes don‘t really happen here. It‘s not really a gender thing. We all have our jobs to do. We‘re all soldiers; we all wear the same uniform.‖176 That this comment is spoken by a female soldier suggests that for the Army ―woman‖ and ―gender‖ are synonymous. Gender is a female issue, a problem only in the minds of potential female recruits; it is not a military issue, the website assures its users. Such representations constitute an attempt to unsex the soldier‘s body. Sexual distinctions between men and women are discursively erased in assertions that all soldiers are the same, that sex and gender somehow cease to exist—to be ―things‖—in the military context.
174 See Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 46–47. 175 For more on the recruitment emphases of today‘s military institutions, see Moskos, Williams, and Segal, eds., Post Modern Military. 176 U.S. Army, ―Video: Basic Combat Training.‖ 66
Yet the decision to write this comment into the female soldier‘s script and insert it in the website‘s introductory material reveals that gender issues are indeed central to the military; the insistence that gender is not an issue is itself a ―gender thing.‖ The sexing of the body continues to play a vital role in military self-definition and self-representation. Indeed, in other marketing material, the body of the female soldier is overtly sexualised and feminised. The Australian and New Zealand militaries provide examples of such sexualisation through their use of imagery that explicitly focuses on the female body. In 2007 the Australian and New Zealand Armies each ran separate recruiting campaigns that featured a remarkably similar female protagonist.
Figure 2: The New Zealand Army utilises the sexed body of the female soldier to appeal to recruits.
The New Zealand Army (Ngāti Tumatauenga) created a computer-generated, 3D character wearing a tight t-shirt (which exposed the midriff) and revealing shorts (Figure 2). The character appeared in television commercials asking would-be recruits ―Have you got what it takes?‖ to join the Army and presenting them with challenges (for example, to perform continuous push-ups until the end of the commercial break) to determine the answer. At time of writing, the character remains on the Army‘s website as the virtual guide through military simulation games. The Australian campaign featured an even more provocative cartoon soldier with long hair, a large bust, and a seductive expression (Figures 3 and 4). She appeared on posters in various roles, including nurse, administrator, cook, band-member, engineer (complete with large spanner, a motif that has its genesis in pornographic movies) and helicopter pilot. The campaign caused offence among military women and was eventually cancelled.177Both characters resemble the Playstation gaming character Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider series. Croft, whose persona was popularised in mainstream culture by Angelina Jolie in movie adaptations of the game, has become synonymous with highly-charged male sexual fantasy.178
177 McPhedran, ―Vampish Heroine;‖ and News.com.au, ―Lara Croft Clone.‖ 178 For recent discussions of the relationship between video games, gender and violence, see Brenick, Henning, and Killen, ―Social Evaluations;‖ Dill and Thill, ―Video Game Characters;‖ Eastin, 67
Figures 3 and 4: The Australian Army produced recruitment material depicting female soldiers in highly sexualised roles.
Both campaigns can be read as examples of the male gaze in action; the images seem to constitute a classic case of ―woman as image, man as bearer of the look.‖179 The characters are sexualised objects for male viewing, demonstrating that the military continues to use the promise of heterosexual reward to entice men to volunteer for service. However, the subject/object dichotomy is complicated in these images through the instability of sexed subject positions. When the Australian campaign declares ―We want you!‖ to which sexes do the ―we‖ and the ―you‖ refer? The traditional relationship between object and spectator is reversed as the subject who does the wanting (the agentic ―we‖) is a woman, while the male viewer becomes the object of her desire. The female character is sexually aggressive, the gaze of the male viewer being met with a counter-gaze reminiscent of Manet‘s Olympia.180 Furthermore, the ―we‖ the female character signifies is the Army itself. Far from being the powerless outsider in the viewing relationship, then, the woman is part of the system, inviting the male spectator to join her in her privileged position as insider. Unlike previous recruitment posters where ―she‖ encouraged ―him‖ to leave her to join the masculine military (―Women of Britain say ‗Go!‘‖), now she is on the inside, beckoning him to join her. As such, the woman in the posters functions not simply as a symbolic woman representing the
―Video Game Violence;‖ Lemmens, Valkenburg, and Peter, ―Effects of Pathological Gaming;‖ Lin, ―Gender Differences;‖ Robinson, Callister, Clark, and Phillips, ―Violence, Sexuality, and Gender Stereotyping;‖ and Scharrer, ―Virtual Violence.‖ 179 Mulvey, ―Visual Pleasure,‖19. 180 Olympia, painted in 1863, is recognised as the quintessential example of how the female gaze can be utilised to reverse gendered power relations in imagery. In having his female figure look directly at the (male) viewer, Manet broke with conventional techniques which depicted the naked, reclining woman as a passive, non-confrontational object of male desire. 68
abstract promise of sexual reward to a male soldier who risks everything to earn it. Instead, she is his fellow soldier, his comrade, performing many of the same tasks (and taking the same risks) as he does. She is demystified; she is not his other but his (theoretical) equal and thus she problematises the subject/object distinction on which the heterosexual male fantasy is based.
However, the sexing of the collective military subject is misleading. In reality, ―we‖ is a defence force that is almost 90 percent male. A Defence spokeswoman stated that the Australian campaign was designed for internal recruitment, primarily targeted at young males in the combat branches to encourage them to change trades.181 In this sense, the choice of a female protagonist suggests the feminisation of the non-combat branches, which are open to women as well as men. Nonetheless, the personnel in these branches remain overwhelmingly male. The campaign was designed by a male-dominated institution (the male ―we‖ behind the female symbol) which utilises the female subject position to its own ends. Rather than a case of women constructing their own subjectivity, then, the images constitute the appropriation of the sexualised, militarised female subject for purposes that suit the male-dominated institution. The female subject of the posters is tough, in control, and sexually aggressive, but she nonetheless continues to serve a male master in the form of the military establishment that created her. The Australian character is thus a woman who appears to have agency but in fact has none. In her analysis of advertising imagery, Rosalind Gill explains how the motif of post-feminist empowerment presents the illusion of female agency but is in reality simply objectification by a different name; women‘s agency amounts to their willingness to be objectified or to objectify themselves.182 Recent analyses of advertising show that it is still predominantly female characters that are objectified and that such objectification is more likely to be present in images targeted at a male audience.183 This general trend is reflected in military recruitment advertising. It is almost impossible to conceive of a poster, aimed at attracting female recruits, which features a male soldier gazing seductively off the page and expressing his sexual desire for women.
The decision to use a female character to signify its collective identity, however, has a paradoxical (and presumably unintended) effect. Rather than presenting itself as a site of masculine sexual power, the military instead constructs itself as a sexually voracious woman. The military is sexualised and feminised; entering the military becomes synonymous with ―entering‖ the sexualised woman. Sexual gratification shifts from something male soldiers earn within the military but receive in the civilian world to something located within
181 McPhedran, ―Vampish Heroine.‖ 182 Gill, ―Empowerment/Sexism,‖ 42. 183 See Monk-Turner et al., ―Who is Gazing at Whom?‖ for a good example of such research. 69
and bestowed by the military institution itself; the military becomes a site of sex, not just a vehicle through which sexual rewards are accessed. Oddly, the Australian campaign not only implies the presence of sex but also appears to encourage a level of sexual contact between male and female soldiers that would disrupt unit discipline and contradict Army fraternisation policies. If the Australian defence force is the female body and the female body is sex then the military is involved in a problematic process of self-definition as sex.
Such a reading, of course, relies on the assumption that the viewer of the images— the ―you‖ of the Australian campaign—is male. As noted above, the Australian posters were officially targeted at a male audience. Regardless of the intention behind the imagery, however, the fact that the character depicted is both a woman and a soldier creates a potential female viewing subject for the campaign. In fact, one female senior Air Force officer who objected to the campaign was quoted as saying that the military ―wouldn't necessarily want the type of women attracted by the posters.‖184 The female soldier is not simply a sex object for men to possess (he wants her), nor a sexual subject seducing men (she wants you/him), but is also a subject for women to emulate (she wants to be her). Representing the military as a female subject invites identification on the part of a female audience; the Lara Croft figure becomes an identity to which potential female recruits can aspire.
The New Zealand campaign does appear to have had a gender-neutral audience in mind. Its character is sexy but not overtly sexual or seductive, ensuring she appeals to a wider market. The New Zealand military differs from the Australian in that it has no restrictions on women in combat, suggesting a greater effort has been made to integrate women into military culture. A campaign like this which regards young women as one of its targets suggests an assumption on the part of the New Zealand Army that this is the sort of femininity twenty-first-century women wish to embody. In the same way militaries during World War II assured women‘s services recruits they would retain their feminine charms (and assured the public that military women were neither mannish nor lesbian),185 the New Zealand Army today constructs a female soldier who is tough and capable but who also remains sexually attractive and available to the opposite sex. The Army depicts itself as a place which invites tough-but-sexy femininity. Because its goal is to attract recruits, it also (unwittingly, perhaps) presents an image of itself as actively moulding such femininity: the subtext of the campaign reads ―join the army and this is what you could become.‖ The promise of female (hetero)sexuality is thus used to entice both men and women to serve.
184 McPhedran, ―Vampish Heroine.‖ 185 Ford, ―Lesbians and Loose Women.‖ 70
Given that the primary objective of military service is to fight wars, not to have sex, media campaigns like these reveal the strong constitutive relationship between female sexuality and militarism and how this connection has in many ways been strengthened not weakened by the integration of women into the armed forces. Specifically, they establish the sexualised female body as the site upon which militarised subjectivity—both male and female—is constructed. The male soldier is defined as the subject who desires the female body, while the female soldier becomes the body which is desired by both the male viewer as possession and by the female viewer as self. In both cases, the female body represents sex; it is the site through which heterosexuality is accessed and on which heterosexuality is played out. The presence of the female body within the military is positively constituted as an encouragement to new recruits, particularly male recruits, to join the forces. Yet as I will show in the next section, the same sexed body is negatively constituted in arguments against women in combat which emphasise the disruption the body of the woman soldier causes to the cohesion of all-male units. In particular, the identity of woman–as–sex negates the identity of woman–as–warrior; the construction of the female body as site of sex/reproduction precludes her construction as effecter of violence. In this way, biological discourse works to ensure women continue to serve military purposes without gaining access to the legitimised violence of combat.
Women Do Not Take Life: Arguments against Women in Combat
The visible presence of female soldiers in today‘s Western militaries came about as a result of gender integration policies in the post-Vietnam period. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, militaries gradually began opening more positions to women. Originally the idea was that women would ease the manpower shortage, brought about by the abolition of the draft, by filling support roles and thus freeing men up to fight in combat. However, by the 1990s there was a push among some servicewomen and feminist supporters to open the combat branches to women as well. This was partly a result of women‘s desire for equality and opportunities for promotion within the military institution, but it was also intended as a reflection of the reality of female soldiers‘ experiences of postmodern war. In spite of legislation preventing them from officially serving in combat, women soldiers were increasingly finding themselves in combat situations during war. The First Gulf War was particularly instrumental in changing attitudes towards women in combat, as women were drawn into combat on an unprecedented scale.186 The U.S. Air Force lifted its combat ban in
186 High-profile cases of women who experienced combat include two female soldiers taken prisoner during Desert Storm, Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy and Major Rhonda Cornum (see also 71
1991187 and the Navy allowed women on combat ships in 1994.188 However, ground combat remains the most contentious area, and women are currently restricted from serving in combat in the armies of the U.S., U.K. and Australia, which I focus on in this section.189
Definitions of ―combat‖ vary between militaries and how each chooses to define combat in relation to prohibitions against women reveals the particular anxieties evoked by the figure of the female combat soldier. U.S. Army regulation 600–13, implemented on 27 April 1992, outlines the Army‘s position on the assignment of women soldiers: ―The Army‘s assignment policy for female soldiers allows women to serve in any officer or enlisted specialty or position except in those specialties, positions, or units (battalion size or smaller) which are assigned a routine mission to engage in direct combat, or which collocate routinely with units assigned a direct combat mission.‖190 The regulation defines ―direct combat‖ as ―Engaging an enemy with individual or crew served weapons while being exposed to direct enemy fire, a high probability of direct physical contact with the enemy‘s personnel and a substantial risk of capture.‖191 The emphasis on ―exposure‖ and ―risk‖ suggests that the decision to ban women from combat arises from an impulse to protect them from danger. In contrast, British and Australian definitions of combat reveal anxiety about the possibility of women not as victims of violence but as its agents. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) defines direct combat duties as those ―requiring a person to commit, or participate directly in
discussion below, pp.80–81) whose examples demonstrated that women could be exposed to the same risks as male combat troops. There were even examples of women commanding troops in combat in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most notable being Captain Linda Bray whose Military Police unit secured an enemy compound in Panama in 1989. Although Bray and an additional 12 women fought in combat during the ensuing gunfight, none was eligible to receive combat medals (Francke, Ground Zero, 48–51). 187 Holm, Women in the Military, 503. In 1995–96, Martha McSally became the first American woman to fly combat missions during a tour of duty in Kuwait to enforce the no-fly zone (Miles and Cross, Hell Hath, 232–33). 188 Francke, Ground Zero, 255. Although the Israeli military is not discussed in this thesis, it does provide an important example of integration efforts. After a long struggle on the part of committed women, Israel removed its ban on female combat pilots and its first woman cadet graduated in 1998. When she was refused entry into a pilot-training course in the Israeli Air Force, Alice Miller took her case to the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favour in 1995 (Israel Women‘s Network, ―Revolutionary Landmark‖). Although Miller failed the entrance test (a six-hour psychological interview determined her to be ―overly motivated‖), the following year seven women were admitted entry to the training programme (Israel Women‘s Network, ―‗Best Women‘‖). On 31 December, 1998, Second Lt. Sari became the first woman to complete the training and qualify as a combat pilot, and the first to be accepted for combat duty since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948 (MINERVA, ―First Israeli Woman‖). 189 In Britain, only one percent of all Army combat personnel are female; all of these serve in the Army Air Corps (Women in the Armed Forces (British Report)). In the U.S., the combat ban excludes women from the following job specialities: infantry, armour, cannon artillery, short-range air defence, combat engineers, and special forces (Wojack, ―Integrating Women,‖ 67). See Postscript for the developing Australian situation. 190 Army Regulation 600–13, Section III, Clauses 1–12a. ―Collocation‖ refers to non-combat units that routinely accompany combat units on missions (p. 5). 191 Army Regulation 600–13, p. 5. 72
the commission of an act of violence against an armed adversary,‖192 while the British armed forces is even more explicit in preventing women from serving in specialisations ―where they would be required to close with and kill the enemy using direct fire weapons.‖193 While some women are authorised to engage in combat from a distance onboard aircraft or warships, they are not permitted to use their bodies as weapons in direct or ―close‖ combat. As Mary Wechsler Segal has noted, women are given access to jobs which require them to perform defensive violence and are excluded from those that involve offensive combat.194 The distinction between distant and close combat in gendered policies reveals an ideology whereby the spaces around soldiers‘ bodies must remain impenetrable by the opposite sex. A woman can kill a man (and a man a woman) using a missile fired from a distance of kilometres, but the two sexes are not allowed to close with one another, to come into direct violent contact body-to-body.195
Anxieties concerning women as both victims and agents of violence pivot on conceptualisations of the female body as reproductive vessel. The sexual role of women as mothers has resulted in a privileging of female life over male life in military discourse. The logic behind combat exclusion policies asserts that women‘s lives are too precious to endanger through exposure to enemy fire.196 Alternately, definitions that focus on excluding women from the violent agency of close combat reveal an assumption that women‘s role as
192 ―Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Group.‖ 193 Women in the Armed Forces (British Report), Clause 8. 194 Mary Wechsler Segal, ―Argument for Female Combatants,‖ 267. 195 As postmodern war develops, women soldiers are drawn into combat more and more. Instances from recent conflicts show discrepancies between what women are actually doing with their bodies and what they are officially permitted to do. Women in support positions are ―exposed to direct enemy fire‖ and receive injuries during war, such as U.S. Army Major Tammy Duckworth who lost her legs when her helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in Iraq in 2004 (Miles and Cross, Hell Hath No Fury,221–22). They are at ―risk of capture,‖ as proved by the recent case of Private First Class Jessica Lynch who was held for nine days as a prisoner of war in Iraq in 2003. Another woman, Specialist Shoshana Johnson, was also taken prisoner during the battle, while a Native American female soldier, Private First Class Lori Piestewa, was killed (for further discussion of this incident, see Chapter 4 of this thesis). Women are wounded while performing acts of bravery in hostile conditions. U.S. Army Specialist Monica Lin Brown was a medic in a combat support team in Afghanistan when her convoy was hit with an IED (Improvised Explosive Device). In the course of moving the wounded to safety, ―At least twice Brown shielded an injured Soldier from the gunfire with her body, continuing to treat their wounds.‖ She was awarded the Silver Star for her bravery (―Women in the Army: Specialist Monica Lin Brown‖). Sergeant Crystal Johnson was also working as a medic when her convoy came under attack. Johnson suffered burns and shrapnel injuries but was able to pull the unit‘s Iraqi interpreter, who lost his legs in the attack, to safety. She was awarded the Purple Heart and two Army Commendation Medals (―Women in the Army: Sergeant Crystal Johnson‖). Women also commit ―acts of violence‖ and ―close with and kill the enemy,‖ such as Leigh Ann Hester, a National Guardswoman, who helped lead a counterattack on Iraqi insurgents in 2005, during which 27 insurgents were killed and six wounded, an act for which she was awarded the Silver Star (Miles and Cross, Hell Hath No Fury, 223). 196 Elshtain writes: ―Male bodies are...expendable in large numbers, from the First World War‘s ‗fallen‘ to Vietnam‘s ‗wasted.‘…. The bodies of young females are not expendable: they are what re-creates and holds forth promise of a future. The body of the young woman is not yet complete. She needs time to give birth‖ (Women and War, 165–66). 73
reproducers makes them naturally unsuited to (or incapable of) performing lethal violence. The female combat soldier is viewed as a figure who problematically introduces sex into the violent domain of war; the objectives of violence and reproduction clash through the unnatural union of male and female bodies not in sex (as nature intended) but in lethal violence between potential equals. Thus, the female combat soldier becomes a disruptive presence, destabilising the natural ―brotherhood‖ of the combat unit, the identity of which is based on equations of violence exclusively with maleness.
An examination of the arguments put forward by opponents of women in combat in the 1990s and early 2000s reveals the ways in which scientific theories that first took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been used to construct the female body as sex and, thus, as antithetical to the performance of violent combat. Women‘s purportedly natural function as bearers of children provides the foundation for all arguments against women in combat, from suggestions that women are physically and emotionally weak to concerns about menstruation, pregnancy, rape, and fraternisation. Women‘s exclusion from war had been used as a justification for gender inequality before debates about women in combat began. For example, during a debate over the British Nationality Bill in 1981, Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell objected to citizenship being transmitted from mothers to children on the grounds that women are not naturally designed to fight wars. ―One of the essential differentiations of function is that between fighting on the one hand, and the creation and preservation of life on the other,‖ he argued. ―The two sexes are deeply differentiated in accordance with those two functions.… One is specialised…to bear arms, specialised for all the attitudes of killing and all the social emotions that are associated with the conduct of war. The other is specialised—however much it may sustain the society in that conflict—to the preservation and care of life.‖197Testifying before the U.S. Congress a decade later, when arguments for women in combat were beginning to take shape, Marine Commandant Robert H. Barrow was more succinct in his summary of the situation: ―Women give life. Sustain life. Nurture life. They don‘t take it.‖198 Through such rhetoric, women have been specifically constructed as natural givers of life in order to prevent them from assuming the warrior identity. No reasons for excluding women from combat other than this reductive assertion of their maternity are believed to be required.
The discourse of biology has thus been used to counter female soldiers‘ demands to be allowed to serve in combat by producing a female body incapable of engaging in the violence of war. Copious studies were conducted during the 1990s to prove that women are physiologically inferior to men and hence unsuited to war-fighting. The findings of this
197 Quoted in Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 12. 198 Quoted in Hugh Smith, ―Debating Women in Combat‖, 10. 74
research are hardly earth-shattering: in general, women when compared to men are shorter; weigh less; have smaller bones, a greater proportion of body fat, and less muscular strength and aerobic fitness; are more susceptible to the effects of heat and cold; and are more prone to injuries.199 The conclusions drawn from these studies are based on averages: the average woman is weaker and less physically fit than the average man. Yet this of course does not mean that all women are less capable of combat fighting than all men. A report on women in combat commissioned by President Bush, Sr., in 1991 (henceforth referred to as the Presidential Commission) notes that ―there is little doubt that some women could meet the physical standards for ground combat.‖200 Even a British report on women in the armed forces(the British Report, conducted in 2002) which places great emphasis on women‘s physical inferiority, concedes that one per cent of female soldiers would be capable of meeting the standards necessary to perform in combat units.201 However, ground combat positions remain closed to all women in both the U.S. and British militaries, regardless of physical ability. The belief in ―women‖ as a coherent group identity, based on shared reproductive potential, enables this blanket ban without consideration of individual differences.
On the opposite side of the debate, some experts have argued that with more training women could greatly reduce physiological discrepancies with men. As noted in Chapter 1, women have traditionally been discouraged from developing strength and endurance which partially accounts for their inability to perform in scientific studies. Captain Adam N. Wojack of the U.S. Army supports integration of the infantry and argues that this can be achieved through improved conditioning of female cadets. The main problem, he argues, is not women‘s natural incapacity but the Army‘s refusal to provide them with adequate training; the Army ―has not given women a chance to succeed physically on a par with men.‖202 The vast strides women have made in sport and athletics—particularly in recent years in activities like boxing and weightlifting which require great upper-body strength—suggest that the gap in physical indicators between men and women can continue to shrink. The ―women are the weaker sex‖ argument is based on logic that is both flawed and outdated; while most women will likely remain less physically strong than most men, numbers of women who can match men in strength and stamina are likely to rise with improved training.
The physiological unsuitability of women for combat fighting is bolstered by arguments that centre more explicitly on the female body as reproductive vessel. Additional
199 For statistics, see Women in the Armed Forces (British Report), Annex B, which reviewed over 100 studies on physiological and bio-medical sex differences. 200 Women in Combat (Presidential Commission), 24. 201 Women in the Armed Forces (British Report), B–5. 202 Wojack, ―Integrating Women,‖ 70. 75
objections to women in combat can be broken down into five variations on the theme of women‘s natural status as reproducers, which are as follows:
i) women menstruate; ii) women fall pregnant; iii) female combat soldiers would disrupt unit cohesion; iv) female prisoners of war would be raped or sexually assaulted; and v) women are the proper sexual reward of male soldiers.
All these variations share the assumption not simply that women have (hetero)sex but that they are sex. Conversely, they rely upon a total denial of the sexed nature of the male body.203 The completeness of the conflation of women with procreation has resulted in a sort of cultural amnesia for the male role as begetter of offspring tantamount to an insistence that men play no part in the reproductive process at all. Thus, in these debates men are believed to have no responsibility for their sexuality; it is women alone who must bear the burden of sex. Placing this burden entirely on women is central to the maintenance of legitimate wartime violence as an exclusively male prerogative: as logical, rational beings divorced from their flesh, men are characterised as the ideal, natural warriors, while women are cast as unstable, at the mercy of their sexual functions, and therefore ill suited to the warrior‘s task. i) Menstruation
All Western defence forces debating the presence and roles of women consider menstruation to be a condition with the potential to adversely affect women‘s ability to serve. The focus on menstruation demonstrates the continuing association of women with polluting fluids and a lack of ―hygiene.‖ Women‘s bodies are conceptualised as unreliable and unbalanced, their menstrual cycles rendering them non-deployable and their hormones interfering with their performance of military duties.204 In a series of studies on the position of women in the Australian Defence Force (ADF Report) conducted in 1996, the author reported that when male service personnel were questioned about women in the armed forces ―there was considerable attention given in focus groups to women‘s menstruation. A proportion of men appear to regard it as a very real impediment to women‘s full participation
203 Susan Bordo has argued that the reduction of women to bodily forces and impulses has resulted in men becoming symbolically detached from the body (Unbearable Weight, 6). Similarly, Elizabeth Grosz refers to the ―disavowal of...the male body‖ in Western philosophical discourse (Volatile Bodies, 4). 204 The belief in women‘s instability during menstruation and their association with fluids dates back to the earliest patriarchies. Thomas Van Nortwick writes: ―Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of women‘s physical nature for the Greeks was their wetness, a condition noted directly by Aristotle and also Greek medical writers like Hippocrates and Galen, and implied in many ways by poets from earlier periods. The proper condition for a healthy human body, on the other hand, was considered to be moderate dryness‖ (Imagining Men, 50). 76
in the military.‖205 The British Report noted that ―irregular menstrual cycles pose health risks, and painful menstruation can impair performance. Some women report a significant impact of menstrual and pre-menstrual symptoms on academic, physical and military activities.‖ It went on to argue that some women experience impaired heat tolerance during certain stages of the menstrual cycle.206
However, the study also documented that other women ―experience no discomfort and perform normally,‖ while some even ―report enhanced performance‖ of their military activities during their menstrual period.207 Many women in the armed forces artificially suspend their periods during assignments, thus eliminating the ―problem‖ of menstruation altogether. T. J. Robertson has argued that women who experience menstrual or pre- menstrual symptoms are no more incapacitated than Navy personnel who experience seasickness, while sociologist M. C. Devilbiss notes that military nurses have functioned for centuries in unsanitary conditions without their performance being affected by menstruation.208 Nonetheless, menstruation is documented as a significant female problem in debates regarding women in combat. Women‘s need for ―privacy‖ during these times, and the logistical problems of providing hygienic conditions for menstruating women, are also stressed. All soldiers need clean water and sanitary conditions during military operations, yet menstruating women are singled out as being the only soldiers requiring such special arrangements. In these debates the menstruating woman is othered, supposedly demanding exceptional conditions that her male comrades do not. ii) Pregnancy
Despite evidence that pregnant women have fought historically in combat, the sacredness of the pregnant woman as a cultural figure means there is still widespread lack of acceptance of a pregnant soldier engaging in violent combat or serving in any military position that would bring her into danger.209 All militaries have policies for immediately removing women from combat-related assignments once they fall pregnant. The non-deployability of pregnant
205 Burton, Women in the Australian Defence Force (ADF Report), Clause 5.7.3. 206 Women in the Armed Forces (British Report), Clause 16e. 207 Ibid., Clause 35, Annex B–4. 208 Robertson, ―Gender Co-operation;‖ Devilbiss, ―Gender Integration.‖ 209 As Linda Grant De Pauw writes, ―Although there were times in the past when women heavy with child strapped on swords to smite the enemies of their people, embedded cultural archetypes make the symbolic union of mother and warrior repellent to many people‖ (Battle Cries and Lullabies, 7). William Duiker writes of the Trung sisters who raised an army which drove the Chinese out of Vietnam in AD 40: ―According to legend, seven of the Vietnamese military commanders were women. One, Phung Thi Chinh, allegedly delivered a child while leading the troops at the front.‖ After giving birth, Phung Thi Chinh continued to fight and kill her enemy with her baby strapped to her back (―Vietnam,‖ 108). There are also accounts of women who fought disguised as men during the American Civil War, their identities only discovered when they gave birth (see Blanton and Cook, They Fought Like Demons, 72; and Burgess, ed., Uncommon Soldier, 4). 77
women has been cited as a justification for keeping all female soldiers (pregnant or otherwise) out of combat units and for denying them equality with male soldiers. The ADF Report notes how women are discriminated against not just for being pregnant but also for what might be called their ―pregnancy potential.‖ Clare Burton, author of the report, elaborates:
Whether or not a woman has children, when she lives with a partner, some superiors act as if she is a ‗home-maker‘ and assume, therefore, that she is not available for the 24 hours for which they want her to be available. The effect of this assumption is that her career aspirations are not recognised and she is not perceived to be ‗100 per cent committed‘. It affects the jobs she is given, the career attention she is given and the reports that are produced on her performance, since she is not perceived as ‗dedicated‘.... It affects postings and, in the longer run, promotions....
Senior Officers acknowledged that there is likely to be discrimination occurring on the ground of pregnancy and potential pregnancy. One senior Air Force Officer believed it would not be unusual for the reaction to a woman who is young being along the lines of: ‗better not select her for this job because if she got pregnant we would be wasting the training‘....
...in some units within the ADF, all young women are regarded as potential mothers and are dealt with on the assumption that they will marry, become pregnant and leave.210
In the attitudes of some senior officers towards enlisted female personnel, women are reduced to reproductive vessels whose pregnancy potential cancels out the other skills or abilities they may possess.211 Another common assumption is that women will purposely become pregnant to avoid deployment and thus that all female service personnel are unreliable.212
210 Burton, Women in the Australian Defence Force, Clause 4.2; 6.2.1. 211 More recently, the ADF has made attempts to change this military culture through the Chief Defence Force Action Plan for the Recruitment and Retention of Women, initiated in 2008. The plan aims to retain women in the armed forces after giving birth, and to ensure more women rise to senior positions. For more information, see the Australian Department of Defence website, http://www.defence.gov.au/fr/RR/Womenindefence/initatives.html (accessed March 23, 2011). 212 Tuten notes how the ―spectre of intentional pregnancies‖ hangs over servicewomen (―Argument against Female Combatants,‖ 251), while Jon Barrett III writes of ―the rash of pregnancies that occurs 78
Debates about women‘s military service also evidence concerns about fertility and reproductive health. The British Report indicates that mothers and their unborn babies may be harmed by some aspects of military service, listing potential exposure to ―toxins, vibration, jolt and electromagnetic fields, which have not been evaluated for their effects on women or embryos.‖213 Such exposure may adversely affect the fertility of women who are not pregnant, as well as the health of expectant mothers and their unborn children. Inherent in these concerns is the belief that mothers and potential mothers are too precious as reproductive resources to lose in combat or as a result of other military service. Once more, woman is reduced to her reproductive potential; her role in the propagation of the species is stressed over her other potential contributions, that is, her ability to assist in the winning of wars or the capturing and killing of enemy troops. It is the woman‘s sexed body that is valued here, not the contributions of the woman herself.
In addition to the ―practical‖ objections to pregnant servicewomen, however, I would argue that the pregnant woman is also symbolically unwelcome in the military.214 As nurturing giver of life—as representative of femaleness and femininity in its most explicit form—the pregnant woman is anathema to the masculinist logic of the current military system. Due to the association of women with sex and reproduction, the pregnant woman is symbolically more of a woman than the non-pregnant woman. Women in positions of command have found that their male subordinates are less likely to take orders from them if they are pregnant,215 as if their womanhood increases with their condition and thus their authority within a male-dominated institution is even further reduced. Perhaps the presence of the pregnant woman also represents a highly visible challenge to an institution dedicated to the violent taking of life. There is of course an inherent contradiction in the fact that pregnant women are supposedly regarded by militaries as precious resources too valuable to endanger through service, yet when female soldiers become pregnant there is often
immediately before ships with large female contingents go to sea.‖ ―Is it possible,‖ Barrett asks sarcastically, ―that they get pregnant purposefully in order to avoid their duty?‖ (―Gender Equality‖). The ADF Report notes: ―the view that women choose to become pregnant in order to avoid sea duty and to avoid postings unacceptable to them is so widespread that it must be hard for many women to defend their pregnancy at the workplace. While there is no question that some women use pregnancy in this way (this is common knowledge) the incidence of it is likely to be very much smaller than people imply‖ (Burton, Women in the Australian Defence Force (ADF Report), Clause 3.1.1). Of course, there are also instances of male service personnel intentionally injuring themselves in order to avoid deployment to war zones, but this is also relatively uncommon. The suggestion that large numbers of women would use this strategy implies a lack of commitment and dedication on the part of female soldiers that is unlikely to be found among women who willingly volunteer for service. 213 Women in the Armed Forces (British Report), Clause 36, Annex B–5. 214 The pregnant woman as symbol is very powerful and disconcerting to masculinist logic. It has been argued that men are intimidated by women‘s role as child-bearers, fearing and envying the power this is believed to entail. See Nadelson (Trained to Kill, 11) who cites Balint, ―Critical Notes;‖ de Beauvoir, Second Sex; and Horney, ―Dread of Women.‖ 215 Francke, Ground Zero, 115. 79
widespread resentment and sometimes violent hostility towards them. The pregnant woman symbolises the highly visible and tangible intrusion of the female and the feminine into the privileged male domain of the military. iii) Disruption to unit cohesion
The body of the female soldier is further materialised as sex through the argument that the integration of women into combat units would disrupt unit cohesion, where cohesion is defined as ―the ability of a unit to remain committed towards the same goal utilising the unit members‘ shared standards and support for each other.‖216 In its simplest form, the argument reads as follows: male bonding wins wars and ―male bonding just doesn't happen with women around.‖217 For proponents of this argument, disruption to unit cohesion is deemed to be entirely the fault of women; they are to blame not simply for how they respond in the combat environment but also for how men respond to them. Measuring the effects of gender integration on cohesion in combat units is particularly difficult given the unique circumstances of the combat environment. If we assume that ―the grinding fear and stress of combat cannot be simulated‖ outside of the immediate combat situation,218 and given that women are not permitted to serve in ground combat, gauging the impact of women on combat unit cohesion during deployment becomes impossible. Nonetheless, speculative arguments about how women would disrupt male bonding continue to form a significant part of the logic behind combat exclusion policies.
Opponents of integration cite sexual misconduct as a potential problem in mixed combat units. This is based on ideologies that stress the natural, overpowering force of heterosexual attraction between young soldiers. According to Anna Simons, the main problem with integrated units is that male soldiers will want to have sex with their female comrades. ―Ultimately,‖ she argues, ―this is the basic, undeniable, unresolvable [sic] problem: heterosexual men like women in ways they don‘t like other men.‖219 She goes on to write that it is inevitable that men will fantasise about and mentally undress women and that male bragging about sex is not only natural but necessary for unit cohesion. In mixed combat units, males would fight one another for possession of females. In a gross extension of the survival mentality, which reduces men to their most basic animalistic level, she claims that unit bonding relies on the requirement that everything is shared: ―If, for instance, there is food to be had, everyone eats. The same goes for sex. If there is sex to be had, then anyone who
216 Women in the Armed Forces (British Report), Clause 5. 217 Luddy, ―Warrior Cult.‖ 218 Tuten, ―Argument against Female Combatants,‖ 252. 219 Simons, ―Women in Combat,‖ 95. 80
wants it should be able to get it. If not, tension mounts.‖220In spite of noting that it is men who want to have sex with women (not the other way around), sexual tension is nonetheless defined as women‘s problem, the solution to which is not to change male attitudes but to remove women from the equation entirely. The presence of female bodies is directly blamed for the unprofessional and cohesion-disrupting behaviour of male soldiers.
Captain John F. Luddy of the United States Marine Corps shares Simons‘s view that ―sexuality distracts, distractions hamper good judgment, [and] impaired judgment in combat gets people killed.‖221 While presumably both men and women possess ―sexuality,‖ in this case it becomes synonymous with women alone: women are sexuality, and sexuality/women will cause otherwise preventable deaths. As Elizabeth Grosz writes:
Those regulating and contextualizing the body and its pleasures have thus far in our cultural history established models which do not regard the polluting contamination of sexual bodies as a two-way process, in which each affects or infiltrates the other. Such a model involves a dual sexual symmetry that is missing in patriarchal structures. It is not the case that men‘s bodily fluids are regarded as polluting and contaminating for women in the same way or to the same extent as women‘s are for men. It is women and what men consider to be their inherent capacity for contagion, their draining, demanding bodily processes that have figured so strongly in cultural representations, and that have emerged so clearly as a problem for social control.222
The responsibility placed on women for sexual misconduct is partly based on the stereotype of women having a sexual pull over men against which they are powerless: the archetype of a woman of ―unlimited wantonness, sexual hunger, and electricity so extreme that she gains the power to dominate men.‖223 Applying similar logic, retired Colonel James W. Revels concludes that the military would not be facing sexual assault investigations against its male personnel if there were no women in the force to assault.224 Against the image of the sexually seductive female soldier, the figure of the ―good wife‖ has also been called upon to bolster anti-integrationist arguments. General Carl Stiner, former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, argued before the Presidential Commission in 1991 that the wives of soldiers may become jealous of their husbands working in such close confines with
220 Ibid., 97. 221 Luddy, ―Warrior Cult.‖ 222 Grosz, Volatile Bodies,197. 223 Gibson, Warrior Dreams, 55. 224 Revels, ―Is It Time to Rethink Women in Combat?‖ 81
other women, and that this would be problematic because the support of wives is crucial to the performance and morale of married soldiers.225
This insistence that the presence of women would introduce sexuality into war, which would then distract male soldiers from their mission, runs contrary to another common theory of opponents of female combatants which states that men find war-fighting (with or without women) to be a profoundly sexual experience. As ardent anti-integrationist and law professor Kingsley Browne observes, ―many men find something deeply sexual about war itself.‖226 This sexuality is inseparable from masculinity; the masculinity of war appeals to men, and an integral component of this masculinity is the hypersexuality of wartime violence. Killing in hand-to-hand combat is particularly associated with heightened sexuality because of the close proximity of bodies it entails. Psychoanalyst Theodore Nadelson, who has counselled combat veterans, writes that ―sexuality is embraced by war. In the grip of mortal danger, there is intoxication and wantonness. Aggression often replaces sexual feeling and bends sexuality to its own aim. Killing itself becomes sexualized.‖227 The U.S. Marine Corps‘s unofficial motto ―Get some‖ illustrates the military‘s recognition of the union of sexual and violent components of killing in war. In other words, sexuality is already present on the battlefield, even among all-male combat units. Such sexual aggression is even conceptualised as a positive aspect of warrior masculinity because it entices men to enlist and encourages them to fight and kill their enemies. Male combat soldiers‘ experiences of arousal reveal the location of sexuality upon and within the male body as well as the female, and in male–male as well as male–female interactions in the field. iv) Sexual violence and rape
Indeed, it is the ubiquitous presence of male sexuality in war that forms the basis of another reason for banning women from combat duty: the fear that female soldiers will be taken prisoner. Of course, all soldiers regardless of their sex run the risk of capture during battle and of being tortured or badly treated by their captors. However, fears over women prisoners centre on their particular exposure to rape and sexual assault, these being regarded as more atrocious and traumatic types of assault than other forms of torture experienced by POWs. Advocates of women in combat note how those female soldiers who have been taken
225 Women in Combat (Presidential Commission), 77. Unsurprisingly, objectors did not take into account the potentially disruptive effect of homosexual relationships between male comrades. Under both pre-1993 bans on homosexuality and subsequent ―Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell‖ (DADT) policies, homosexuality became something of an ideological impossibility in military discourse. It remains to be seen whether the recent repeal of DADT by the U.S. Senate (December 2010) will lead to material and ideological changes in the treatment of either homosexuality or gender relations. 226 Browne, Co-Ed Combat, 122. 227 Nadelson, Trained to Kill, 124. Dave Grossman also acknowledges the sexuality of combat violence (On Killing, 134–37). 82
prisoner in past wars were for the most part treated well and not subject to sexual abuse. Some who have experienced sexual assault, such as Major Rhonda Cornum who was captured by Iraqi troops during Desert Storm, accept this (along with all other forms of violence and torture) as one of the risks of going to war. As Cornum testified before the United States Congress: ―Being raped in downtown D.C. or Peoria, Illinois, or somewhere like that is very different than getting raped in a military.... You don‘t expect that to happen when you walk down the streets of your hometown, but it is an occupational hazard of going to war, and you make the decision whether or not you are going to take that risk when you join the military.... I really think that it is a phenomenon of our society that we worry about it much more than the people who undergo it.‖228 However, the lived experiences of the female soldiers themselves are rejected in the debates in favour of their hypothetical effect on male soldiers. As Cornum suggests, it is the trauma experienced by men in response to female sexual assault, not the trauma of the female victims themselves, that is given priority in debates about women in combat. Testimony before the Presidential Commission in 1991 maintained that the (actual or implied) abuse of female POWs would have a negative impact on their fellow male prisoners.229 Air Force Colonel Nathan McDaniel, a former POW, argued regarding a hypothetical situation in which one of his fellow captives was female: ―There is no doubt in my mind that it would make a difference.... I would certainly lean toward giving the enemy something if I knew they were raising hell with a fellow female prisoner.‖230 According to Linda Bird Francke, during the First Gulf War male students at SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) school were so concerned about the capture of women ―that the instructors felt it posed a potential threat to national security‖ as the men were likely to divulge information to spare a woman from being abused.231 This assumption is extended in the argument that women POWs would have a negative effect on the morale of the entire military and even the entire country during wartime.232 In December 2000, the British defence force surveyed personnel, recruits, and spouses of personnel on their attitudes towards sexual integration of the army. The results showed that most respondents (male and female)
228 Quoted in Women in Combat (Presidential Commission), 89.Cornum was digitally penetrated by one of her captors in a military vehicle. Female POWs who have not experienced sexual assault include Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy (Desert Storm); Faye Turney (British Marine captured in Iran in 2007); and Shoshana Johnson (Operation Iraqi Freedom). Although there have been claims that Jessica Lynch was sodomised by her Iraqi captors in 2003, Lynch has no memory of the assault and her Iraqi doctors dispute this claim (see Bragg, I Am a Soldier, Too; and Chapter 4 of this thesis). 229 Women in Combat (Presidential Commission), 25. 230 Ibid., 70.Not all male soldiers share this view. Former POW Giles Norrington (captured in North Vietnam) is of the opinion that, ―Hypothetically, I don‘t think a woman being singled out for torture would make any difference‖ to his morale as a POW (quoted in Francke, Ground Zero, 90). 231 Francke, Ground Zero, 89. SERE is the training undergone by U.S. combat pilots in preparation for being lost behind enemy lines. 232 Women in Combat (Presidential Commission), 28. For a discussion of how militaries and governments can use female POWs to their advantage, that is, to increase the morale of their countries and militaries, see the discussion of Jessica Lynch in Chapter 4 of this thesis. 83
―agree[d] that putting women at risk of death, rape or torture could negatively affect general public support for operations;‖ however, more women than men (a third of female personnel and recruits) disagreed with this statement.233
For proponents of combat exclusion, the capture of a woman equates to the rape of that woman; again, the female soldier‘s body is constructed as the site of sex, the object upon which sexual acts necessarily (naturally, inevitably) take place. While male POWs have undoubtedly been the victims of sexual violence, this is not mentioned in the reports about combat exclusion. Sexual violence is only ever conceptualised as something that is perpetrated by men against women, who are regarded as the ―inevitable‖ targets of male sexual aggression. In spite of the fact that many female POWs never experience sexual assault, and without regard for the ability of individual women to cope with rape when it does occur, the risk of capture has been enough for some to recommend banning women from combat regardless of their skills as military personnel. In its recommendation for denying women entry to combat aviation, for example, the Presidential Commission noted that: ―Although the evidence presented indicates that women are capable of flying and competing with men in combat aviation assignments, the Commission finds that concerns over cohesion and women as prisoners of war (POWs) were more persuasive and voted to recommend retention and codification of the Service‘s policies prohibiting the assignment of women to combat aircraft.‖234 Ironically, even a woman whose body meets the rigorous physical requirements for combat is deemed an unsuitable candidate because that same body is inevitably subject to sexual assault by men. No matter how hard a woman works to mould her body into that of a combat soldier she will never be able to escape her body as the site of sexual enactment.
Informing this fear of the assault of female prisoners is the contradictory rationale that men should protect women.235 A male soldier‘s certainty that he would disclose information in order to stop a hypothetical woman from being tortured requires a belief that the defence of women is more important than the defence of the nation or of his male comrades. The idea that men should and do protect women, that this is their natural, instinctive impulse when a woman is in peril, is strong and far-reaching. Yet there is little evidence for its practical application in a military context. Kingsley Browne unwittingly reveals the complexities of the logical of male protection in his anti-integration book Co-Ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn’t Fight the Nation’s Wars. His argument that it is natural for men to protect
233 Women in the Armed Forces, (British Report), Clause 23, Annex D–4. 234 Women in Combat (Presidential Commission), 28. 235 For more on the logic of masculinist protection and predation, see Chapter 1, p. 28, n. 28 of this thesis. 84
women is sandwiched between speculation that male soldiers may ―frag‖ (murder) female soldiers whom they view as putting their lives at risk and a description of the American steamship the Arctic which collided with a French ship off the coast of Newfoundland in 1854. The men on board trampled women and children to get to the lifeboats, causing all the women and children to perish.236 Browne uses the fact that the men onboard the Arctic were publicly disgraced as cowards to argue for men‘s natural instinct to protect women, yet this case actually proves the opposite: society may believe that men should protect women but this is not necessarily the reality. The notion of men as women‘s natural protectors is also challenged by the many instances of women being abused and assaulted by men in civilian society and of female soldiers being raped by their male comrades. Some sources have even suggested that female soldiers are actually more likely to be raped by their male comrades than by the enemy,237 refuting the argument that male soldiers necessarily consider themselves responsible for the sexual protection of women. v) Women as sexual reward
Concerns about the rape and sexual assault of women are less likely to be about protecting women than they are the result of traditional notions of the female body as the sexual property of men. In support of this position, the traditional belief that women are the rightful sexual reward of male soldiers continues to surface in some debates. Stephanie Gutmann, a vocal opponent of the ―feminisation‖ of the United States military, claims that male soldiers need to know their acts of bravery will be rewarded by the ―adoration of women‖ because this adoration, and the promise of sexual reward it implies, spurs them on to fight.238 Similarly, Simons argues that the presence of female combat soldiers would undermine the ideal behind the male impulse to fight; women represent ―home, family, the future, and everything worth fighting for—nonviolence especially…. With women right there, ‗women‘ as an ideal would never work.‖239 Simons simultaneously places the burden of encouraging and preventing war on women; once women enter combat, the male impetus towards both violence and non-violence somehow evaporates. She argues that women merely have symbolic value in the production of war; the experience and potential of real women is
236 Browne, Co-Ed Combat, 178–86. 237 See T.S. Nelson, For Love of Country. 238 Gutmann, Kinder, Gentler Military, 50.This view also appeared in the 1995 case of Alice Miller who filed a lawsuit against the Israeli Air Force when she was barred from taking the entrance test for combat pilots. Voicing his objection to Miller‘s case, Israeli President Ezer Weizman argued that ―being a pilot is the prerogative of the best men while the best women are the prerogative of the pilots‖ (Israel Women‘s Network, ―Revolutionary Landmark‖). 239 Simons, ―Women in Combat,‖ 97. 85
sacrificed so that the ideal of ―woman‖ can flourish for the benefit of men (and the benefit of war or peace respectively).240
Conclusion: The Abjection of the Woman Warrior
Many of the arguments originally voiced in the 1990s when women first began to demand the right to serve in combat positions continue today and many of the same policies regarding sexual integration also remain. They demonstrate an enduring reliance on the construct of nature and scientific discourse to justify gender inequality within Western militaries. Arguments like these illustrate how, while the discursive female body remains central to military self-construction and self-definition, the material bodily contributions women may be able to make to war are often sidelined in favour of their symbolic function. Indeed, arguments against women in combat entail the marginalisation or demonisation of the female soldier‘s corporeality due to its fundamentally ―dangerous‖ nature. Paradoxically, the bodies of women combatants are received as dangerous both for their inability to perform the violence required of them and for their concomitant capacity to unleash destruction on an unprecedented scale.241 In a statement to the United States House Armed Services Committee, General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the highest ranking military officer and principal military adviser to the President) during the Reagan administration declared: ―The greatest change that has come about in the United States forces in the time that I‘ve been in the military service has been the extensive use of women…. That‘s even greater than nuclear weapons, I feel, as far as our forces are concerned.‖242 The suggestion that the use of women in any form in the military (let alone in combat) constitutes a greater transformation to warfare than nuclear weapons is remarkable, given that the advent of nuclear technology signalled the end of total war as experienced in the first half of the twentieth century (see Chapter 1). Yet implicit in Vessey‘s comment is also the belief that the entrance of women into the armed forces is potentially more damaging than the atomic bomb. The employment of women in combat has been conceptualised as posing a threat not just to military readiness but also to the very fabric of society. Many experts who testified before the Presidential Commission ―argued if women [were] assigned to combat to fight this nation‘s wars, the resulting damage to American
240 Arguments about the conflicting function of women in male violence evidence a neomedieval logic extending back to chivalric romance when women played the dual roles of instigator of knightly combat and of sexual distraction luring men away from battle. See Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 103–14. 241 This contradictory attitude towards the violence of the female body is also evident in imagery of Hillary Clinton, discussed in Chapter 6. 242 Quoted in Brian Mitchell, Women in the Military, xi; no date provided. 86
culture and society would be monumental and irreversible.‖243 Women‘s bodies on the battlefield have the potential to decimate the world as we know it, physically, socially, sexually, and morally.
Objectors to women combatants map the female body as an unstable, hazardous entity, the presence of which would completely disrupt the cohesion of male bodies in relation to other male bodies in the combat environment. Yet the debates are corporeal in their location not just on the bodies of female soldiers but also in the bodies of their most vocal opponents. The bodies of women warriors are met with a bodily reaction by their detractors. ―I just can‘t get over this feeling of old men ordering young women into combat,‖ stated U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Merrill A. McPeak in the early 1990s. ―I have a gut-based hangup there.‖244 Major Nicholas Coppola, Major Kevin LaFrance, and Henry Carretta begin their positive assessment of women combat soldiers with the following statement: ―A female infantryman. There are few other oxymorons that could invoke an immediate visceral response from within the U.S. Army‘s infantry branch.‖245 Objections to the presence of women combat soldiers are thus based not just on arguments about biological instinct but also on the ―instinctive‖ biological reactions of opponents themselves. As Gutmann writes, ―After all the logical arguments about women in the infantry have been made...the government will still have to deal with another objection, an instinctive ‗no‘; the recoil of the heart, of the nerves, and of the gut.‖246 Women combatants are rejected for emotional reasons (the heart): opponents of integration hold a sentimental view of women as naturally pacific and incapable of real violence. They are opposed out of fear (the nerves): fear of what may happen to women in combat situations but more of what women may be capable of if their violence and aggression are legitimated through combat status. Finally, they are met by a recoiling of the gut: women warriors prove physically distasteful to many people, their indigestibility causing a societal gag reflex which attempts to expunge the woman warrior from the body politic.
That the female warrior is met with such bodily resistance and revulsion is indicative of the abjection of the woman soldier‘s body. Abjection ―literally means to cast off, away, or out‖247 and the visceral purging of the female soldier‘s body from the bodies of her detractors connects it to disease, dirt and filth, to that which endangers life. The rejection of the abject through the ―spasms and vomiting‖ of the gut constitutes the body‘s attempt to protect itself
243 Women in Combat (Presidential Commission), 59. 244 Quoted in Gutmann, Kinder, Gentler Military, 272–73. 245 Coppola, LaFrance, and Carretta, ―Female Infantryman,‖ 55. 246 Gutmann, Kinder, Gentler Military, 272. 247 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 243, n. 2. 87
from a threat to being.248 The female combatant‘s body can thus be viewed as constituting a threat to the bodily integrity of her opponents. Her presence challenges the exclusively male subject position of warrior, a challenge which disrupts the very core of what it means to be a man in today‘s society and of what it means to inhabit a male body. The woman warrior contravenes ―nature,‖ which has assigned men the role of life-taking and women that of life- giving. She is thus constructed as a figure with the potential to jeopardise the very survival of the human race.
The figure of the woman combat soldier, as representative of sanctioned female violence, occupies a problematic ideological space, therefore, simultaneously between and within nature and culture. She is at once productive and destructive, controlled and uncontrollable, culturally powerful and powerless to the forces of nature that supposedly govern her emotions and behaviour (specifically her sexual and maternal urges). She is simultaneously object of male sexual fantasy and agent of sexual control, required by the military to meet manpower quotas and to entice new recruits, and rejected by the military as endangering its very existence. The abject is neither subject nor object; it is that which ―disturbs identity, system, order.... [It] does not respect borders, positions, rules;‖ it is ―the in- between, the ambiguous, the composite.‖249 The body of the female soldier is all these things. It is the epitome of ambiguity, refusing to respect the traditional female subject position of passive/pacifist and collapsing the boundaries separating male from female and female from violent agency. As such, the female combat soldier is herself an intervention in the discourse of natural sexual difference. Due to her liminal status, the female combatant‘s very humanity is called into question; she occupies the realm of the monstrous.
248 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 249 Ibid., 4. 88
Chapter 3
“Manless and Man-eating”250: Monstrous Amazons and the Warrior Myth
The female combatant is monstrous because of her body‘s refusal to conform to a single sex category. As a monster, she threatens both the Western gender system and the continuing existence of the sexed body as ontological entity. This chapter argues that current beliefs in the monstrosity of the female combatant are sustained by mythologies of women‘s warriorhood which culturally inscribe the scientific theories of sexual difference explored in the previous chapter. In Chapter 2 we saw how biological discourse is utilised to deny women access to the warrior identity, yet biology alone is insufficient to perpetuate the belief in women‘s non-violent nature. Cultural narratives are also necessary to reify the lessons of science. To make this case I explore the mythology surrounding the ―original‖ monstrous warrior woman: the Amazon. The Amazon is regarded not just as the origin of women‘s war- fighting but also as part of the origin story of humanity; her mythology is deemed to hold the key to original (natural, prediscursive) gendered embodiment. The return to earliest humanity is believed to provide access to the ―truth‖ about human experience; mythology is viewed as a gateway to our essential nature. However, the premise of this chapter, as indeed of this entire thesis, is that myths are not windows into a natural past that pre-dates culture but are instead products of culture, constructed for political and social purposes. In a discussion of gender and war, it is vital to study mythologies because these are the loci of issues a society deems to be of greatest importance;251 more specifically, they contain that which causes a society the greatest anxiety. A myth is only a myth if it survives to be passed from generation to generation.252 A myth only survives if it remains relevant, and it only remains relevant if its central problem goes unresolved, requiring continuing re-visitation and reinterpretation. This chapter explores the ongoing fascination with the Amazon and her continuing relevance in postmodern war. The Amazon remains the dangerous, shadowy figure lurking behind contemporary understandings of female violence and soldiering.
As noted in the Introduction to this thesis, the concept of postmodern war encompasses wars of the past, present and future, and soldiers both real and imaginary, and this chapter broadens the study of female soldiers to include fictional and historicised examples of women at war. This chapter is concerned with the symbolic Amazon, not the historical Amazon. Rather than attempting to prove or disprove the facticity of Amazonia
250 Aeschylus Suppliant Women. Translation in Tyrrell, Amazons, 21. 251 Csapo, Theories of Mythology, 9. 252 Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth, 20. 89
(there is already considerable scholarship dedicated to this question),253 this chapter addresses the mythology that has developed around the figure of the Amazon in the Western tradition through a study of her representation in literature, film and television. This chapter begins with a discussion of the Amazon in feminist discourse. The postmodern period has witnessed a feminist appropriation of the Amazon as a symbol of female empowerment and anti-patriarchal social order. However, through an exploration of ancient, modern and postmodern re-visitations of the Amazon narrative, I argue that the conservative, misogynistic components of the myth work against an uncritical espousal of Amazonia as feminist origin story. The Amazon has always been a political construction, designed and manipulated for the purpose of defining and delimiting gender boundaries. This chapter will argue that the Amazon has been constructed as a monster against which the Western gender order is defined. Existing on the borders of the known world, the Amazon represents deep gender anxiety within patriarchal society, and conceptualising the Amazon as monster allows for transhistorical connections to be drawn between the earliest mythologies of warrior women and the demonisation of female violence today. Yet a study of cultural re-visitations of Amazon mythology also demonstrates the ways in which the Amazon acts to subvert the Warrior Myth. When the figure is used conservatively, she reinforces gender norms and contracts the boundaries of acceptable gendered behaviour; when she is used transgressively, she expands, and potentially shatters, those boundaries. This chapter ends with an exploration of the Amazon in contemporary television and cinema, with a specific focus on the cult 1990s television programme Xena: Warrior Princess. This most postmodern of Amazons encompasses the contradictions inherent in the figure of the woman warrior in the popular imagination and in the gender–violence relationship in contemporary media.
Amazon Mythology: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Appropriations
We are the myths. We are the Amazons, the Furies, the Witches. We have never not been here, this exact sliver of time, this precise place. There is something utterly familiar about us. We have been ourselves before.
253 For arguments that the Amazons did exist, see Linduff and Rubinson, Are All Warriors Male?; and Wilde, On the Trail. There is extensive evidence to suggest that women in ancient societies did fight in combat, and were honoured for their achievements on the battlefield (Gera, Warrior Women). Archaeological evidence reveals the existence of women honoured with the burial rites of celebrated warriors (Geary, Women at the Beginning). 90
— Robin Morgan254
Origin stories invariably script plots for how, in returning to our true nature, we might emulate models that were social to begin with. The return to origins is really a return to history. — Roger Lancaster255
The Amazons of Greek mythology were a tribe of warrior women who were believed to have lived in an all-female community, sometime around the thirteenth century B.C., somewhere on the edge of the known world. They first appeared in literature and vase paintings in the eighth century B.C. and their legacy lasted throughout the classical period. Amazons shunned marriage, coupling with men solely for the purpose of procreation, and privileged their female offspring, either abandoning or killing their sons.256 They hunted, rode horses, and fought savagely in war with the Greeks.257 Importantly, they were not only militaristic but also politically organised, founding numerous cities.258 A monarchical society, the queen was the most skilled warrior of the tribe, indicating that the power hierarchy of the Amazons, like patriarchal society at the time, was based on military prowess. Some literature suggests that they removed their right breast in order to more accurately wield their bows259 (etymologically, the word ―Amazon‖ is believed to mean ―breastless‖); however, in vase paintings they are always depicted with both breasts intact.260 Their homeland was the city of Themiscyra,261 which was variously believed to be in Asia Minor, south of the Black Sea; near the Caucasus; Libya; the Aegean coast of Turkey; Crete; and the Eurasian Steppe.262 Wherever their geographical location, symbolically they always inhabited the realm between the savage and civilised worlds. As more regions were explored and the Greek world
254 Robin Morgan, Going Too Far, 142. 255 Lancaster, Trouble with Nature, 39–40. 256 Apollodorus Library 2.5.9. 257 Apollodorus Library 2.5.9; Herodotus Histories 277–79; and Hippocrates Airs, Waters, Places 17. 258 Diodorus Siculus, quoted in Garber and Vickers, eds., ―Diodorus Siculus,‖26. Diodorus Siculus wrote: ―It was the custom for those women to manage all matters of war; and, for a certain time keeping themselves virgins, they went out as soldiers into the field, and, after so many years spent in their warfare, they accompanied with men, for the preservation of posterity, but the magistracy, and all public offices, they kept wholly in their own hands.‖ 259 Apollodorus Library 2.5.9; Diodorus Siculus, in Garber and Vickers, eds., ―Diodorus Siculus;‖ and Hippocrates Airs, Waters, Places 17. 260 The focus on women warriors‘ breasts is common across time and cultures. See, for example, the Vietnamese myth (248 AD) of Lady Trieu An, also known as Trieu Thi Trinh, who slung her three-foot- long breasts over her shoulders and led her men into battle (Sandra Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 19), and anti-integration historian Martin van Creveld‘s assertion that women should be excluded from today‘s militaries because of their ―pendulous‖ breasts (Men, Women and War, 153). 261 Apollodorus Library 2.5.9. 262 See Blok, Early Amazons, 2; Kirk, ―Images of Amazons,‖ 28; Linduff and Rubinson, Are All Warriors Male?; and Wilde, On the Trail, 32. 91
expanded, Amazonia was imaginatively pushed further and further outwards.263 Some ancient scholars believed that the women of Sauromatae, who kept many of the same customs, were direct descendents of the Amazons.264
The early Amazon narratives are located within a broader classical mythology in which female figures are accorded considerable power over both life and death. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, transforms Actaeon into a stag which his own dogs then hunt and kill;265 the Gorgon Medusa turns men to stone with a single glance;266 the terrifying Furies relentlessly pursue Oedipus of his crimes.267 Goddesses go head-to-head with gods in physical clashes from which they sometimes, like Athene fighting Ares in Homer‘s Iliad, emerge triumphant.268 Pandora opens the jar that releases death and destruction on the world.269 Mortal women also commit acts of violence which change the course of events in Greek tragedy: Medea kills her children,270 Clytemnestra her husband and his concubine.271In addition to their violence, women in Greek mythology are given considerable sexual power. Calypso holds Odysseus captive for seven years in the Odyssey and alludes to other goddesses (Demeter and Eos) who have abducted the men they desire, although the goddesses are rarely permitted to keep their male lovers forever.272 Women in Greek society also held spiritual influence, playing a vital role in religious festivals and ceremonies, such as the Panathenaia,273 and the Thesmophoria, a fertility rite which only women celebrated.274
In light of these examples of powerful women in art and life, the contemporary period has witnessed a feminist appropriation of the ancient world as a locus of female
263 Tyrrell, Amazons, 56. 264 See Herodotus Histories 277–79; and Hippocrates Airs, Waters, Places 17. 265 Ovid Metamorphoses 3.131–265. 266 Apollodorus Library 2.4.1. 267 Homer Odyssey 11.279–80. See also Sophocles Oedipus the King in Three Theban Plays. 268 Homer Iliad 21.391–415. Athene triumphs with the words: ―You stupid fool! It never occurred to you, before you matched yourself with me, to consider how much stronger I was‖ (410–12). 269 Hesiod Works and Days 2.79–105. 270 Euripides Medea 2.1236–93. 271 Aeschylus Agamemnon in Oresteia 2.1343–72. 272 Homer Odyssey 5.118–29, 15.49–51. Calypso complains about the double standard that allows gods but not goddesses to keep their abductees as lovers: ―‗You are cruel, you gods, jealous beyond measure. You resent goddesses sleeping with men in open union, if one of us makes a man her loved husband. So it was when rosy-fingered Dawn chose Orion. All the time you resented her, you gods who live at ease yourself.... So it was when lovely-haired Demeter yielded to her desire for Iasion and lay with him in love‘s union in the three-furrowed fallow.... And so now this time with me—you gods resent me having a mortal man‘‖ (2.118–29). The gods either kill or take away the goddesses‘ male lovers. For more on Eos‘s abductions, see Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth, chapter 6. 273 Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth, chapter 8. 274 The Thesmophoria was a rite of the goddess of the harvest Demeter (Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth, 26). For more on women‘s religious power, see Wilde, who argues that there was ―a strong subliminal recognition of feminine power as expressed in religious rites‖ in classical society (On the Trail, 21). 92
empowerment. In particular, there has been a reclaiming of ancient mythology by feminists in an attempt to locate an essential feminine identity. In representing how things were ―in the beginning,‖ myths are believed to hold truths about who we are—and who we could be—that have been obfuscated in postmodern Western society. As Charlene Spretnak elaborates, ―Patriarchal culture holds that a strong, courageous, independent woman is an aberration, an unfortunate freak of nature. We know this to be a lie because we have discovered widespread traditions of mythic and historic women of power, our potential shapers of identity.... [Myth] offers multi-faceted answers to ‗What is our true nature?‘ ‗What is possible?‘ Those answers are not static; their richness increases as our wisdom grows. Our history of power is a grounding for our present and future evolution.‖275The feminist appeal of the classical period rests largely in the idea of women-only religious cults, providing a context in which contemporary feminists can ―envisage women engaging in women-identified behaviour and telling subversive tales.‖276 Today‘s goddess-worship groups draw on ancient myths of fertility goddesses and personifications of an Earth Mother, locating a source of power in the feminine potential to bring forth life.277 In cultures which worshipped the Great Goddess as the origin of all life, they argue, mortal women necessarily commanded respect and authority. Goddess-worshippers engage in symbolic returns to a mythological past in order to achieve the empowerment they feel they are denied in the contemporary period. The idea is that, by accessing and keeping alive female empowerment in the past, it may be possible to replicate this same state in the future.278 Feminist scholars of goddess studies envisage ―the evolution of a postpatriarchal spirituality‖ by the means of returning to a pre- patriarchal spirituality.279
The feminist fascinations with classical mythologies of women‘s pacifism and maternalism (goddess-worship) and its apparent antithesis female warriorhood (Amazonia) are connected through their location in women-only communities and their designation of power over life and death to female figures. The particular appeal of the Amazons appears
275 Spretnak, ―Mythic Heras,‖ 89–90. 276 Zajko, ―Women and Greek Myth,‖ 393. 277 See, for example, the websites A Chapel of Our Mother God, http://www.mother- god.com/index.html; Your Inner Goddess, http://www.yourinnergoddess.net/; Alter of the Great Goddess, http://www.spiralgoddess.com/Altar.html; The Goddess Today, http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/goddess/herstory/goddess_today.html. (All accessed January 29, 2011). The notion of the sacred feminine—a female-centred spirituality which predates modern Christianity— has captured the popular imagination recently, as Dan Brown‘s phenomenally successful novel The Da Vinci Code illustrates. This novel, and the movie which followed, espouses the idea that the patriarchal religious institution of the Catholic Church has suppressed and obscured the sacred feminine from its dogma, resulting in the subjugation of women in Christian society. 278 For a discussion of the problematics of this position within goddess studies, see Wood, ―Concept of the Goddess.‖ 279 Spretnak, ―Introduction,‖ xv. Mary Daly pioneered postpatriarchal spirituality, through the vehicle of sisterhood as a counter to patriarchal religious notions of hierarchy and brotherhood, in Beyond God the Father (1973). 93
to rest not so much in their status as warriors but in their association in the contemporary imagination with matriarchal and gynocratic social structures. Amazon society has been re- imagined as belonging to a mythical time before women became oppressed by men under systems of patriarchy. In the original Greek narratives, Amazon society was not strictly matriarchal. As Isle Kirk notes, matriarchy implies women ruling over men (Amazons lived apart from men) and accords prime importance to motherhood (Amazons killed or abandoned their male offspring).280 Yet in the nineteenth century Western scholars began to claim the Amazons as an example of a pre-patriarchal social system. J. J. Bachofen‘s highly influential work Mother Right (1861) argues that the Amazon legend had a historical basis in a matriarchal society where women ruled—the most extreme and violent form of which he referred to as ―Amazonism‖—before it was destroyed by the advent of patriarchy. Amazonism must have come about, according to Bachofen, because women were being abused and degraded by men and decided to fight back.281 For this reason, he viewed matriarchy as both a ―universal phenomenon‖ and a ―natural truth‖: ―It is not based on the special physical or historical circumstances of any particular people, but on conditions that are characteristic of all human existence.... The same cause everywhere calls forth the same result. Amazonian phenomena are interwoven with the origins of all peoples.‖ Although he views Amazonism as ―a perversion of matriarchy,‖ in that matriarchy privileges childbearing and nurturing while ―man-murdering Amazonism‖ favours violence,282 subsequent feminist scholars have nonetheless taken Bachofen‘s theories as the basis for arguing the Amazons‘ matriarchal status. In the 1930s, Helen Diner borrowed extensively from Bachofen in her controversial text Mothers and Amazons, where she argued for the Amazons as an example of an early matriarchal society. 1970s and 1980s feminists were in turn influenced by Diner‘s work. Judy Chicago claims the Amazons as violent resisters to patriarchal attempts to destroy matriarchy.283 Phyllis Chesler views the warrior tribe as rebellious daughters fighting on two fronts: their opposition to patriarchal control was matched by their attempt to break away from matriarchal societies that valued pacifism and maternity.284
Amazon society has thus become a reference point to which contemporary feminist concerns and priorities are traced. The Amazons, in their broadest definition, are categorised as one of the earliest known examples of a gynocentric social structure; they are also commonly claimed as the original women warriors. Historians of women in combat invariably
280 Kirk, ―Images of Amazons,‖ 33. 281 Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 104. 282 Ibid., 91; 105; 123; 173. 283 Chicago, ―Our Heritage,‖ 153. Chicago‘s seminal art installation The Dinner Party (1974–79) constitutes her attempt to acknowledge the contributions of previously silenced or ignored female historical figures in order to empower contemporary women. 284 Chesler, ―Amazon Legacy,‖ 102. 94
locate the woman warrior as part of a tradition that begins with the Amazon. It is rare to open a history of women warriors without encountering the mythological women of Amazonia. In fact, it would seem remiss to discuss women‘s war-fighting without at least a passing reference to them. Yet, more than simply referring to the Amazons as one example of women‘s warriorhood, there is a tendency to conflate the Amazon with the fighting woman; the Amazon has become the archetype of the woman warrior. Since the Amazons were first written into myth, the term has been used to refer to female combatants from the members of the king‘s elite fighting force in nineteenth-century Dahomey285 to the women who fought in disguise in the American Civil War.286 Joan of Arc, perhaps the single best-known female soldier in the Western tradition, is commonly referred to as an Amazon.287 Several recent books which seek to document the historical participation of women in combat have relied on the Amazon motif to encapsulate the essence of the woman warrior. While The Encyclopedia of Amazons, by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, references some ―actual‖ Amazons, such as Andromache, Antiope, Hippolyte and Penthesilea, it also serves as an ―exhaustive‖ compilation of ―swordswomen of recorded history,‖ including ―a broad sampling of twentieth-century combatants and armed revolutionaries.‖288 Julie Wheelwright‘s Amazons and Military Maids documents female cross-dressing soldiers and sailors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with no explicit mention of the exploits of the all-female tribe of warriors from the Bronze Age. Paige Eager has also borrowed the term to denote agency in reference to female terrorists.289
The legend of the Amazons thus serves as a feminist origin myth; the Amazon becomes the source of both female empowerment generally and of women‘s warriorhood specifically. It is celebrated as a transgressive example—whether real or imaginary—of women rejecting male-dominated systems of power and functioning independent of male control. Because matriarchy and gynocracy are believed to pre-date patriarchy as the earliest forms of religious and political organisation, they are characterised as natural social systems. Spretnak, for example, essentialises female social dominance by categorising feminine powers—namely the corporeal activities of conception, gestation, childbirth, and lactation—as natural, while the powers men came to possess are cultural or ―invented.‖290
285 See Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta; and Edgerton, Warrior Women. 286 See Blanton and Cook, They Fought Like Demons, 109, 195. 287 Marina Warner argues that the attribution of ―d’Arc‖ to Joan‘s name by later commentators, ―with its multiple meanings of ‗bow,‘ ‗arch‘ and ‗curve,‘ places Joan at the centre of a web of imagery associated with the power of women since antiquity. The bow is the weapon of the Amazon, and when Joan of Arc was first written about...it was principally as an Amazon that she was presented‖ (Joan of Arc, 199). 288 Salmonson, Encyclopedia of Amazons, xi. 289 Eager, From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists, 23. 290 Spretnak, ―Introduction,‖ xiii. 95
However, this is as problematic as the idea that patriarchy is the natural social structure, which Spretnak aims to refute. In addition to reducing women‘s power to their reproductive function, this view fails to recognise the social aspects of childbirth and childrearing, and the cultural rituals that develop around them. It also ignores the fact that social and political organisation, while it may be based in bodily criteria, is necessarily a cultural phenomenon. This position is further problematised when we attempt to reconcile Amazon society, itself embraced as a feminist origin myth, with woman-centred cultures based on pacifism and maternalism. Spretnak argues that matrifocal, pre-patriarchal societies did not experience war; these cultures were ―communal, harmonious, and peaceful..., thereby differing very substantially from patriarchal cultures.‖291 Yet the Amazons are anything but a peace-loving people, preferring to use their female bodies for fighting than mothering. Arguing for the Amazons as the source of female empowerment is complicated by their precarious position between mythologies of peaceful matriarchy and those of violence and warmongering.
Further destabilising the feminist potential of the Amazon legend is the fact that the original Amazon narratives are unquestionably conservative. Far from comprising a celebration of female self-determination, they focus instead on the Amazons as aberrations of the social order and their resultant conquest by Greek male heroes. Although they are depicted as brave and skilled warriors, the Amazons are always defeated by superior male fighters in Greek narratives. The denouement of Amazon narratives is invariably the taming of the warrior woman through rape and her assimilation into patriarchal society via the institution of marriage. In the most commonly narrated Amazon story, Heracles is sent on his ninth labour to steal the girdle (symbol of virginity) of the Amazon queen Hippolyte. Hippolyte either falls in love with and agrees to marry Heracles, or is raped and/or killed by the hero, depending on who is telling the story. In the earliest written account (Euripides‘s Heracles, c. 417 B.C.), Heracles forcibly takes the girdle from Hippolyte and returns with it triumphant to Greece.292 In Apollodorus‘s account, Hippolyte agrees to give Heracles her girdle but, when Hera incites the rest of the Amazons to attack Heracles‘s ship, he retaliates by raping and killing the queen.293 Diodorus of Sicily has Hippolyte refuse to relinquish her girdle, causing a battle with Heracles‘s men in which almost all the Amazons are killed, for ―it was a thing intolerable to [Heracles], who made it his business to be renowned all the world over, to suffer any nation to be governed any longer by women.‖294 Amazons are also commonly
291 Ibid., xvii. 292 Euripides Heracles in Heracles and Other Plays. 293 Apollodorus Library 2.5.9. 294 Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca Historica 4.15–16. 96
depicted in Greek vase painting in the process of dying at the hands of their male opponents while attempting to invade Attica.295
The Amazon world is a world turned upside down: it is a complete inversion of the society that gave rise to it. In Athenian society, women married young and devoted their lives to mothering, confined in large part to the domestic realm, while men engaged in hunting and battle and controlled the political sphere.296 In contrast, Amazon women, and their descendents the Sauromatian women, took on masculine roles.
...the women of Sauromatae have kept their old ways, riding to the hunt on horseback sometimes with, sometimes without, their menfolk, taking part in war and wearing the same sort of clothes as men.... They have a marriage law which forbids a girl to marry until she has killed an enemy in battle; some of their women, unable to fulfil this condition, grow old and die in spinsterhood.297
Their women, so long as they are virgins, ride, shoot, throw the javelin while mounted, and fight with their enemies. They do not lay aside their virginity until they have killed three of their enemies, and they do not marry before they have performed the traditional sacred rights.298
The extermination of Amazon society in narrative can thus be read as a reactionary attempt to ensure the traditional gender system remains intact. Indeed, Greek narratives involving women generally served conservative purposes regarding the sexual order. Women were viewed as more lustful and less rational than men, and their sexual appetites were believed to be destructive if not controlled.299 Myth was thus a way of regulating female sexuality within the family; as sex outside of wedlock and women living without men constituted threats to the institution of marriage, preserving the sexual status quo became the function of many myths that centred on women.300 Thus a tension inheres in the Amazons narratives between the subversiveness of an all-female tribe of women warriors and the conservatism of their representation as exemplars of abnormal and inappropriate gendered behaviour.301
295 See Wilde, On the Trail, 24–25. 296 Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth, 25–26; Tyrrell, Amazons; and Wilde, On the Trail, 16–17. 297 Herodotus Histories 277–79. 298 Hippocrates Airs, Waters, Places 17. 299 Thornton, Eros, 70–76. 300 Csapo, Theories of Mythology, 262–63. 301 In the pre-modern and modern periods most narratives told about the Amazons were constructed to diffuse the anxiety that the figure of the female warrior, as well as the woman living without men, creates in male-dominated societies. Abby Kleinbaum documents what she refers to as a ―war against 97
Such conservative representations of the Amazon exist uneasily alongside the feminist employment of the figure as a symbol of women‘s empowerment. The Amazon narrative has been revised and rewritten by feminist historians specifically as a counter- narrative to the male warrior tradition. Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy write:
In Western culture, the most powerful and influential story is arguably that of the male just warrior. Told through the centuries in myth, history, and literature, and, more recently, in film and on television, the story of the male just warrior saturates our consciousness and helps to structure and define our institutions.... From ancient times, Western society‘s just warrior narrative has been male privileged.... The few women who have achieved warrior status in this hegemonic war chronicle have been portrayed as temporary transgressors and have not been permitted to form a tradition of their own. Such warrior women, with Joan of Arc providing the most well-known example, have been honored as virtuous viragos, but they also have been viewed as inherently unsettling to the patriarchal social order; their stories often have been belittled or excised from historical memory.302
In light of this silencing of women‘s warrior tradition in cultural narrative, it is easy to see why the Amazon has been appropriated as an icon of strong, militaristic womanhood. Shunning marriage and using men solely for procreative purposes, the Amazons engage with their male enemies in battle on an equal basis and are feared by the warriors who encounter them. The Amazon narrative has thus been reconstructed as an answer to the Warrior Myth which states that soldiering is the natural prerogative of men alone, and that only men have fought historically in combat. Yet, paradoxically, the Amazon narrative can also be read as an integral component or product of the Warrior Myth because the Amazon has been utilised in narrative to reinforce conventional definitions of war-fighting as something that is only natural to men. The myth‘s construction of a liminal race of women warriors endorses the premise that women can fight and have fought as warriors while at the same time demonstrating how this goes against nature, and thus contributing to the reification of the warrior as an inherently male identity.
the Amazons‖ by literary men throughout Western history. From their brutal rape and slaughter at the hands of Greek heroes, through their erasure by the Christian church during the Middle Ages, their exotic turn and global proliferation in narratives of exploration and conquest during the Enlightenment, and their sexualisation in nineteenth-century moralising narratives, the Amazons have been reproduced and re-invented across the centuries specifically for the purpose of eliminating or containing the threat they pose (War against the Amazons). 302 Early and Kennedy, ―Introduction,‖ 1. 98
In her discussion of scholarship on the goddess figure, Juliette Wood cautions against making the assumption that the presence of powerful women in ancient mythology is evidence that real women commanded authority and respect in Greek society. In fact, alongside stories of goddesses and Amazons, Greek narratives are full of examples of women oppressed and exploited at the hands of men. Part of the feminist mythopoeia by contemporary authors involves a re-vision of the subjugated Greek women who have functioned as the cultural origins of feminine identity. A central feminist strategy has been to rewrite these narratives from the perspective of the silenced woman. In just one example, in a re-vision of the story of the Odyssey, Margaret Atwood‘s Penelope laments that her husband‘s version of events has been falsely believed while she has been reduced to ―an edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with.‖303 Originally content to play the dutiful wife and keep quiet, Penelope is compelled to tell her side of the story posthumously, when she sees the purpose to which her image has been used.
...after the main events were over and things had become less legendary, I realised how many people were laughing at me behind my back – how they were jeering, making jokes about me, jokes both clean and dirty; how they were turning me into a story, or several stories, though not the kind of stories I‘d prefer to hear about myself.... Now that all the others have run out of air, it‘s my turn to do a little story-making. I owe it to myself.... I‘ll spin a thread of my own.304
The fact that Atwood‘s Penelope speaks to a contemporary audience from her home across the River Styx, rather than the author locating her in the classical world, posits the current period as a climate finally open to engagement with the perspectives of ancient women, finally ready both to write and to receive their stories.305 According to feminist poet Adrienne Rich, such instances of re-vision are essential acts of survival for women in a male- dominated society. ―We need to know the writing of the past,‖ she argues, ―and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.‖306 A feminist reconstruction of an ancient world that was oppressive to women thus coexists with a feminist appropriation of this world as a locus of female empowerment; both form part of a politicised return to the past as a process of changing the present and
303 Atwood, Penelopiad, 2. 304 Ibid., 3. 305 In The World’s Wife, Carol Ann Duffy writes poems from the perspective of the silenced women of mythology and history. Her classical subjects include Penelope, Demeter, and Medusa. 306 Rich, ―When We Dead Awaken,‖ 19. Bella Debrida argues that, ―By reclaiming for ourselves the art of poetry, the creation of song, we can spin off from mythological insights and create our own guiding mythological visions for a new age‖ (―Drawing from Mythology,‖ 148). 99
imagining an alternative future. A new past must be imagined to ensure a new future can be created.
This tension—between Amazon as feminist warrior/matriarch and Amazon as servant of patriarchy—has resulted in the transformation of the Amazon as cultural symbol across time and space. Since the ―birth‖ of the figure in Greek narrative, the Amazon has been imbued with symbolic meaning as originary proof of both matriarchy and patriarchy, as the locus of women‘s empowerment and disempowerment, as evidence that violence is natural in women and as evidence that female violence in completely unnatural. Outgrowing its original narrative, the Amazon figure has acquired a symbolic life of its own, proliferating throughout Western literature and culture as a point upon which gender debates focus. Like the ―feminist‖—with which it is in many ways interchangeable—the Amazon figure has with the passage of time become detached from its original definition and has been used to describe strong and independent women in both transgressive and conservative terms. The Amazon has grown polysemic, taking on different meanings simultaneously, undergoing an overlapping multiplicity of writings and readings.
At different times, the term has been variously ascribed to single women who do not rely on men, business and career women, sportswomen, aggressive and unruly women, female politicians, feminists, and lesbians, and has been used in both complimentary and derogatory senses. Katherine R. Goodman notes how the appellation was employed with reference to literary women in Enlightenment Europe, where ―Amazons warring with men on the literary battlefield‖ was a popular metaphor applied to the female intellectual.307 In his study of representations of women in seventeenth-century drama, Simon Shepherd discusses how the term at this time indicated ―a woman who uses her strength for non- virtuous, specifically lustful ends‖ and was actually set up in opposition to the chaste warrior woman; on stage the label was often used pejoratively ―as an insult, applied to women who fight and drink, especially wives who are aggressive and women who refuse traditional submission to men.‖308 In nineteenth-century America, ―Amazon‖ women appeared in circuses and freak shows where they wrestled with and triumphed over men,309 while violent
307 Goodman, Amazons and Apprentices, 5. 308 Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women, 2; 14. 309 Mrozek, ―‗Amazon‘ and the American ‗Lady‘.‖ Mrozek writes: ―One such woman, who was born in 1864 and named Ella Hattan, took the stage name Jaguarina and was even billed as ‗Champion Amazon of the World‘ and ‗Ideal Amazon of the Age.‘ Jaguarina established herself through skilled use of the sword from 1884 to 1900.… The famous wrestler Minerva, also known as ‗Miss Josie‘ from Hoboken, New Jersey, posed in similar fashion—bold, proud, balanced, and graceful. In both cases, the image of the accomplished female athlete was inseparably tied to the spectre of dominant womanhood. Minerva trounced men in some of her most popular wrestling encounters…. So, too, Jaguarina met—and usually defeated—a string of male opponents‖ (206). 100
and criminal black women were derogatorily labelled ―colored Amazons.‖310 Today the term is used to describe tall, well-built women who conduct private fetish sessions for men who like to feel dominated.311 It has been used in the context of fictional action heroines who have no genealogical connection to the Amazons, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and female stars of adventure/exploitation films like Pam Grier and Dyanne Thorne.312 Today‘s women wrestlers and bodybuilders are commonly referred to as Amazons.313 The term also evokes the empowerment indicative of a group of strong women existing independently of men, and has particular significance for the lesbian community.314
As I will discuss further in the next section, the monster is a boundary-crossing figure that evades classification and definition. This lack of fixed meaning signifies the Amazon‘s monstrousness. Unable to be ascribed a single definition, she transmogrifies to serve both the feminist and the anti-feminist purposes of those who appropriate her mythology. The Amazon‘s monstrousness suggests her ability to collapse gender boundaries, complicating feminist appropriations of Amazonia as an originary woman-centred or matriarchal society. Yet her mythology is also utilised in ways that reinforce gender boundaries in order to dispel the anxiety her existence causes. As we will see in the next section, the monster is created so it can be destroyed.
Monstrous Warrior Women: Amazons as Boundary-Crossing Figures
The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed an intriguing simultaneity or doubleness: like the ghost of Hamlet, it introjects the disturbing, repressed, but formative traumas of ‗pre-‘ into the sensory moment of ‗post-,‘ binding the one irrevocably to the other. The monster commands, ‗Remember me‘: restore my fragmented body, piece me back together, allow the past its eternal return. The monster haunts; it does not simply bring past and present together, but destroys the boundary that demanded their twinned foreclosure.
— Jeffrey Jerome Cohen315
Why does one make a monster? In order to watch it die, of course.
310 Gross, Colored Amazons. 311 For one such use, see O‘Neill, ―Invasion of the Amazon Women.‖ 312 Schubart, Super Bitches, 7. 313 Frueh, Monster/Beauty, 105; and Richardson, ―Flex-rated!‖ 290, 296, 297. 314 See, for example, Sarah F. Green, Urban Amazons. 315 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory, ix–x. 101
— Edward Ingebretsen316
Sometime around the turn of the fifth century B.C., Lysias gave his version of the Amazon narrative during a funeral oration in Athens.
Long ago there were Amazons, daughters of Ares, who lived along the Thermodon River. They alone of the peoples around them were armed with iron, and they were the first to ride horses. With them, because of the inexperience of their enemies, the Amazons slew those who fled and outran those who pursued. For their bravery Amazons used to be considered men rather than women for their physical nature. They seemed to surpass men in their spirit instead of falling short of them in appearance. They ruled many lands and enslaved their neighbors. Then, hearing of the great renown of this land, they gathered their most warlike nations and marched against the city. A glorious reputation and high ambitions were their motives. But here they met brave men and came to possess spirits alike to their nature. Gaining a reputation that was the opposite of the one they had, they appeared women because of the dangers rather than from their bodies.... They made the memory of the city imperishable because of its bravery and rendered their own country nameless because of their disaster here. Those women who unjustly lusted after another‘s land justly lost their own.317
In his account Lysias describes how the Amazons were received as men in spite of their female bodies because they behaved like men. Indeed, it is even suggested that they were more male than some men because of their exceptional bravery on the battlefield. However, when they encounter the ―real‖ men of Athens, the Amazons undergo a reversal, becoming women in the face of the male warriors‘ superior courage. While their bodies remain anatomically identical before and after meeting the Athenians in battle, their change in behaviour from bravery to cowardice brings about their transformation from male to female.
This account provides an insight into how sex and gender were understood in the classical period. For many Greek thinkers, the difference between male and female bodies was understood as one not of kind (as in today‘s binary sex model) but of degree. The female body, while obviously different from the male, was believed to be a reversal of the male body—Galen understood the female genitals to be a literal inversion of the male—not
316 Ingebretsen, At Stake, 153. 317 Quoted in Tyrrell, Amazons, 17. 102
its ontological opposite.318 Thus while men and women were different, this distinction was conceptualised as ―gender‖ not as ―sex.‖ As Lysias‘s account demonstrates, behaviour was more important in determining one‘s status as male or female than biology; after encountering the Athenians in battle the Amazons became women ―because of the dangers‖ (that is, because of their cowardice in the face of danger) ―rather than from their bodies.‖ Thus, while the Greeks believed that women were naturally suited for domestic labour while men were naturally designed to fight wars, biology was not the foundation of this social arrangement.319 This ideology explains why, though women were not believed to be naturally capable of war-fighting, a tribe of women could nonetheless defeat many ―inexperienced‖ men in battle. In behaving like men they triumphed over males who did not possess manly ―spirits‖ to match their own. When they encounter the Athenians, however, they are finally ―outmanned‖ by a superior race of males. In their defeat at the hands of the Athenians, the Amazons are transformed back into women and the natural gender order is restored.
In this section I argue that the Amazon can be read as a monstrous boundary- crossing figure. The classical period was an era of monster making. David Gilmore traces monsters in ancient literature back to the Homeric legends, and notes how the Greeks had ―the richest reparatory [of monsters] of perhaps any ancient civilization.‖320 Yet the Amazons were not considered to be monsters in the classical period. A monster is a cultural figure that blurs boundaries between categories. Given that sex categories as we understand them today did not exist in ancient Greek societies, Amazons would not have been conceptualised as collapsing boundaries between male and female bodies (there was only one sexed body, ―one flesh‖321). Monsters for the Greeks were instead typically those creatures that combined human and animal bodies, blurring distinctions between species. In his overview of monsters in Western mythology, Gilmore cites Tritons, Satyrs, Centaurs, the Chimera, the Griffin, the Hydra, and the Gorgons among the monsters of antiquity; all these creatures were ―grotesque hybrids, recombinations uniting animal and human features or mixing animal species in lurid ways.‖322 Paul Murgatroyd describes classical monsters as ―mythical, fabulous and imaginary creatures which are extraordinary, alien and abnormal. They are often malformed, having multiple limbs (such as three heads) or combining elements from different forms (e.g. a man‘s body with a bull‘s head), and sometimes they can change their shape (like a werewolf).‖323 People who shifted between male and female genders might
318 Laqueur, Making Sex, 25–26. 319 Ibid., 29. 320 Gilmore, Monsters, 37. 321 Laqueur, Making Sex. 322 Gilmore, Monsters, 6. 323 Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 1. 103
have been considered threatening and dangerous to ancient patriarchal structures, but they would not have been understood as monsters.
Many of today‘s monster theorists continue to focus on the human–non-human combination. According to Nina Lykke, it is precisely this ―mixture of human and non-human dimensions‖ that ―constitutes the monster‘s monstrosity‖ across cultures and time periods.324 Yet, as we have seen, in the late modern period the categorising of men and women into two opposite and incommensurable sex categories based on biological distinctions became the foundation of human identity and remains the dominant sex/gender ideology today. The occupation of one sex category or the other has taken on immense epistemological significance in demarcating the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural, the normal and the abnormal, in post-Enlightenment thought. As such, within modern and postmodern understandings of sex, the Amazon can be read as a monstrous creature that destabilises the ontology of biological difference. The ability of Lysias‘s Amazon to morph from female to male and back again can be read as evidence of her status as a borderline figure; rather than simply occupying the ―wrong‖ category, the Amazon refutes the very concept of sex categories by proving the ideological boundaries erected between them to be permeable.
By today‘s sexual logic, then, the Amazons of Greek mythology can be conceptualised as monstrous hybrids of female and male bodies and natures. As women, they copulate with men, and bear and sometimes suckle children; but they also use their bodies for the male acts of hunting, ruling, and fighting in combat, and they reject their ―natural‖ position within the institution of marriage. Aeschylus refers to the Amazons in The Suppliant Women as ―manless and man-eating,‖325 suggesting both the Amazons‘ separation from male corporeality and its centrality to Amazon society. Although they live in all-female communities, they require men for their two primary activities: making love and making war. Both these activities can be read as instances of the Amazons consuming men; while they do not literally devour male flesh, components of the male body—namely the bodily fluids semen and blood—are necessary for their survival as androgynes. Through consumption of the male body in sexual intercourse, the Amazons ensure the reproduction of their female bodies; through engaging with and destroying the male body in war, they maintain their status as physical men. Interactions between Amazons and the men they slaughter are always highly corporeal in nature, as is described most vividly in epic poetry. Virgil‘s Aeneid emphasises the extreme brutality of the Amazons as it catalogues the deaths of men at the hands of the queens Penthesilea and Camilla.
324 Lykke, ―Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs,‖ 76. 325 Aeschylus Suppliant Women. Translation in Tyrrell, Amazons, 21. 104
...she hurled a long pine-shaft Clear through the chest he exposed when he turned round to face her. Collapsing, Vomiting rivers of blood, he kept biting the ground he‘d made gory, Writhing in spasms of death round the very wound that destroyed him.
......
Now the pursued was pursuer. He pleaded and begged as she rose up Higher and hacked through the arms of the man, through his bones, with her mighty Axe-blade, again and again. Gashes flooded his whole face with hot brains.
......
She outraces his horse, grabs the reins, turns to face him, attacks him, Then penalizes her foeman in blood, casually, like a sacred Predator soaring on wings from a cliff-top, extending his pinions, Stalking a pretty dove, over her limits, unbridled, in veiling Cloud; and he catches her, grasps her, and guts her with curving Talons. Her blood sputters; plumes wrenched out flutter down from the heavens.326
In this last account of the death of Aunus‘s son, the Amazon is conceptualised as a bird of prey, with the implication that the Amazon (metaphorically, at least) ingests her victim after she has caught and killed him. The genders in this metaphor are reversed, with the Amazon becoming a male predator and the male warrior a female bird, indicating the gendering of the predator role as male irrespective of the possession of a male body, with the sexual overtones of the rape motif that specifies a female victim. Through her unnatural acts of violence, the Amazon is thus conceived of as a hybrid of both human and beast, and male and female. The simultaneous sexual and violent nature of the Amazons‘ consumption of the male body indicates that it is a process at once generative and destructive of sexed corporeality. The monstrous Amazon both produces the conventional gender order and brings about its destruction.
326 Virgil Aeneid 11.666–69; 696–98; 719–24. 105
Viewing the Amazon as a gender monster for our time is useful for exploring and understanding the political purposes the Amazon serves; that is, it helps us to understand the Amazon‘s peculiar mythopoeia. Once we take into account the idea that the Amazons can be conceptualised not just as aberrant women but as sexual hybrids of male and female, then they can be seen as occupying the realm of the non-human, given that the cornerstone of one‘s humanity in (post)modern Western society is one‘s occupation of a single gender category. Heinz Mode defines a monster as ―a new shape resulting from a combination...of characteristic components or properties of different kinds of living things and natural objects.‖ Although Mode catalogues monstrous human–animal and animal–animal amalgamations, such a definition could also apply to the Amazon, or indeed any violent or warrior woman, combining as she does male and female behaviours and corporealities. Mode goes on to argue that due to its hybridity the monster ―does not occur in nature, but belongs solely to the realm of the human imagination.... Its shape forms an organic entity, a new type capable of life in art and in the imagination.‖327 The Amazon might have once existed in a physical, tangible sense but she does not occur ―in nature;‖ that is, she is constructed as ―unnatural.‖ She is a monstrous product of the Warrior Myth in the sense that she is an integral part of the mythology that denaturalises women combatants; she is constructed and manipulated in the cultural imagination.
Reimagining the Amazon as monster helps us to see how she signifies cultural anxieties as we reconstruct her for contemporary purposes. Societies produce monsters in the shape of those things they most fear, and they appear at times of crisis and upheaval. The continuing re-visitation of the Amazon marks her position as an embodiment of monstrous sexual potentialities and the need of some to explore, and others to repress, these potentialities. Etymologically, the term monster means warning or display. The Greeks used the word teras, meaning an omen, to label the aberrant creatures of their mythology, while the English word monster derives from the Latin verb monere—to warn—and noun monstrum—a warning or portent.328 Like the classical monsters she developed alongside, the Amazons served as a warning to Athenian society of what might happen if the gender order was reversed and women began to perform masculine roles in the public/political domain.329 While the ancient Amazon may not have technically classified as a monster, her narrative nonetheless signified the overturning of the natural order; it warned men not to relinquish control to women and it warned women to remain in their proper place in the
327 Mode, Fabulous Beasts and Demons, 7. 328 Braidotti, ―Signs of Wonder,‖ 136; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory, 4; Gilmore, Monsters, 9; and Knoppers and Landes, ―Introduction,‖ 3. 329 This argument is put forward in Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth; Kleinbaum, War against the Amazons; and Tyrrell, Amazons. 106
domestic realm. As Amazons remained unmarried, it cautioned against the perils of rejecting the marriage contract and the ascribed gender roles within it. The result of not following this gender order was a race of barbarous women who plunged society into violence and chaos. As we will see in the next section, the Amazon today continues to act as a warning against the collapse of ―natural‖ distinctions between men and women. The Amazon remains the locus of anxiety about what might happen if boundaries between male and female, masculine and feminine, break down.
Defining the Amazon as monster also illuminates the connections between the original Amazon narrative and violent or Amazonian women today. While monsters in the classical period were primarily hybrids of human and animal, the definition has changed so that today‘s monsters are fully human. By the Middle Ages, the term was being used to describe human deformities(rather than creatures belonging to non-human races), specifically babies born with malformed or abnormal body parts (such as infants missing limbs, or conjoined twins) as well as those who supposedly had animalistic features.330 The word has been further humanised in the contemporary period to describe otherwise ―normal‖ people who commit acts of atrocious or unspeakable violence or abuse: dictators like Hitler or Stalin, serial killers like Ted Bundy, rapists and paedophiles. For the Greeks, monsters were antithetical to their creators; our monsters are more like us than not. The monster is uncanny—like/of us yet unfamiliar—and thus it invites both revulsion and fascination.
An exploration of Amazons and warrior women as monsters sheds light on the changing definitions of the term through its transhistorical location in bodies that resist classification. The monster always signifies anxiety about the physical body, about where the monstrous body ends and the human body begins, and about what is ―natural.‖ The monster is a product of the imagination, a (political) myth,331 but it is also a material, corporeal, embodied subject. A monster is monstrous precisely because there is something abnormal about its body: either it is physically deformed (Greek Gorgons and Cyclops, medieval abnormal births) or it uses its body for aberrant purposes (serial killers, paedophiles). In her study of representations of the monster in late-twentieth-century horror films, Barbara Creed contends that the female reproductive body is the basis of all conceptualisations of monstrosity. Creed coined the term ―monstrous-feminine‖ to describe the idea that it is the reproductive function itself (the feminine), rather than the individual woman, that is deemed
330 For discussions of understandings of monstrosity in the Early Modern period, see Douthwaite, Wild Girl; Fudge, Gilbert, and Wiseman, eds, At the Borders of the Human; and Knoppers and Landes, eds, Monstrous Bodies. 331 For conceptualisations of monster-like figures as political myths, see Haraway‘s cyborg (―Cyborg Manifesto‖), Braidotti‘s nomadic subject (Nomadic Subjects), and Deleuze and Guattari‘s rhizome (A Thousand Plateaus). 107
monstrous in the cultural imagination.332 This view is shared by Rosi Braidotti, who argues that the connection of the monstrous with the female body indicates ―the deep-seated anxiety that surrounds the issue of women‘s maternal power of procreation in a patriarchal society;‖ women‘s bodies are ―morphologically dubious‖ in their ability to literally change shape and collapse distinctions between physical entities through carrying another being inside them.333 Female bodies by this logic are sites of monstrosity; they create monsters from their bodies which are themselves monstrous.
Yet, for all the fear and mysticism that continues to surround pregnancy and childbirth, mothering is nonetheless considered a natural behaviour for women. While female procreation and sexual desire are feared, it is women‘s violence and destructiveness that are the most unnatural, and therefore the most monstrous, behaviours. Because of the extreme ―unnaturalness‖ of her body—designed to give birth not take life—the female killer is particularly monstrous, as the case of American serial killer Aileen Wuornos, whose Oscar- winning biopic was simply (and ironically) titled Monster, demonstrates.334 Unsurprisingly, special monstrous status is reserved today for the mother who kills her children—her apparent lack of the ―maternal instinct‖ to protect her offspring cited as evidence for her monstrosity—just as the Amazons contravened their maternal natures by slaughtering or abandoning their sons.335 Thus it is not the feminine but the absence of femininity in the violent woman that most often signifies her monstrosity. Similarly, today‘s male monsters are feminised: male serial killers are often portrayed in ways that stress their lack of
332 Creed, Monstrous Feminine, 3. Creed writes: ―I have used the term ‗monstrous-feminine‘ as the term ‗female monster‘ implies a simple reversal of ‗male monster‘. The reasons why the monstrous- feminine horrifies her audience are quite different from the reasons why the male monster horrifies his audience. A new term is needed to specify these differences. As with all other stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality. The phrase ‗monstrous- feminine‘ emphasizes the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity.‖ She goes on to argue that ―when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions‖ (7). 333 Braidotti, ―Signs of Wonder,‖ 139; Nomadic Subjects, 80. Braidotti provides a history of monstrous femininity: ―The association of women with monsters goes as far back as Aristotle who, in The Generation of Animals, posits the human norm in terms of bodily organization based on a male model. Thus, in reproduction, when everything goes according to the norm a boy is produced; the female only happens when something goes wrong or fails to occur in the reproductive process. The female is therefore an anomaly, a variation on the main theme of man-kind. The emphasis Aristotle places on the masculinity of the human norm is also reflected in his theory of conception: he argues that the principle of life is carried exclusively by the sperm, the female genital apparatus providing only the passive receptacle for human life. The sperm-centered nature of his early theory of procreation is thus connected to a massive masculine bias in the general Aristotelian theory of subjectivity. For Aristotle, not surprisingly, women are not endowed with a rational soul‖ (Nomadic Subjects, 79).See also Chapter 2, p. 77, n. 214 of this thesis. 334 Monster, directed by Patty Jenkins, was released in 2003 by M8 Entertainment Inc. 335 For example, American woman Susan Smith, who murdered her two sons in October 1994 by rolling her locked car into a lake, was frequently labelled a monster by media and the public. See Chavez, ―Murders Show Evil;‖ McCarthy, ―Monster Mommy;‖ Sobran, ―Be Careful;‖ and Teitell, ―Why We‘re So Fascinated.‖ 108
heteronormative masculinity, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, who had sex with his male victims before killing, and sometimes cannibalising, them.336 Conceptualising the contemporary woman warrior as part of this monstrous tradition enables us to make transhistorical connections between deviant violence and gender non-conformity in Western cultures within the paradigm of the monstrous.
Because the monster is both signifier and cause of anxiety, it must be marginalised, banished to the periphery of civilised society. The monster in the imagination is always outside, either geographically (relegated to faraway lands on the borders of the known world) or socially (existing on the ―fringes‖ or the ―underground‖ of society). The monster is othered; its body is abject.337 The Amazons were originally conceptualised as a separate race of women and as such they were ethnically distinguished from the Athenians. In fact, some scholars believe the Amazons actually represented the Persians, defeated in battle by the Athenians, and that the myth was a way of derogating this ―inferior‖ race by feminising its male warriors.338 Amazonia was also geographically isolated outside the realm of the civilised world; Greek heroes encountered the warrior women on their long journeys into mythical lands. The world, both physical and social, outside Athenian society was a monstrous space where creatures of all kinds lurked, threatening anyone who crossed the border into chaos. According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ―The monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself.‖339 The ancient Amazon, although not technically designated monstrous, was nonetheless a means of defining Self against Other, of policing the boundaries of nature and humanity. At the same time, she was a convenient means of displacing ―unnatural‖ and ―abnormal‖ feared elements of Greek society, such as aggressive or independent womanhood, onto a barbarous tribe, and of exorcising such female strength from the all-important marriage contract.
Yet the monster‘s banishment is not sufficient to protect civilised society, as it continually threatens to enter from the outside. The Amazons invaded Attica and waged war on the Greeks on more than one occasion. As such, the monster must be either tamed and
336 Dahmer was convicted of murdering 17 men between 1978 and 1991. Male serial killers‘ and sex offenders‘ relationships with their mothers are also frequently analysed, with cold, overbearing, or overindulgent mothers blamed for their sons‘ transformations from normal boys into monstrous predators. 337 Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls. Kristeva writes of the monstrous: ―The monstrous or deviant is a figure of abjection in so far as it trespasses and transgresses the barriers between recognizable norms or definitions‖ (Powers of Horror, 81–82). 338 See Wilde, On the Trail, 24. 339 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory, 12. 109
incorporated into society or completely destroyed. We have seen how the typical fate of the ancient Amazon was rape/marriage or death at the hands of a Greek male hero. The common act of raping the Amazons was a means of socially incorporating them by bringing the female reproductive body back under male control. Yet the taming or destruction of the Amazon in narrative is only ever a temporary measure, as the underlying anxiety she causes remains. In the ancient narratives, Heracles, Theseus, Bellerophon and others all engage with and kill the same Amazons, only to have them resurface again in another narrative, to be slaughtered by another hero. The Amazon story is constantly undergoing a process of rewriting and re-vision as the gender order is negotiated and renegotiated. It is this very repetition, this constant battle with the Amazons that has enabled them to survive as culturally relevant figures across centuries.340 While many of the classical monsters have ―died out‖ in contemporary narratives, the Amazon remains as a figure upon which gender anxieties are played out in the twenty-first century. The next section turns to a discussion of postmodern media re-visitations of the Amazon, focusing on the 1990s television programme Xena: Warrior Princess. The Amazon in contemporary cinema and television is a figure that continues to be used to try to make sense of, and dispel anxiety regarding, the woman warrior and the violent woman more generally within contemporary Western society.
The Xenaverse: Postmodern Amazons on Screen
For much of the history of late-twentieth-century cinema, the Amazon has been used for the conservative purpose of affirming male potency and authority. In her study of women in action films of the 1970s and 1980s, Rikke Schubart notes how Amazons in popular cinema were divided into ―good‖ and ―bad‖ categories. Amazons who retained their independence and warlike propensities were characterised as ―bad Amazons‖ who were pitted against the male hero and destroyed by the movie‘s end. These women were sometimes depicted as lesbian, their ―deviant‖ sexuality adding to their status as evil subverters of the gender order. As in ancient Greek narratives, in order for an Amazon to be ―good‖ she must be tamed, that is, she must relinquish her feminist ways and be firmly on the side of patriarchy, assisting the male hero and supporting a heteropatriarchal agenda.341 Amazons in popular cinema typically served explicit male-fantasy purposes, such as in the exploitation genre. The Amazon was transformed into a dominatrix figure, dressed in skimpy leather bikinis, her weapons used not to fight but to torture male victims in sadistic, sexualised rituals.342 The
340 Kleinbaum, War against the Amazons. 341 Schubart, Super Bitches, 36. Schubart cites Conan the Barbarian (1982), Barbarian Queen (1985), and Red Sonja (1985) as examples of such movies (36; 232–33). 342 Schubart, Super Bitches, 36. See Barbarian Queen (1985). 110
―good‖ Amazon was allowed to survive in these movies, but only in the service of men, stripped of her power and agency.
However, the 1990s witnessed a change in representations of Amazons and other violent women on the big and small screens. These heroines were constructed as much more complex characters than simply archetypes of inappropriate femininity. In particular, their rejection of men and propensity for violence began to be depicted in a much more positive light. While they developed out of screen heroines of the 1960s on—such as Agent 99 from the television series Get Smart, Wonder Woman, the Angels of Charlie’s Angels, the Bionic Woman, and Batgirl—these new heroines were less stereotypical and served as a ―reaction to the perceived limits of 1970s feminism and 1980s conservatism.‖343 Sherrie Inness notes how tough women in film and on television in the 1990s formed part of an attempt by film companies and television networks to push the boundaries of what was acceptable to depict on screen. Controversy was good for profits and violent women were controversial. Yet she also argues that market forces alone should not be used to explain the trend of tough women on screen, noting that ―the tough girl also represents a culture in which real women are re-evaluating what it means to be tough.‖344 Women and girls became more interested in engaging with female strength, power and violence on screen. The creation of fantasy worlds where women were powerful and fearless intersected with the increasing belief that such power could translate into female viewers‘ real lives. Young male viewers, raised during the women‘s movement, were also more receptive to examples of powerful womanhood than in previous decades. These on-screen examples brought the warrior woman into a public consciousness that was, perhaps, finally ready to receive her.
Of all the 1990s Amazon incarnations, one captured the imagination more than any other: the honorary Amazon Xena. The immensely popular television programme Xena: Warrior Princess (hereafter Xena) aired globally between 1995 and 2001. Originally appearing on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994–1999), the warrior princess character (played by New Zealand actress Lucy Lawless) was so popular with audiences that the show‘s producers gave Xena her own series. Xena is a former warlord and leader of a rebel army who is made to see the error of her ways and, when the first season opens, is beginning to make amends by doing good works. The show sees her wandering the countryside of the ancient world with her sidekick Gabrielle, a young and idealistic bard whose life Xena saves in the first episode. Together, Xena and Gabrielle fight bad guys, outwit monsters and gods, and rescue people in need. Xena became an overnight cult sensation; it aired in over 100 countries worldwide, attracting thousands of hardcore fans
343 Early and Kennedy, Athena’s Daughters, 4–5. 344 Inness, Tough Girls, 6. 111
(known as Xenites) and giving rise to hundreds of Internet fan sites. There have been numerous spin-offs of the show, including books, graphic novels, movies, and action figures, as well as vast quantities of fan fiction based on the characters.
How do we explain the popularity of Xena? It could be viewed as simply another cult fantasy show which, along with The X-Files and Star Trek: Voyager, formed part of a slew of fantasy series in the last decade of the twentieth century. Yet there was something more specific about Xena and her butt-kicking companion that spoke to a late 1990s Western (and indeed global) audience. That the show depicts female heroes who fight their own battles and do not depend on men for their protection or sense of identity goes part way to explain its popularity among women of all ages.345 Xena developed alongside other extremely popular 1990s female television heroes like Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Nikita from La Femme Nikita.346 More than this, however, Xena‘s viewer appeal stems from the fact that the show explicitly appropriates the Amazon legend of antiquity for contemporary, and in many ways feminist purposes. The show is thus a postmodernist re-vision of the misogynistic cultures of both ancient and contemporary worlds. In the episode ―Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts‖ (Season 1), Xena and Gabrielle help Helen of Troy develop the self- confidence to leave Paris and stand on her own two feet; in ―Many Happy Returns‖ (Season 6) the virgin Jania opens a shelter for abused women. ―Here She Comes...Miss Amphipolis‖ (Season 2) portrays today‘s beauty pageants as demeaning to women. Xena convinces the contestants to stand up to the boyfriends who made them enter, inspiring the women to quit the pageant and follow their own dreams. Here, and in many similar examples, ancient stories of women‘s victimisation are rewritten in light of postmodern feminist concerns, in ways that simultaneously confront the oppression women continue to face in today‘s world. For the six years it was on the air, the physical battles Xena and Gabrielle waged against their enemies became symbolic of the battles the show‘s female viewers faced in their own lives. The warrior women‘s triumphs translated into potential victories for the ordinary women who tuned in each week.
The show‘s examples of female triumph against adversity have affected viewers across the world in highly tangible ways. In 2002, after the show was taken off the air, Xenite
345 During the show‘s early seasons, critics assumed its primary audience would be video-game- playing teenage boys and comic-book-loving men. It soon transpired that Xena also had a large female following. See Cuff, ―Prime-time Paragon.‖ 346 Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an American show that aired from 1997 to 2003. Its teenage heroine comes from a long line of young female ―Slayers‖ chosen to protect the world from evil and endowed with powers of increased strength, endurance, and clairvoyance. The Canadian La Femme Nikita is based on the French film of the same name, and aired from 1997 to 2001. Its main character Nikita is forcibly recruited as an assassin for a counter-terrorism organisation. The show was followed by an American series called Nikita, which went to air in 2010 and continues to run at time of writing. 112
Nikki Stafford compiled fan stories in a collection titled How Xena Changed Our Lives. Fans emotionally describe how the show helped them to stand up for themselves against bullies, cope with illness and the loss of loved ones, and feel empowered as women. One fan comments: ―It‘s nice to see a woman being strong without the influence of a man. It‘s so hard to teach our daughters to be strong in a world where no matter how hard they fight, they‘ll always be considered second class.‖347 Another remembers Xena as ―a strong, independent woman who managed to overpower her adversaries using formidable strength and intelligence. No matter the situation, Xena and her trusty sidekick, Gabrielle, could outlast any foe.‖348 On websites and blogs, fans document their feelings of personal connection with the characters, their distress when the show ended, and their traumatised responses to the violent death of their hero. One blogger, calling herself ―Warriordoc,‖ writes how an episode where Xena uses her medical skills to save Gabrielle‘s life inspired her to become a military doctor.349 Another credits Gabrielle‘s spiritual quest in India in Season 4 with her life- changing discovery of yoga practice.350 In an interview shortly after the show began, Lawless commented that most of her fan mail came from women of all ages ―who somehow find the show really empowering.‖351 Critics also responded favourably to Xena‘s tough-girl persona. John Haslett Cuff noted the timeliness of the warrior princess‘s arrival on the airwaves, describing her as the ―Woman for the Nineties‖ audiences had been waiting for.352 Stacey D‘Erasmo praised the writers for the show‘s refreshing lack of sexual violence in an entertainment culture that constantly writes the threat of rape and sexual assault into narratives that revolve around women.353 Eileen Glanton and Elizabeth Kastor referred to Xena as a ―feminist icon,‖354 while Stephanie Schorow suggested that ―the character has become a ‘90s icon of female empowerment.‖355
Of particular significance to fans is the deep friendship between the warrior princess and the young bard Gabrielle; the bond represents the model of female friendship to some, while others read a blossoming butch-femme lesbian relationship between the pair. Several of the stories Stafford documents relate to young women who believe the show helped them come to terms with their homosexuality and to recognise that others would also be accepting of them. The show‘s producers started exploring the lesbian undertone of Xena and Gabrielle‘s relationship after fans began to comment on it during the first season. By Season
347 Stafford, ed., How Xena Changed Our Lives, 3. 348 Ibid., 7. 349 Xena Rules. http://warriordoc.com/xena/ (accessed February 16, 2010). 350 Torch Online. ―How Xena‘s India Storyline Changed My Life.‖ 351 Glanton, ―Herculean Role.‖ 352 Cuff, ―Prime-time Paragon.‖ 353 D‘Erasmo, ―Xenaphilia.‖ 354 Glanton, ―A Herculean Role;‖ Kastor, ―Woman of Steel.‖ 355 Schorow, ―Xena: It‘s Those Thighs.‖ 113
2, lesbian innuendo—known as the ―subtext‖—was fully incorporated into the show, thanks in large part to the influence of gay producer Liz Friedman. Xena kisses Gabrielle on the mouth in ―The Quest‖ (Season 2) and in the show‘s last ever episode ―A Friend in Need: Part 2‖ (Season 6). In ―A Day in the Life‖ (Season 2) Xena and Gabrielle spend the entire episode squabbling like a married couple. The episode opens when the women are ambushed while sleeping at their campsite and Xena uses cooking implements to fight off their male attackers, a reference to the fact that Xena subverts traditional feminine roles but also that she uses female power to defeat men. When the overzealous bard attempts to start a fight with a man they meet on a forest path, Xena grabs her hair and pulls her backwards, reining her in like a clichéd caveman disciplining his wife. Later, the women take a bath together, sponging each other‘s backs; an argument disintegrates into a playful water fight. The episode ends with the couple lying side-by-side, gazing up at the stars, and Gabrielle gives Xena a goodnight kiss on the cheek. Regardless of whether viewers chose to read Xena and Gabrielle‘s relationship as lesbian, the creation of Xena as part of a wider community of fighting women, when compared to other lone female heroes of film and television, contributed to both the show‘s popularity and its feminist potential.356
The emotional testimony of fans illustrates the cultural adoption of Xena as an Amazon warrior for the postmodern age. Although Xena is not technically an Amazon, she regularly fights alongside Amazon women and is accepted as one of them. In addition, Gabrielle is crowned the Amazon queen, although she is not of Amazon blood either. The show‘s audience often recognises Xena, Gabrielle and other fighting women of the Xenaverse as Amazons, part of a wider sisterhood of female warriors. Fan Jules Warrick, for example, believes that, thanks to Xena ―the Amazon nation will continue to be strong‖ in the twenty-first century.357 Early reviewers of the show labelled Xena ―Amazonian,‖ cementing the connection between the character and the mythological tribe of women warriors she frequently encounters.358 A self-confessed ―Xenaholic‖ describes the positive impact the lesbian subtext had on her using Amazonian rhetoric: ―Being a lesbian, I‘ve considered myself to be an Amazon many years before Xena and Gabrielle came along, but I have appreciated the positive images this show has presented of strong women and the tribes of Amazons.‖359 Thus, while not of the Amazon race, Xena is accepted in the cultural imagination as an Amazon and the show draws heavily from Amazon mythology in its construction of its female warrior characters.
356 Sharon Ross, ―‗Tough Enough‘.‖ 357 Stafford, ed., How Xena Changed Our Lives, 46. 358 Cuff, ―Prime-time Paragon;‖ D‘Erasmo, ―Xenaphilia;‖ and Weiner, ―One Tough Sister.‖ 359 Stafford, ed., How Xena Changed Our Lives, 45. 114
Xena shows us what the Amazon has come to signify in contemporary Western culture: women‘s liberation and empowerment, as well as female erotic agency and, to an extent, an endorsement of female same-sex attraction. Xena has even been hailed as a hero for our time, rescuing women from a patriarchal culture which disempowers and abuses them; in the words of Gabrielle lookalike Wendy Woody, ―Xena was the hero we never knew we needed until she arrived.‖360 Yet, as with the other Amazon incarnations described in this chapter, the show‘s employment of the Amazon legend is in fact highly ambivalent.361 The Amazons Xena encounters are depicted as a tribe of strong, fierce women warriors who do not need men for protection and who fight with immense skill and violence. They rule themselves, and sovereignty is matrilineal. At the same time, however, the near-extinction of the Amazon race is continually emphasised in the show. Strong as they are, the Amazon women are not tough enough to stop themselves from being wiped out by their more powerful male enemies, just as Heracles ―utterly extirpated‖ the Amazon race in Diodorus of Sicily‘s account (cited above, p. 94). The overt sexualisation of Xena‘s Amazons—their costumes of skimpy loin cloths exposing their legs up to the waist and barely covering their backsides; their brass bras held together with metal pins easily removed from between the cups—also curbs the feminist potential of these figures. Scenes which draw on the S&M tradition of the sexually violent woman diffuse the power of the Amazon as the male ―victims‖ of her violence experience pleasure as well as pain. Here the Amazon is violent subject but also sexual object of male fantasy, a commodity whose express purpose is to provide sexual services for men. Xena‘s Amazons are also exoticised and Africanised in keeping with the ancient myth that they hailed from Libya. Their representation is an exercise in primitivism; the exotic is erotic and also has the effect of making the warrior women seem like they belong to an earlier world than that of the fighting men they encounter, highlighting their near extinction.
Although Xena herself is a symbol of independent Amazonian womanhood, with a penchant for violence and a strong reluctance to marry, she is also in many ways a stereotype of heterosexual male fantasy. Her costume resembles that of the other Amazons in the series. Clothed in a metal and leather boned corset, an impossibly short skirt, and thigh-high boots, with long dark hair in a feminine style (partially pulled back from her face to accentuate her high cheekbones but always flowing over her shoulders) and sporting a sword, chakram (circular boomerang) and, on occasion, a whip, she is part warrior, part
360 Quoted in Stafford, ed., How Xena Changed Our Lives, 86. 361 For other discussions of the show‘s ambiguous treatment of powerful women, see Inness, Tough Girls; and Schubart, Super Bitches. 115
dominatrix.362 This aspect of Xena‘s presentation contributes to the appeal of the show to male viewers but also to young women. Xena is both feminist and post-feminist icon. As comic book author Sarah Dyer observes, ―She really appeals to younger, post-feminist women and girls. She wears a skirt and she proves you can fight really good in a skirt. She has cool-looking hair, but she kills people.‖363 For reviewer John Haslett Cuff, being a ―Woman for the Nineties‖ (cited above, p. 111) translates as not being ―a feminist bully who plays the gender card to advance her personal and professional goals.‖364 After the consciousness-raising seventies, the glass-ceiling-shattering eighties, and in the immediate backlash against sexual harassment lawsuits and the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas controversy, here was a woman embodying the virtues of the ―girl power‖ generation: strong but sexy, independent but erotically available to men, and definitely not feminist. Cuff highlights the show‘s location within a satirical, sceptical, and ―politically incorrect‖ decade when he describes it as ―‗feminist‘‖ in inverted commas.365 Even Lucy Lawless insisted she did not consider herself a feminist (which she conflated with being ―anti-men‖) and objected to being labelled as one in an early interview with Ms. magazine.366
Thus, while Xena does subvert traditional gender roles, and while the show‘s lesbian subtext questions heteronormativity, the warrior princess nonetheless operates ―within a patriarchal and heterosexual frame.‖367 The world Xena and Gabrielle inhabit is not a matriarchy, nor do they live in or fight with a tribe of women warriors. In fact, in the back- story to the show, Xena led an army of male warriors. As a woman warrior, Xena is an exception not just in the 1990s world of television action shows but also in the fictional world she inhabits; most of the villains she fights and the heroes who fight alongside her are men. The warrior role in this fictional world remains male, and Xena is frequently referred to as ―the woman warrior,‖ emphasising her unique status. This ambiguous treatment of the warrior princess reveals that the Amazon signifies not just women‘s liberation and empowerment but also the threat such empowerment poses to male-dominated societies.
362 Xena‘s feminist potential is also problematised by the show‘s representation of other female figures. While the episode ―A Day in the Life‖ (cited above, pp. 111–12) subverts heteronormativity in the sexual banter between Xena and Gabrielle, it also endorses other gender stereotypes that objectify and demean women. Xena advises a peasant‘s girlfriend, who has become jealous of her lover‘s attraction to Xena, to dress in a revealing leather outfit and play tough in order to rejuvenate her boyfriend‘s sexual interest. ―For Him the Bell Tolls‖ depicts the goddess of love Aphrodite as a sexy porn-star type with long blonde ringlets and wearing a pink body suit and transparent robe. In the same episode, aristocratic women swoon over Joxer, the chivalrous warrior, endorsing the stereotype that women are aroused by a man who fights to save her. 363 Quoted in Kastor, ―Woman of Steel.‖ 364 Cuff, ―Prime-time Paragon.‖ 365 Ibid. 366 Minkovitz, ―Xena.‖ 367 Schubart, Super Bitches, 237. 116
The postmodern Amazon is thus constructed in ways that serve to alleviate the danger she poses: she is sexualised, infantilised, and distanced from feminist ideology.
Further complicating the show‘s gender politics, however, is its self-reflexive and often humorous acknowledgement of the exploitative, anti-feminist traditions upon which it draws. The thief Autolycus‘s disappointed call of ―Hey, I paid for an hour!‖ when his torture at the hands of an Amazon ends quickly and abruptly (―The Quest,‖ Season 2) is a nod to domination fetishes in pornography and prostitution. After a peasant man develops an attraction to Xena in ―A Day in the Life,‖ Gabrielle explains to her bemused friend that some men cannot resist a woman in leather. When Gabrielle suggests she try wearing chainmail instead, Xena worries that this would ―just attract a kinkier group.‖ Comments like these illustrate the show‘s self-conscious attempts to appeal to male viewers through stereotyped male-fantasy tropes while undermining the power of these tropes through irony and subversive humour. The show‘s subtext and large lesbian fan-base also problematise the gendered subject/object relationship, since women as well as men form the sexual spectatorship of the female characters. As such, the character of Xena oscillates continually between the positions of feminist agent and sexual object, never fitting neatly into one or the other but, in the process of shifting between the two, subverting both. The tension she embodies points to the ongoing instability of the Amazon‘s signification in the postmodern period.
Conclusion: What Would Xena Do?368
Amazons are coming into existence today. I have heard them and joined with them. We have howled with the bears, the wolves, and the coyotes. I have felt their strength. I have felt at moments that they could unite with the animal kingdom, or ally themselves with all that is female in the universe and wage a war for Mother Nature. These women are creating their own mythologies and their own realities.
— Margot Adler369
In 1979 Margot Adler wrote these words as a way of corporeally connecting contemporary feminists with the Amazons of old via the ―high ululation‖ made by demonstrators at women‘s
368 Stafford notes two female Xenites who asked themselves this question in response to problems they were facing in their lives. One was living with cancer; the other wanted to overcome her shyness (How Xena Changed Our Lives, 24; 27–28). 369 Adler, ―Meanings of Matriarchy,‖ 131. 117
rights rallies. Xena famously utters the same cry before going into battle, a primal scream that conjures up the strength and energy of the women warriors of myth and history. The popularity of Xena among female viewers reveals that, in spite of the ways in which the show reinforces stereotypical and sexualised versions of femininity, some women nonetheless identify with the Amazon as an icon of feminist empowerment. This identification extends beyond the pleasure experienced by watching fictional women warriors on television to the desire to more directly embody the Amazon identity themselves. Several years after Xena went off the air, ―Camp Amazon NZ‖ was devised as a Xena-inspired retreat where women could live like Amazons. The camp, held in October 2009 in Auckland, New Zealand, promised attendees they would ―Live the life of an Amazon Warrior Woman in this fully authentic Amazon Village and play in the backyard of Xena Warrior Princess.‖ The Australian company offered four, seven, and 11-day retreats for up to 50 people, which included a tour of the Xena film location and Auckland city (complete with visits to Lucy Lawless‘s ―favourite chill zones‖), an Amazon dance party and induction ceremony, and shopping at an Amazon market place using special Amazon currency. Guests would eat like Amazons, experience a Roman chariot charge, participate in Amazon yoga, tai chi, and aerobics, and get in touch with the warrior within through archery and battle skills training and an Amazon boot camp, culminating in the Amazon Olympics where they would test their skills in competition with their fellow warrior women. Attendees were encouraged to wear Amazon costume and could even bring prop weapons if they desired. The aim was that they would leave the camp having accessed their inner Amazon.370
Meanwhile, devoted Xena fans continue to dress up as lookalikes at fantasy conventions and create their own fan fiction based on the television show. The interactive nature of online media enables would-be Amazons to develop communities with other fans and to write and share their own Xena narratives, sometimes inserting themselves into the stories or rewriting characters to resemble themselves, so they too can embody the Amazon identity.371 Fictionalised rewritings of warrior women allow ordinary women to participate in militarised violence in a way that is typically prohibited in their real lives. Interactive media enable them to write a new mythology of gender and war with women at its heart, a counteraction to the Warrior Myth. In the postmodern period, media is increasingly becoming a site of gender identity construction and reconstruction; in the context of postmodern war, media is a space in which the battlefield is re-imagined with sex and gender at its centre.
370 See the Camp Amazon NZ website. http://campamazonnz.com/index.html (accessed November 12, 2009). 371 Examples of fan fiction websites include Tom‘s Xena Fan Fiction Archive, http://www.xenafan.com/fiction/; The Great Hall of Xena Scrolls, http://xena-fanfiction.com/; and the Xena and Ares Fan Fiction Library, http://www.bing.com/search?q=xena+fan+fiction&src=IE- SearchBox. (All accessed October 22, 2011). 118
Imaginings and re-imaginings of the sexed body in media on the postmodern battlefield is what I turn to next in Part 2.
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PART 2
MEDIATING THE SEXED BODY IN POSTMODERN WAR: THE WAR ON TERROR AND
AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Part 1 of this thesis sought to establish the primacy of the interaction between biological discourse and gendered war mythologies in sexing the human body. In Part 2 I explore the discursive and representational ways in which these constitutions of sexed bodies take place in the context of postmodern war, with a focus on media as the principal site of sexual construction. These chapters examine the connections between militarism, politics, and media through a discussion of the military–media complex, whereby militaries and governments utilise media to advance the causes of militarisation and war. In these chapters I focus on the conflicts in Afghanistan (2001–) and Iraq (2003–10) which comprise part of the American-led War on Terror, and the American political context in which they have been waged. These wars subscribe to the doctrine of Information War, a media strategy of postmodern war involving propaganda and perception management. Information War is particularly concerned with manipulating representations of the human body, whether through concealing the dead or injured body, masculinising the heroic body of the soldier, or emasculating the body of the enemy. These chapters examine hegemonic constructions of the sexed body in mainstream print and broadcast media, which continue to reify the warrior identity as male in spite of the large numbers of female soldiers deployed in these wars. I also analyse alternative media outlets for subjugated knowledges that are marginalised in official war narratives. Silenced groups use media to construct their own identities in opposition to those constructed for them by the military–media complex. These alternative perspectives find an outlet in both traditional narrative form and in new media technologies and Part 2 ends with a discussion of the ways the Internet is transforming the nature of media representations of gender, politics and war. These new media forms contain the possibilities for gender transformation in the new century.
Background to the War on Terror
The Bush administration‘s War on Terror began in response to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, when a group of Islamic jihadists (later discovered to be members of the Al Qaeda terrorist network) hijacked four American passenger aircraft and crashed them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington. (The fourth plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania after 120
passengers and crew attempted to overpower the hijackers.) The U.S. government pinpointed Saudi Osama bin Laden, who was believed to be in hiding in Afghanistan, as mastermind of the attacks. Combat operations in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). Coalition forces led by the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan with the goal of locating and bringing to justice bin Laden and other members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who were accused of harbouring terrorists. Bin Laden was killed by U.S. military forces in Pakistan on May 1, 2011, but Coalition troops continue to occupy Afghanistan as the country struggles with regime change and rebuilding. In addition to the war in Afghanistan, OEF encompasses military counterterrorism operations in the Philippines, the Horn of Africa, and central Africa.
Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) began on March 20, 2003, when a Coalition led by American and British troops invaded Iraq. The invasion was ordered in response to intelligence that suggested Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including chemical and biological weapons, although United Nations weapons inspectors who were sent into Iraq before the invasion were unable to locate any. There was also speculation that Saddam Hussein was supporting Al Qaeda and harbouring terrorists, and in this sense the Iraq War can be viewed as part of the larger War on Terror. The original invasion was quite successful, with the Coalition encountering less resistance than expected in their push to Baghdad, which was taken within three weeks. However, as they moved into other cities and surrounding provinces, Coalition forces encountered sustained resistance from insurgents. As the insurgency grew in 2004, fighting became particularly intense in the city of Fallujah, where the U.S. military encountered ―some of the heaviest urban combat...since Hue City in Vietnam.‖372 Although President George W. Bush declared combat operations over on May 1, 2003, this proved premature. Combat operations continued until August 31, 2010, when President Barack Obama declared OIF officially over. Coalition troops remain in the country to support the Iraqi military at time of writing.373
372 Garamone, ―ScanEagle Proves Worth.‖ 373 Under a bilateral agreement between U.S. and Iraqi governments, Coalition troops are required to leave Iraq by December 31, 2011. 121
Chapter 4
The Information War on Terror: Constructions of the Heroic Body in News Media Coverage of Afghanistan (2001–) and Iraq (2003–10)
The events of September 11, 2001, transformed the American political and cultural landscape. The first foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour was the catalyst for the American declaration of a global War on Terror which has witnessed its first manifestations in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, conflicts in which the U.S. military continues to be embroiled at time of writing. 9/11 also witnessed the culmination of changes that had been taking place for several decades to the relationship between media and disaster. Media representations of the 9/11 attacks were characterised by entertainment, spectacle, virtuality, and the blurring of fact and fiction, leading to postmodernist interpretations of the construction of the event in cultural memory.374 While the Pentagon was also attacked, the events of that morning have been condensed to the symbols of the Twin Towers, the epicentre of visual spectacle. A common observation made by television audiences of the airliners crashing into the Twin Towers was that they felt like they were watching a movie, that the events were not really happening. The unreality—or hyperreality—of the attacks was a result of virtuality: advances in digital technology have brought about the computer-generated collapse of buildings and similar spectacular events in every respectable disaster movie and television programme at the turn of the twentieth century, leading to a close association between spectacle and fictional representation.375 In addition, the virtuality of the attacks as they appeared to a television audience was enhanced by the relative absence of visible human bodies. What viewers watched on television was the destruction of two skyscrapers and the deaths of almost three thousand people; what viewers saw was the damage to and collapse of two buildings from a distance of several miles. Without a clear and obvious visual representation of the bodily harm caused (bar occasional images of tiny specks that viewers had to be told by media commentators were people leaping from windows), the event lost its sense of reality and slipped into the realm of the virtual. The aftermath of the Twin Towers collapse was also marked by the absence of bodies. Only around half of the victims would ever be identified, while the rest corporeally disintegrated under the force of the collapse.
374 For a discussion of the relationship between 9/11 and postmodernism, see Hammond, Media, War and Postmodernity, esp. Introduction (1–12). Hammond argues that the War on Terror is ―another attempt to resolve the crisis of meaning‖ of postmodernity (59). 375 See Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism; and Hoskins, Televising War. 122
In the hours, days and weeks following the attacks, however, new bodies were constructed to fill the void. While the desperate search for the bodies of victims took place, the bodies of the rescue workers were thrust into the media spotlight. All hope now rested on the strength and endurance of these rescuers to dig through the rubble, to carry the few survivors to safety, and to recover the remains of the dead. But these were not just any bodies: the rescuers who formed the subject of media attention were almost exclusively sexed male; they were also predominately white. While women and non-white Americans played vital roles in the search for victims, the administration of medical care, and the later clean-up efforts, media attention was focused on the burly, blue-collar, white male members of the rescue teams.376 Ground Zero was reconstructed as a masculine space occupied by male fire fighters, police officers, paramedics and volunteers, all presided over by the patres familias of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush. Media focus on male rescuers was an exercise in the production of heroes, and the rhetoric of heroism was widely relied upon to give stability and a sense of purpose to a tragic and chaotic situation. Yet the construction of heroes had implications that reached further than the temporal and spatial site of Ground Zero; national heroism for the new American century was supposedly redefined in this moment.377 News media were of course not the only agents in the construction of these new heroes, but they did play a central role in the dissemination of gendered (and racialised) motifs of heroism to the country and to the world, particularly since news media were the primary sources by which members of the public accessed information about the attacks. In the act of redefining heroism, those who did not fit the mould (namely all women and non-white males) were excluded from the hero identity. Yet the events of 9/11 were just the beginning of the construction of this quintessential American hero. Once the clean-up on their own soil was complete, the heroes of 9/11 would venture out across the frontier to hunt down their enemies and bring them to justice.
In this chapter I discuss the construction of gendered heroes in news media in the context of the violent conflicts that were precipitated by the events of 9/11. In the early years of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, representations of heroism in media centred on two American soldiers—Corporal Pat Tillman and Private First Class Jessica Lynch—who became the public faces of American intervention in the Middle East. This chapter analyses media outlets from the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, all of which showed a high level of interest in these two military figures. This cross-national
376 For discussions of 9/11 and masculinity, see Brison, ―Gender, Terrorism, and War;‖ Charlesworth and Chinkin, ―Sex, Gender, and September 11;‖ Faludi, Terror Dream, esp. chapter 3; and Lorber, ―Heroes, Warriors, and ‗Burqas‘.‖ 377 As Faludi notes, the heroism constructed in response to 9/11 was actually a continuation of much older American notions of white male heroism, based on frontier mythologies and neo-imperial ideologies (Terror Dream). 123
approach demonstrates how these nations‘ media share strikingly similar gendered ideologies about heroism and war. It also suggests the increasing globalisation of postmodern media; a centralisation of media sources, and the prominence of global news networks like the Associated Press (AP),378 means media outlets across the Western world consistently print and broadcast the same stories, often with the same political and ideological agendas. While other parts of this thesis have given a broader definition to the term ―media‖—encompassing film and television drama, advertising, and literature—this chapter centres specifically on media purporting to present ―news,‖ that is, factual information about current events. The media sources cited in this chapter distinguish themselves from other forms of media via their purported representation of factual information. As such, they are given a truth value denied to other forms of media and thus take on a particularly important function in the construction of ―reality.‖I also focus here on mainstream media, defined in Chapter 1 as print and broadcast services that form part of large news conglomerates from which the majority of media consumers access their information. When I use the term ―media‖ in these chapters, then, I am referring specifically to newspapers, magazines, and television news programmes. As will become apparent, however, a discussion of news media in the twenty-first century is necessarily located within a wider dialogue about entertainment culture, which also encompasses other media forms. The relationship between—and overlap of—news media and entertainment media constitutes an important part of my analysis here.
This chapter posits that news media play a vital role in the construction and maintenance of the Western binary gender system. As discussed in Chapter 1, media both reflect and create dominant cultural definitions and understandings of male/female and masculine/feminine identities. In addition, in times of war and violent conflict, media take on a very specific role as perpetuators of government and military propaganda. As I will outline below, there has been extensive critical work completed on the levels of media cooperation with government during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasising Western media‘s involvement in policies of perception management and censorship, their willingness to unquestioningly accept official sources, and their reluctance to engage in informed analysis about the moral and political justifications of the conflicts. Media‘s increased commercialisation and the focus on bottom lines has been partially blamed for an increase in sensationalised, uninformed, and biased reportage during the War on Terror. Media constructions of gender can thus be seen as one component of a propaganda project and a
378 The Associated Press is an American-based not-for-profit cooperative which aims to be ―the essential global news network.‖ The AP website claims that more than half the world‘s population will receive news from an AP source on any given day. See http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html (accessed March 8, 2011). 124
concomitant desire of media organisations to boost ratings and readership by emphasising spectacle and scandal. Yet I will argue that there is another, broader motivation at work in the construction of gender in the War on Terror. By foregrounding gender in a discussion of media representations of postmodern war, we can see how media function not simply as proponents of propaganda and entertainment but also as prescribers of gender hegemony over-and-above party political and financial motivations.
This chapter begins with a discussion of contemporary mass media‘s relationship to war through an analysis of the military–media complex, a model that has been developed to articulate the intricate, bi-directional relationship between military and media in the context of modern and postmodern warfare. I then turn to two examples of this complex in action, analysing media constructions of gender during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. An examination of media representations of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch illustrates the dual forces of propaganda/entertainment and hegemonic motives that characterise gender construction in media. I will argue that, while constructions of these two soldiers may have been initially motivated by propaganda and entertainment variables, broader hegemonic objectives eventually took over as media coverage became immersed in wider debates about the meaning of heroism and the relationship between soldiering and gender identity. Analysis reveals that the war hero identity in these debates (like the hero identities of the September 11 attacks) is located firmly in the sexed body. In media representations of Tillman and Lynch, the soldier‘s body was constructed as the site upon which definitions of heroism were written and gender anxieties were played out.
News Media and Information War
There is no war...without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction by also of perception. — Paul Virilio379
Western media coverage of war in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is characterised by the interplay of government, military and media processes and objectives. This has been referred to broadly as the military–media complex (or the military–industrial– media complex), whereby media are implicated in the propagation of the ideologies of militarism, the processes of militarisation, and the rationalisation of war. This section provides an overview of the development of this complex in the context of postmodern war.
379 Virilio, War and Cinema, 6. 125
Governments and militarises have devised a particular media strategy of postmodern war which has been termed Information War, in which information itself is a primary weapon of warfare and the management of information is an important tactic in the waging of war.380 In contrast to the total wars of the first half of the twentieth century, the declaration of Information War requires ―the mobilization of the public as spectators rather than active participants,‖381 and media channels are central to this mobilisation process. Frank Webster notes how Information Wars are typically fought in the name of democracy and thus it is necessary to give the appearance that the population has sanctioned a conflict in order for it to attain legitimacy.382 Consequently, an exploration of the relationship between governments, militaries and news media is vital to an understanding not just of the documentation of war but also of its causes, its mechanisms, and its development in the postmodern period.
Information War is ―discernible by its use of propaganda, deception and perception management.‖383 Within the military–media complex, governments and militaries rely on media for the dissemination of propaganda and the management of public information. Militaries may choose to release certain information about war, withhold other information, manipulate the amount of information released about a certain event, or actively present untruths about war through media channels. Media have in fact been useful propaganda tools throughout the twentieth century, utilised primarily to bolster public support for war and keep civilian morale high. Newspapers were used to spread propaganda in both Allied and Central Powers nations during the First World War, and the new medium of cinema also became a powerful propaganda tool.384 World War II saw the addition of the radio as a new instrument of propaganda, alongside film and the press,385 and film propaganda was an important feature of the Cold War in both the USA and Soviet Bloc countries.386 Strategies varied from presenting images and descriptions of happy, healthy soldiers on the propagandists‘ side; demonising and vilifying the enemy in cartoons and caricatures in order to simultaneously dehumanise the enemy and generate fear; and constructions of noble and
380 As Information War requires the possession of advanced communications and weapons technologies, it has been defined as ―war capable of pursuance only by affluent and defense-oriented nations and especially by the United States or the NATO alliance that it dominates‖ against countries that do not possess similar technologies (Tumber and Webster, ―Information War,‖ 63). 381 Tumber and Webster, ―Information War,‖ 65. 382 Webster, ―Information Warfare,‖ 64. 383 Maltby, ―Introduction,‖ 3. David Welch notes how the Pentagon uses the term ―perception management‖ in order to avoid the unpopular term ―propaganda‖ but that they essentially mean the same thing (―Introduction,‖ xv). 384 For British propaganda during World War I, see Badsey, ―‗The Missing Western Front‘.‖ For German propaganda, see Smither, ―Der Magische Gürtel;‖ and Welch, ―Mobilizing the Masses.‖ 385 For propaganda in film in World War II, see Richards, ―Humphrey Jennings.‖ For radio and film, see Fox, ―‗Mediator‘.‖ 386 Welch, ―Introduction,‖ xii–xiii. 126
righteous leaders to whom loyalty must be demonstrated. Another common propaganda strategy has been the restriction of information released from the frontlines. The absence of violence from media coverage of the Iraq War was roundly criticised by both media scholars and soldiers on the ground (see Chapter 5 of this thesis). Yet, as Susan Carruthers reminds us, controlling media representations of the casualties of war has always been a policy of wartime governments, with the aim of minimising the perceived human cost of conflict.387
The relationship between Western militaries and media was for most of the last century characterised by cooperation, with media happy to spread propaganda in the name of war.388 However, there have been instances of media dissent that have caused problems for governments and militaries and have had the potential to materially impact the trajectory of violent conflict. The Vietnam War has been regarded as a turning point in the relationship between militaries and media, as media began to engage in more independent reporting in order to document the often brutal violence of the conflict. In spite of the popular mythology that media were responsible for turning the tide of popular opinion against the war, most media coverage was in fact in line with government policy, and it is widely agreed by scholars that media cannot be credited with changing public perceptions of the conflict.389 Nonetheless, media played an important role in disseminating unofficial, unsanctioned information to the populace with significant material consequences. Of particular importance was the rise of television, which replaced newspapers, film and radio as the primary news medium. Moving images of the human and environmental costs of war, beamed directly from the battlefields into living rooms across the world, has played a vital role in shaping public perceptions of violent conflict ever since.390
The quest by some media outlets to report the ―reality‖ of the Vietnam War from all angles resulted in new controls imposed on media by governments at war, designed to ensure the human cost of war was withheld from the public.391 For instance, Robin Andersen notes how the Pentagon stopped releasing official body counts in post-Vietnam conflicts.392 The conflicts in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and the Persian Gulf (1991) were characterised by increased censorship and what David Altheide has referred as ―‗photo-op‘ combat footage.‖393 Margaret Thatcher‘s Ministry of Defence severely restricted media access during the Falklands War, foregrounding the radio as primary media outlet in an
387 Carruthers, ―Missing in Authenticity?‖ 245. 388 See Welch, ―Introduction,‖ x. 389 See Culbert, ―American Television Coverage;‖ and Hallin, ―Images.‖ 390 The famous photograph and film of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Vietcong member is an example of such uncensored war coverage, showing real violence in real time. 391 See Tumber and Palmer, Media at War, 2. 392 Andersen, Century of Media, 259. 393 Altheide, Terrorism, 167. 127
attempt to prevent images of violence being disseminated to the public.394 By the time of the First Gulf War, television coverage was unavoidable. The Pentagon devised the strategy of pooling, whereby all television networks had to share footage shot by only a few cameras, in order to control the release of visual information about the war.395 As important as government control of media is to war efforts, however, governments in the ―free world‖ also must be careful to avoid accusations of propaganda and censorship—Thatcher‘s government, for instance, was criticised for excessive censorship during the Falklands War396—and thus a fine balance must be negotiated between access and control. During the Iraq War, the Bush administration attempted to walk the media tightrope through the strategy of embedding, an approach designed to give the U.S. military maximum control over journalists in Iraq while retaining the appearance of unlimited access. Reporters were assigned to combat units, travelling with their designated unit and reporting from the front lines. While this had the advantage of getting reporters close to the combat action, it also enabled military officials to carefully police what was reported.397
Although perception management has always been a feature of media war, Information War became an increasingly necessary political strategy in the postmodern period, principally due to the development of live television news coverage and the 24-hour news cycle. The War on Terror has witnessed the implementation of a particularly intensive Information War model, with perception management being utilised by the American government to a greater degree than in previous conflicts, especially in the early years of the War.398 One of the most important and contentious policies was the Bush administration‘s request that media not print or broadcast images or descriptions of dead or injured Coalition
394 Dodds, ―Contesting War.‖ 395 There has been extensive scholarship on the military–media complex in the First Gulf War. For pooling specifically see Hedrick Smith, ed., Media and the Gulf War; and Philip Taylor, War and the Media. For general discussions see Baroody, Media Access; Bennett and Paletz, eds., Taken by Storm; Denton, ed., Media and the Persian Gulf; and Jeffords and Rabinovitz, eds., Seeing through the Media. 396 Dodds, ―Contesting War.‖ 397 Some journalists viewed the policy as a success, describing unprecedented access to information and freedom of movement (see Lewis et al., Shoot First). However, in other instances military commanders‘ close policing of embedded journalists resulted in limited access and restrictions on what could be filmed and broadcast (Tumber and Palmer, Media at War). The Pentagon‘s policy of ―embedding for life‖ meant that journalists had to remain with the same unit for the duration of the conflict and were not permitted to embed with multiple units (Andersen, Century of Media; and Lewis et al., Shoot First). Embedding was also criticised for providing an insight into war solely from the perspective of Coalition forces, with limited engagement with the experiences of Iraqi soldiers or the effect of the war on civilians and the environment. Because of its encouragement of journalist identification with an assigned unit, embedded reporters tended to emphasise instances of Coalition victory, such as successful attacks on Iraqi positions or insurgents surrendering (Cooper and Kuypers, ―Embedded versus Behind-the-Lines Reporting‖). 398 Such perception management was especially necessary during the Iraq War, which was viewed by many domestically and internationally as illegitimate and illegal according to the United Nations Charter. 128
soldiers, or soldiers taken prisoner during the conflict.399 Ostensibly this policy was designed out of respect for family members of the victims, but it has the obvious additional effect of keeping the public in the dark about the violent realities of war. Media were also asked not to film the return of the bodies or flag-draped coffins of the fallen to American soil.400 In addition to censorship of the dead and injured body, the administration staged war events via media outlets. In what came to be known as the ―Mission Accomplished‖ stunt, on May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to proclaim the ―end of major combat operations‖ in Iraq before the international media. (In fact combat missions would continue in Iraq for another seven and a half years.)401 Similarly, the military feigned an elaborate ―rescue‖ of POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital in April 2003, which was filmed by her Marine rescue team. Such propaganda relied on an uncritical and unquestioning mass media for its execution. As we will see in the discussion below, for the most part the American media, as well as media from other Western nations, readily accepted the information fed to them by the Pentagon and passed it on to the public.
It is overly simplistic, however, to claim that media are merely passive receptacles of whatever information governments give them, or that their only motive is to do what governments tell them. For instance, David Welch notes how the British press during World War I created its own unofficial propaganda independent of government mandates.402 During the War on Terror there certainly appears to have been a large degree of self-censorship among American media in order to avoid getting offside with government (who act as media‘s primary source of news information) or, particularly in the context of post-9/11 nationalistic fervour, being labelled ―unpatriotic‖ or ―anti-American.‖ Today, networks and media outlets are ultimately motivated by financial needs, ratings, and the interests of their advertisers. Thus the decisions they make are largely commercial in nature.403 For example, 24/7 live news coverage, developed by CNN during the First Gulf War, was designed to give the network a monopoly on war coverage and thus increase its ratings. Particular political angles may be taken by networks in their reporting depending on what is deemed to be a popular perspective among viewers and financial backers. The interests of private elites thus
399 Andersen, Century of Media, 216. 400 The Pentagon openly expressed its disapproval when some media broke ranks and broadcast such images in 2004. See, for example, CNN: Anderson Cooper 360, ―Life, Death of Pat Tillman;‖ and Watson, ―Death of the All-American Boy.‖ See Chapter 5 of this thesis for further discussion. 401 A large banner displaying the words ―Mission Accomplished‖ hung behind the President during his speech. 402 Welch, ―Introduction,‖ xi. 403 For discussion of the commercialisation of mass media, see Andersen, Century of Media; Bagdikian, New Media Monopoly; Elliot D. Cohen, ed., News Incorporated; Gerbner, Mowlana, and Schiller, eds., Invisible Crises; Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent; Hoskins, ―Ghost in the Machine;‖ and Thomas and Nain, eds., Who Owns the Media? 129
combine with government and military interests in the creation of news stories that are presented to the public as objective ―fact.‖
The commercial motivation behind war reporting is particularly imperative in the contemporary period which has seen dramatic changes to the media industry. Structural factors such as the merging of media organisations into conglomerates have resulted in increased commercialism and centralisation. According to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, such developments have strengthened what they refer to as the ―propaganda model‖—that is, the idea that ―the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.‖404 Clearly, the more media come to rely on powerful elites for their survival, the more they will be willing to create and disseminate ―news‖ that serves the interests of these elites. For Herman and Chomsky, such centralisation of media outlets results in a weakening of the Habermasian public sphere, which they define as ―the array of places and forums in which matters important to a democratic community are debated and information relevant to intelligent citizen participation is provided.‖405 When media stop providing the people with a space in which key democratic issues can be debated and start serving powerful elites, a worrying situation emerges which threatens the democratic process. Concerns over bottom lines make media primarily interested in keeping ratings high and pleasing advertisers and corporate interests, restricting the extent to which they can serve as a forum for the expression of dissent.
Herman and Chomsky devised their propaganda model over 20 years ago in the late 1980s, yet (as the authors themselves note in the preface to the 2002 edition) it is perhaps even more relevant in today‘s corporate media climate. Of particular concern has been the increase in the importance of entertainment to this model. In the drive for ratings, news media have become sources of entertainment, causing news to merge with drama and fictional modes of representation, and leading to the rise of instant news, the ―sight-bite‖ and an ―infotainment‖ culture. News networks have been bought out by entertainment conglomerates, leading to a shift in news content to include greater coverage of popular and celebrity culture.406 War and violent conflict, as staples of news, thus also become entertainment sources, exploited for their entertainment value.407 Andersen argues that while
404 Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, xi. 405 Ibid., xviii. See Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. For more on the Habermasian public sphere and media in postmodernity, see Chapter 6 of this thesis. 406 Entertainment modes are designed particularly to attract a younger audience, thus improving ratings (Thussu, ―Live TV,‖ 122). 407 Journalist Godfrey Hodgson makes the same argument from a different perspective, noting the importance of the lack of threat of total war in this shift to war news as entertainment (along with the economic imperatives of media outlets). Western viewers are no longer worried that war might affect them personally because wars happen in distant places with little observable effect on viewers‘ lives. 130
the entertainment approach to war began with the First Gulf War, it reached a new level in the Iraq War with the creation of ―a new hybrid genre...for twenty-first century war‖ which has come to be known as ―militainment.‖408 Militainment is characterised by a problematic blurring of distinctions between fact and fiction in the context of war reporting.409 Entertainment models increase the reportage of war‘s most sensational elements, such as tracers lighting up the sky over Baghdad in the early days of the invasion of Iraq. The events of war are privileged over ―less entertaining‖ analysis of the causes, justifications, and aftermath of war and occupation; thus the broader context in which wars take place is often neglected in favour of immediate entertainment value.410 Entertainment serves to create a ―fog of war‖ which distracts viewers and readers from the human and environmental costs of conflict, particularly from civilian casualties. Militainment has been characterised as a specifically postmodern form of war propaganda, used to sell war to a media-saturated public that increasingly cannot tell the difference between reality and invention.411 The centrality of the entertainment model in the representation and waging of war has seen a shift in understandings of the relationship between military and media to include the entertainment variable. The ―military–industrial–media‖ complex has been surpassed by the ―military– industrial–media–entertainment network,‖ or MIME–Net, as it is referred to by James Der Derian.412
The entertainment model of war reporting witnesses the reliance on fictional modes of representation and narrative traditions in news stories. War–as–entertainment requires charismatic protagonists to maintain public interest; like all good war stories, the War on Terror necessitated the creation of heroes. Yet heroes do more than entertain. Their presence in the war narrative also helps to establish a dichotomy of good versus evil which ensures support for a ―just‖ war. They also help convince the public that ―our‖ side is indeed triumphing over the enemy, that a war is indeed winnable. The male rescuers at Ground Zero
As such, it is viewers who drive the shift towards war–as–entertainment, as they lose interest in news stories about war and international conflict (―End of the Grand Narrative‖). Colin McInnes argues that, in the absence of tangible danger to viewers, war becomes akin to a spectator sport (Spectator-Sport War). 408 Andersen, Century of Media, xxvi. 409 Andersen cites President Bush‘s ―Mission Accomplished‖ stunt, with its reliance on motifs from the movie Top Gun, as an example (Century of Media, xxx–xxxi). 410 Hoskins, Televising War; and Thussu, ―Live TV,‖ 124. 411 Along with the centralisation and commercialisation of news media, the rise of the entertainment model has been criticised as damaging to democracy. Thussu argues that ―if television news is trivialized and reduced to easily-digestible sight-bites, it is likely to contribute to a structural erosion of the public sphere in the Habermasian sense, where the viewer, bombarded with visuals, may not be able to differentiate between public information and propaganda from a powerful military–industrial– entertainment complex‖ (Thussu, ―Live TV,‖ 123). 412 Der Derian, Virtuous War. Andersen simply refers to the ―military–entertainment complex,‖ emphasising the conflation of all media with entertainment modes of representation (Century of Media). 131
were constructed to fill such a role, while President Bush constructed himself as another home-grown hero of the War on Terror, with media assistance.413 Yet the War also needed heroes on the battlefield, and it is to the production of such heroes that I now turn. Who would these heroes be? How would they be chosen? As I will demonstrate, out of the potential candidates for heroism, the possession of a male body would become an essential prerequisite to media selection.
Constructing the War Hero’s Body: A Problem of Definition
This section explores media constructions of two American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq: Cpl. Pat Tillman (killed in Afghanistan in April 2004) and Pfc. Jessica Lynch (wounded and taken prisoner in Iraq in March 2003). I focus on representations of these soldiers in American media and media from other Western nations, under the assumption that the binary gender system is common to Western nations and that media across these countries provide a space for the public construction of gender identity. While there has been scholarly interest in representations of Lynch and Tillman separately,414 there has been no work dealing with both cases in tandem. Comparing media representations of these soldiers as part of a broader discussion of the interrelationship between media and the military leads to new insights about representations of gender and war in the postmodern period. In order to show these processes at work, I have chosen to focus on the constructions (and deconstructions) of these soldiers as heroes. A Factiva database search was conducted for Western newspaper and magazine articles and television news transcripts about Tillman and Lynch that contained the word-stem ―hero–.‖415 This limitation was applied so that I could explore the gender anxiety this specific concept produces and the subsequent, highly gendered efforts to define the word and contain its meaning. The date range for articles about Tillman spanned from the time of his enlistment in June 2002 to the time reports about the true nature of his death surfaced in May 2004. Articles about Lynch were collected from
413 When Bush donned a flight suit and flew a fighter jet over the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare the end of combat operations in Iraq in May 2003, BBi Toys released an action figure commemorating the occasion. The 12-inch action doll, called ―Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush—U.S. President and Naval Aviator,‖ was available for purchase at ProBush.com. The figure ―features a realistic head sculpt, fully detailed cloth flight suit, helmet with oxygen mask, survival vest, g-pants, parachute harness and much more‖ (http://www.probush.com/elite_force_george_w_bush.htm, accessed June 14, 2008). The action figure is available from Amazon.com at time of writing. 414 For scholarship on Lynch, see Faludi, Terror Dream, chapter 7; Hogan, Gender, Race and National Identity, 154–68; Kumar, ―War Propaganda;‖ Prividera and Howard, ―Masculinity, Whiteness;‖and Takacs, ―Jessica Lynch.‖ There has been less scholarly interest in representations of Tillman. See Altheide, Terrorism, 185–205; and Kusz, ―From NASCAR Nation.‖ 415 The search term incorporated the keywords ―hero,‖ ―heroes,‖ ―heroism‖ and ―heroic,‖ as well as ―unheroic.‖ 132
the time of her capture in March 2003 until she spoke publicly about her experience in November 2003.
The Western tradition has a long history of connecting masculinity to heroism in the context of war. ―Hero‖ is a male identity conventionally reserved for the warrior or warrior-like man and is a vital component of the Warrior Myth. Heroic rhetoric helps to cement the warrior as the ideal man, normalising soldiering as a masculine enterprise and asserting violent, aggressive masculinity as superior over other possible forms of masculine identity. The earliest heroes of classical mythology (those who fought and defeated the Amazons, as discussed in Chapter 3) were half-man, half-god, able to perform superhuman feats of strength and courage, who typically risked their lives and proved their worth in brutal hand-to- hand combat. Early Greek writers were concerned with the connection between masculinity and the ―heroic life.‖416 The heroic life necessitated a fundamental separation from the mother and identification with the father in order for ―full manhood‖ to be reached. During this process, the hero confronted his mortality, the ―definitive quality of a masculine life as the Greeks understood it;‖ the crucible of war, the perfect place to engage with death, was thus also the ―crucible of masculinity.‖417 Heroism (and ―real‖ manhood) was thus best accessed through the violence of war.
The modern period saw a democratisation of the hero identity along with a cementing of the connection between heroism and soldiering. In classical writing, heroism was reserved for superhuman warriors; regular soldiers could not be heroes. The age of democratic revolutions in the West witnessed a change in the nature of soldering. With the advent of total wars, which required the mass mobilisation of populations, soldiering became a duty of citizenship.418 The American revolutionaries, for example, ―waged their revolution in the name of, and fashioned themselves after the model of, the virtuous citizen-soldier who was willing to sacrifice all for his liberty and that of his republic.‖419 In order to ensure support for compulsory military service, and later to entice men to volunteer, heroism was used as an incentive to fight. Any soldier could potentially become a hero if he performed adequate feats of strength and bravery. As war became a tool in the creation and maintenance of the nation state, the location of heroism shifted from individual demonstrations of personal glory to something gained in service of the national good. Heroes were protectors of liberty, democracy, and the nation, and soldiers who excelled at war were exalted as national
416 Van Nortwick, Imagining Men, xii. Van Nortwick argues that the heroic life gained its ―richest expression‖ in Homer‘s Iliad and Odyssey. 417 Ibid., 7; 76. 418 For the democratisation of soldiering in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Britain and France, see Dudink and Hagemann, ―Masculinity in Politics and War;‖ and Horne, ―Masculinity in Politics and War.‖ For Second World War Britain, see Rose, ―Temperate Heroes,‖ 184. 419 Dudink and Hagemann, ―Masculinity in Politics and War,‖ 7. 133
heroes. In the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, heroism was symbolically connected not just to the nation but to the expansion of empire.420 According to Graham Dawson, the Empire was imagined as a site of masculine adventuring and the heroes of empire were those whose violent exploits combined soldering and colonising in one.421 Heroism was simultaneous reward and justification for service to nation or empire; it was an identity individual men strived to embody materially and nations embraced symbolically.
This democratisation of heroism, however, did not go so far as to extend to women. Heroism (like soldiering to which it is yoked) remained, and continues to remain, the preserve of men. In spite of changes to the definition of heroism in the modern period, many of the basic ancient mythologies survived. Men continued to break out of the feminised domestic sphere and assert themselves in the domain of their warrior forefathers. The battlefield remained a masculine space where a brotherhood of men was forged through violent combat. Although modern heroes were entirely human, and any man could become one through the performance of certain physical feats, the symbolic connection of the heroic with the divine continued. As Robert Segal writes, ―hero myths transform humans into virtual gods by conferring on them divine qualities. The qualities can range from physical attributes— strength, size, looks—to intangible ones—intelligence, drive, integrity.‖ Indeed, symbolic divinity is a necessary component of heroism: ―mere bravery, kindliness, strength, or knowledge would not suffice. Heroic qualities must be magnified to the point of divinity.‖422 So while any ordinary man could potentially be a hero, in becoming a hero he ceased to be an ordinary man and instead rose above other men as an ideal example of masculinity. Heroism also maintained its ancient connections with active corporeality and the performance of agentic violence (which remained ideologically connected to the male body).
It has been argued that heroic ideals were severely challenged by war in the twentieth century. Advances in mechanised weaponry in the First World War threatened the male body which was powerless to withstand the destructive force of the new war machines.423 The devastation of the Great War led to the rise of the anti-heroic identity in the interwar period424 and the spread of ―patriotic pacifism‖ where men rejected militarised masculinity in favour of non-aggressive manhood.425 Yet, as Dawson has argued, warrior heroism remained culturally relevant alongside anti-heroism through mythology, literature,
420 Dawson, ―Blond Bedouin;‖ Dawson, Soldier Heroes; and Roper and Tosh, ―Introduction.‖ 421 Dawson, ―Blond Bedouin,‖ 119. See also Dawson, Soldier Heroes; and Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure. 422 Robert Segal, Hero Myths, 7; 9. 423 Fussell, Great War; and Horne, ―Masculinity in Politics and War,‖ 32. 424 Rose, ―Temperate Heroes,‖ 179. 425 Horne, ―Masculinity in Politics and War,‖ 32–33. 134
and cinema, in figures like Lawrence of Arabia.426 The continuing symbolic presence of the war hero during the interwar period ensured the ready resurrection of heroic rhetoric in the Second World War. Others have suggested it is postmodern war that has marked the end of heroic warrior mythology. Coker, for instance, maintains that ―heroism...died a death in Vietnam‖ by which he means that the heroic ideal of dying for one‘s country was replaced by an opportunistic concept of heroism, whereby to be a hero meant simply to stay alive in the face of almost insurmountable odds.427 Yet if heroism as courage and self-sacrifice died in Vietnam, it was to be resurrected in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, as the rhetoric surrounding the 9/11 rescuers cited above demonstrates. Heroism remains a key motif in the construction of postmodern soldiers and postmodern war. As we will see, it remains as closely tied to the male body and masculinity as ever.
Super Hero: Pat Tillman and Warrior Masculinity
I heard Pat Tillman died in the hills of Afghanistan He came for justice not for greed, not for ego His truth came through the fog like the hometeam's marching band Are you a warrior, or a savior, or the great American hero?428
This section discusses how mythologies of masculinity and warfare were used to construct a poster boy for the War on Terror in the form of former Arizona NFL player Pat Tillman. Only a minor celebrity as a football player, 25-year-old Tillman became an overnight star after announcing his decision to retire from professional football to join the military in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Tillman was initially deployed to Iraq (a war he actually objected to on moral grounds) and was then sent to Afghanistan, where he was killed on April 22, 2004, after sustaining multiple gunshot wounds to the head. Although the military initially claimed he was killed by the enemy, an investigation revealed that Tillman had in fact come under friendly fire from his fellow Army Rangers during the confusion of an ambush by Taliban fighters in Magarah. The U.S. Army had tried to cover up the details of Tillman‘s
426 Dawson, ―Blond Bedouin‖ and Soldier Heroes. 427 Coker, Humane Warfare, 34. 428 Excerpt from ―Kiss the Sun (A Song for Pat Tillman)‖ by Ellis Paul, from the album American Jukebox Fables, 2005. Written by E. Paul. 135
death to avoid the bad publicity associated with such mistakes.429 I will analyse media constructions of Tillman at the three key stages of the story—at the time of his enlistment, at the time of his death, and in the period following the investigation into the cause of his death—to trace the development of heroic rhetoric in media coverage.
Tillman was constructed as a war hero long before his death. He was the prototype of the manly American hero: although short for a linebacker (at just five-feet eleven-inches), he was muscular and athletic and had a reputation for playing hard and aggressive football. He was said to have approached life with a superhuman attitude; espousing the belief that modern life was too easy, he ran marathons and competed in triathlons in the off-season.430 Known for his courage, his nickname on his college football team was ―Braveheart.‖ Tillman also came from a tradition of patriotic fighting men; his grandfather and uncles served during the attacks on Pearl Harbour.431 This was exactly the kind of stereotypical white American masculinity the Bush administration wished to emphasise in its efforts to sell the War on Terror in the months and years following the 9/11 attacks.432 With men like Tillman among their ranks, how could the U.S. military possibly lose its battle against a devious, cowardly and effeminate enemy? Tillman‘s example was also used to encourage other young American males to enlist. Although he personally shunned media, not wishing to be treated any differently from other soldiers, Tillman‘s heroism and masculinity were emphasised in media stories about his enlistment in 2002. Irish newspaper the Sunday Tribune characterised Tillman as an adventurer, using his propensity for tree climbing from the age of five to liken him to the mythological icon of masculinity, Tarzan.433 Another article printed the following year, just after the invasion of Iraq began, painted him as a born leader who enjoyed a challenge.434 Tillman was most frequently referred to as a hero due to his decision to leave behind a lucrative and successful football career and join the army during a time of war. In an increasingly commercialised culture characterised by personal expediency and a concomitant scepticism towards government, Tillman was constructed using motifs of patriotic self-sacrifice and a sense of duty mixed with a healthy masculine dose of courage and adventure-seeking.
429 There was also some suspicion on the part of Tillman‘s family that the cover-up was intended to disguise the fact that Tillman was murdered by his fellow troops. See Tillman, Boots of the Ground By Dusk, 60. 430 Hannigan, ―Universal Soldier;‖ and Gary Smith, ―Code of Honor.‖ 431 Gary Smith, ―Code of Honor.‖ 432 For more on this hypermasculine image as peddled by the Bush administration, see Faludi, Terror Dream. 433 Hannigan, ―Universal Soldier.‖ 434 Hannigan, ―Admiration as Tillman Soldiers On.‖ 136
The political efficacy of Tillman as a poster boy for the war in Afghanistan is obvious. There are clear ideological connections between sport and soldiering that can be capitalised on in propaganda. Altheide notes how these connections are based on nationalistic and patriotic values, as well as the qualities of courage, dedication, camaraderie, and team playing.435 Sport and war are also ideologically fused through motifs of acceptable and lionised masculinity. The postmodern period has witnessed the construction of new heroes in the form of sports stars and athletes whose actions mimic war when there is none being fought. Like soldiers, sports stars are lauded in media as heroes who put their bodies on the line for some greater (national/regional/community) good. This keeps the mythology of male heroism relevant, to be applied to war when it breaks out, and is an important component of the permanent militarisation that characterises postmodern war. In the case of Pat Tillman, this heroism was universally accepted by media. Most commentators and reporters in mainstream media did not question his decision to enlist and the assertion of his heroism silenced any potential debates about the legitimacy or morality of the war that his enlistment may have triggered. Nor did reporters reflect on the way his example was being used as propaganda by the Bush administration to sell the war.436
Yet it was not sufficient to simply label Tillman a hero; his heroism had to be defined and quantified, and media set about this task with gusto. Media rhetoric concerning Tillman‘s decision to enlist shows how in certain contexts a distinction is made between different kinds of heroism based on understandings of authenticity. In times of relative peace, athletes are extolled as society‘s greatest heroes; in times of war, the inauthenticity of their heroism suddenly becomes apparent. In the case of Tillman‘s enlistment, we see an example of media policing its own rhetoric, changing its definitions of heroism to bring them in line with government and military definitions and objectives in a time of war. Numerous commentators (some of whom had presumably been guilty of using the term ―inappropriately‖ themselves) lamented the fact that the term ―hero‖ was being used frivolously to describe sportspeople when only those men who truly put their lives on the line deserved to have the appellation applied to them. An editorial in the New York Post melodramatically bemoaned that the word ―hero‖ was the most ―overused, sadly abused word in the English language‖ and hoped that Pat Tillman‘s example would ―restore some of its true meaning.‖ The article title—―Pat Tillman: Hero‖—suggested not just that Tillman was a hero but that the meaning of the word located itself exclusively in the person of Pat Tillman, that Tillman was original signifier of
435 Altheide, Terrorism, 185–205. For more on the parallels between sport and war, see McInnes, Spectator-Sport War, 149–52. 436 Altheide argues that it was only on the Internet that commentators looked critically at the use of Tillman‘s story as war propaganda (Terrorism, 198–99). For more on the Internet as a space for alternative discourse, see Chapter 6 of this thesis. 137
heroism.437 Sports stars—media darlings in peacetime—were transformed through Tillman‘s example into villains who were greedy, selfish, and vain. The Sunday Tribune article comparing Tillman to Tarzan claimed in its headline that Tillman had ―turned‖ from ―American football star‖ to ―American hero,‖ suggesting he was not a hero before his enlistment but simply a celebrity who played football.438 Pat and his brother Kevin, a Minor League Baseball player who enlisted at the same time as Pat, were singled out for the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPY Awards (cable television network ESPN‘s annual sports awards ceremony) in July 2003 for showing real bravery that transcended the sports field.439 The message from these media commentators (and from governments and militaries in times of war) is that there is only one true path to heroism and that is military service and fighting in combat.
Tillman‘s death in April 2004 added to his propaganda value and was maximised accordingly. The Army posthumously promoted him from specialist to corporal and awarded him the Silver Star for combat valour. President Bush, Republican Senator for Arizona John McCain, and other government officials personally spoke about his death, with McCain giving a speech at his memorial service. The timing of Tillman‘s death was particularly opportune from the point of the view of an administration that was dealing with international scrutiny and criticism after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal that same month. According to Jon Krakauer, heroic accounts of Tillman‘s death were used as a means of deflecting attention away from the shocking and incriminating stories and photographs emerging from Abu Ghraib.440 It was particularly important that the reality of Tillman‘s death by friendly fire was not made public at a time when American military mistakes and mismanagement were being scrutinised by the international community.
Once more, media were called upon to propagate the message of Tillman‘s death, the heroic status it accorded him, and the legitimacy it accorded the war. In spite of vehement opposition by the Pentagon to images of dead American soldiers, body bags and
437 New York Post, Editorial; my emphasis. 438 Hannigan, ―Universal Soldier.‖After his death, the ―authenticity‖ of Tillman‘s heroism compared to that of other athletes became even more poignant. Sports radio talk show host Jim Rome articulated the difference between Tillman and other sports stars, categorically rejecting athletes‘ claims to hero status: ―There are no heroes in sports. Athletes today are often referred to as heroes or warriors, when in reality, they‘re neither.... Athletes are urged to sacrifice, to go the extra mile, to pay the price, all in the name of winning because winning isn‘t everything, it‘s the only thing. As it turns out, winning isn‘t everything, and winning isn‘t the only thing. But risking your life for a belief is‖ (quoted in Tillman, Boots on the Ground, 156). Michael Bidwill, vice president for Tillman‘s NFL team the Arizona Cardinals commented on CNN: ―In sports we have a tendency to overuse terms like courage and bravery and heroes and then someone special like Pat Tillman comes along and reminds us what those terms mean‖ (CNN: Anderson Cooper 360, ―Life, Death of Pat Tillman‖). 439 PR Newswire, ―Pat and Kevin Tillman.‖ 440 Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory, 294–96. For other discussions of the Abu Ghraib scandal in this thesis, see pp. 26; 61–62. 138
coffins being published and broadcast, Tillman‘s funeral was permitted to be televised on ESPN.441 Yet, while there were plenty of examples of such official propaganda associated with Tillman‘s death, mainstream media also set about on its own project of transforming Tillman from ―regular,‖ human hero to divine, super(natural) hero in the tradition of classical mythology. In death, Tillman became a folkloric legend, inspiring lyrical and epic musings from journalists seeking to immortalise him. In keeping with the ideological imperative to imbue heroes with divine qualities, heroic hypermasculine Tarzan swinging from the trees was transmogrified into a saintly Christ-like figure442 with long flowing hair,443 who rode a bike and wore bare feet, who climbed towers and mountains to meditate,444 who shunned material possessions and refused to own a cell phone.445 In an obituary in Sports Illustrated magazine notable for its tone of hero-worship, Gary Smith conceptualised Tillman‘s death as a spiritual loss experienced on a national level: ―The news whistled through America's soul and raised the hair on the back of its neck. It tapped into people's admiration, their awe, their guilt,‖446 forcing them to question their very existence. With the passing of Pat Tillman, a legend had simultaneously died and been born. In his description of the first time he met Pat, recounted at Tillman‘s memorial service, sports radio talk show host Jim Rome retrospectively endowed him with a special aura that set him apart from other athletes and all other men.
We were all fired up; we were going to finally meet Pat. Because Pat had that intelligible ‗It,‘ he had an aura, he had a presence. It‘s hard to explain, but you know it when you see it. It was rock and roll, he was a man‘s man and he did not disappoint, he lived up to all the hype that day. Pat freaking Tillman.447
441 Kusz, ―From NASCAR Nation,‖ 84. 442 The religious politics of Tillman‘s death are interesting. Although Tillman was a vocal atheist, who even went so far as to tell a fellow soldier as they were being fired upon that praying could do nothing for him (testimony of Private Bryan O‘Neal, in Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory,267), this lack of religiosity is almost never mentioned in media reports about Tillman, while Christian motifs are commonly used to describe him. The key public figures who spoke at his memorial all made reference to God in their speeches, but Pat‘s brother Richard‘s blatant assertion that Pat‘s ―not with God; he‘s fucking dead‖ was considered distasteful and censored from the live telecast, even though Richard assured his audience that Pat would ―want me to say this‖ (quoted in Tillman, Boots on the Ground,174). Christian references to Tillman speak to the general religiosity of the United States as well as more specifically to the use of Christianity as a justification for a war waged in the Middle East against the impending threat of Islam. 443 CNN: Anderson Cooper 360, ―Life, Death of Pat Tillman.‖ 444 Gary Smith, ―Code of Honor.‖ 445 Lumpkin, ―Former Professional;‖ Gary Smith, ―Code of Honor;‖ and Watson, ―Death of the All- American Boy.‖ 446 Gary Smith, ―Code of Honor.‖ 447 Quoted in Tillman, Boots on the Ground, 160. 139
Rome spoke of how he was looking forward to telling his son all about Pat, turning the fallen soldier into a role model for the next generation of American males.448 In death, Tillman was permanently inscribed into the mythology of the warrior hero.
And, of course, the word ―hero‖ itself continued to appear in media commentary with renewed vigour. Just as Tillman‘s enlistment negated his hero status as a professional athlete, so too his heroism in death surpassed that in life. True heroes, commentators now asserted, were not soldiers who fought but only those who died fighting for the greater good. The exclamations of Tillman‘s heroism continued to become more and more extreme. With his death, the Times noted, Tillman was transformed from ―all-American kid‖ to a ―genuine all-American hero,‖449 while MSNBC News correspondent David Shuster credited the deceased Tillman with ―redefin[ing] the term, sports hero.‖450 Media were also quick to quote members of the political and sporting communities who provided further ―evidence‖ of Tillman‘s heroism in death. Arizona senator Jon Kyl called Tillman ―a great American hero in the truest sense.‖451 Bob Feller, a former Major League Baseball player who received five campaign ribbons and eight battle stars for his service during the Second World War, was quoted explaining the primacy of death to the definition of heroism in a speech at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame: ―I‘m no hero, I‘m a survivor. There are two different types of soldiers: those who survive and the heroes. The survivors come here. The heroes don‘t.‖452 Kevin White, former Arizona State athletic director, histrionically (and prematurely) pronounced Tillman ―without question the biggest hero of my lifetime.‖453
Media reports across the period from Tillman‘s enlistment in 2002 to his death in 2004 were notable for their increasingly hyperbolic insistence on applying this particular word to Tillman, as if his heroism might vanish or be called into question if not articulated and defined on a regular basis. The emphasis on authentic heroism—the need to preface the assertion of Tillman‘s heroism with adjectives of authenticity (―true,‖―real,‖―genuine‖)—is also telling. It demonstrates the anxiety that the instability of the word produces, and the corresponding desire to permanently fix its meaning by attaching it to one man who exemplifies it at its mythological, idealised best. Concerns about the authenticity of Tillman‘s heroism intensified when an investigation reported that he had not been killed by Taliban forces but by friendly fire during an incident of serious miscommunication within his platoon. Tillman‘s own father even cast doubt on his heroism when he argued that his son should not
448 Cited in Tillman, Boots on the Ground, 157. 449 Watson, ―Death of the All-American Boy;‖ my emphasis. 450 MSNBC: Hardball, ―Hardball for April 23, 2004.‖ 451 Davenport, ―Leaders Salute Former NFL Player;‖ my emphasis. 452 Quoted in Altheide, Terrorism, 195. 453 Gary Smith, ―Code of Honor.‖ 140
have been awarded the Silver Star as this honour was not supposed to be conveyed upon soldiers killed by friendly fire.454 Media commentators and politicians worked in tandem to reassure the public that the manner of Tillman‘s death did not detract from his heroism. In so doing, they reinforced the fact that the mission in Afghanistan remained worthy of support. Head of Army Special Forces, Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr., declared that the circumstances surrounding his death ―in no way diminished the bravery and sacrifice displayed by Cpl. Tillman.‖455 Arizona congressman Trent Franks similarly argued that Tillman‘s death by friendly fire ―does not take away one iota from the heroic nature and courage of the man.‖456 By the time of his death, Tillman had come to operate as the embodiment of the entire mission; as long as he remained a hero, the war could continue to be portrayed in a heroic light.
Yet in this media coverage of Tillman I argue that there is also a broader hegemonic motivation at work. Reassuring the public that the fallen soldier was still a hero was a means of justifying the occupation of Afghanistan but it was also a way to ensure his masculinity remained intact, that he continued to serve as a symbol of the masculine ideal. My analysis of media representations of Tillman has shown that the need to cast Tillman as a genuine American hero was motivated by more than propagandistic purposes. Tillman–as–hero was constructed not only to legitimise the war but also to legitimise a particular kind of masculinity that served both propaganda efforts and the more generalised reinforcement of the gender order. In other words, it was important both to the propagandists and to the guardians of white American masculinity generally that the moniker remain attached to Tillman, shifting its definition as the circumstances changed. (A more detailed discussion of the racialising of the hero identity takes place in the next section.) Tellingly, the above analysis reveals that Tillman was at once constructed as an exceptional hero and as an ―all- American‖ guy, thus ensuring that, while not all men were heroes, all (white) men (and only men) had the potential to be if they were prepared to make the ultimate manly sacrifice. Heroism is thus conceptualised as the exclusive preserve of the male, located firmly in the sexed and racialised body of the white man.457 These ideas regarding sexed and racialised heroism become more complex when we look at media representations of Tillman‘s female counterpart, Jessica Lynch. Broadening the discussion of the gendered representation of soldiers in the War on Terror to include both male and female subjects reveals the prominence of media‘s function as preserver of the gender binary over its role as disseminator of propaganda. While government propaganda attempted to sell both Tillman
454 Tillman, Boots on the Ground, 72. 455 Quoted in Jay Cohen, ―Army.‖ 456 Quoted in Coman, ―All-American Hero.‖ 457 Kusz makes this argument about the heroic rescuers of 9/11 (―From NASCAR Nation‖). 141
and Lynch as heroes, media found it much more difficult to accept the heroism of a female soldier.
Victim or Hero? Labelling Private Lynch
Fighting for her country Now she's a celebrity Yeah she got herself captured and was on the TV They wrote a book and made a movie
Oh spare me!
Jessica Lynch is now everywhere I see ...... Yeah Jessica Lynch on covers of magazines I saw it, I saw it in the express line
Enough now!458
According to his mother Mary, Pat Tillman‘s hero was a woman and a pacifist whom Pat accorded with the ultimate markers of heroism typically reserved for military males. Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old peace activist who was crushed by Israeli bulldozers while trying to protect the home of a Palestinian family on March 16, 2003, just before the Coalition invasion of Iraq. ―That‘s my hero,‖ Tillman reportedly said of Corrie. ―She was a stud; she had a lot of guts.‖459 While Pat was prepared to recognise a female hero, the media that heroised him were not. During 2003–04, a series of female soldiers serving in Iraq were causing problems for the terminology of heroism. First to make headlines was Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was taken prisoner when her convoy was ambushed on March 23, 2003, three days into the war, in the city of Nasiriyah. Lynch, a supply clerk in the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, was held prisoner in an Iraqi hospital for nine days before she was rescued in an elaborate mission involving members of all four military services. The rescue was captured on film and disseminated widely in media.
458 Excerpt from a song by Floyd‘s Garage, a parody of the song ―Fairies Wear Boots‖ by Black Sabbath. Full lyrics available from http://www.amiright.com/parody/70s/blacksabbath26.shtml (accessed August 16, 2010). 459 Tillman, Boots on the Ground, 67. 142
The story of Lynch‘s capture and rescue was met with intense international media attention. Without a tradition of heroic warrior women to rely on, media pundits had to decide on the appropriate terminology to describe Lynch. Was she hero or victim, fearless warrior or damsel in distress? Lynch‘s lack of physical resemblance to the conventional hero compounded the problem: very young looking (she was often described as childlike), slightly built, blonde, and pretty, Lynch was the corporeal opposite of the stereotypical war hero. Many reporters left it to her family and friends to declare Lynch a hero. First to be quoted in the days after Lynch‘s capture was Don Nelson, a family friend who said Lynch was ―a hero in my eyes‖ but also problematised this claim by infantilising her as ―everyone‘s baby.‖460 Lynch was at once national hero and infant for the nation. After Lynch‘s rescue on April 1, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer declared that ―family members are calling her a hero‖ but did not seem prepared to apply the label himself.461 Lynch‘s father Greg, her mother Deadra, and her brother Gregory Jr. were quoted describing her as a hero.462 Yet reporters typically framed Lynch‘s heroism as a question not a statement. In an early interview after the rescue, CNN anchor Paula Zahn tentatively asked Lynch‘s parents: ―Some people would consider her a hero. Do you?‖ to which Greg Lynch emphatically replied, ―Many, many times, yes.‖463
Still uncertain about the applicability of the label to a female soldier, media continued to search for men to take their rightful places as the real heroes of the story. As details and video of Lynch‘s rescue came to light, some considered it was the all-male rescue team— which included Pat Tillman, then stationed in Iraq, in a minor supporting role—not Lynch herself that deserved the hero label.464 The most common adjective applied to the rescue was ―daring‖465 and it was also called ―heroic.‖466 Media described in detail how Special Forces commandos from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force stormed the hospital under cover of darkness, bravely fighting off Lynch‘s captors and whisking her to safety. The male Iraqi lawyer who supposedly tipped off American forces to Lynch‘s whereabouts was also lauded as a ―hero‖ by the press.467
460 See, for example, Barker and Vitello, ―Family and Friends.‖ 461 CNN: Connie Chung Tonight, ―Lynch Rescue.‖ 462 Father: Walters, ―Spirited but Weak.‖ Mother: Coleman, ―Rescued POW.‖ Brother: Barker, ―Family of Rescued POW;‖ and NBC News: Today, ―Profile.‖ 463CNN International: Special Events, ―Lynch Family Comments.‖ 464 Parkinson, ―Pte. Lynch a One-Day Hero.‖ 465 Barker, ―Family of Rescued POW;‖Courier-Mail, ―Wounded Hero;‖ CNN: Connie Chung Tonight, ―Lynch Rescue;‖ and Walters, ―Spirited but Weak.‖ 466 Parkinson, ―Pte. Lynch a One-Day Hero.‖ 467 Lenkowitz, ―Jessica‘s Iraqi Hero;‖ Montgomery, ―Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief;‖ and Wright, ―Rambo Who Wasn‘t.‖ Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief received a book deal from HarperCollins shortly after the rescue; his story, Because Each Life is Precious, was rushed to print later the same year. He also acted as a consultant on an NBC docudrama, which aired on November 7, 2003, and was told from his perspective (Holland, ―Dangers of Playing Dress-Up;‖ and Kumar, ―War Propaganda‖). Al- 143
While media were initially reluctant, the American government and military were keen to portray Lynch as a hero from the start. In Chapter 2 I discussed the belief that female POWs would be harmful to national morale as a central justification for continuing combat bans on women. Yet Lynch‘s example played a key role in the government attempt to increase public support for an unpopular war. Lynch‘s sex was central to her usefulness as an instrument of war propaganda. She was made to simultaneously symbolise the face of Americans fighting in Iraq and the face of what they were fighting for. Her beauty and wholesomeness worked in the same way as Tillman‘s masculine looks, as she became the emblem of the American femininity and purity the troops were defending. Her presence in Iraq was also construed as a symbol of female liberation in the West, as contrasted with gender inequality and female oppression in the Middle East that the Coalition was supposedly fighting against.468 Most important to the construction of her heroism were details released by officials claiming Lynch opened fire on the enemy during the ambush, killing several Iraqi soldiers before she ran out of ammunition. One official was widely quoted saying, ―She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive.‖469 Lynch reportedly continued to struggle with her captors despite sustaining multiple gunshot and stab wounds.470
Once these details were released, the label ―hero‖ was more freely and firmly attached to Lynch in media. Australian newspaper the Courier-Mail declared ―Wounded Hero Fought Like Trooper;‖ the Washington Post called her the ―U.S.‘s new hero;‖ and a Pennsylvania newspaper editorial went so far as to argue that ―without doubt‖ Lynch ―is a hero now.‖471 A mythology similar to Tillman‘s began to emerge with regard to the bravery Lynch was said to have demonstrated on the battlefield. There was talk of both a Hollywood movie and a made-for-television docudrama within hours of her rescue.472 The Times pronounced her a ―legend‖ who had ―won a place in history as a gritty, all-American hero, to rival the likes of Bonnie and Clyde.‖473 She was mythologised in song when New York man Jon Alvarez altered the words to a tune about another American legend, ―The Ballad of Davy Crockett.‖ Alvarez was inspired to write the song after reading the reports of how Lynch
Rehaief and his family were granted political asylum in the United States because of his assistance in the rescue (Kumar, ―War Propaganda‖). Although Al-Rehaief‘s role in the event has been challenged—Lynch does not recall him being present and a nurse who worked in the hospital accused him of being a liar (ABC News: Primetime Thursday, ―Primetime Live‖)—his heroism was uncritically accepted by many media commentators. 468 See Kumar, ―War Propaganda.‖ 469 This was originally quoted on the front page of the Washington Post (Schmidt and Loeb, ―‗She Was Fighting to the Death‘‖) and was repeated in other media reports. 470 Waxman, ―Hollywood Zeroes in.‖ 471 Courier-Mail, ―Wounded Hero;‖ Waxman, ―Hollywood Zeroes in;‖ Lancaster New Era, Editorial. 472 Daily Star, ―She‘s a Reel Hero;‖and Waxman, ―Hollywood Zeroes in.‖ 473 Monaghan, ―Jessica Enters the Realms.‖ 144
fought, which reminded him of Crockett ―swinging away ‘til the end.‖474 Artist Lei Hennessy created a different mythological motif from the gun-toting frontiersman, dedicating a 10-foot tall ―hero‘s angel‖ to Lynch.475
While Lynch recuperated in a German hospital, narratives of her heroic fight to the death continued to circulate in media. However, once Lynch had recovered she began to speak out about her experience and the ―truth‖ was revealed: Lynch had not bravely fought her captors; in fact, she had been helpless to defend herself as her gun had jammed. The tales of her heroism were, she argued, nothing more than propaganda. Once these details emerged, the hero label was hastily withdrawn. A media which had been reluctant to call the female soldier a hero ―simply‖ for enduring nine days as a POW was quick to remove the label once the stories about her fighting collapsed. A few commentators continued to assert her heroism in spite of the facts of her capture,476 but many were happy to accept Lynch‘s own insistence that she was ―no hero.‖ As details about the other soldiers involved in the ambush came to light, some commentators claimed that the real heroes on the day of her capture were men, just as they had regarding the day of her rescue. In an article mocking Lynch‘s ―unheroic deeds,‖ Nicholas Wapshott of the Times argued: ―There was at least one genuine hero of the firefight, Sergeant Robert J. Dowdy, 38, who saved many American lives and killed many Iraqis.‖477 Australian publication the Townsville Bulletin asserted that Pfc. Patrick Miller, who also killed several Iraqis, was the real hero, while Lynch‘s heroism was no more than a ―myth‖ (translation: a lie).478 Philip Gailey hoped that an unknown male soldier ―hero,‖ who was killed while reportedly trying to rescue other soldiers from a vehicle, would be identified so his ―selfless act of courage‖ could be honoured.479 The only group who consistently continued to celebrate Lynch‘s heroism was her family and members of her home community in Palestine, West Virginia. Although Deepa Kumar cites evidence that Lynch‘s return from the German military hospital in July was stage-managed as part of her construction as a hero by the Bush administration,480 media descriptors of Lynch reveal how her symbolic value was reduced from national hero to ―hometown hero‖ in the public consciousness.481
474 McElhinny, ―N.Y. Man Inspired.‖ 475 Wrenn, ―Artist Dedicating New Work.‖ 476 See, for example, News Gazette, ―Jessica Lynch;‖ and Navarrette, ―Jessica Lynch.‖ 477 Wapshott, ―Private Jessica.‖ 478 Townsville Bulletin, ―Wrong Turn.‖ 479 Gailey, ―Pvt. Lynch.‖ 480 Kumar, ―War Propaganda,‖ 307. 481 Gold Coast Bulletin, ―POW Jessica.‖ Kumar‘s point that early scepticism about the facts of Lynch‘s story and recognition of its propaganda value occurred mainly in non-American media is valid (War 145
As Pat Tillman would only a few months later, Lynch caused a flood of anxiety about the meaning of the term ―hero.‖ Yet, while Tillman was received as a location on which heroism could be permanently fixed, Lynch was constructed as its ultimate destabliser. As commentators on the Tillman case would question the authenticity of sports stars as heroes, some reporters claimed the application of the term to Lynch devalued acts of ―genuine self- sacrifice.‖ Members of the American public wrote angry letters to their local papers, asserting that ―hero isn‘t a casual term‖ and claiming it was ―misused‖ in the case of Lynch,482 and, echoing the common complaint that militaries reduce hurdle requirements in PT tests for women recruits, that ―the bar for heroism was lowered for Jessica Lynch.‖483 Reporter Dianne Williamson declared that ―heroes are born, not made‖ and implored her readers to respect the definition of the word: ―Doesn't dubbing her a hero diminish the deeds of the countless, faceless soldiers of this war who perhaps fought harder than she, or at least had the chance to make choices that defined their courage? By using the term so cavalierly, don't we run the risk of reducing its definition? Heroes, by nature, must make conscious decisions; victims of circumstance typically don't cut it.‖484 Commentators wondered about the welfare of a nation that rushed to label Lynch a hero. ―What do you think it says about the state of our country that America was so quick to embrace her as a hero?‖ NPR: Weekend Edition host Liane Hansen asked Harvard School of Education research associate and hero ―expert‖ Peter Gibbon, who diplomatically refrained from making a final pronouncement as to whether Lynch was more accurately a ―victim‖ or a ―hero.‖485 The staff at Time magazine thought the labelling was such a complex and important issue that they opened a poll on their website, asking readers ―Is Jessica Lynch a hero? Yes or no?‖486 One reporter even attempted to quantify Lynch‘s heroism by questioning whether her story was really worth the $1 million she and journalist Rick Bragg had purportedly been paid to write her memoir.487 Lynch became the axis of a media-based examination of the problematics of heroism in both American and broader Western culture in a way that Tillman, whose heroism was never in question, did not. Importantly, media self-reflexively questioned their own rush to label her a hero, which they would not do for Tillman.
How do we explain this media obsession with labelling Jessica Lynch? I argue that it suggests an attempt to contain and fix the meaning of a girl/woman who threatened to
Propaganda, 304–6). However, my analysis shows that, when it came to applying and withdrawing the ―hero‖ label, non-American Western media outlets followed similar patterns to American media. 482 Earl R. Davis, Letter to the Editor. The author of this letter is a former sergeant major in the U.S. Marine Corps. 483 Michael F. Cohen, Letter to the Editor. 484 Williamson, ―Heroes are Born.‖ 485 NPR: Weekend Edition—Sunday, ―Interview: Peter Gibbon.‖ 486 Cited in Boehlert, ―Selling Private Lynch.‖ 487 Walde, ―Is Ex-POW Lynch‘s Story Worth $1 Million?‖ 146
destabilise gender signification. More appropriate feminised terms for Lynch were eventually arrived at: ―victim,‖ ―casualty,‖ and ―celebrity,‖ a term that connotes traits of vanity and self- absorption that are stereotypically gendered feminine. One article even called her an ―American idol,‖ comparing her to the contestants on the popular musical talent show and thus suggesting her contribution to the nation was no more significant than those of wannabe pop stars.488 The labels ―victim‖ and ―casualty‖ denote a lack of agency, implying that her body was acted upon as opposed to performing actions on others,489 thus precluding her from the hero label. Doctors‘ reports that she had been raped in captivity were of particular interest to media and enhanced her victim status, although Lynch has no memory of being sexually assaulted.490 Yet I would argue that it was not Lynch‘s lack of agency that was the most important factor in denying her the hero identity. When we look at the details of what really happened on the days in question, the Lynch and Tillman stories bear striking resemblances. Both soldiers came under unexpected fire during enemy ambushes; both were wounded; both begged for their lives against an onslaught of fire they were incapable of defending themselves against; neither returned fire or performed acts of exceptional courage. Much has been made of the fact that Lynch was hiding at the time of her capture, crouched in the back of a Humvee with her arms over her head, and that she surrendered without a fight, but it is never mentioned in media reports that Tillman was also hiding from the gunfire aimed at him. In his biography of Tillman, Jon Krakauer writes that while his fellow troops fired on him, ―Pat sat behind his boulder above the wadi—wounded, shouting his name, waving his hands over his head to signal that he was an American soldier.‖491 Both soldiers came to grief as a result of serious mistakes by their superiors which they were powerless to prevent; neither went down in a blaze of glory. Yet while Lynch‘s body was portrayed as responding to danger in a naturally feminine way,492 retreating and cowering under fire, Tillman‘s similar bodily reaction was never feminised in media. His body was only ever constructed as strong, powerful, and ideally masculine.
Thus, while Tillman was universally accepted as a hero by media, Lynch‘s heroism (although equally propagated by government and military sources) was at best questionable, at worst offensive and disrespectful. The distinction between Tillman and Lynch relied on the rhetoric of authenticity: Tillman was received as a hero in the truest sense of the word while Lynch was quickly recognised as a false hero manufactured by the propaganda machine.
488 Irvine and Crary, ―American Idol.‖ 489 See Prividera and Howard, ―Masculinity, Whiteness.‖ 490 ABC News: Primetime Thursday, ―Primetime Live;‖ and Bragg, I Am a Soldier, Too. Lynch was also, though less commonly, called a victim of crazed feminists who wished to sacrifice her in the name of equality (see Holland, ―Dangers of Playing Dress-Up‖). 491 Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory, 275. 492 See Holland, ―Dangers of Playing Dress-Up,‖ 37. 147
Despite Tillman‘s equally vocal claims during the initial media hype about his enlistment that he was no hero, few media commentators accepted this or considered that his story might also be used for propagandistic purposes. The military cover-up in Tillman‘s case did nothing to detract from his heroism, while for the majority of commentators similar military lies about Lynch cemented her unheroic status. Although her failure to kill the enemy is claimed to be the defining reason why Lynch was not a hero, the fact that Tillman did not kill anyone when he came under fire (as this would have involved murdering his fellow soldiers) does not disqualify him from the label. Tillman was never referred to as a ―victim‖ in spite of his death by friendly fire and the Pentagon‘s use of his death as propaganda. The reasons for denying Lynch‘s heroism while insisting on Tillman‘s are thus less to do with agency and more to do with the sexed bodies of the soldiers involved. For media commentators, Tillman was a born hero, making it impossible to remove the label from his person. Even texts which purport to represent the ―truth‖ about Tillman‘s death cannot help but represent him as a hero. Krakauer‘s book, which suggests Tillman‘s case was used as part of a propaganda project to deflect attention from Abu Ghraib, is nonetheless titled Where Men Win Glory, and its Homeric epigram positions Tillman in the epic tradition of warrior heroes.493 Conversely, Lynch‘s truth-telling biography goes out of its way to emphasise her childlike, feminine body, her incongruous presence in the military, and her complete lack of heroism.494
It seems, then, that Tillman was a born hero for the sole reason that he was born a white American male with certain appropriate masculine qualities. Tillman had the right body for the job, while Lynch‘s body precluded heroism. The significance of the racial body in addition to the sexed body was to become especially important in constructions of Lynch in media, and is highlighted in the example of another female soldier who was killed at the time of Lynch‘s capture. Lori Piestewa was a potential candidate for the first female hero of the Iraq War but, while she gained limited hero status she was not embraced as a national hero in the way Lynch was. Piestewa was a close friend of Lynch‘s who was driving the Humvee Lynch was in when her convoy was ambushed. She died from injuries when the Humvee crashed during the attack. In spite of the fact that Lynch proclaimed Piestewa the real hero of the day,495 in media Piestewa became a symbol for her people but not the nation. Media reports on Piestewa centred on her racial heritage and the only references to her heroism came when quoting her brother and other members of the Hopi and Navajo communities she
493 The epigram, taken from the Iliad, reads: ―Who among mortal men are you, good friend? Since never before have I seen you in the fighting where men win glory, yet now you have come striding far in front of all others in your great heart.‖ 494 Bragg, I Am a Soldier, Too. See Holland, ―Dangers of Playing Dress-Up,‖ for a discussion of Lynch‘s portrayal in this biography. 495 Bragg, I Am a Soldier, Too. 148
represented. Newspaper articles highlighted the fact that it was not the nation but the tribe/s that ―mourned‖ and ―remembered‖ Piestewa.496 She was even credited with ending the centuries-long feud between the Hopi and the Navajo.497 Most significantly, her death presented a chance to debate not the meaning of the word ―hero‖ but that of the word ―squaw,‖ with one article suggesting not so much that her actions had earned her the right to be labelled a hero but that they had ensured she would not be labelled a ―squaw.‖498 Piestewa was immortalised when a mountain and a freeway in her home state of Arizona were named after her; yet these were previously named Squaw Peak and Squaw Peak Freeway respectively, and in their renaming one symbol of Native American femininity was replaced by another. Piestewa‘s greatest achievement, then, was conceptualised not as a sacrifice for her nation but as ensuring a specific racial and gendered group had the right to be treated as human beings and not reduced to racial and sexual slurs. Similarly, Shoshana Johnson, a black soldier captured at the same time as Lynch, received much less media attention than her white counterpart, in spite of her unique status as the first African American female prisoner of war.
Kyle W. Kusz has suggested Tillman‘s example was used to reinscribe white masculinity in post-9/11 American society.499 Similar arguments have been made about Lynch and white femininity.500 However, there has been no analysis of how the two figures worked together to symbolically assert both racial and sexual hegemonic identities. Media representations of the Tillman and Lynch cases, when analysed in tandem, reveal a gendered discourse of whiteness whereby white femininity and masculinity are simultaneously employed in the service of war and national identity. Lynch‘s example of white femininity was held up as a justification for the invasion and her alleged mistreatment at the hands of her captors was used to demonise a non-white enemy. In Tillman‘s case white masculinity was used to demarcate heroism in contrast to non-white masculinity, which signified evil and immorality both at home and abroad. The media suggestion that both Lynch and professional male sports stars (typically black athletes) were unworthy of the label suggests that heroism is connected not just with men but with a particular kind of white masculinity.501 Those who are not worthy of the term are women—soldiers like Lynch,
496 Manning, ―Tribes Remember Piestewa;‖ and Monaghan, ―Jessica Enters the Realms.‖ 497 Younge, ―News—Private Lynch‘s Comrade.‖ 498 Montini, ―Lori Piestewa Was a Warrior.‖ 499 Kusz, ―From NASCAR Nation.‖ 500 Kumar, ―War Propaganda;‖ and Prividera and Howard, ―Masculinity, Whiteness.‖ 501 Kusz notes how black athletes in particular are associated with the negative qualities of greed, sexual promiscuity and disloyalty (―From NASCAR Nation‖). In a September 2010 survey by the Q Scores Company, which measures public perception of professional athletes, the six Most Hated Athletes in America were African American males. The most common reasons given were disloyalty to teams, sexual indiscretions, and arrogant attitudes. See, for example, 149
Piestewa and Johnson—and men who are transformed by racial difference into the universal feminised ―enemy.‖ Professional athletes who had not fought and died in combat were sometimes explicitly feminised in media coverage which compared them negatively to Tillman, vilifying them as emblems of inauthentic masculinity. Laurie Roberts lamented that while Tillman was fighting and dying like a real man ―the playing fields abound with prima donnas who hire themselves out to the highest bidder, with no mind to the fans who put them there on the pedestal.‖502 Men who behave like ―women,‖ who prostitute themselves for money or attention, or who are materialistic, overly concerned with their appearance, or too self-absorbed to ―man up‖ and go to war, can never be heroes because they are not real men. In assuming the ―female‖ role, their bodies are discursively feminised; they ―become‖ women and hence can never be real heroes.503
When studied together, these cases reveal how their protagonists were used to reinforce the Western gender binary. Tillman and Lynch‘s constructions as hero and non- hero respectively secured the warrior identity to the male body while implying that women were the natural victims of war. Ultimately, media reports constructed Lynch‘s body in ways that determined innate sexual difference, focusing on her smallness, fragility and beauty. As Shannon L. Holland writes, ―The representation of Lynch‘s body as innately female is a dominant theme in the texts that proclaim to reveal the truth about Jessica Lynch. The readability of Lynch‘s body as a signifier of intrinsic femaleness inhibits her ability to pass as a legitimate (masculine) comrade to her male counterparts. As a quintessential signifier of the naturalness of the two-sex/gender binary, Lynch‘s body becomes an icon of female otherness and, conversely, sustains the codes of hypermasculinity as represented by military culture.‖504 Some commentators used the details about what really happened to Lynch, and the essential difference between men and women this was made to signify, to bolster arguments against women in the military. In an article titled ―Private Lynch and Amazon Myths,‖ which criticised Lynch‘s false construction as a hero in media, well-known advocate of combat exclusion Elaine Donnelly argued that ―no one‘s daughter‖ should have to go through what Lynch endured, focusing on the ―savage rape‖ at the hands of her captors and her fragile broken bones.505 But as news about the horrific injuries sustained by Pat Tillman emerged six months later, arguments that no one‘s son should have to suffer the same fate were conspicuous by their absence. The weak and fragile Lynch was classed as a
http://www.9wsyr.com/content/news/TMN/story/The-List-Hated-athletes/- yw_IN0eXkaPEhV9Me7LCg.cspx (accessed October 1, 2010). 502 Roberts, ―Tillman‘s Life.‖ 503 For another example of this discursive feminisation, see my discussion of the male victims of torture at Abu Ghraib, Chapter 2. 504 Holland, ―Dangers of Playing Dress-Up,‖ 33. 505 Donnelly, ―Private Lynch and Amazon Myths.‖ 150
―true‖ woman masquerading as a soldier and thus used as proof that women should not be in warzones in the first place.506 Lynch was universally denounced as a fake, a phony, a fraud. Her claim from her Iraqi hospital bed that ―I‘m an American soldier, too‖507 continues to go unheard, drowned out by another, supposedly incommensurable claim that she is no hero. Lynch‘s treatment in media when analysed in tandem with Tillman‘s reveals the complicated relationship between media‘s dual functions of disseminating military propaganda and maintaining the sexual status quo. Although it served military interests to construct Lynch as a hero of the Iraq War, this construction directly undermined the mythology which states women are the victims of war not its heroes. As a result, a tension developed in media representations of Lynch between acceptance of her heroism and an underlying scepticism that any woman could fit the hero mould. Ultimately, Lynch–as–victim trumped Lynch–as–hero, and the example of the postmodern female soldier cemented rather than challenged the Warrior Myth.
Conclusion: Postmodern War Villains
In your high school photo You look so young and naïve Now I heard you got a nickname The lady with the leash
Was it funny on the midnight shift? I bet you had your fair share of stiffs ......
Well you're a dangerous, dangerous A dangerous beauty Yeah, disdainfully, painfully A bit of booty.508
This chapter has shown how Western media reinforces the gender binary in the context of postmodern war through the application of heroic rhetoric. I have argued that the motivation
506 The same argument has also been made to the opposite effect. Kayla Williams, who also served in Iraq, argued in her memoir that Lynch was not representative of real women soldiers, but was masquerading as a soldier and hence should not be used as a standard against which to judge all female troops (Love My Rifle, 28–29). 507 Bragg, I Am a Soldier, Too, 131. 508 Excerpt from ―Dangerous Beauty‖ by The Rolling Stones, a song about Lynndie England from the album A Bigger Bang, 2005. Written by M. Jagger/K. Richards. 151
behind such gender construction is based on a complex combination of propaganda, profit- driven reliance on entertainment models, and a broader hegemonic function of maintaining (white) male dominance by barring all women from the hero identity by virtue of their sexed bodies. That the male body is constructed as exclusive site of heroism has tangible consequences for gender relations that stretch beyond the theatre of war. As symbols of a nation and embodiments of ideal and authentic citizenship, heroes have considerable influence in social and political spheres. Military heroes are able to use their heroism to their distinct political advantage, as I will discuss in the final chapter of this thesis. As such, to deny women access to the hero identity on the basis of their sex has significant negative material implications for gender equality and the social and political advancement of women. For this reason it is vital to develop an understanding of the broader hegemonic motivations behind media constructions of gender identities in war. Media constructions of gender not only constitute propaganda efforts to drum up support for war, nor are they solely used for entertainment purposes to improve profits. They also serve to create and reinforce binary gender identities in the postmodern period.
Concerns about the stability of gender categories in the War on Terror are perhaps most apparent in the media frenzy surrounding the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, previously discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 of this thesis. While heroic rhetoric is used to reinforce the gender binary on the basis of appropriate gendered behaviour, rhetoric of monsters and villains is also used for this purpose (as demonstrated in Chapter 3) by defining inappropriate behaviour. If Tillman was the real hero of the U.S. military in the War on Terror, and if Lynch was its fake (manufactured) hero, then Pfc. Lynndie England was surely its villain. England defied gender norms due to her masculine appearance and behaviour. Widely portrayed as ugly and unfeminine, she was singled out for her ―unnatural‖ performance of violence, specifically sexual violence, against male prisoners. While Tillman and Lynch produced and reflected cultural anxiety about masculinity and heroism, England produced and reflected anxiety about femininity and monstrousness. England was constructed in media as the ultimate monster, blurring the boundaries between male and female corporealities. Although dismissed along with her co-conspirators by the President as simply a ―bad apple‖ who did not represent the true nature of military intervention in the Middle East, England was portrayed in media as a symptom of a deeper cultural malady that was blamed on feminist politics and the increasing presence of women in the military.509 England was a biological woman who looked and acted like a man within the male- dominated sphere of the United States military at war, encapsulating anxiety about sexual instability in postmodernity.
509 See Chapter 2, p. 62, n. 171 of this thesis. See also Oliver, Women as Weapons, 23–25; 38–40. 152
The monsterisation of England reached new heights in the cultural fascination with impersonating England which began shortly after the public release of the photos. Video spoofs appeared on YouTube, such as ―I am Lynndie England,‖ a Cabaret-style performance where a female singer dressed in fatigues simulates the sexual torture of naked, hooded prisoners.510 The most widespread impersonation phenomenon was known as ―doing the Lynndie‖ (or ―doing a Lynndie‖) whereby Internet users (male and female) photographed themselves mimicking one of England‘s most infamous poses. Participants found a suitable subject of humiliation, such as a homeless person or a friend they wanted to shame, and posed with a cigarette hanging from their mouths, pointing ―finger guns‖ at the object of their derision.511 Along with the actions of abuse and torture, an entirely new verb was created to express the particularly gendered monstrousness of England‘s behaviour. To do the Lynndie was the ultimate expression of monstrous gender bending. Neither entirely male nor female, her gender identity was simply ―Lynndie,‖ a monstrous category all of its own.
A villain of a different kind to emerge from the War on Terror was Cpt. Rick Duncan whose story became public in 2009.512 Born Richard Glen Strandlof, Duncan created a fake identity for himself, claiming to be a former Marine who had served three tours of duty in Iraq, received serious injuries during combat, and been inside the Pentagon during the September 11 attacks. He was an active and trusted advocate of veterans‘ rights and founder of the Colorado Veterans‘ Alliance.513 He also became an anti-war protestor who campaigned in support of local Democratic candidates.514 Those who had believed Duncan‘s story described his fraud as ―a slap in the face to veterans‖ and a ―betrayal.‖515 Yet Duncan is just one of numerous American men who have falsely claimed to be heroes from the War on Terror.516 So extensive was the problem of impersonating veterans that Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act in 2005, making it a federal offence to pose as a member of the armed forces. Like Jessica Lynch, Duncan and other imposters threatened the stability of the term ―hero‖ at a time when the fixity of heroism in the service of national and military interests was
510 Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xOLOGTskW4 (accessed March 20, 2011). 511 The photo craze seemed to begin when website Badgas (http://badgas.co.uk/lynndie) launched a competition to find the best picture. Groups dedicated to sharing Doing the Lynndie photos were set up on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/groups/lynndie/) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2510562623). Numerous other websites also developed around the Lynndie phenomenon.(All accessed March 10, 2009). 512 The Gazette was first to break the story (Benzel and Roeder, ―Investigation Unravels‖). Subsequent articles include Benzel, ―Accused;‖ Denver Post, ―Stolen Valor;‖ Frosch, ―Leader of Veterans;‖ Frosch and Dao, ―Military Deception;‖ Lofholm, ―Phony Marine;‖ Carlyn Ray Mitchell, ―Judge Says;‖ Patterson, ―Advocate Ousted;‖ and Riley, ―Red-Faced Blue State.‖ 513 Patterson, ―Advocate Ousted.‖ 514 Benzel, ―Accused;‖ Benzel and Roeder, ―Investigation Unravels;‖ Denver Post, ―Stolen Valor;‖ Frosch and Dao, ―Military Deception;‖ and Patterson, ―Advocate Ousted.‖ 515 Frosch, ―Leader of Veterans.‖ 516 For others, see http://stolenvalor.com/target.cfm?source=link&sort=order (accessed March 30, 2011). 153
both so vital and so precarious. Although Duncan was arrested and prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act, a Colorado judge ruled that the Act was a violation of free speech rights under the First Amendment,517 further destabilising the connection of heroism to warrior masculinity. If a man who had never set foot on a battlefield wanted to publically call himself a war hero, the government was powerless to stop him.
Yet another challenge to the male hero identity was to emerge from the War on Terror from an unlikely source. Not long after the war began, soldiers who had served started speaking out against mainstream media representations of the conflict. The official need to construct heroes from the war had resulted in the marginalisation of the experience of ordinary soldiers on the ground. Specifically, the political imperative to construct strong, whole masculine bodies like Pat Tillman‘s negated the experiences of bodily fragmentation and the ―unheroic‖ realities of soldiers on the ground. As we will see in the next chapter, soldiers began to construct their own war narratives which directly disputed the heroic nature of war and the role of combat as a reinforcer of masculine identity. These narratives focused on the fragility of the male body and psyche, questioning the axiomatic connection between men and war.
517 Carlyn Ray Mitchell, ―Judge Says.‖ 154
Chapter 5
Writing Gender, Writing the Self: The (Re)construction of the Soldier’s 518 Body in Combat Memoirs from the Iraq War (2003–10)
The Warrior Myth asserts that men are forged in the fire of war. Combat is conceptualised as a generative experience through which men pass on the journey towards complete masculine identities, the final phase in the transition from boy to man. Yet combat is obviously a highly destructive exercise. Its violence constitutes a threat to the physical body and to the life possessed within it; as such, it is an attack on the self, on personal identity. Warfare can annihilate the self through death or fragment the self through dismemberment and mutilation. In modern and postmodern wars, civilians can be equally exposed to danger as soldiers, and civilian casualties can be as high as or higher than military casualties.519 However, in spite of theories of postmodern war that suggest soldiers are being removed from the battlefield, the soldier‘s job still involves the most direct and persistent engagement with corporeality. Soldiers are both responsible for and subject to the hunting, maiming and killing of war. The soldier‘s body is thus particularly vulnerable during war: some soldiers go missing and are never found; others are maimed so badly they cannot be identified. Some literally ―go to pieces,‖ their bodies shattered by explosion or incinerated by fire, their faces disintegrated by land mines and grenades; others share the same fate on the psychological level, developing a schism between body and mind. Those who live through war leave parts of themselves behind on the battlefield, both through the literal loss of limbs and blood during combat and in the sense that they can often never fully psychically integrate back into civilian life.
In spite of increasing numbers of women in militaries across the globe, a special responsibility to fight in close combat during war continues to fall on men. As outlined in Chapter 2, women are rarely permitted to serve in combat units and, while female soldiers may be called upon to fight defensively, offensive combat remains the domain of males. Ideologically, combat soldiers are identified with the most masculine qualities of agency, strength, courage, and power over life and death. The material experiences of many
518 Parts of this chapter have been published by Monash University Press in History Australia. Ritchie, Jessica. ―Instant Histories of War: Online Combat Videos of the Iraq Conflict, 2003–2010.‖ History Australia 8.1 (2011): 88–107. 519 It is very difficult to establish accurate civilian casualty figures in postmodern war and the U.S. military does not release body counts. However, non-government efforts to document casualties suggest they can be significantly higher than military casualties. The Iraq Body Count project (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/, accessed March 30, 2011), a public web-based database that draws its evidence from media reports, has documented over 100,000 civilian deaths from the Iraq War. In contrast, the U.S. military reports around 4,400 military casualties (see n. 523 below). 155
soldiers, however, prove to be just the opposite: in addition to the constant threat of death and dismemberment, men may freeze in fear during combat, unable to fire their weapons; perform acts of cowardice such as running away from battle or killing surrendering enemy troops; undergo torture and humiliation as prisoners of war; or be powerless to prevent their comrades, or themselves, from being wounded, captured or killed.520 Soldiers may thus feel that their experiences of war result not in the strengthening of their masculine identities but in their emasculation, both through the threat to their physical selves and through their inability to perform to the standard of idealised masculinity expected of them. Some historians, anthropologists and behavioural scientists claim that war is a condition of masculinity and that fighting wars reinforces men‘s sense of themselves as men,521 and indeed it can. The agentic experiences of defending oneself and killing one‘s enemy, of battling with other men and emerging triumphant, can bolster male soldiers‘ masculinity. Yet the personal and collective experiences of war also constitute a serious threat to masculine identity whereby real soldiers are incapable of living up to their own mythologies. Furthermore, the horror of war disturbs both soldiers‘ and civilians‘ beliefs that aggression and violence are noble or valorous components of masculine identity.522 Paradoxically, war is a vehicle through which masculinity is at once asserted and found wanting.
This chapter examines the combat experiences of male soldiers serving in the U.S. military during the Iraq War. This war, which officially lasted seven and a half years, refutes the idea that postmodern conflicts are necessarily short523 and that they minimise casualties. While around 300 allied troops died in the First Gulf War, thousands have been killed in Iraq.524 For all the sophisticated machinery and weaponry employed by the U.S. military, the soldier‘s material body remained central to this war as both an agent and a recipient of violence. For Coalition soldiers, this war was marked by physical fragmentation, dismemberment, and bodily annihilation through the widespread use of explosives by
520 See Bourke, Intimate History; Grossman, On Killing; and Nadelson, Trained to Kill. 521 See, for example, Browne, Co-Ed Combat, esp. chapter 10; van Creveld, Men, Women and War; and Wrangham, Demonic Males. 522 This was a particularly common experience among soldiers who fought in the Great War, many of whom expressed their disenchantment with militarised masculinity in literature and art (see Fussell, Great War).The reaction against warrior masculinity led to the popularity of the anti-hero in interwar literature (Rose, ―Temperate Heroes,‖ 179). See also p. 131 of this thesis. 523 See theories of ―instant war,‖ Chapter 1, p. 44, n. 103 of this thesis. 524 Toffler and Toffler quote a figure of approximately 340 allied casualties from the First Gulf War (War and Anti-War, 65) while Coker cites 270 American casualties (Humane Warfare, 12).As at March 14, 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense reported 4,408 military deaths from OIF and 20 from Operation New Dawn (OND), which replaced OIF on September 1, 2010. Around 32,000 were reported wounded in action (WIA). Figures available from http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil /personnel/CASUALTY/state_oef_oif.pdf (accessed March 22, 2011). For civilian figures, see n. 518 above. For Operation Enduring Freedom, the Defense Department reports 1,493 military deaths and 10,662 WIA at March 14, 2011. Figures available from http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel /CASUALTY/state_oef_oif.pdf (accessed March 22, 2011). 156
insurgents. IEDs (improvised explosive devices) became the signature weapons of the war and the ease with which such devices could be concealed in cars, in houses, on roadsides, or on/in the body meant all Coalition soldiers were routinely exposed to the threat of dismemberment or death, not just those serving in combat units. The high proportion of soldiers who experienced combat in some form or other meant troops in Iraq were particularly prone not only to physical injury and death but also to experiences of profound psychological trauma. However, while these experiences formed the cornerstone of soldiers‘ service, the violence and subsequent psychological problems they suffered received only minimal recognition by the military establishment and mainstream media. As discussed in Chapter 4, in its desire to present a ―clean‖ war to the international community the Bush administration asked media not to print or broadcast images of dead or injured Coalition soldiers, or soldiers taken prisoner during the conflict, ostensibly so as not to traumatise family members who may see them.525 Yet, as Robin Andersen notes, this censorship is also an important part of the propaganda of war, ―for war could not be carried out if its negative, counter-narratives of death and brutality were starkly drawn.‖526 The mechanisms of Information War were thus employed to erase violence and the body from public discourses of the Iraq conflict in order to ensure ongoing support of the war effort.
In the face of this silence surrounding their experiences of violent combat, many soldiers chose to create their own personal documentation of their service, focusing on the corporeality of combat. Their aim was typically to record what they perceived to be the ―truth‖ of a soldier‘s life in a warzone, including both the banalities and the extreme horrors of their situation. Soldiers‘ accounts of their combat experiences can thus be regarded as counter- narratives against ―official‖ versions of events which sought to sanitise the war by minimising its violence and emphasising the heroic and beneficent nature of the occupation. In this chapter I examine personal narrative construction as a form of war documentation by analysing written combat memoirs by male American soldiers. I discuss soldiers‘ efforts to express the authenticity of their combat experiences, as well as their attempts to impose narrative order on the chaos of war. I will argue that the memoir becomes an outlet for both political and psychological testimony. The soldier bears witness to his service in a political attempt to communicate his experiences with others and to keep an accurate historical record of his service. Yet the combat memoir also functions as a forum in which the soldier does battle with his body and mind, with his memories, and with his masculine identity. In other words, the soldier mediates his masculine identity in his memoir, constructing the warzone as a space where masculinity is tested and shaped. As we will see, in his memoir
525 Andersen, Century of Media, 216. 526 Ibid., xvi. 157
the soldier ―remakes‖ his wartime experience in narrative form in order to reconstruct his damaged masculine identity. This process involves a reconstruction of the sexed body as soldiers attempt to negotiate the discursive relationship between the material and the symbolic body at war. Ultimately, these memoirs problematise the axiomatic equation of combat with masculine integrity propagated by the Warrior Myth. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the online memoir as a site of counter-narrative testimony and identity construction. In particular, Internet and digital technologies have enabled the production and dissemination of visual narratives, highlighting the increasing primacy of the image in postmodern war representation.
Combat Memoirs: Trauma, Identity, and Narrative Construction
In its public and private manifestations, autobiographical writing is a discursive and material practice in which gendered subjectivity is constructed, confirmed, and sabotaged. — Felicity Nussbaum527
A war memoir is like autobiography in that it is the personal narrative of one man in his life; though it would be more precise to consider it a subcategory of this genre, conversion-literature, since it is a testament of a profound inner change in the teller. Most war stories begin with a nobody-in-particular young man, who lives through the experience of war, to emerge in the end defined by what has happened to him. Out of that nobody, war has forged a Self. Nobody, however young, returns from war still a boy, and in that sense, at least, war does make men.
— Samuel Hynes528
Iraq War combat memoirs comprise the latest development in a long tradition of soldier testimony. They form part of a self-commemorative project in which soldiers ensure their experiences of war are documented and not forgotten. Soldiers‘ personal narratives have taken various written forms across the last century. The First World War in particular was characterised by literary productions, generating what Martyn Lyons calls a ―seismic cultural shift‖ of ordinary soldiers writing about their experiences.529 During their service soldiers wrote letters and diaries, poems and novels, and continued to document their experiences in
527 Nussbaum, Autobiographical Subject, 37. 528 Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, 5. 529 Lyons, ―New History,‖ 60.5. 158
memoirs decades later. Soldiers adopted varying literary styles in their narratives, expressing diverse opinions and ideologies. Paul Fussell has read literary productions by Great War soldiers as examples of ironic forms of representation, which emphasised the futility of war.530 Rosa Maria Bracco expanded the study of First World War writing, concluding that some soldier writers in the interwar period also ―attempted to rescue war from futility...by describing for its readers the link between suffering and the lessons of the war.‖531 Alistair Thomson identified the diverse motivations behind the personal narratives of Australian soldiers at Gallipoli, including the feeling that their war experiences were worth recording, the desire to have a personal reminder of their service, practical reasons such as keeping track of troop movements, and a need to communicate their experiences to loved ones at home.532 Sandra Gilbert documents the specifically gendered and sexualised nature of World War I literature, arguing that ―the gloomily bruised modernist antiheroes churned out by the war suffer specifically from sexual wounds, as if, having traveled literally or figuratively through No Man‘s Land, all have become not just No Men, nobodies, but not men, unmen.‖533
In particular, soldiers‘ war narratives since World War I have served a counter- narrative function, writing against official state-sanctioned and mass media versions of war. The fundamental experience for the soldier on the ground has always been violence, and combat is recognised by soldiers as the most authentic war experience. Memoirs and testimony by soldiers thus focus especially on the violence of war. British First World War soldiers Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon documented the mindless bloodshed in the trenches in their anti-war poetry,534 and Joseph Heller expressed his cynicism for the American military during World War II in his satirical novel Catch-22 (1961). The brutality of the Vietnam War was widely recorded in memoirs, novels and films during the 1970s and 1980s, including Ron Kovic‘s coming-of-age memoir Born on the Fourth of July (1976), which was later turned into a movie, and Tim O'Brien's novel Going after Cacciato (1978). This counter-narrative tradition includes both anti-war protest narratives and pro-war narratives that nonetheless provide alternative perspectives to official versions of events through their privileging of the soldier‘s-eye-view.
A more direct precursor to soldier testimony from the Iraq War is the First Gulf War memoir. The most well-known example is Anthony Swofford‘s Jarhead (2003), which was
530 Fussell, Great War. 531 Bracco, Merchants of Hope, 1. 532 Thomson, ―Anzac Stories,‖ 9–10. For a discussion of World War II personal narratives, see Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, 108–76. 533 Gilbert, ―Soldier‘s Heart,‖ 198. 534 For a fictionalised account of WWI soldiers‘ anti-war sentiment, see Barker, Regeneration Trilogy. 159
developed into a movie in 2005. More than ten years after his deployment to Kuwait, Swofford, a Marine sniper, decided to revisit his wartime experiences by writing a memoir which at times is explicitly anti-war. He documents his disdain for the Marine Corps and for the government who sent him to war; his cynicism about the Pentagon being more concerned with public relations than troop safety; a lack of confidence in the gear provided to protect soldiers from chemical attack; his contemplation of suicide; and what he ultimately refers to as ―the dark futility of the entire venture.‖ Most significantly, he cites his military service as granting him the right to voice his opinions about war, even if these contradict the official party line.
I am entitled to despair over the likelihood of further atrocities. Indolence and cowardice do not drive me—despair drives me. I remade my war one word at a time, a foolish, desperate act. When I despair, I am alone, and I am often alone. In crowded rooms and walking the streets of our cities, I am alone and full of despair, and while sitting and writing, I am alone and full of despair—the same despair that impelled me to write this book, a quiet scream from within a buried coffin.535
Swofford‘s memoir has an important place in the tradition of war writing as dissent but also more generally in the construction of the memoir as a space for soldiers to express their individual beliefs, whether these be anti-war, pro-war or somewhere in the conflicted space between. Swofford also notes the significance of the memoir in keeping an accurate historical record so as not to forget the sacrifices that were made; soldiers have not just a right but an obligation to document war from their own perspectives.
Swofford‘s memoir is an explicitly political statement; the act of speaking out and writing against the official narrative is an assertion of personal agency, and this is typically the motivation behind memoirs today. Following memoirist Thomas Larson, I make a distinction between autobiography, in which an author attempts to provide a comprehensive, chronological overview of his or her entire life, and memoir, offspring of the autobiography, which sees the author focusing on one pivotal moment or event from the past. Like its parent genre, the subject of the memoir is the self; unlike autobiography, however, the events of one‘s life are not significant in their own right but rather are recounted so as to assist the subject in making sense of his or her present-day self. Events are thus not necessarily recounted chronologically and some events may be left out because they are deemed unnecessary to the process of self-definition. As Larson notes, the memoir is based on an
535 Swofford, Jarhead, 181; 254. 160
uneasy but indispensable oscillation between ―a past self and a present self,‖ creating a tension which ―hurls [the author] into a kind of vortex, whirling judgment, dizzying memory.‖ Memoirists are increasingly favouring what Larson has termed the ―sudden memoir,‖ choosing to write about ―the immediate past, even the still-corruptible present, not waiting for time to ripen or change what they know,‖ which further problematises the relationship between past and present selves.536 As we shall see, Iraq War combat memoirs, written as the conflict continued to be waged, are examples of the impulses of sudden memoir in action.
For Larson, there is only one way out of the memory and identity vortex generated by the self-reflective process and that is to tell the truth. The genre of memoir is indeed by definition an expression of ―truth;‖ it separates itself from fiction through its determination to uncover what ―really happened‖ to the historical subject. The authenticity of the memoir as a historical account is validated by its first-person narration, which is deemed more reliable than either the third-person non-fictional or the fictional account. Vivian Gornick refers to the memoir‘s first-person narrator as a ―truth speaker‖ in the sense that readers trust the narrator to tell them the whole truth.537 Several commentators have noted the commitment to eye- witness testimony in the present cultural moment; as Robert Folkenflik notes, ―an age that has become distrustful of history‖—that is, ―official‖ third-person accounts of historical events—―is still willing to read avidly the first-person account, one by the eyewitness or the participant true to his or her subjective response.‖538 Authors are only too willing to provide readers with such accounts. Gornick describes the present age as ―characterized by a need to testify;‖ people feel a pressing urge to speak their own truth in their own words and on their own terms.539 The popularity of the genre is a reflection of a present-day search for authenticity in narrative, which is itself a reaction against the instability of meaning in postmodernity. William Zinsser has even gone so far as to label the contemporary period ―the age of the memoir.‖540
The memoir genre is also popular because it is based on the democratic principle that everyone has a story worth telling.541 For the memoirist and his/her readers, each individual life is of value, not just those of prominent or famous people, and everyone‘s voice
536 Larson, Memoir and the Memoirist, xii; 16. 537 Gornick, Situation and the Story, 25. 538 Folkenflik, ―Introduction,‖ 11.Gornick also writes: ―Thirty years ago people who thought they had a story to tell sat down to write a novel. Today they sit down to write a memoir. Urgency seems to attach itself these days to the idea of a tale taken directly from life rather than one fashioned by the imagination out of life‖ (Situation and the Story, 89). 539 Gornick, Situation and the Story, 91. 540 Zinsser, ―Introduction,‖ 3. 541 Goodwin, Autobiography, 8; Gornick, Situation and the Story, 90–91; and Larson, Memoir and the Memoirist, 2. 161
deserves to be heard. Autobiography has historically been a genre in which marginalised and silenced groups can speak out, offering ―individuals otherwise excluded from the spheres of political representation and publication‖—for example women, ethnic minorities, and slaves—―the opportunity to address the public in their own voices.‖542 The contemporary memoir continues to serve such purposes. Gornick writes: ―Everywhere in the world women and men are rising up to tell their stories out of the now commonly held belief that one‘s own life signifies. And everywhere, civil rights movements and the therapeutic culture at large have been hugely influential in feeding the belief.‖543 Telling your story, constructing your own personal history, is recognised as an overtly political act in the twenty-first century. As noted in Chapter 1, in the context of war personal testimony has often been a tool favoured by victims, particularly female victims, and much of the research on personal war narratives has been on this type of traumatic testimony. However, a study of male soldier narratives sheds light on the ways these men are also traumatised and indeed often see themselves as victims of war, as well as providing important insights into their perpetration of wartime violence.
The assertion that theirs is a story that deserves to be told is a common refrain in the memoirs of Coalition soldiers returned from Iraq. As in the past, today‘s soldier memoirs often serve to set the record straight, writing against official narratives in which their voices have been silenced. Applying a Foucauldian analysis to power in war, Gray argues that soldiers‘ experiences and perspectives are ―subjugated knowledges‖ which are marginalised from the dominant discourses of war.544 Particularly in the context of postmodern war, narratives about science and technology have been privileged over those of human soldiers on the ground (what James Gibson has referred to as the ―warrior‘s knowledge‖).545The memoir thus becomes a space in which soldiers can express their truths in response to what they perceive as lies or omissions about their personal of collective experiences of war.For instance, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Nathan Sassman wrote a memoir to clear his name after he was scapegoated for an alleged incidence of prisoner abuse that took place under his charge. Sassman expresses the importance of setting down his version of events in writing: ―I knew within two months of my command in Iraq that I wanted to tell my story, mostly for my family and friends, and then several months later, for the American people and future military and civilian leaders.... Iraq was the best and worst year of my life and the story needs to be told.‖546 The stories soldiers tell are represented as definitive truths because they are spoken
542 Goodwin, Autobiography, 18. 543 Gornick, Situation and the Story, 91. 544 Gray, Postmodern War, 98–99. 545 Gibson, Perfect War, 468. 546 Sassman, Warrior King, ―Acknowledgements.‖ 162
from positions of narrative authority. Only the soldier knows what really happened and only the soldier‘s voice is able to speak out against his misrepresentation by military officials.
Such misrepresentation also takes place in mass media (via the military–media complex) and soldiers in Iraq often wrote memoirs to tell the stories of ―ordinary‖ troops that were overlooked in the press. Soldiers complained that U.S. media did not report on the deaths of their fellow troops and that audiences were not interested in soldiers‘ experiences. Shannon Meehan expressed his frustration at the absence of media attention to battles he was involved in and deaths he witnessed. Regarding the lack of coverage of men killed by a House-Borne IED in Diyala, he wrote:
I don‘t know what I had expected. I suppose I thought the press would flock to cover the horror of the explosion because the whole terrible event marked so starkly the lives of all of us there.... But for anyone else, that day became just another set of casualties of the war. Details were unnecessary.... The soldiers‘ stories...were invisible, silent in the face of too much loss, too much war.
I did not expect deep coverage.... There were too many stories like ours for that to be the case.... I just wanted to see something like humanity in the news coverage. I wanted to sense some connection between our lives and the lives of our families back home.547
Later, Meehan documents his disgust that media outlets pay more attention to the death of model and actress Anna Nicole Smith than to those of soldiers in Iraq.548 Sassman notes how the American public were grossly under-informed about the extent and nature of violence; the horror of war was not reported in mainstream media, while the government went to great lengths to hide the war‘s tragedies, such as deaths by friendly fire, for fear of losing public support.549 Public distrust and scepticism regarding media coverage of the Iraq War may in part explain the popularity of soldier memoirs from this conflict as a means of accessing the ―truth‖ about the war.
The ordinary postmodern soldier‘s voice is silenced, then, by the military establishment and by mainstream media decisions about which stories are ―worthy‖ of attention. Yet the soldier‘s voice is also quieted internally by the trauma of war.
547 Meehan, Beyond Duty, 131–32. 548 Ibid., 155. 549 Sassman, Warrior King, 185–88. See also my discussion of the cover-up surrounding Pat Tillman‘s death by friendly fire in Chapter 4. 163
Psychological trauma, like physical pain, is aphasic, destroying language.550 Speaking about one‘s trauma requires revisiting it psychologically and emotionally and as such is shunned by many trauma survivors. The associated emotions of shame, guilt and disgust, and the stigma associated with emotional weakness, particularly for men, has an additional silencing effect on those who experience trauma. Yet at the same time, testifying about one‘s traumatic experiences is recognised as the preferred way of making sense of and thus recovering from them.551 Telling one‘s story—to a friend or counsellor, between the covers of a private diary or, in the case of the narratives discussed in this chapter, in the form of a published memoir—becomes the main therapeutic tool in the recovery from psychic trauma. Trauma is indeed perhaps the most common theme of the contemporary memoir. Suzette A. Henke has put forward a theory of ―scriptotherapy‖ which she defines as ―the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment.‖552 According to this theory, autobiographical writing, like psychotherapy, could assist in the alleviation of severe psychic trauma.
Thus, in addition to the political act of ensuring others hear one‘s voice or that the memory of the events one experienced is preserved, memoir has an additional function as a therapeutic activity in which the writer attempts to come to terms with the trauma he or she has experienced. As Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw argue, ―testimony about traumatic experience always has a double function, both producing social discourse and initiating individual recovery.‖553 The idea of memoir as a therapeutic tool for dealing with trauma is of course particularly pertinent when analysing the memoirs of soldiers who have experienced combat. The horror of combat, specifically the violence expected, witnessed and experienced, creates a fertile environment for psychic trauma which resists expression. Soldiers note in their memoirs the silencing effect of their trauma and the struggle to raise their voices above it in order to recover from it. A soldier who was so troubled by his experience in Iraq that he deserted the U.S. Army wrote in his memoir:
This is the story of how that voice [my conscience] finally grew louder than the rumbling of tanks and the blaze of gunfire and the hollering of commanders.... This is the story of what I did to the Iraqi people and what I saw other Americans do to them, and why I deserted the war
550 See Chapter 1, p. 32, n. 43 of this thesis. 551 See, for example, Pennebaker, Opening Up. 552 Henke, Shattered Subjects, xii. 553 Miller and Tougaw, Extremities, 12. 164
and became an outlaw in my own country. I was made to be a criminal in Iraq, but I am a criminal no longer and I am never going back.554
And another when he heard that an order he gave resulted in the deaths of innocent children:
The words hung in the air, and I looked at the men in my tank. A new silence settled in. A deeper, more devastating silence. One that joins men together. One that conspires. One shared by all of us soldiers, from any war, who have witnessed the unspeakable and who, in our attempts to cope, pledge to each other, with simply a glance, not to say a word, not to resurrect what we have destroyed. This is my voice rising out of that terrible silence. This is my story trying to order the ruins of that day.555
Memoirs of soldiers who served in Iraq in many ways become about speaking the unspeakable in an attempt to heal psychic wounds. Telling ―the truth‖ about what happened to them is the key to soldiers‘ recovery.
What is damaged, and what needs to be recovered by these soldiers, is their identity, their sense of self. In the case of male soldiers, this identity is typically gendered, framed by the meanings of manhood and masculinity. As discussed above, war is characterised by the disintegration of body and mind, and soldiers report that the nature of the violence in Iraq resulted in especially high incidences of both physical and psychic fragmentation. The widespread use of explosive devises which dismember the body with particular ferocity— tearing off limbs, ripping heads from bodies, severing bodies in two—resulted in corporeal disintegration and annihilation. Soldiers wrote of their inability to recognise the dead because their faces had been blown off, or had collapsed into their skulls, rendering them ―completely unrecognizable as...human being[s].‖556 They witnessed other soldiers running through the combat zone carrying the limbs of their comrades.557 Soldiers note their reliance on technology to protect their fragile bodies from technology in the form of the mechanised weaponry of war: ―Holding the plates [protective plates worn inside Kevlar vests] in my hand,‖ one wrote, ―was an acknowledgment of how frail my body was, how incapable it was of confronting the weapons of war.‖558 In the combat environment, the soldier‘s body rebels against him. In the intense heat of the Iraqi sun, one soldier describes how ―our body
554 Key, Deserter’s Tale, 9. 555 Meehan, Beyond Duty, 9. 556 Ibid., 125. 557 Ibid., 121. 558 Ibid., 42–43. 165
temperatures hover at a hundred and three. Our ears ring. On the edge of heat exhaustion, we get dizzy as our stomachs heave.‖ Soldiers get ―the spastic shits, with stabs of pain as our guts liquefy thanks to the menagerie of local bacteria.‖559 The experience of combat in Iraq forces the soldier to confront the fragility of the male body in a battle not just with technology and machinery but also with nature.
Corporeal fragmentation is a threat to identity; to lose a part of the body is to lose a part of the self. Yet psychic fragmentation also results from the expectation of physical pain, dismemberment or death. All soldiers experience moments of terror, confusion and despair during combat; if this trauma continues upon leaving the warzone it is manifest as post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The main criteria for PTSD are that the person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which they were injured or threatened with injury or death, and where the exposure resulted in emotions of ―intense fear, helplessness, or horror.‖ In addition, the person re-experiences the trauma in one or more of a variety of forms, including distressing memories, recurrent dreams, and flashbacks in which the person feels as if the traumatic event is recurring.560 PTSD is not unique to veterans of the Iraq War. It was classified as shell shock in the First World War and battle fatigue in World War II, and was widespread among American soldiers fighting in Vietnam where it was first referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder and recognised in its present form. Yet the Iraq War has been identified as a particularly fertile ―incubator‖ for the disorder,561 as well as for traumatic brain injury (TBI)562 which causes PTSD-like symptoms. A 2008 study commissioned by the RAND Corporation (hereafter referred to as the RAND Report),563 hypothesises that the psychological damage of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan may be much greater than the physical casualties, and refers to PTSD and TBI, along with major depression, as the ―signature wounds‖ of these wars.564 Some clinicians are predicting PTSD rates from Iraq to be higher than in any previous American-fought conflict. Original estimates that 1 in 8 soldiers would experience PTSD symptoms565 rose to 1 in 5 in 2007566 and were as high as 1 in 3 by 2009–10.567
559 Bellavia, House to House, 1. 560 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), 427–28. 561 Greenburg and Roy, ―In the Shadow of Iraq,‖ 888. 562 Burke, ―New Disability.‖ The widespread use of IEDs has resulted in high incidences of traumatic brain injury (RAND, ―Invisible Wounds‖ (RAND Report), 2). 563 The RAND Corporation is a non-profit organisation which performs research and analysis for the U.S. government and armed forces. 564 RAND, ―Invisible Wounds‖ (RAND Report), iii. 565 Associated Press, ―1 in 8 Returning Soldiers.‖ 566 Roehr, ―High Rate of PTSD,‖ reporting findings from the American Public Health Association (APHA) 135th Annual Meeting and Exposition. 567 Atkinson, Guetz, and Wein, ―Dynamic Model.‖ Although there is growing awareness about PTSD, there is still much stigma attached to it in the military, as well as among the civilian population. The 166
The Iraq War resulted in particularly high incidences of exposure to trauma for several key reasons, all of which soldiers emphasise in their memoirs. The most significant reason was the nature of the fighting. Due to the terrorist and guerrilla tactics of the enemy, a high proportion of soldiers experienced combat in some form or other, even if they were not classified as combat soldiers. The Iraq War Clinician Guide, compiled in 2004 by the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center to assist clinicians with the treatment of returned soldiers, notes that the Iraq War entailed high levels of exposure to ―warfare experiences such as firing a weapon, being fired on (by enemy or potential friendly fire), witnessing injury and death, and going on special missions and patrols that involve such experiences.‖568―Combat‖ in Iraq took various forms, from direct engagement with the enemy in buildings or on city streets to attack by roadside IEDs which did not discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. The high probability of experiencing combat also exacerbated soldiers‘ fear of encountering such violence. The absence of safe zones (there were no demarcated battlefields in Iraq) coupled with longer deployments than in previous conflicts, frequent redeployments, and only short breaks between deployments,569 resulted in limited opportunities to rest from combat. While the RAND Report found that combat exposure was the ―single-best predictor‖ for PTSD,570 perceived threat can be as traumatic for soldiers as actual encounters with combat. Perceived threat has been recognised as ―particularly pertinent to the war in Iraq, where the possibility of exposure to chemical or biological threats [was] a genuine concern.‖571 The Iraq War Clinician Guide also cites the aftermath of battle—including witnessing or handling dead bodies and remains of military personnel, enemy combatants, civilians and animals; observing the damage done to communities and the environment; and dealing with prisoners of war—as risk facts for developing PTSD.572
Another contributing factor to the trauma experienced by soldiers was the lack of distinction between enemy and civilian that characterised this war. Soldiers often note their frustrations and fear due to the fact that the enemy they were fighting did not wear uniforms and were indistinguishable from Iraqi civilians. As the Iraq War Clinician Guide notes:
In a highly armed nation such as Iraq, US troops cannot be certain whether an innocent appearing civilian may be carrying a firearm, an
U.S. military‘s failure to provide support and treatment for sufferers has been criticised (see RAND, ―Invisible Wounds‖ (RAND Report),14–15) although efforts are being made to provide better care. 568 National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, ―Iraq War Clinician Guide,‖ 25. 569 RAND, ―Invisible Wounds‖ (RAND Report), 1. 570 Ibid., 13. 571 National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, ―Iraq War Clinician Guide,‖ 24. 572 Ibid., 25. 167
explosive, or a remote detonation device. Rules of engagement are altered regularly by command in response to political and tactical requirements. When an individual or a vehicle challenges a roadblock or security checkpoint, a delay in the use of force may result in friendly forces injuries. A premature response may result in the unnecessary death of civilians. Such conditions create chronic strain, particularly when split second decisions may undergo retrospective analyses to determine their appropriateness.573
In order to protect themselves and their fellow soldiers, Coalition troops had to regard all Iraqis—men, women, children, and the elderly—as potential enemies. At the same time, political pressure to minimise civilian casualties, coupled with soldiers‘ own desire not to take innocent lives, put them in an impossible situation of having to make instantaneous decisions about who to fire upon and who to spare. As an analysis of their memoirs will show, some of the most severe trauma experienced by soldiers occurred when they participated in or witnessed the killing or wounding of civilians, especially children. One Army platoon leader notes how soldiers often felt powerless to prevent civilian deaths because the civilian casualty rate remained high even when correct protocol was followed.574
In the face of such physical and psychological fragmentation, soldier testimony becomes an exercise in constructing a coherent whole out of the fragments of combat. Soldiers remake their wars in text and, through this process, remake themselves.575 The symptoms of PTSD—flashbacks, recurrent dreams, and intrusive memories of the traumatic experience—reveal how the fragmentation of the self is analogous with the fragmentation of time. The past collapses into the present at the locus of the traumatic event; the present self is fixated at the moment of trauma, trapped in the memory of the past. In the experience of such temporal collapse, repetition of the traumatic memory becomes both the disease and the cure. Research has shown that ―exposure therapy,‖ which involves the patient repeatedly recollecting and recounting the traumatic event in vivid detail, is the most effective treatment
573 Ibid., 8. 574 Meehan, Beyond Duty, 136–37. 575 Hilde Lindemann Nelson has argued for the concept of ―narrative repair,‖ that identities can be restored in narrative through the construction of ―counterstories‖ that constitute the subject as moral agent. For Nelson, a counterstory is written against the narrative identity imposed on an individual by an oppressive dominant power. Written by marginalised members of a society, counterstories aim to ―reidentify such people as competent members of the moral community and in doing so to enable their moral agency‖ (Damaged Identities, xiii). In the case of the soldier memoir, the dominant power could be conceptualised as the war machine which strips its participants of much of their agency and individual identity. The construction of a counterstory in memoir is an act of assertion of one‘s personal subjectivity in the dehumanising milieu of war. 168
for PTSD.576 Thus, while uncontrolled repetition in the form of flashbacks and dreams can retraumatise the patient, controlled repetition can be an exercise of power. The patient repeats the traumatic event over and over in order to gain mastery over it.577
As a highly structured form of testimony of past trauma, the memoir is at once a written manifestation of disease and the soldier‘s attempt to cure himself of that disease by giving voice to his trauma. Writing the memoir is a type of exposure therapy that helps the soldier to come to terms with what has happened to him. For the memoirist, the process of writing his memoir is one of gaining control of his repeating traumatic memories through the imposition of narrative order. By structuring the traumatic event as part of a temporal narrative, it can be relegated to the past and prevented from intruding into the soldier‘s present. Leonard V. Smith has studied trauma in the written testimony of French soldiers fighting in the trenches during World War I. His analysis of soldiers‘ novels, poems, and autobiographical writing led him to conclude that the arbitrary nature of casualties in trench warfare resulted in a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness among soldiers who were conscious that there was little they could do to reduce their chances of horrific deaths. Writing became a means by which soldiers attempted to retain their masculine identities in the face of such random annihilation.
As Smith writes, ―The challenge of narrative...is emplotting the events of experience in a way so as to bring them under the structure of time, with a distinct relationship to past, present, and future.‖578 The narrative structure of beginning, middle and end is a structure of situation, crisis and resolution,579 an imposition of temporal order that counteracts the chaotic and illogical nature of war. Like World War I, the Iraq War is distinguished by the arbitrary nature of casualties and the constant fear of death through annihilation or dismemberment. Yet for soldiers suffering from PTSD, there is no resolution to be documented in the memoir. Rather, the memoir becomes the means through which resolution is sought. The logic of first-person narration assumes there is a narrator with a coherent identity who can have experiences and recount them in narrative form. Yet the contemporary memoir is rather an exercise in forming or assembling the narrator‘s identity within the text. The narrative itself has only a beginning (the traumatic event) and a middle (the aftermath of that traumatic event); the process of writing and publishing the memoir is a means to an end, not the end itself. Thus the narrator‘s memory is not that which he recalls from his final position as a
576 Greenburg and Roy, ―In the Shadow of Iraq,‖ 889. 577 Peter Brooks, discussing Freud‘s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, highlights the role of repetition of unpleasant events in the transition of a subject‘s relationship with those events from passive to active, from a position of submission to one of mastery (―Freud‘s Masterplot,‖ 285–86). 578 Leonard V. Smith, Embattled Self, 17. 579 Ibid., 21. 169
complete individual (something that ―happened‖ in the ―past‖), but that which he experiences contemporaneously with the act of writing as part of the process of (re)constructing the self.
We see these attempts at imposing narrative order, and thus at constructing a whole self out of fragments, in Iraq War combat memoirs. Structurally, these memoirs all tend to follow a similar narrative pattern. They begin with a prologue which condenses the defining moment of the soldier‘s tour of duty. This is typically a particular battle or violent event that comes to represent the soldier‘s entire war experience and causes him to confront himself as a human being and as a man. The soldier‘s future self (the present self of the author) is created in this moment. The narrative then turns to the author‘s memories of childhood and how he came to enlist in the military, his training, and the lead-up to his deployment. This part of the narrative often focuses on the soldier‘s quest for masculine identity and for acceptance among a brotherhood of men. Finally, the soldier‘s documentation of his time at war leads him back to the defining combat moment, which is then elaborated in greater detail, before concluding remarks about how the war has affected him since his tour of duty ended.
The prologue-based structure of many of today‘s combat memoirs reflects an editorial decision that recognises the role of the memoir as therapeutic tool. This structure is a mirror of the author‘s psychological journey towards coherent identity. The prologue signifies the flashback; the soldier‘s consciousness is fixated on one particularly traumatic or defining moment which shapes and frames his self-definition. This moment is typically chaotic: in the heart of battle, the soldier becomes disoriented, his survival instincts take over, and he alternates between paralysing fear and surges of adrenaline that propel him on. He must also perform acts of horrific violence and have such violence performed on him. The traumatic event exists for the soldier as a memory fragment. The insertion of the memory into a memoir can be read as the soldier‘s attempt to place this memory fragment into a coherent war narrative, thus decreasing its potency and its haunting effect, and helping the soldier to gain mastery over the experience. The memoir involves the transformation of the memory fragment into just one (albeit highly significant) part of a broader narrative, thus preventing the fixation of the soldier‘s identity in this particular temporal moment.
Thus, following Leonard V. Smith, ―firsthand testimonies [by soldiers] share a common goal of constructing the ‗embattled self,‘ an identity as well as a text.‖580 For the French First World War soldier, the defining feature of that identity was the experience of
580 Ibid., 8. 170
warfare in the trenches;581 for the Iraq War soldier, it was the experience of war in and around houses. Because the majority of combat took place in built-up urban areas, much of the fighting occurred inside buildings. Indeed, one of the primary tasks of the infantryman in Iraq was going from house to house, clearing them of insurgents and weapons during the occupation of strategic cities such as Fallujah and Baqubah. As I will discuss below, in the combat memoir the house comes to signify more than a physical structure in which the soldier does battle with terrorists. It also becomes a metaphor for a psychic space in which the soldier battles with his own inner demons, with the enemy within. The house is reconceptualised in memoir as the soldier‘s mind, inside which a fierce contestation between courage and cowardice, fear and rage, humanity and savagery takes place. The soldier must enter the house where his greatest fear (the fear of death, that is, the fear that his self will cease to exist) awaits him. He is then confronted with his fear and in the process is confronted with himself. How the soldier emerges from the house—or whether he emerges at all—becomes the key to his identity and his masculinity. Some soldiers remain psychically trapped in the house, and the memoir becomes an exercise in trying to escape. In the textual remaking of combat experiences, houses simultaneously function as physical structures, psychological structures, and narrative structures. The house is the location where the battle for masculine identity unfolds.
This chapter is concerned with memoirists‘ use of the written text as a space to construct personal identity. I cannot make any meaningful assertions about why certain publishers chose to publish certain memoirs, and of course publishers‘ decisions to release these memoirs would obviously have been based on many different factors, not simply (or even principally) the author‘s treatment of gender. Nonetheless, a note about the publishers of these memoirs is pertinent. While four of the memoirs were published by major publishing houses, one—Marco Martinez‘s Hard Corps—was released by a small press. As I will discuss below, Martinez puts forth a highly conventional portrayal of masculinity in his memoir, while the other memoirists present more complex attitudes towards their masculine identities. The fact that the most conventional gendered account was published by a small press perhaps suggests that gender conventionalism and stereotyping do not only occur in mainstream media. Indeed, as this thesis has demonstrated elsewhere, both gender conventionalism and subversion occur across different media outlets, in mainstream and alternative media, often simultaneously. I will discuss this further in Chapter 6 when analysing traditional news media and online news media representations of gender. As in my discussion of other media forms throughout this thesis, my interest is not with the reception of these memoirs—how many people bought them, the sorts of reviews they received, or
581 Ibid. 171
how subversive or controversial they may have been considered—but is instead with the authors‘ use of the memoir as a therapeutic tool to make sense of their own fragmented gender identities.
Battlefield of the Body, Battlefield of the Mind: Mediating Masculinity at War
Here I am, running from what I‘ve become by fading into the echoes of my past. — Jeremiah Workman, U.S. Marine Corps582
In this section, I analyse the mediation of masculine identity in a selection of sudden memoirs by male American soldiers and Marines recently returned from Iraq. Female soldiers have also written memoirs documenting their service in Iraq. Memoirs by female soldiers often explicitly address being female in the military and constitute (re)negotiations of femininity, with the authors‘ roles within a male-dominated institution complicating their sense of gender identity. While male soldier memoirs typically concentrate on the male body as agent of life and death, female soldier memoirs often centre on the female body as site of sex. In her memoir Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (2005), Kayla Williams notes how female soldiers are ascribed the identities of whores or bitches, depending on how sexually available they are to men, but she also admits the pleasure she experiences when she receives sexual attention from male soldiers. General Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, wrote her memoir One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story (2005)after she believed she was scapegoated for the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison because she was a woman. Military men see the Army as a male domain, and Karpinski fights for the right to call it her army too.583 Yet Karpinski is also careful to point out her enduring femininity and struggles to balance her identities as woman and soldier, just as her accusers do.584 Shoshana Johnson wrote her memoir I’m Still Standing: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen—My Journey Home (2010) precisely because she was the ―first black female ever to be held as a prisoner of war.‖585 She documents her concerns that her status as a female POW could adversely affect her fellow male prisoners, as her captors might torture her to get information from them.586
582 Workman, Shadow of the Sword, 92. 583 Karpinski, One Woman’s Army, 24–25. 584 Karpinski, One Woman’s Army, 68–69; 79. 585 Johnson, I’m Still Standing, v. 586 Johnson, I’m Still Standing, 113. 172
Although female soldiers clearly have direct experience with the performance and reception of violence in the war zone, the sexual segregation of combat units means male soldiers continue to have the primary responsibility for inflicting the violence of war. I have chosen five memoirs that deal explicitly with male soldiers‘ relationships to violence and provide a cross-section of the different ways soldiers cope with their experiences of combat. For some of these soldiers, combat reinforced their sense of self; for others, Iraq forced them to redefine their identities. In spite of their differences, however, I argue that the (re)construction of the self that takes place in all these combat memoirs is manifest as a negotiation of masculine identity. The combat environment in these memoirs is conceptualised as a space in which masculinity is defined, contested, proven, and destroyed. Specifically, soldiers attempt to mediate their gender identities through a re- visitation and reconstruction of their sexed bodies on the battlefield. Combat memoirs necessitate an engagement with the discursive relationship between the material and the symbolic body at war. Male soldiers reflect in writing on their corporeal experiences in the warzone in order to understand themselves as men in their present, post-war condition. How has the war changed them physically and mentally? How have they negotiated the conflicting masculine roles of soldier, killer, father, husband, lover? How have their combat experiences challenged, redefined, or reinforced their definitions of what it means to be a (real) man? These questions boil down to a conflict between masculine identity and human identity, with the meanings ascribed to soldiers‘ acts of violence determining their (in)ability to reconcile the two. The battles described in these memoirs are battles for physical integrity (to remain alive and intact), psychic integrity (sanity, identity, selfhood), and masculine integrity (a combination of the two).
For some soldiers, military service in Iraq became a vehicle through which their identities as ―real men‖ were reinforced. Combat was regarded as the ultimate test of manhood, from which these soldiers emerged triumphant. Marco Martinez chronicles his search for masculine self-definition in his memoir Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero (2007). The title of the memoir affirms Martinez‘s perception of the military as a bastion of stereotypical hypermasculine toughness. Martinez recounts his youth as a gun- toting gangster in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who sees gang culture as a brotherhood in which he can earn respect as a man. He steals, takes drugs, and gets involved in gunfights in an effort to prove his masculinity. However, always mindful that he is an embarrassment to his Army Ranger father, Martinez enlists in the Marine Corps at age 18 and quickly comes to regard the military as the real testing ground for manhood. The memoir charts Martinez‘s transformation from punk kid to man through his military service. His time at boot camp and in training is characterised by repeated and relentless displays of corporeal 173
hardness and toughness. One of the initiation traditions he undergoes is getting his ―blood wings,‖ the nailing of the prongs of a Marine‘s chevrons into his chest, leaving puncture marks that brand him as a Marine. Enduring the extreme pain without flinching or crying out cements his status as a ―hard-ass.‖587 Martinez also has the Marine Corps slogan ―DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR‖ tattooed on his back.588 Military training shapes his body and his identity into that of a man, and Martinez reconstructs his body as tough, whole, and unbreakable when he recounts the training in his memoir.
The ultimate shaping of masculine identity, of course, takes place in battle. Martinez‘s decision to join the infantry was fuelled by his belief that combat is the only legitimate war experience; Marine infantrymen are for Martinez by far the most hardcore (―hard corps‖) of all military personnel. Martinez stresses that his primary goal is to see combat, to ―Get some‖ in the tradition of the Corps slogan. Failure to ―pop your combat cherry,‖ like failure to perform sexually, results in being less than a complete man, and Martinez describes the inadequacy he feels during the invasion of Afghanistan when he knows other Marines are out ―getting some‖ while he is not.589 When he finally gets to go into combat in Iraq, one event comes to shape his war experience and his masculine identity. The memoir opens with the Official Navy Cross Citation outlining the circumstances of the combat scenario for which Martinez was awarded the second highest medal for valour in the Navy. The Citation congratulates Martinez on his act of ―extraordinary heroism‖ during which he engaged in direct combat and eliminated several of the enemy, displaying ―decisive leadership, unlimited courage..., and utmost devotion to duty.‖590 Near the end of the memoir, Martinez recounts the battle in detail. When his squad leader is wounded, Martinez assumes leadership during the clearing of houses in the city of Al Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. As his men sustain intense fire from insurgents hiding in a bunker, Martinez uses an enemy rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) to damage the bunker before charging the enemy and killing four terrorists with a grenade. Martinez sustains no injuries in the engagement.
At least in the retelling of his combat experiences, Martinez never doubts his ability to lead and perform as a man in battle; his physical and psychic integrity remain intact. While he occasionally mentions feeling uneasy or scared, he never describes being paralysed by his fear and is always supremely confident that he will past the combat test. According to Martinez‘s logic, true masculinity always equates to physical and mental
587 Martinez, Hard Corps, 98. 588 Ibid., 122. 589 Ibid., 66; 114. 590 Ibid., xiii–xiv. 174
hardness which can either be appropriately channelled into military endeavours or squandered in thuggish activity on the streets. Writing the memoir may serve as a symbolic re-enactment of the combat experience; in reliving these experiences, Martinez once more reinforces and strengthens his sense of masculine self-definition. He is particularly critical of the use of the war memoir as a space for speaking out against war and the military, attacking Marine Anthony Swofford for producing ―whiny drivel‖ in Jarhead, a copy of which he ceremoniously burns after his own heroic display in battle.591 Martinez‘s writing is a discursive reinforcement of the Warrior Myth which argues for the ontological connection between manhood and warriorhood.
For many soldiers, however, the combat test proves much harder, with the likelihood of failure considerably higher. These soldiers are plagued by doubts about their capacity to perform under pressure and the combat zone becomes a space in which masculinity is hard fought for. Recounting the experience in writing is an exercise in making sense of the battle the soldier has fought not for the liberation of the Iraqi people but for his own masculinity. One such soldier is Staff Sergeant David Bellavia who narrates his time as an infantryman during the 2004 occupation of Fallujah in his book House to House: An Epic Memoir of War (2007). Bellavia leads a team of soldiers as they systematically raid and clear houses in the city. It is dangerous and unpredictable work; the soldiers do not know who they will face inside the houses, whether the occupants will be armed insurgents or innocent civilians, or whether the houses will be booby-trapped. The book centres on one particular raid on a house and the fierce battle that ensues. What takes place inside this house comes to define Bellavia‘s entire war experience and his opinion of himself as a leader and as a man.
Bellavia conceptualises battle as an explicit test of manhood, and the book charts his personal struggle with proving his masculinity through leadership in combat. This perspective is made clear from the first time he introduces military life to the reader. After describing the pain and corporal indignity the infantryman must endure, Bellavia explains why combat service still appeals to some soldiers: ―Welcome to the infantry.... It sucks, and we hate it, but we endure for two reasons. First, there is nobility and purpose in our lives. We are America‘s warrior class. We protect; we avenge. Second, every moment in the infantry is a test. If we measure up to the worst days...it proves we stand a breed apart from all other men.‖592 Indeed, Bellavia‘s decision to join the military in the first place came after an earlier failed test of manhood when, at age 23, he was unable to protect his parents from a robbery
591 Ibid., 221–22. 592 Bellavia, House to House, 1. 175
and home invasion.593 As the book progresses, Bellavia finds his manhood tested again in a repeat of the home invasion, but this time he is the invader doing battle with his enemy. He describes how the nature of urban street fighting in Iraqis particularly efficacious for the testing and proving of masculinity.
Combat distilled to its purest human form is a test of manhood. Who is the better soldier? Who is the better man? Which warrior will emerge triumphant and which will lie in a heap in the street? In modern warfare, that man-to-man challenge is often hidden by modern technology—the splash of artillery fire can be random, a rocket or bomb or IED can be anonymous. Those things make combat a roll of the dice. Either you die, or you don‘t; your own skill doesn‘t have a lot to do with it. But on this street and in these houses, it can be man-to-man. My skills against his.594
Experiences like these demonstrate that, in spite of advances in weapons technologies, direct bodily combat remains a central feature of postmodern war. Bellavia defines such experiences as combat in its purest form; emerging triumphant from direct combat thus becomes an assertion of pure, authentic masculinity.
Yet the attainment of this pure masculinity requires a temporary surrendering of humanity and sanity. House to House sees its author engage in a kind of schizophrenic struggle with himself, as he alternates between his determination to prove himself as a man and the paralytic fear that consumes him and threatens to sabotage the ―test of manhood‖ he has set for himself. Bellavia recreates a conversation he had with himself during battle. He uses italics to distinguish the different, sometimes conflicting voices in his head.
Are you man enough? Are you tough enough? Do you have the nuts for this? Can you pull the trigger? Can you kill? Can you survive? Yes.... Combat is a descent into the darkest parts of the human soul. A place where the most exalted nobility and the most wretched baseness reside naturally together. What a man finds there defines how he measures himself for the rest of his life. Do we release our grip on our
593 Bellavia wrote of the home invasion: ―I couldn‘t intimidate them [the burglars], and I couldn‘t find the strength to attack them.... I stood paralyzed with fright and watched them. As they got into their car outside, my father came out of the bedroom and stared at me with a mixture of disgust and pity.... That look shamed me, and the humiliation drove me to join the army in search of the heart and spirit I so desperately lacked. I needed to understand courage. I needed to become a man‖ (Ibid, 45–46). 594 Ibid., 112–13. 176
basic humanity to be better soldiers? Do we surrender to the insanity around us and ride its wave wherever it may take us? Yes.595
In both cases, Bellavia answers himself resoundingly in the affirmative. Later, however, during the house raid that becomes his final and most difficult test, Bellavia jumps erratically between a raging drive to fight and an overwhelming fear that in some instances prevents him from effectively leading his team, a mental state bordering on madness. After retreating under fierce enemy fire, Bellavia re-enters the house and is confronted with the sudden terrifying realisation that he is in mortal danger.
I lean back against the wall and try to think, but my mind is floating. Everything has an ethereal quality. I hear noises all around me. I can‘t tell what is my imagination and what is real. Am I hallucinating? Get a grip. Get a fucking grip. I whack myself on the helmet. I‘m still disoriented. It fails to clear my head. Come on, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself.... A flood of terror ices my spine, and for a second I‘m paralyzed.... What have I done to myself? This is crazy. You’re going to die. My breathing is rapid fire. My head swims. I‘m losing all control. You stupid fuck. You’ve trapped yourself.596
More than just a battle with insurgents, in its recounting the fight also becomes a battle within Bellavia, between his desire to prove himself as a man and his instinctive drive for self-preservation. He views the raid on the house as a battle for his very manhood. If he is successful—if he kills the insurgents and emerges from the house alive—he has passed the test and proved himself a real man. If he fails—if he dies or runs away in fear—his masculinity is shattered. Retreating from the house amounted to a surrendering of Bellavia‘s ―honor‖ and ―manhood;‖ returning to the house is his chance to reclaim it.597
The most striking feature of Bellavia‘s account is the physical intensity of the fighting he experiences. Bellavia and his men engage in brutal direct combat inside the house, which the author describes in graphic detail. The insurgents are enemies who refuse to die; seemingly immune to the dozens of rounds fired into them by the American soldiers, they
595 Ibid., 113. 596 Ibid., 237. 597 Ibid., 227. 177
are examples of the indestructible male body.598 (It later transpires that the insurgents took large doses of amphetamine before the gunfight to keep their hearts going long after they should have died.) The raid culminates in Bellavia engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the last remaining insurgent. After dropping his rifle, Bellavia is forced into an epic struggle for bodily supremacy with the insurgent, whom he refers to as the Boogeyman. During the fight, the insurgent attacks Bellavia twice in the groin—the physical site of manhood—once by kicking and once by biting.599 Bellavia recounts his extreme fear that his genitals have been damaged and that he will be ridiculed by his comrades; the genital wound is a physical manifestation of his mental struggle for masculine self-definition. They punch, kick, bite and scratch each other, and beat each other with weapons and helmets, while letting out primal shrieks: ―My voice isn‘t human any more. Neither is his. We‘ve become our base, animal selves, with only survival instincts to keep us going.‖600 After a monumental struggle, Bellavia remembers he has his Gerber knife and decides to use it to finish off the insurgent.
I pounce on him. My body splays over his and I drive the knife right under his collarbone. My first thrust hits solid meat.... I grab the handle again and squeeze it hard. The blade sinks into him and he wails with terror and pain. The blade finally sinks all the way to the handle. I push and thrust it, hoping to get it under the collarbone and sever an artery in his neck.... I lunge at him, putting all my weight behind the blade. We‘re chin to chin now, and his sour breath is hot on my face.... The knife finally nicks an artery. We both hear a soft liquidy spurting sound.... I‘m bathed in warmth from neck to chest. I can‘t see it, but I know it is his blood.... His eyes show nothing but fear now. He knows he‘s going to die. His face is inches from mine, and I see him regard me for a split second. At the end, he says ‗Please.‘ ‗Surrender!‘ I cry. I‘m almost in tears. ‗No...‘ he manages weakly.601
The killing of the insurgent is described in a way that evokes the sex act; the battle culminates in the union of the two men through phallic penetration with the knife. (Bellavia
598 See, for example, p. 254. 599 Ibid., 261; 265. The association of the penis with masculine self-identity is introduced earlier in the text when Bellavia recounts at length another soldier wounded in the groin (Ibid., 170–76). 600 Ibid., 263. 601 Ibid, 266–67. 178
recalls sitting inside the house afterwards smoking a cigarette.602) The description highlights the symbolic connections between sex and male power and between sex and death, and points to the experience of combat as a highly sexual activity.603 It also indicates Bellavia‘s triumph over his ambiguous relationship with his masculine identity as he finally overcomes his fear and embraces his power, killing the gentle and ―human‖ part of himself and fully embodying the warrior identity. The insurgent‘s final moment with Bellavia is one of tenderness as he finally gives in: a lover‘s embrace.
His face goes slack. His right hand slips from my hair. It hangs in the air for a moment, then with one last spasm of strength, he brings it to my cheek. It lingers there, and as I look into his dying eyes, he caresses the side of my face. His hand runs gently from my cheek to my jaw, then falls to the floor. He takes a last ragged breath, and his eyes go dim, still staring into mine.604
Bellavia has overpowered his enemy in an act reminiscent of rape, forcing the insurgent to submit to his more powerful will. Yet at the same time the enemy ―loves‖ Bellavia (and Bellavia ―loves‖ his enemy) because he is part of Bellavia; the description of the death of the insurgent comes to signify the end of a love-hate relationship with part of himself. When reconstructed in the memoir, the battle with the enemy is a battle with the self, a ferocious contest for the author‘s masculine identity from which he ultimately emerges triumphant.
Bellavia‘s memoir confirms that war has the ability to make men but is also capable of destroying them. While Bellavia left his demons behind with the killing of the final insurgent, some soldiers continue to struggle with their masculine identity after they exit the combat zone. For these men, the experience of combat is not fortifying of their manhood but rather raises more problematic issues of masculine self-definition. As Bellavia‘s experience demonstrates, combat involves a continual negotiation between humanity and masculinity, and between sanity and madness. Martinez and Bellavia both managed to reconcile these identities in different ways; their success as soldiers/men fortified their success as human beings and they do not see their acts of violence as compromising their humanity in the long term. While inhumanity and insanity defined their identities in the combat environment—―I am the madness,‖ Bellavia declares when recalling his battle experience, while Martinez describes how ―something inside [him] snapped‖ and he ―went primal‖ when he saw the
602 Ibid, 272. 603 See Muchembled, Orgasm and the West. See also Chapter 2, p. 80 of this thesis. 604 Ibid., 267. 179
enemy fire on one of his wounded men—this is only a temporary sacrifice and neither man is haunted by traumatic memories of his violent acts.605 Other soldiers view war as forcing them to make a permanent choice between sacrificing their humanity to cement their masculinity (to be a good soldier) or sacrificing their manhood to remain human (thus failing as soldiers). Inability to successfully negotiate this identity exchange results in long-term psychic fragmentation that lasts beyond the moment of engagement with the enemy.
The narratives of the three memoirs discussed below revolve around problems of memory, and the interconnections between memory and manhood. These soldiers all suffer from PTSD to varying degrees. The frequent flashbacks and nightmares they have of their time in Iraq cause them to become psychically fixated in the moment of their greatest trauma. They are prisoners of their war memories. Their memoirs function as therapeutic spaces in which they can confront and manage those memories as part of the recovery process. In dissecting and reconstructing their traumatic memories of war, these soldiers attempt to make sense of their identities as men and as human beings. Their war experiences, and the aftermath of those experiences, provide fundamental challenges to the mythology of warrior masculinity. War does not cement masculinity for these men but rather brings about its collapse and redefinition according to alternative logic.
Shannon P. Meehan wrote about his experiences as an armour platoon leader in his memoir Beyond Duty: Life on the Frontline in Iraq (2009). Meehan‘s service in Iraq begins with the affirmation of his masculinity through his leadership success in battle. His identity as a man and as a leader is reinforced with each successful operation he completes. Regarding a missile strike he ordered which obliterated an enemy RPG team, he notes: ―That moment built my confidence. I had been successful as a platoon leader. It was known that I would shortly be awarded the Army Commendation Medal of Valor, and I had developed a reputation as an officer capable of executing a demanding mission.‖ Like many soldiers serving in Iraq, Meehan has a family history of military service, and expresses his pride at being part of the male warrior tradition.606 However, when Meehan is put in charge of his company, one decision changes his life and completely alters his sense of self. Meehan orders another missile strike on a house which is believed to contain a House-Borne IED. After the target is destroyed it quickly transpires that the casualties are not terrorists but a family of eight, including several young children. This incident becomes the defining moment for Meehan, the memory he fixates on throughout his story, and the one that most threatens his masculine identity.
605 Ibid., 113; Martinez, Hard Corps, 195. Bellavia specifically notes how he does not have nightmares about the war (308). 606 Meehan, Beyond Duty, 3–4; 17. 180
According to Meehan, war causes all soldiers to question their masculinity and their performance as men. He recognises the capacity of war to fundamentally fragment the self.
We all felt sometimes that the war might not simply rip away our lives, but rip away who we were and who we might have become. We held onto our soldierly hope, our ideals that make us believe that our training has made a difference in our lives, that our experiences will make us into men and maybe into leaders. But we fear the nights, and we fear the times alone, waiting and wondering about what might have been and what might still be. We dress our wounds, pressing hard down on them, hoping that the dark bird won‘t swoop down on us and lift us like shadows from a scorched earth.607
Even before he ordered the strike on the house, Meehan notes that the war had altered his masculine identity, that the deaths he had both witnessed and perpetuated made him feel ―smaller,‖ ―like a child,‖ and ―reduced.‖608 The deaths of the children, however, constitute the turning point in his identification as a man. Although he is praised for his decision, he rejects the definition of manhood celebrated by the Army, acknowledging: ―I did not believe the war was shaping me into the man I thought I would become.‖609 In his own eyes, Meehan ceases to be a man and is reduced to a child by the deaths of children. When he returns to the U.S. he suffers from depression and nightmares, and is eventually diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury. His war experience has left him not with a coherent sense of self but rather with confusion and ―too many questions..., too many memories to sort through and make sense of.‖610 Writing his memoir forms part of the arduous process of making sense of the memories of war.
For Marine Jeremiah Workman, memories of war are often too much to bear. Workman‘s memoir Shadow of the Sword: A Marine’s Journey of War, Heroism, and Redemption (2009) is as much about his post-war recovery as it is about his wartime experiences. As a sufferer of PTSD, Workman‘s present existence is yoked to his service in Iraq, which is condensed in his psyche to an incident in which three of his fellow Marines were killed in a gunfight inside a house from which he emerged alive. Workman‘s present and past become indistinguishable in the text, as the memory of this one event continuously and involuntarily intrudes into his present narrative. While most memoirs recount multiple engagements with the enemy, albeit with emphasis on one defining moment, Workman‘s
607 Ibid, 74. 608 Ibid, 83; 135; 170. 609 Ibid, 205. 610 Ibid, 269. 181
time in Iraq is entirely reduced to this one event which endlessly repeats itself in his mind, a repetition that re-traumatises him over and over again. His identity as a human being and as a man is stuck inside the house in which his comrades died. This incident is the moment of fracture for Workman, and the memoir becomes a therapeutic space in which he attempts to put himself back together and to create a future free from the trauma of war.
While soldier memoirs typically begin with a condensed recollection of the pivotal moment in the form of a prologue, Workman begins his story with a nightmare of this event. His narrative is framed not by the traumatic experience, but by the haunting memory of the experience which has become as real and as defining as the event itself. Workman‘s identity is split between the gung-ho masculinity of the Marine Corps and the fragility of his humanity. In his nightmare, as he struggles up a flight of stairs inside the house, the Marine identity compels him to prove his manhood: ―The marine in me says keep moving. Never give up. Never. In our line of work, you fight; you die. You do not turn pussy.‖611 In fact, Workman does not give up but fights like a man and emerges from the house physically intact. His trauma comes from the fact that three other Marines died that day and he cannot live with the guilt of surviving when they did not. Workman is broken by the war and is diagnosed with PTSD when he returns to the United States. The core of his being is challenged by his symptoms and his diagnosis; he always believed he could handle anything and, faced with the reality that he cannot, he asks himself: ―Have I lived with a false identity all these years?‖612 He continually relives his moment of trauma, violently acting out against his family, and almost strangling his neighbour‘s dog during a flashback. The ―madness‖ of war, the aggressive masculinity that instructs Marines to fight and kill and die in combat, has negative repercussions when transferred to the civilian home environment. Workman‘s memoir demonstrates that combat does not necessarily result in an unproblematic affirmation of masculinity. Workman must now try to redefine what it means to be a man in light of his traumatic experiences of war. It is clear that this process has not ended with the writing of the memoir but will continue for many years to come.
Sometimes traumatised soldiers are successful at redefining their masculine identities in opposition to the hyper-aggressive warrior ideal. Joshua Key was so affected by the violence against civilians he witnessed in Iraq that he decided to desert the military. In his memoir The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq(2007) Key documents how he began his life with conventional ideas about masculinity and bravery; before going to war himself, he would have labelled all deserters
611 Workman, Shadow of the Sword, ix. 612 Ibid., 42. 182
cowards and had nothing but scorn for them.613 Unlike the other memoirists discussed in this chapter, however, Key has no desire to see combat and is reassured by the Army recruiter‘s insistence that he will be assigned to a bridge-building unit and remain in the United States. Upon his deployment to Iraq, he originally believes in his mission, convinced that hunting for terrorists is an honourable task. However, the longer he serves, the more disenchanted he becomes as he witnesses American soldiers looting Iraqi homes, and assaulting and possibly raping civilians, along with the ubiquitous ―collateral damage‖ of postmodern war. When he is sent home on leave Key makes the decision not to return to Iraq and ends up fleeing to Canada with his wife and children. He comes to believe the activity of American soldiers in Iraq is ―criminal‖ and he deserts to avoid having to continue engaging in such behaviour himself.614
The actions of soldiers in Iraq do not align with Key‘s personal definition of manhood. Although he was raised tough in a culture of heavy drinking and fighting, his experiences with abusive stepfathers taught him to respect women and children. He is not bloodthirsty, describing his abhorrence at shooting a deer as a child and his attempts to humanely kill animals so they would not suffer. Key challenges the assumption that war and combat are inevitable bastions of masculinity. Like Bellavia, Key‘s manhood is tested in war, but a ―pass‖ for Key means refusing to participate in activities he believes are unethical and immoral. The axiomatic connection between violence and masculinity is broken in Key‘s story; violence in fact becomes the antithesis of heroic manhood. While Bellavia embraces the madness of war, harnessing it in his quest to become a complete man, Key recognises the madness as leading only to barbarism and inhumanity. He describes a scene where American soldiers attack a group of Iraqi men and then desecrate their corpses:
‗We fucking lost it, we just fucking lost it,‘ the soldier was shouting.... Two other soldiers were laughing and kicking the heads of the decapitated Iraqis. It was clearly a moment of amusement for them. This was their twisted game of soccer.
Another soldier perversely enjoys wrestling with the bodies of dead Iraqis.615 Like Meehan, war does not shape Key into the man he wanted to become, so he chooses to walk away from it. He chooses humanity over conventional masculinity, rejecting the masculine mythology of war. The Deserter’s Tale is part of Key‘s attempt to construct an alternative, non-hegemonic masculinity based on compassion and non-violence.
613 Key, Deserter’s Tale, 2–3. 614 Ibid., 9. 615 Ibid., 105–6; 149. 183
Ironically, Key‘s journey towards desertion and masculine redefinition begins with his encounters with women in Iraq. Key‘s narrative is unique among those of the male soldiers analysed here in that it is constructed primarily around female figures, as opposed to the more typical focus of the soldier memoirist on his place within a brotherhood of men. All the memoirs discussed in this chapter include influential female characters, but these are usually confined to the soldier‘s pre- and post-combat experiences, representing a space that is antithetical to the combat environment. These women include loyal wives, mothers and sisters who provide support and encouragement, a stable home to return to, and a reason to fight. They also include unfaithful wives and girlfriends who betray the soldiers and cause them anguish and pain. Women soldiers appear occasionally in these memoirs, but they are almost always viewed as sexual objects who only appear at base camp and are again confined outside the combat zone. For Key, in contrast, it is the presence of women and girls in the field of combat that comes to shape his anti-war mentality. The Iraqi civilian population is itself feminised; opposing the war and unable to defend themselves, the Iraqis are the helpless victims of American oppression. In an early encounter on Key‘s first day in Iraq, after raiding a house and detaining the civilians inside, a teenage girl causes him to question his position. Breaking her traditional role of silence, hers is a feminine voice speaking out against war.
A girl in the family—a teenager—started staring at me. I tried to ignore her. Then she began speaking to me.... Her eyes bored holes right through me. She was skin and bones, not even a hundred pounds, not yet a full-grown woman, but something about her seemed powerful and disturbing. I feared that girl, and I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could.... She had no veil, so I could see her face perfectly. Her eyes were coal black and full of hatred. In English, she asked me,... ‗Why are you doing this to us?‘ I couldn‘t answer that.616
Words fail the soldier in the face of female resistance. He fears her because she confirms what he already knows to be true: that his presence there is unjustifiable, that there is no valid answer to her question.
The second pivotal moment for Key takes place at a hospital he is guarding. So significant is this particular event to his narrative that he dedicates an entire chapter to ―The Girl at the Hospital.‖ The girl, who is around seven years of age, lives in a house opposite
616 Ibid, 68–69. 184
the hospital and comes to see Key every day to ask for food. Key is concerned for her safety, but capitulates and begins giving her MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). He creates an imagined life for the girl and describes her appearance and actions in detail. When the girl is violently killed in front of him, her head blown up ―like a mushroom‖ by what he assumes is American fire, Key cannot forgive himself for inadvertently luring her into harm‘s way.617 On other occasions he expresses his concern about the safety of Iraqi women being harassed by Coalition troops in the street and worries that American officers are raping women inside a house he is made to guard.618 Key‘s final war story is reserved for a young girl raped by Iraqi police at the Syrian border. In his narrative he connects the girl with his own daughter, whose future self he imagines in judgement of him: ―This is the last of my war stories. I dream of it still, and find myself waking and shouting out in the night. My own daughter, Anna, is not yet three years old. I can already imagine her questions, one day, and I do not look forward to them.‖619 Key is haunted not just by the violence he has witnessed but specifically by the women he was unable to protect from the horrors of war.
Key‘s is a political memoir which is intended to present his side of the story after he was labelled a criminal and a fugitive in his own country. It is also a psychological memoir which allows its author to create narrative order and meaning out of his traumatic experiences. Key, like the other memoirists discussed in this chapter, aims to document ―the truth‖ about his experiences in Iraq. Yet, as Leonard Smith notes, tangible experience—what ―happened‖—is fundamentally incompatible with narrative. Experience is only ever ―a succession of nows,‖ while narrative requires the imposition of temporality onto those events.620 As such, what ―actually happened‖ can never be captured in narrative form. Instead, the ―truth‖ these memoirs express is the identity of their authors; the quest for truth is synonymous with the quest for self. What happened is not of consequence in its own right but gains meaning as a tool the author uses to mediate his identity as a soldier and as a man. That truth, that identity, is always in flux, constantly in progress, as the soldier struggles to come to terms with himself as a man in a post-war context. Ultimately, whether the soldier‘s experiences of war reinforce or undermine his masculine identity, the Iraq War combat memoirs discussed here highlight the discursive construction of gender and the sexed body, and the significance of the battlefield (both real and remembered) as a site of this construction.
617 Ibid, 123. 618 Ibid, 80; 135. 619 Ibid., 177. 620 Leonard V. Smith, Embattled Self, 20. 185
Conclusion: War Memoirs Online
I believe that the only genuine stories are the ones that never get told. When someone records history, you get their view infused with their motivations and insecurities and their myopic observations of events. Not only am I no different from any other historian quack, but I‘m the worst there is. I‘m obsessed with trying to recount events as accurately and honestly as possible, but in practice the only thing I‘m really any good at is telling you how I feel. — Jason Christopher Hartley
Soldier Jason Christopher Hartley expressed this opinion about the nature of personal narrative in his diary chronicling his time in Iraq.621 The truth about events in Iraq is unattainable; all he can provide is an interpretation of what those events meant to him and how they affected him. Hartley‘s narrative is comparable with those of other soldiers discussed in this chapter, with one important difference: Hartley shared his writing with his readership on the Internet while serving in Iraq. With the advancement of communication technologies in the early twenty-first century, soldiers are increasingly turning to online media to communicate their wartime experiences. Hartley‘s narrative, posted in the form of a weblog (or ―blog‖)—an online diary that documents the daily events of the writer‘s life— represents the next generation of soldier testimony.622 Warblogs (blogs with war content) created by soldiers during their service are often disabled by the U.S. military for compromising military intelligence; this is indeed what happened to Hartley, who also received disciplinary action for violating operational security.623 Yet like memoirs, blogs are as much about constructing the identity of the writer as they are about accurately documenting events. On his blog Just Another Soldier, Hartley noted his role as truth teller in the face of media censorship, but he was also aware of the limitations of the soldier‘s perspective, acknowledging his inability to fully comprehend the situation in Iraq. The truth for Hartley, as for other soldiers in their memoirs, is simply what he ―feels.‖
621 Hartley originally posted this comment on his warblog Just Another Soldier (http://justanothersoldier.com). It was reproduced in the printed version of his diary (Hartley, Just Another Soldier, 59). 622 Weblogs are also created by civilians to document their experiences of war. The most popular and well-known civilian blog of the Iraq War is Dear Raed, which appeared during the lead-up to and opening months of the conflict. On this blog, Salam Pax (the pseudonymous virtual identity of a young architect living in Baghdad) chronicled his views on the morality and political expediency of the invasion, as well as documenting the daily happenings of life in a warzone. Available from http://www.dear_raed.blogspot.com/ (accessed June 7, 2010). 623 Another popular soldier blogger was Colby Buzzell, who was permitted to continue posting on his blog My War (http://cbftw.blogspot.com/) during his time in Iraq. 186
Ultimately, what Hartley feels is a deep cynicism for the entire enterprise and a staunch refusal to take the war, or his role in it, seriously. One interesting feature of Hartley‘s story is his awareness that it is just that: a story. Hartley is highly cognisant of his role as narrative architect and the fact that the memoirist or diarist does not simply tell unmediated truth but actively shapes and constructs truth through narrative. This is made particularly apparent when Hartley recounts an ambush on his unit from the perspective of an Iraqi named Raed, a fictional persona created for one of the men who attacked him. Hartley‘s recognition that he only ever gets to see war from the perspective of his side compels him to invent an identity for his enemy. Written in the first person, Raed‘s elaborate story is a counter to the identity Hartley shapes for himself in his blog. The fact that Raed is not a real person confirms the idea that, in postmodern war, truth is relative, that the only truths are the personal ones experienced by individuals on the ground, and that these truths are remarkably similar for both sides. Hartley‘s decision to include the story of Raed in his narrative of the ambush is part of his attempt to flesh out the detail, to create a meaningful and coherent narrative out of a chaotic situation, to bring the narrative to a ―resolution‖ that did not exist in the actual experience.624
Hartley‘s war diary is thoroughly postmodernist in its content, its narrative style, and the medium of the Internet through which it is distributed. The Internet is increasingly becoming a forum for the expression of personal truths and the mediation of personal identities in the twenty-first century. It is also a space in which the blurring of fact and fiction in the process of identity construction is accepted and even embraced. The instability of meaning the Internet has given rise to is apparent in a new type of war document to come out of the Iraq War: the online combat video.625 Unlike in previous conflicts, many soldiers carried cameras or other hand-held recording devices into Iraq, and many created visual narratives about their wartime experiences. Coalition soldiers often posted their combat footage online, mostly on YouTube given its primacy as by far the largest video-sharing website.626 At time of writing, there are over 5,000 such videos on the website. YouTube‘s slogan ―Broadcast Yourself‖ highlights the role of the medium as a space in which personal identity is shaped and communicated. YouTube, like the Internet generally, also shares the
624 Hartley, Just Another Soldier, 255. 625 See Ritchie, ―Instant Histories.‖ 626 Launched in 2005, YouTube is an integrated interface designed for the uploading and viewing of short video clips by members of the general public. With its hundred million plus videos, YouTube has been defined as the world‘s largest moving image archive or database (see Kessler and Schäfer, ―Navigating YouTube;‖ Prelinger, ―Appearance of Archives;‖ and Schröter, ―On the Logic‖).YouTube has become the default site for the dissemination of audiovisual documents online and is widely regarded as a democratic forum for sharing information about the Iraq War. Snickars argues that video-sharing websites are changing the nature of information and data storage due to the decentralized and increasingly mobile network structure of the Internet (―Archival Cloud‖). 187
democratic impulses of memoir which assert that everyone has a story worthy of narration. YouTube is a product of the contemporary entertainment culture; based on the ethos of reality television and instant celebrity, this culture is a celebration of the self, and the documentation of war is increasingly taking place within this culture.
As kinds of visual memoirs, online combat videos share much with the written memoirs discussed in this chapter. Like their literary counterparts, they often focus on the brutal corporeality and violence of the Iraq War.627 However, they also subscribe much more readily to the principles of entertainment culture. Providing records of only short moments in time—videos of longer than ten minutes are rare—these videos are by their nature fragments that resist temporal narrative order.628 They could thus be regarded as much closer representations of truth in the sense that they seek to capture the ―now‖ of the combat moment without the imposition of authorial, narratorial, or temporal control. However, through the editorial decisions of their creators, they too impose their own order on the chaos they document and their own interpretation on the events they portray. By in large these videos construct the warzone as an exclusively male space. In spite of the large numbers of female soldiers who fought in Iraq, women seldom appear in these videos, just as they seldom appear in written memoirs. Protagonists are almost always male and some videos function as explicit statements of warrior masculinity, asserting the connection between combat and manhood. Of particular interest to a discussion of warrior masculinity is what Christian Christensen has termed the ―Get Some‖ video (a visual equivalent of Martinez‘s Hard Corps memoir).629 These videos depict soldiers engaged in fierce combat with the enemy. They are designed to maximise excitement and emphasise the intense physicality of the combat situation. These videos often feature music soundtracks, almost always aggressive heavy metal or rap with male vocals.630 On occasions when videos do not
627There are many videos which claim to show the ―real‖ or ―raw‖ Iraq War through an emphasis on the graphic violence of combat. Some examples are: ―US MARINES in Iraq Real Footage Warning Graphic,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enm9Dhp79Vk; ―The Real Iraq War (What They Dont [sic] Want You To See!)‖ available fromhttp://www.youtube.com/results?search_query =iraq+war+real&aq=f; ―Iraq War—(Real Footage)‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5PAwbmd3Gw; ―The REAL Iraq War,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next _url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DocsrOjJn1bA; ―What Really Happens in Iraq. WARNING: Graphic Images,‖ available fromhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v =CuehYGXM_Og; and ―Raw IRAQ VIDEO WARNING GRAPHIC FOOTAGE RAWIRAQ.com,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhx7H5aIuMQ&feature=related. (All Accessed October 29, 2010). 628 I am indebted to Caitlin Maher for this idea. 629 Christensen, ―‗Hey Man, Nice Shot!‘‖208–10. 630 There are thousands of ―Iraq War music videos‖ on YouTube. Some examples are: ―Iraq War Music Video—US Airforce bombing Iraq,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =JM58Z1zzoP4; ―4th25: Iraq War Music Video: Song ‗Live From Iraq‘,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w8uTyVbYUE; ―Iraq War Music Video,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbsIw8gD6NE; ―Iraq War Music Video,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0sHVU715Y; ―Combat footage of US Marines in Fallujah, Iraq 188
conform to the hardened masculine stereotype, viewer comments denote disapproval. For example, the dance track ―With a Spirit‖ by 009 Sound System, which is used as the soundtrack to several Iraq combat videos, is widely denounced in the online comments that accompany the video for making the military seem ―gay‖ (that is, effeminate, denoting male homosexuality not lesbianism).631 Such ―feminine‖ music is accused of misrepresenting the military as soft and weak; the videos are criticised as inauthentic because they fail to construct the combat environment as a space where real men are made.
Many online combat videos thus confirm the mythology that war fortifies conventional masculinity. Yet these videos also form an important part of the counter-narrative tradition discussed above, and soldiers who made the videos clearly felt a sense of entitlement to document their personal war experiences and circulate them in the public domain, even if this explicitly contravened military policy. Christensen has (correctly) referred to these videos as examples of ―dissonance‖ designed to provide ―opposing views‖ to official war narratives propagated by the U.S. military.632 Yet dissonance is not the same as dissent, and these videos are not necessarily anti-war. Indeed, in their glorification of violence the ―Get Some‖ videos could be seen as pro-war, or at least pro-violence. The comments of soldiers who posted the videos reveal that they could be equally disgruntled with anti-war protestors as they were with a government and military that seemed intent on needlessly sacrificing American lives in a war many soldiers did not support and could not justify. Regardless of their political stance, or lack thereof, these videos are ultimately concerned with documenting a perspective that is not represented in mainstream media. In a documentary about the war filmed by U.S. soldiers, Sergeant Steve Pink recorded his reaction after a car bombing he was present at was reported on CNN: ―We made the news. I feel exploited and proud at the same time. I have lost all faith in the media—a hapless joke I would much rather laugh at than become a part of.‖633 In MTV‘s documentary Iraq Uploaded: The War That Network TV Won’t Show You, which interviewed soldiers about their web videos, soldiers articulated their impressions that mass media had ―dropped the ball‖ regarding coverage of Iraq due to self-censorship. The documentary describes the role of soldiers‘ videos in ―filling in details about the Iraq War largely scrubbed from the mainstream media.‖634 For some soldiers, then, the act of creating and distributing a video constituted an explicit effort to
Music Video,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M5J_VYKo6s. (All accessed October 29, 2010). 631 Videos that use this song include ―US MARINES in Iraq Real Footage Warning Graphic,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enm9Dhp79Vk&feature=related; and ―Awesome Sniping,‖ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ00uZs7uNI&feature=related. (Both accessed August 12, 2010). 632 Christensen, ―Uploading Dissonance,‖ 167. 633 War Tapes. 634 Iraq Uploaded. 189
represent the ―real‖ Iraq as seen from the perspective of the ordinary soldier on the ground. Unlike Hartley, these soldiers believe there is a definitive truth to their experience that can be accessed and presented to the public. Soldiers thus created narratives in opposition to postmodernism—which posits war as spectacle and entertainment, seeks to erase the human body from the discourses of war, and breaks down distinctions between fiction and fact—while using the tools of postmodernity to achieve this goal.
These videos point to the Internet as a space where alternative war narratives might be written and disseminated. The Internet constitutes an interactive interpersonal space where the principles of democracy, self-actualisation, and entertainment culture merge. Since it resists the hegemonic control of mass news media, the Internet provides an important challenge to the military–media complex which relies on military and government control of media outlets. The Internet provides a space for voices traditionally silenced by war and militarism, including women‘s. How will new media technologies impact the gender– violence relationship? What are the implications of online media for constructions of gender and the sexed body in postmodern war? Will cyberspace be utilised for the reinforcement of mythologies of male warriorhood, as in the ―Get Some‖ videos cited above? Or will it rather enable non-hegemonic conceptualisations of sex and gender that destabilise the Warrior Myth? The next and final chapter of this thesis explores gender identity construction in the online space in an attempt to answer these questions. 190
Chapter 6
Politics as a Continuation of War: The Posthumanisation of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic Primary Campaign (2007–08)635
Postmodern war is first of all, and last of all, a political issue.
— Chris Hables Gray636
German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz‘s maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means has become the prevailing definition of modern war. War was utilised by governments in modernity as a tool for maintaining dominance over other nations, for gaining territory and political advantage, and for ensuring allegiance. It could be argued that in the postmodern period the situation has reversed and politics is now an extension of war.637 When a society is in a state of permanent war and militarisation, politics operates in the maintenance of war waging and militaristic ideology. As Gray writes, ―Politics are so militarized that every act of war needs political preparation and justification. There is only the most limited war space where all important decisions are made on military grounds. Wars can only be won politically. Through military means the best that can be accomplished is not to lose.‖638 This chapter centres on the American political system in the context of post-9/11 militarisation and overseas military action. I use the term ―politics‖ to refer to the organisation of government within the context of the Western democratic system, and am particularly interested here in the electoral environment and the processes by which states choose their government leaders. In the era of postmodern war it is the mandate of American politicians in the highest offices not only to lead their country in times of war but also to ensure the permanent militarisation of their societies. In earlier chapters, I discussed how such militarisation is assisted through the military–media complex, whereby governments manage the perception of violent conflict through the manipulation of media channels, and through media‘s self-appointed role as perpetuators of gender hegemony in war. Such militarisation is also apparent in media constructions of political leaders, particularly concerning the role of president who acts as commander-in-chief of the West‘s largest military force. This chapter explores the interaction between ideologies of gender and ideologies of militarism in such
635 Parts of this chapter are forthcoming in Feminist Media Studies. Ritchie, Jessica. ―Creating a Monster: Online Media Constructions of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic Primary Campaign, 2007—8.‖ Feminist Media Studies 13.1 (2013). 636 Gray, Postmodern War, 251. 637 Foucault argues that politics ―has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder.‖ In the eighteenth century, military forces were used to protect nations from external enemies but also to maintain order within societies (Discipline and Punish,168–69). 638 Gray, Postmodern War, 169–70. 191
representations. Although societies have always been militarised, at different times militarisation takes on new or particular importance. This chapter explores the particular context of U.S. society after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the specific relationship between militarism and twenty-first-century electoral politics.
Militarism has always been of central importance to the American presidency. From the nation‘s first president, war hero George Washington, to Second World War general Dwight D. Eisenhower, holding a military position has often been a precursor to entering the White House. In recent years, presidential candidates have gone to great lengths to assert their military prowess during their campaigns. John McCain‘s service in Vietnam and his status as a former POW was the centrepiece of his campaign in 2007–08, helping him to win the Republican nomination. McCain‘s campaign staff emphasised his military service as a marker of effective political leadership and drew on the mythology of heroism to give legitimacy to his campaign. (One of McCain‘s campaign buttons sported the slogan ―Time for a real hero.‖) In 2003–04, John Kerry was chosen to run on the Democratic ticket in part because he was a war veteran; he further enhanced his bellicose image by inviting media on his hunting trips.639 Conversely, lack of military service can work against candidates, as witnessed when Kerry‘s war heroism was publicly questioned, undermining his viability as a presidential candidate.640 Anti-war sentiment has also worked against presidential candidates: Kerry was initially considered a suspect candidate because of his early anti-war stance, while Bill Clinton‘s ―draft dodging‖ was used by his opponents in an attempt to discredit him during his bid for the White House in 1992. George Bush Sr. was famously branded with the ―wimp factor.‖641 Sitting presidents also take pains to militarise themselves, as in the example of George W. Bush who constructed himself as a hero of the War on Terror (see Chapter 4).
Male presidents and presidential candidates simultaneously rely on the masculinist logic of the Warrior Myth and develop their own personal warrior mythologies, representing themselves as war heroes whether they have fought in combat or not. Female candidates, in contrast, are symbolically denied access to warrior mythologies and cannot draw upon the warrior legacy. The most they can do is attach themselves to male warriors or play at warmongering, such as in the case of McCain‘s running mate Sarah Palin whose son was serving in Iraq during the campaign and who was frequently photographed sporting firearms. Most famously, media reaction to an earlier candidate for vice-president proved both how
639 See Duerst-Lahti, ―Masculinity on the Campaign Trail.‖ 640 See, for example, Laurence, ―Vietnam Swift Boat Veterans.‖ 641 For a discussion of how George H. W. Bush overcame his effeminate image, see Ducat, Wimp Factor, chapter 3. 192
central militarism is to the presidency and how that militarism is the exclusive preserve of men. Geraldine Ferraro, who ran on Democrat Walter Mondale‘s ticket in 1984, was asked what a male candidate would never be expected to answer: Was she strong enough to ―push the button‖ and declare nuclear war?
This chapter discusses the relationship between politics, the Western gender system and postmodern war through an analysis of media constructions of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary campaign of 2007–08. I examine the gender trouble that arises when a woman enters the race for the presidency by exploring media reactions to the incongruities of a potential female commander-in-chief. As in previous chapters, I analyse media sources from the United States as well as other Western countries (the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia). While American media outlets were likely to have been the primary source of information about the campaign for potential voters, as previously noted media is increasingly becoming transnational and the American voting public also has access to foreign media via global news networks, the circulation of foreign newspapers, and the broadcast of foreign news programmes on American television. In particular, my discussion of representations of Clinton in online media suggests the increasing globalisation of new media technologies. Comparisons with representations in other nations‘ media also reveal shared gender ideologies and attitudes towards women in positions of power. Representations of Clinton in the media of other Western nations may have additional implications for popular acceptance of female leaders, as well as for understandings of the gender binary, in those nations.
The 2007–08 primary provides a unique context for analysing sex and gender not only because a woman progressed further in the race than any other in history but also because of the unusual and complex ways in which the two main candidates (Clinton and Barack Obama) were gendered in media. Media constructions of Clinton underscore Western society‘s ongoing efforts to grapple with sexual and gender identity in the postmodern period and are indicative of a profound gender anxiety that is thrown into relief when women enter the political realm. Generating particular anxiety is the relationship of female politicians to violence and war, along with the complex interconnections between violence and sexuality. While the office of the presidency demands a tough stance on international relations and an ability to engage with militaristic policies, gender stereotypes that associate women with weakness and non-violence continue to cloud perceptions of female candidates, putting them at a disadvantage.
At the same time, technological developments are complicating understandings of female candidates‘ relationship to violence, taking them beyond a reliance on conventional 193
stereotypes. Media constructions of Clinton that utilise military and cyber-technology demonstrate much more conflicted attitudes towards women and war/violence than a simple assumption that a woman could never ―push the button.‖ In this chapter I make a case study of online media and the ways new media technologies are changing politics, militarism, and gender identity construction in the twenty-first century. However, this discussion is located within an analysis of the wider media climate in recognition that all media sources work in tandem as part of the same postmodern mediascape. Many newspapers and television networks have websites on which they post their articles and programme transcripts, blurring distinctions between online and offline, ―old‖ and ―new‖ media. The Internet is changing the nature and definition of ―media‖ in postmodernity, particularly with the introduction of participatory and interactive systems and networks (known as Web 2.0), necessitating new understandings of the role of media in the negotiation of gender in postmodern war.
In its exploration of the ways technology is transforming gendered experience and representation, this chapter engages with theories of posthumanism and the posthuman body. Just as humanism is the defining ideology of modernity, posthumanism is shaping understandings of postmodern identity formation. Theories of posthumanism are based on the idea that the notion of being ―human‖ (human being) is destabilised by human interactions with and reliance upon technology.642 As discussed in Chapter 1, theorists of postmodern war have argued that the human body is disappearing from war and being replaced by machines. Throughout this thesis I have argued against this idea, positing instead that technology is altering the human body (materially and discursively) at war. Theories of posthumanism embrace this position. While theories that argue the human is being replaced by the machine assume ontological difference between the two (much like the distinction between male and female bodies that has characterised modernity), in the posthuman view ―there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.‖643 Thus posthumanism does not signal the end of the human nor signify what comes ―after‖ humanity. Rather, it encompasses the amalgamation of organism and machine, collapsing distinctions between them.
If binary gender is a central feature of humanist identity in modernity, posthumanism also provides a theory of post-gender identity; the destabilisation of ―humanity‖ entails the destabilisation of the gender binary. The post-gender subject of posthumanist theory is the
642 For examples of posthumanist theorising of the human–technology relationship, see Clarke, Paradox of the Posthuman; Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future; Halberstam and Livingstone, Posthuman Bodies; Haney, Cyberculture; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Merrell, Sensing Corporeally; Miccoli, Posthuman Suffering; and Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls. 643 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. 194
cyborg, which has been theorised as a figure of feminist transgression. Cyborgs constitute another engagement with the relationship between the representational and the experiential. As simultaneous ―entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions,‖ cyborgs are products of both ―technology and discourse.‖644 The cyborg problematises the gendered distinction between nature and technology. As an uncontainable, unclassifiable dual hybrid of male and female, and organism and machine, the cyborg is the ultimate gender-bending monster for the postmodern age. Yet the cyborg (like the monster which spawned it) has also been used as a vehicle for the reinforcement of sexual difference, marginalising and subjugating women by dehumanising them. In the last section of this chapter I explore the tension in the cyborg as a figure of gender containment and transgression through an analysis of the cyborgisation of Hillary Clinton in media, with a case study of posthuman digital imagery. Far from making sex and gender irrelevant, as arguments for the cyborg‘s post-gender embodiment have suggested, the posthumanisation of Clinton in media instead makes sex the defining feature of her identity, simultaneously using her womanhood and lack of womanhood against her, and punishing her for her symbolic refusal to stay within the bounds of one sex category.
Gendered Constructions of Political Candidates in Media: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
Understanding the gendered implications of media constructions of political candidates is imperative as these are likely to have a significant impact on popular opinion and thus on voter outcome. News coverage typically provides the only contact the voting public has with their candidates; as such, voters are guided largely by the information presented to them by media sources.645 Numerous studies have demonstrated significant differences in media representations of male and female candidates in the American political context, concluding that this usually works against women. Research conducted in the 1990s revealed that gender stereotypes were prevalent in media coverage of senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns.646 Kim Fridkin Kahn found that ―reporters [were] much more likely to refer to ‗female‘ traits such as compassion and honesty when describing women candidates compared to male candidates‖ in senatorial campaigns.647 Male candidates were more closely associated in media with supposedly masculine qualities, such as assertiveness and
644 Hayles, ―Life Cycle of Cyborgs,‖ 158. 645 Duerst-Lahti, ―Masculinity on the Campaign Trail;‖ Heith, ―Lipstick Watch;‖ Kahn, Political Consequences; Paletz, Media in American Politics; and Woodall and Fridkin, ―Shaping Women‘s Chances.‖ 646 Kahn, ―Does Being Male Help?‖ ―Does Gender Make a Difference?‖ and Political Consequences. 647 Kahn, Political Consequences, 53. 195
aggression, and masculine issues such as foreign policy and defence. Female candidates also received less media coverage than male candidates in Kahn‘s study.648 More recent research has suggested that media coverage is becoming more balanced, with female senatorial and gubernatorial candidates receiving equal amounts of media attention as male candidates.649 However, news media continue to rely on gender stereotypes, focusing on women‘s appearance, marital status and personal qualities, and associating them with ―feminine‖ issues like health and education.650 Further, a 2007 study by Woodall and Fridkin demonstrated that reporters ―are less accurate in their representation of the messages of women candidates,‖651 suggesting an enduring assumption that women do not belong in the political arena.
There is less data to analyse at the federal level, as few women have campaigned for the presidency, but studies of Elizabeth Dole‘s bid for the Republican nomination in 1999 found that she received less media attention than her male rivals, and her coverage was more stereotyped, with reporters tending to concentrate on her appearance and personality traits rather than her policies. In addition, coverage of Dole was more negative, with emphasis placed on her lack of viability.652 Women are likely to fare less well at the presidential level because this office is more closely associated with masculine traits and behaviours. For instance, Kahn found that the higher the office in question, the more asymmetrical the news coverage of male and female candidates; that is, women running for governor received more favourable media treatment than women running for the senate, probably because gubernatorial campaigns tend to concentrate on stereotypically feminine issues.653
At the presidential level, media representations of female candidates‘ relationships to militarism and war are especially important as these issues play a central role in shaping public opinion. Survey results reveal that the American public assumes men to be more capable of handling military and foreign policy issues while women are perceived as operating more effectively in the areas of education, health care and social welfare.654 While
648 Kahn, Political Consequences. 649 Bystrom et al., Gender and Candidate Communication; and Jalalzai, ―Women Candidates.‖ 650 Bystrom et al., Gender and Candidate Communication; Devitt, ―Framing Gender;‖ and Kittilson and Fridkin, ―Gender, Candidate Portrayals and Election Campaigns.‖ 651 Woodall and Fridkin, ―Shaping Women‘s Chances,‖ 77. 652 Aday and Devitt, ―Style Over Substance;‖ and Heldman, Carroll, and Olson, ―‗She Brought Only a Skirt‘.‖ 653 Kahn, ―Does Gender Make a Difference?‖ and Political Consequences. 654 Huddy and Terkildsen, ―Gender Stereotypes;‖ Kahn, Political Consequences, 65; and Woodall and Fridkin, ―Shaping Women‘s Chances,‖ 70. 196
the majority of Americans have stated their willingness to vote for a female president,655 studies have shown that support for women candidates drops in periods of war and violent conflict. Results of several polls demonstrated that support for a female commander-in-chief decreased in the years immediately following the September 11 attacks.656 Support for hypothetical female presidential candidates was on the rise again by 2006.657 However, a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted during the primary campaign in July 2007 found that, while the majority of respondents believed Hillary Clinton demonstrated ―presidential‖ qualities, more than half were uncertain about her ability to handle an international crisis.658 Such gender stereotyping has significant implications for female candidates because ―masculine‖ issues are more likely than ―feminine‖ issues to be viewed as salient by the American voting public at all times,659 but especially in times of war.660
Perhaps for this reason Clinton consistently called attention to her militaristic qualities as well as her general toughness during the Democratic primary campaign. Clinton took a characteristically masculine stance in her policies on war and national security: she supported the Bush administration‘s decision to invade Iraq in 2002 and refused to retract or apologise for her position during the primaries; in 2007 she voted for a resolution to designate Iran‘s Revolutionary Guard as terrorists; and she was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2003. While Clinton‘s foreign policy positions reflect her personal and political beliefs, she also appears to have drawn specific attention to her militarism at key points during the campaign. She emphasised her militaristic agenda during her campaign, with statements such as one made on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary that, as commander-in-chief she could ―totally obliterate‖ Iran if it launched a nuclear attack on Israel.661 In a now infamous gaffe, she unsuccessfully attempted to construct herself as a kind of war hero, claiming that she had come under gunfire when disembarking from a helicopter in Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1996. Her stated reason for seeking the nomination for president was that she considered herself to be ―the best qualified and experienced person to hit the ground running in January 2009,‖ likening herself to troops parachuting into battle.662 To assuage the fears of that half of the population which doubted her ability to
655 In a 2000 Gallup poll, 87 percent of respondents stated that they would vote for a ―qualified‖ woman nominated by their party (cited in Duerst-Lahti, ―Masculinity on the Campaign Trail‖). 656 Falk and Kenski, ―Issue Saliency;‖ and Lawless, ―Women, War, and Winning Elections.‖ 657 Han, ―Is the United States;‖ Hansen and Otero, ―Woman for U.S. President?‖ Woodall and Fridkin, ―Shaping Women‘s Chances,‖ 82. 658 CBS News/New York Times Poll, July 9–17, 2007, cited in Kunin, Pearls, Politics, and Power, 155. 659 Falk and Kenski, ―Issue Saliency,‖ 3; and Huddy and Terkildsen, ―Gender Stereotypes,‖ 141. 660 Woodall and Fridkin, ―Shaping Women‘s Chances,‖ 81. 661 D. Morgan, ―Clinton Says.‖ 662 Scherer, ―Hillary is from Mars.‖ 197
handle an international crisis, her campaign staff produced a commercial showing an unflinching and unemotional Clinton answering the Red Phone at 3am.
However, media reaction to Clinton‘s tough approach demonstrates how such gender atypical displays, while intended to increase a female candidate‘s viability, can have the opposite effect. The belief that women should be warm and compassionate means that when female candidates fail to behave in these expected ways they are often criticised and mocked. Clinton was negatively characterised by media as cold, calculating and mechanical due to her stereotypically masculine approach. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, for instance, censured Clinton for being ―controlling, aloof and contemptuous.‖663 Jonah Goldberg criticised her wooden appearance and lack of spontaneity: ―She plans everything.... One can imagine her practicing every important pronouncement in front of her mirror with color-coded flashcards.‖664 When Clinton showed an uncharacteristic display of emotion after losing the Iowa primary she was demonised for falsifying emotion in order to win sympathy from (especially female) voters.665 According to several media sources, Clinton is so mechanical and unfeeling that she is incapable of crying real tears. However, the double bind faced by female candidates is that they are just as likely to be denigrated for showing too much emotion. ―Feminine‖ traits such as emotional instability and compassion are incommensurable with the key election issues of militarism and aggressive foreign policy.666
Yet gender stereotypes were not the only reason Clinton‘s attempts to militarise herself backfired; the unique electoral climate of the 2007–08 cycle also played a role. Ironically, voters reacted against Clinton‘s bellicosity in favour of her main rival Barack Obama‘s diplomacy. A woman trying to subvert the Warrior Myth did not receive a positive reaction in the particular anti-war climate following eight years of Bush‘s unpopular military endeavours.667 It was precisely his lack of militarism—and his associated ―feminine‖ traits of compassion and empathy—that made Obama so appealing to voters. In contrast to Clinton, Obama emphasised mediation and diplomacy, refusing to support the Iraq War and calling for the peaceful resolution of international disputes, and in so doing playing into the stereotype of the ―sensitive New-Age man.‖ While Clinton was viewed as ―tough‖668 and her candidacy as resembling ―the muscular vision and authority of the macho candidates of
663 Andrew Sullivan, ―Great Escape.‖ 664 Goldberg, ―Hillary is the Queen.‖ Clinton has been criticised for her calculating personality since her time as first lady (see Ducat, Wimp Factor; and Templin, ―Hillary Clinton‖). Elizabeth Dole was also ridiculed for her lack of spontaneity (see Clift and Brazaitis, Madam President, 149). 665 See Andrew Sullivan, ―Great Escape;‖ and USA Today, ―Did Near-Tear.‖ 666 Jamieson, Beyond the Double Bind. 667 For discussions of the importance of the political climate in electoral campaigns, see Lawless, ―Women, War, and Winning Elections;‖ and Woodall and Fridkin, ―Shaping Women‘s Chances.‖ 668 Marie Wilson, quoted in Amy Sullivan, ―Gender Bending.‖ 198
yesteryear,‖669 Obama was received as ―warm,‖ ―soft,‖ and ―tender,‖670 bringing ―messages of hope and reconciliation.‖671 In spite of the symbolic conflation of militarism and heroism, however, this role reversal did not result in the heroising of Clinton and the censuring of Obama for his weakness. Instead, Obama was constructed in liberal media as a different kind of hero—not a hero of war like his Republican rival McCain but a hero of peace, a pacific saviour for a war-torn world.672 As established in Chapter 4, the hero role is one that only a man can fill, and ―heroes have always had an edge in elections,‖673 even if that heroism is characterised by stereotypically female attributes and behaviours. Like Jessica Lynch, Clinton‘s sexed body precluded heroism.
What was most interesting about this particular campaign, however, was the very instability of the candidates‘ sexed bodies in media representations. Some media and members of the public took gendered characterisations of Clinton and Obama beyond the simple assertion that Clinton was masculine (tough, cold, aggressive) and Obama feminine (soft, warm, compassionate). As the campaign progressed, the imperative to conflate feminine behaviours with women and masculine behaviours with men resulted in a bizarre re-sexing of the two main candidates. A range of media outlets, along with members of the voting public, began to assert that Obama was the female candidate in the race while Clinton was the man. ―In the Democratic presidential pack,‖ Salon.com‘s Michael Scherer declared, ―the leading man is a woman and the leading woman is a man.‖ Scherer quoted Clara Oleson, an Iowa Democrat (and Obama supporter) referring to Obama as ―the female candidate‖ and ―the woman‖ while Clinton was ―the male candidate.‖674 Clinton supporters brought home-made signs to a 2007 rally in Oakland, California, sporting the slogan: ―Hillary Clinton: She‘s Our Man.‖675 Margaret Wente advised her Globe and Mail readers that ―If you want a real man, just vote for Hillary‖ and asserted that Clinton‘s Red Phone commercial was designed ―to warn voters not to send a young man to do a real man's job.‖676 Marie Wilson, co-founder of the White House Project, a non-partisan organisation with the goal of advancing women in government and business, described Obama as ―the girl in the race‖677
669 Scherer, ―Hillary is from Mars.‖ 670 Democrat Clara Oleson, quoted in Scherer, ―Hillary is from Mars.‖ 671 Marie Wilson, quoted in Amy Sullivan, ―Gender Bending.‖ 672 The symbolic association of Obama with heroic anti-militarism continued into his presidency. In 2009 he was controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, just nine months into his presidency. See Watts and Schroeder, ―Obama: Surprised, Humbled.‖ 673 Duerst-Lahti, ―Masculinity on the Campaign Trail,‖ 88. 674 Scherer, ―Hillary is from Mars.‖ 675 Watkin. ―Hillary Conundrum.‖ The signs were confiscated by security guards. 676 Wente.―If You Want a Real Man.‖ 677 Quoted in Amy Sullivan, ―Gender Bending.‖ 199
and Kathleen Parker charted Clinton‘s ―metamorphosis into a man.‖678 Scherer aptly ended his article with the impartial pronouncement, ―May the best woman win.‖
Specifically, it was the candidates‘ stances on militarism that brought about this virtual sex change. A common strategy among pundits was to turn John Gray‘s nineties pop- psychology maxim on its head by arguing that ―Hillary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus,‖ firmly yoking assertions of Clinton‘s manhood to her militarism and Obama‘s lack of militarism to his womanhood through a reliance on sexed mythologies regarding war.679 Statements about Clinton‘s ―gender bending‖ were often used to mock or denigrate her, such as when fashion guru and television‘s Project Runway host Tim Gunn told Conan O‘Brien that Clinton‘s sense of style suggested she was ―confused about what her gender is,‖ a comment that was met with raucous laughter and applause from the studio audience.680 Yet, as the hand-made signs on the campaign trail suggest, Clinton supporters also championed their candidate‘s honorary manhood. Embodying the opposite sex was viewed as both a positive and a negative feature of Clinton‘s candidacy. While Dick Morris and Eileen McGann‘s assertion that ―conflict is the principle which permits her to organize her life‖ was meant disparagingly, Gloria Steinem used Clinton‘s stereotypically male enjoyment of conflict to convince voters she would make an effective president.681 Similarly, the endowing of Clinton with metaphorical male genitalia served as a compliment—albeit a backhanded one, such as when Bill Clinton‘s former advisor James Carville declared that ―if [Hillary Clinton] gave [Obama] one of her cojones, they‘d both have two‖682—and as part of an effort to malign Clinton, as in Wente‘s comment that a lagging Clinton‘s ―only hope of reclaiming the nomination is to scare people into thinking she has more balls...than that kid with the jug ears who's got the audacity to hope he can beat her.‖683 For the female candidate, being ―male‖ was at once a strength and a weakness.
678 Parker, ―Senator Clinton, Cyborg.‖ 679 ―Hillary is from Mars, Obama is From Venus‖ is the title of Scherer‘s article on Salon.com. Writing for FoxNews.com, Dick Morris (former advisor to Bill Clinton) and Eileen McGann argued, ―If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, the former valuing peace and the other reveling in war, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lot more like Mars than Venus‖ (―Hillary Clinton: Warrior or Bully?‖). See also Fields, ―Look Who‘s Just in From Venus.‖ 680 Video available from The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/19/tim-gunn- hillary-clinton-_n_87408.html (accessed November 17, 2008). 681 Morris and McGann, ―Hillary Clinton: Warrior or Bully?‖ Steinem, quoted in Stanage, ―Stumping for Clinton.‖ 682 Carville, quoted in Parker, ―Senator Clinton, Cyborg.‖ 683 Wente, ―If You Want a Real Man.‖ During her time as first lady, Clinton was frequently represented as having a penis in jokes and political cartoons. Ducat argues from a psychoanalytic standpoint that ―depictions of the first lady‘s penis...not only express worry about and contempt for her phallic potency, but also evince...a certain pleasure. It is as if...[some] men are unconsciously torn between the fear that a woman might have a penis, and the wish that she did‖ (Wimp Factor, 142). 200
Wente‘s argument highlighted Clinton‘s dilemma: her need to convince the voting public she had figurative balls was a glaring indication of the fact that she did not literally possess any. Despite her stance on war, her origins on Mars, and her honorary male subjectivity, Clinton was still essentially female in the eyes of media, and her womanhood was as much a focus of media attention as her lack thereof. Clinton‘s female sex was always going to be a key feature of the presidential race. She had, after all, come closer to receiving a presidential nomination than any woman in history.684 As a result, hundreds of column inches were dedicated to discussions of her historic bid for the White House, along with speculation as to whether the country was indeed ―ready‖ for a female president and, in light of her main rival‘s equally historic position as potentially the first African American president, heated debates over whether gender or race was a greater hindrance to political and social advancement.685Clinton‘s womanhood also prompted a deluge of misogynistic and anti- feminist commentary thinly disguised as political analysis. During the course of the campaign, she was referred to in print and broadcast media as ―bitchy,‖686 ―castrating,‖687 a ―dominatrix,‖688 and a ―strip-teaser,‖ and was compared to ―Madame Defarge,‖ ―Nurse Ratched‖689 and a ―scolding mother.‖690 Radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh asked if the nation would want to watch a woman grow old in the White House,691 while host of MSNBC‘s Hardball Chris Matthews likened her voice when delivering a speech to ―fingernails on a blackboard.‖692 Anti-feminist backlash even worked its way into one of Clinton‘s own rallies in New Hampshire where hecklers were removed after chanting ―Iron my shirt!‖ at the senator, an incident that was widely reported in media. In addition to misogynistic sentiment, Clinton was frequently accused of playing the ―gender card‖ and of winning states as a result of the
684 Although she progressed further than previous female candidates, Clinton was wrongly represented by the news media as the first ―serious‖ female contender for president. Woodall and Fridkin note that media sources constructed Elizabeth Dole in the same way during her campaign for the Republican nomination in 1999. They write: ―By using the ‗first woman‘ frame, the news media may have been encouraging citizens to view Dole as a novelty and as a candidate not to be taken seriously‖ (―Shaping Women‘s Chances,‖ 79). 685 For discussions of Clinton‘s construction as ―first‖ female contender for presidency and whether the American people were ―ready‖ for a female president, see Han and Heldman, eds., Rethinking Madam President; Payne, ―Whether Clinton Advances;‖ and Wilson, ―Gender Politics and Fear.‖ For news articles on gender versus racial politics, see Crary, ―Sexism, Racism;‖ and Yeatman, ―How is a Black Feminist to Choose?‖ 686 Christopher Hitchens on CNBC, quoted in Goodrich, ―Soppy and Bitchy.‖ 687 Tucker Carlson, host of MSNBC‘s Tucker, March 20, 2007. Transcript available from Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200703200013 (accessed November 2010). 688 Dowd, ―Haunting Obama‘s Dreams.‖ 689 MSNBC‘s Hardball host Chris Matthews, quoted in Jorgensen, ―Ice Queen.‖ 690 CNN‘s Jack Cafferty, quoted in Boehlert, ―For Chris Matthews.‖ 691 Cited in Crary, ―Sexism, Racism.‖ 692 MSNBC: Hardball, ―Hardball for October 30, 2007.‖ 201
―gender vote.‖693 Inevitable comparisons with Margaret Thatcher—ironically dubbed a ―real‖ feminist because she did not draw attention to sex discrimination against her—diminished Clinton on the basis of her sex while appearing to be pro-women.694 If any voters were inclined to view Clinton as a candidate rather than a female candidate, media served them frequent reminders that rendered such gender blindness impossible.
Clinton‘s sexual identity was, therefore, simultaneously constructed as male and female; at once ballsy and ball-busting (witness the production of the ―Hillary Nutcracker‖ which crushed even the toughest nuts between its stainless steel thighs), she was perceived as inhabiting the identities and bodies of both a man and a woman, a characterisation that reached its logical conclusion in her construction as monster and cyborg (see below). Media coverage of the Democratic primaries suggests the stability of identity categories in the Western cultural consciousness. Discussions of ―gender‖ and ―race‖ were predicated on the assumption that such markers of identity have ontological and epistemological significance in the twenty-first century and continue to play a prominent role in the definition of a person‘s subjectivity and in the way that person is perceived by others. In addition, assertions that Clinton was ―male‖ and Obama ―female,‖ while reversing the typical categorisation, persisted in affirming the dialectic of sexual difference as a meaningful human classificatory system. Yet media portrayals of both candidates also drew attention to the permeability of identity boundaries. Just as characterisations of Obama as ―mixed race‖ (born of a black African father and a white American mother) fuelled anxiety about the parameters of racial and ethnic identity—was Obama ―really‖ black, and to what extent could he be classified as ―African American‖ given the absence of an ancestral connection to slavery?—so too Clinton‘s simultaneous embodiment of male and female identities exposed a society in the midst of a deep gender crisis.
Constructions of Clinton and Obama as sexed subjects point to the performativity of both gender and sex. Clinton performed and was received by media as a man, complete with testicles, taking a hard-line approach to foreign policy and national security, but also as a feminist who frequently emphasised her identity as a woman in response to campaigns to discredit her, as well as the historic nature of her bid to become the first female President of the United States. Obama performed as a woman, spreading a message of togetherness and reconciliation as he blasted female empowerment ballads at his rallies,695 but also as a
693 Devine, ―Give the Excuses a Break;‖ Harnden, ―Clinton Plays Gender Card;‖ Spooner, ―Clinton and the Gender Vote;‖ Andrew Sullivan, ―Great Escape;‖Andrew Sullivan, ―Slippery Hillary;‖ and Wente, ―If You Want a Real Man.‖ 694 Devine, ―Give the Excuses a Break;‖ Andrew Sullivan, ―Great Escape;‖ Andrew Sullivan, ―Slippery Hillary;‖ and Wheatcroft, ―Who Made Hillary Queen?‖ 695 Scherer, ―Hillary is from Mars.‖ 202
black man with a specific racialised and gendered history (his bestselling memoir was revealingly titled Dreams from My Father). All these constructions reveal sex and gender (as well as race) to be complex interactive systems that problematise conventional, stable categorisations of male and female, masculinity and femininity.
Yet, while both Obama and Clinton were made to undergo sex reversals in media, Clinton‘s gendered construction was further complicated by the fact that female presidential candidates are comparatively unusual. Only Clinton‘s simultaneous embodiment of male and female identities resulted in her construction in media as a dangerous monster. Anxiety about Obama tended to focus more on his racial and religious background, with speculation that he is Muslim and was born in Kenya. In particular, the Internet was a space for the vilification and mockery of Obama on the basis of his race. Digital images spliced Obama‘s head onto Osama bin Laden‘s body, referencing the similarities in the two men‘s names;696 cartoons mocked his large ears, comparing him to Dumbo;697 and he was portrayed as a rapper appealing for the black vote, playing into the stereotype of the modern African- American male.698 Like Clinton‘s gender, Obama‘s racial and religious heritage was a source of considerable anxiety throughout the campaign that has continued into his presidency, with the vocal presence of the ―birther‖ movement which has challenged Obama‘s right to the presidency by questioning the authenticity of his birth certificate.699
Linda F. Selzer notes that Obama‘s opponents represented him in media in three prominent ways during the campaign that emphasised both his race and the ―un- Americanness‖ that was perceived as stemming from it. He was connected to black American extremism, primarily through his association with Revered Jeremiah Wright; rumours were spread about his representation of African and Middle Eastern interests; and he was linked to ―subversive left anti-Americanism.‖ Selzer argues that ―all three representations capitalized on a perceived complexity or ambiguity associated with Obama‘s embodiment of blackness to raise doubts over the character of his citizenship and the degree of his commitment to national interests.‖700 The markings of race can work in similar ways to those of gender, and Obama‘s race was utilised to suggest his unsuitability for the presidency, as Clinton‘s gender was used against her.
696 ―Sen. Osama Obama,‖ http://librabunda.blogspot.com (accessed 30 August 2009). 697 ―Barack Hussein Odumbo,‖ http://rushlimbaugh.com (accessed 30 August 2009). 698 http://freedominion.com.pa (accessed 30 August 2009). 699 The birthers have established a website dedicated to disproving Obama‘s U.S. citizenship (www.birther.org). For more on birther movement, see Harris-Perry, ―For Birthers;‖ Page and Kucinich, ―Citing ‗Sideshow‘.‖ 700 Selzer, ―Barack Obama,‖ 17. 203
The monsterisation of Hillary Clinton took place across media forms; as this section has shown, traditional print and broadcast media, along with online sources, demonised Clinton as unsuited to the presidency for specifically gendered reasons. Yet, as with racist attacks on Obama, it was the Internet that was to become a particularly fertile site of Clinton‘s monsterisation. Specifically, cyber-technology enabled the production of digital images of Clinton that morphed male and female corporealities. As noted above, the Internet should not be analysed in isolation and must be viewed as part of a broader mediascape with close ideological, political and economic connections to traditional media outlets. Nevertheless, new technologies enable new engagements with gender identity and the sexed body in the virtual space that make the Internet worthy of examination as a unique medium, as the remainder of this chapter will explore.
Politics 2.0: The Internet, Identity and Democracy
While the studies of representations of female politicians cited above focused on broadcast and print media, the gendering of politicians in online media remains largely unexplored.701 The expansion of the Internet as a political forum necessitates greater insight into the gendered constructions of political candidates online. The World Wide Web is playing an increasing role in American presidential election campaigns. Televised debates are simulcast on websites like C-SPAN702 and campaign staffers conduct online polls to determine how their candidate is faring. Most candidates have a campaign website and many are utilising online networks in their efforts to raise financial contributions, obtain support, and publicise their policies, while their supporters use social networking sites to attempt to sway public opinion. Howard Dean began the trend on a large scale by conducting a vigorous weblog campaign when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003–04.703 Barack Obama effectively utilised the Internet in the 2007–08 campaign, increasing his public profile (particularly among young voters) and mobilising his supporters via social networking sites like Facebook. In addition to such official, candidate-
701 One exception is Heldman, Oliver, and Conroy who found that coverage of 2008 vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was more negative and sexist in new media (blogs) than traditional media. The authors conclude that ―the advent of New Media is not a good omen for female candidates‖ and ―will make it even more difficult for women to gain legitimacy (and thus resources) as candidates‖ (―From Ferraro to Palin,‖ 25). Other research on Internet representations of female candidates has tended to focus on candidates‘ self-representations on their campaign websites; see, for example, Bystrom et al., Gender and Candidate Communication; and Dolan, ―Do Women Candidates.‖ 702 C-SPAN.org provides live and recorded broadcasts of congressional debates and committee sessions. 703 For a detailed discussion of Dean‘s netroots campaign, see Feld and Wilcox, Netroots Rising, esp. chapter 2. 204
endorsed uses of the Internet, unofficial websites also allow voters to directly participate in the campaign process by posting their opinions online and commenting on the opinions of others. For instance, members of the voting public created their own Facebook pages to try to derail Hillary Clinton‘s primary campaign.704
In addition to being a site of political information and activism, however, the Internet is also fast becoming a major news source alongside the more traditional mediums of newspapers and television.705 The Internet has revolutionised information processing and dissemination, allowing for the spread of information with a scope and speed not previously possible. As a transnational system, the World Wide Web is globalising media networks, providing real-time global access to news information. The continuing development of new communications services such as Twitter—a social networking and microblogging platform— enables the almost instantaneous distribution of information to a potentially limitless audience around the world. The Internet has also transformed the storage of news information. In traditional media, today‘s headlines are forgotten tomorrow, superseded by the latest ―breaking news,‖ but in spite of the prominence of rapid ―updates,‖ information distributed on the Web remains online stored as data easily retrievable through a simple keyword search. This can have material political implications, such as when bloggers picked up an underreported media story about U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott making what were believed to be racist remarks in late 2002 and continued to comment on the incident until Lott was forced to resign.706
Such instances have led some commentators to argue that the World Wide Web bolsters democracy by giving the public control of news and information.707 Concerns about the commercialisation and centralisation of mainstream media (discussed in Chapter 4) are assuaged by arguments that Internet technology reduces traditional media hegemony by allowing the public direct access to original documents and reports. American voters can access complete transcripts of politicians‘ speeches, for example, via the Library of
704 Some of the dozens of anti-Clinton Facebook groups, which ranged in scale from hundreds of thousands to just a handful of members, include ―Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)‖ (795, 105 members), ―ANTI Hillary Clinton for president ‘08‖ (44, 763 members), ―Stop Hillary Clinton‖ (1, 393 members) and ―Hillary Clinton SUCKS‖ (184 members). Membership numbers current at September 17, 2009. One of the most directly sexist groups was ―Hillary Clinton Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich,‖ which had over 30,000 members during the campaign. Profile pictures for some of these groups depict Clinton as a Communist, or as a devil with horns or the number 666 on her forehead. 705 Survey results show that since the late 1980s newspaper circulation and television news viewing has been in steady decline. Younger audiences in particular are switching to online sources (Moeller, ―Media and Democracy,‖ 176). 706 See Keren, Blogosphere, 6; and Lessig, Free Culture. 707 Barlow, Blogging America; Feld and Wilcox, Netroots Rising; and Winston, ―Digital Democracy.‖ 205
Congress Web Server,708 as opposed to relying on news media to present them with those speeches in edited, paraphrased or, occasionally, misquoted forms. In addition, new modes of online communication are changing the very way news information is generated, not just disseminated. The rapid rise of interactive, information-sharing websites as part of Web 2.0 technology709 has witnessed the expanding role of the public in both the creation and the longevity of news stories, as the Trent Lott case illustrates. In what Aaron Barlow has referred to as the ―horizontal‖ structure of online media (as opposed to the top-down ―vertical‖ structure of conventional media),710 members of the public do not simply comprise the passive audience of news but are rather active participants in the production of news, deciding what merits their attention and what does not by selecting information to post and commenting on stories that are important to them.
In particular, blogs enable the real-time participation of large numbers of people in news creation and political commentary. Blog numbers are estimated in the tens or even hundreds of millions, although they are proliferating at such a rapid pace as to make keeping track all but impossible.711 Proponents of blogs and other interactive websites have labelled the community of blogs and their users a ―blogosphere‖ that reinvigorates the public sphere which, as discussed in Chapter 4, is perceived as being threatened by the commercialisation of mainstream news media. Drawing on Habermas‘s theories, blog researchers such as Barlow, Stephen D. Cooper, Michael Keren, and Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker view the blogosphere as a civic space where members of the community can assemble and share ideas outside the authority of the state and free from censorship.712 While mass media are subject to the hegemonic forces of the state, ―massed media‖ have a decentralising and emancipatory effect, enhancing the democratic process through the accumulation of numerous disparate ideas and opinions.713
The blogosphere, proponents argue, has given rise to a new breed of ―citizen- journalist‖ who actively researches and composes his/her own stories and uncovers mistakes or omissions in mainstream media. Bloggers couple as media watchdogs — ―watching the watchdog,‖ as Cooper terms it—who discover ―truths‖ that would otherwise
708 http://www.thomas.loc.gov/ (accessed October 2009). 709 Web 2.0 refers to web applications that allow users not just to retrieve information but to share information, control data, and interact and collaborate with other web users. The most influential and fastest growing aspects of Web 2.0 are communication and social networking applications, including blogs, wikis, and social network sites. 710 Barlow, Blogging America, 2. 711 For recent figures, see Richard Davis, Typing Politics. 712 Barlow, Blogging America; Cooper, Watching the Watchdog; Keren, Blogosphere; Mortensen and Walker, ―Blogging Thoughts.‖ 713 Barlow, Blogging America, 45. 206
remain hidden.714 The belief that mass media lie while new, technologised media are authentic is common, as witnessed by the decision of many Iraq War soldiers and veterans to create their own war narratives online in reaction to mainstream media censorship and propaganda (see Chapter 4). Studies by Richard Davis, Barbara K. Kaye, and Thomas J. Johnson and Barbara K. Kaye found that many blog users believe the content of blogs is more accurate than that of traditional news media.715 With reference to the electoral environment, Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean, argues that the rise of new media constitutes ―a move from the phoniness of the thirty-second spot to the authenticity of what happens when I catch you on my cell phone video.‖716 What is more, for Trippi ―authentic candidates‖ are likely to have more success under the scrutiny of transparent new media technologies, suggesting that such media have the potential not only to ensure the dissemination of accurate information but also to guarantee the election of trustworthy politicians.
While the Internet does enable widespread access to and sharing of political information, its status as defender of truth is dubious. Statements like Trippi‘s are highly problematic, not least because the definition of ―authenticity‖ is impossible to pin down in a media culture where distinctions between fact and fiction, truth and untruth, have been blurred beyond recognition. Exactly what is an ―authentic candidate?‖ And is authenticity necessarily tantamount to political virtue? The Internet as a site of authentic identity construction is challenged by examples such as Rick Duncan, the ―fake Marine‖ discussed in the conclusion to Chapter 4. Duncan used digital technology to create his fake war hero identity. While he had never actually been to Iraq, he photoshopped images of himself in military uniform on deployment and posted them online. He also uploaded speeches he gave about his wartime experiences on YouTube. Duncan was the ultimate ―virtual veteran‖ of a virtual war. Cyber-technologies provided legitimacy to his fake identity by enabling him to create ―proof‖ of his service and disseminate his persona to a wide audience. Thus, while the Internet undoubtedly changes the nature of identity construction, the significance of this change should not be reduced to simplistic assumptions about levels of authenticity.
For the most part, the Internet remains uncontrolled, uncensored and unregulated. While this can be seen as adhering to democratic impulses by allowing for free speech and unrestricted access to information, it also enables the spread of fraudulent information with real-world political consequences.717 Absence of regulation gives rise not just to spurious
714 Cooper, Watching the Watchdog. 715 Richard Davis, Typing Politics; Kaye, ―Blog Use Motivations;‖Johnson and Kaye, ―Wag the Blog.‖ 716 Trippi, quoted in Feld and Wilcox, Netroots Rising, 170. 717 Keen, Cult of the Amateur. 207
information but also to bigotry and hatred; sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic and homophobic commentary find a welcome home online.718 Internet publication is often anonymous, particularly on personal websites that receive no state sponsorship or commercial endorsement. Behind the veil of anonymity, many authors feel free to voice prejudiced opinions without being held accountable for them and without fear of recrimination. Information is always mediated in some fashion or other—the presentation of a lie as truth, or of information slanted by bigotry, are themselves forms of mediation—and the absence of qualified gatekeepers in new media is in many ways conducive to anarchy not democracy.719 Lack of control and regulation, therefore, should be mistaken neither for authenticity nor as the inevitable harbinger of democratic principles.
Feminism and Internet Technology
Of particular feminist concern regarding politics and the Internet is the relationship between women and cyber-technology. Feminists are divided over the nature of this relationship, with debates tending to bifurcate between pessimistic attitudes towards the feminist potential of digital technologies and utopian visions of the Internet as a post-feminist or post-gender space. Concerns about the negative implications of cyber-technology for women stem from earlier radical and ecofeminist arguments that technology has been used as a means of establishing male control over both women and nature. Feminists in this camp cite the connection of technological research and development to the military–industrial complex, arguing that technology serves masculinist purposes which are ultimately destructive to women and the planet. Cynthia Cockburn has documented technology‘s role in the subordination of women in the labour market,720 while reproductive technologies are seen as delimiting women‘s control of their own bodies. Critics of the Internet have demonstrated the ubiquity of pornography, global prostitution rings, and cyberpimping as harmful to women and fundamentally anti-feminist.721 Alternately, utopian cyberfeminists propose that digital technologies encompass a radical break with masculinist systems of control by embracing the undisciplined, decentralised fluidity of female subjectivity. While traditional media remain male-dominated and work in service of maintaining the gender order (see Chapter 1), the Internet is not subject to the same hegemonic authority, leading to its conceptualisation as a feminine space. Sadie Plant connects the complex systems of the World Wide Web to
718 For instance, the recent resurgence of the white nationalist movement, which Sophie Statzel argues is ―dependent on new media for its success,‖ illustrates the importance of questioning utopian attitudes towards the relationship between ―massed media,‖ freedom of expression, and democracy (―Cybersupremacy,‖ 407). For an extended discussion of hate speech in the online domain, see Henry, ―Beyond Free Speech.‖ 719 Barber, ―Which Technology?‖ 720 Cockburn, Brothers. 721 Hughes, ―Internet and the Global Prostitution Ring.‖ 208
women via the metaphor of weaving.722 Cyberfeminists like Plant argue that, while men attempt to subject network culture to a process of domination, such dominance is impossible. ―Cyberspace,‖ Plant writes, ―is out of man‘s control: virtual reality destroys his identity...and, at the peak of his triumph, the culmination of his machine erections, man confronts the system he built for his own protection and finds it is female and dangerous.‖723
Perhaps the most dangerous feminist figure in cyberspace is the cyborg. First to conceive of the cyborg as a symbol of feminist transformation was Donna Haraway, whose ―Cyborg Manifesto‖ posited an ―ironic political myth‖ in which distinctions between male and female, organism and machine, human and animal, and nature and culture/technology collapse.724 For Haraway, the cyborg is a kind of monster that offers the potential for transcending traditional gender boundaries by creating alternative possible identities outside ―those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.‖725 Yet, as Haraway herself notes (and as I have argued in Chapter 3 of this thesis), monsters have historically played the role of defining rather than subverting the limits of identity in Western cultural consciousness,726 and the cyborg is no exception. Feminist film theorists in particular have noted the tendency for the female cyborg to be cinematically depicted in ways that sexualise and demean women and reinforce heteropatriarchal authority.727 The cyborg of science- fiction cinema is an exercise in male technophilia, constructed by men for male consumption, and thus conforms to the conventional viewing paradigm of male subject and female object.728
Utopian cyberfeminists counter this argument by claiming that, although the predominant sense used in the reception of ―old‖ media (such as film) is sight, hyper- or multi-media reception requires a fusion of senses, the most significant of these being touch. As such, for Plant, ―there is more to cyberspace than meets the male gaze.‖729 This surpassing of the gaze is brought about by the supposed destabilising of the body in cyberspace; there is no coherent body to commodify or fetishize. Posthumanist cyberfeminists view technology as transcending the sexed body, enabling the
722 Plant, ―Future Looms.‖ 723 Plant, ―On the Matrix,‖ 181–82. 724 Haraway, ―Cyborg Manifesto,‖ 149. 725 Ibid., 180. For others who follow Haraway‘s definition of the cyborg, see Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects and ―Posthuman, All Too Human;‖ Gray, Cyborg Citizen; Kirkup et al., eds., Gendered Cyborg; Lykke and Braidotti, eds., Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs; Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls; and Wolmark, ed., Cybersexualities. 726 Haraway, ―Cyborg Manifesto,‖ 180. 727 See Balsamo, ―Reading Cyborgs;‖ and Wajcman, TechnoFeminism. 728 Mulvey, ―Visual Pleasure.‖ 729 Plant, ―On the Matrix,‖ 179. 209
conceptualisation of ―post-bodied and post-human forms of existence.‖730 Some cyberfeminists, such as Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein, argue that the disembodied nature of the cyborg depoliticises it as a feminist motif, noting that women‘s lived experiences in relation to Internet technology continue to be based on violation, abuse and commodity exchange.731 However, contradictorily, Plant‘s emphasis on touch as the primary sensory faculty of multi-media technology affirms, rather than surpasses, the corporeality of human interactions with cyber-technology.
Indeed, constructions of Hillary Clinton online reveal how monstrous/cyborgian rhetoric and imagery in cyberspace can be used to reify the materiality and ontological stability of the sexed body. Clinton‘s body was identified as the site of her monstrosity and served as the basis behind arguments that she was unsuitable for the role of commander-in- chief. New media constructions of Clinton as cyborg and monster illustrate the simultaneity of Internet technologies as conservative and transgressive tools which at once preserve and subvert the sexual order. Clinton appears online as threatening cyborg, confirming that cyberspace is indeed the location of the dangerous feminine; yet the cyborgisation of Clinton serves the specific purpose of alleviating the threat posed by the dangerous woman: the monster is created so it can be destroyed. Plant contends that virtual worlds undermine two thousand years of patriarchal control,732 but online constructions of Clinton show how these same worlds can reinforce male authority by affirming the masculinity of the presidency and constructing a female president as unnatural and obscene. Online constructions of Clinton‘s sexed body, when read alongside her depiction in traditional print and broadcast media, present a complicated negotiation of the relationship between the sexed body, political leadership, and militarised violence in the postmodern media landscape.
Media Constructions of Hillary Clinton as Monster and Cyborg
On March 8, 2008, Samantha Power resigned from her position as foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Her resignation was brought about by her reference to Hillary Clinton as a ―monster,‖ who was ―stooping to anything‖ to win the Democratic nomination, in an interview with the Scotsman newspaper on the previous day.733 While Power‘s resignation was necessary in order to maintain the image of the ―clean‖ campaign
730 Featherstone and Burrows, ―Cultures of Technological Embodiment,‖ 2. 731 Hawthorne and Klein, ―CyberFeminism: Introduction.‖ 732 Plant, ―On the Matrix.‖ 733 Peev, ―‗Hillary Clinton‘s a Monster‘.‖ Power apologised for her comment, which she believed was ―off the record,‖ and said she regretted making it. At time of writing she is a Special Assistant to Barack Obama on the Staff of the National Security Council. 210
run by the Obama camp, the characterisation of Clinton as monstrous was in fact widespread in print, broadcast, and online media throughout the primary race. Monsterisation is a common strategy among the opponents of both male and female political leaders. It is typically used with regard to a politician‘s militaristic stance, supposed indifference to suffering, or ruthless pursuit of personal power, that is, behaviour that is somehow deemed to be ―inhuman.‖ Yet, as discussed in Chapter 3, the monster label also has a specifically gendered dimension; women who step outside the bounds of appropriate feminine behaviour are more likely to be tarred with the brush of monstrosity.734 A woman is deemed to be monstrous not so much if she does not behave like a human but if she does not behave like a (―natural‖) woman. This section analyses the construction of Hillary Clinton as a particular kind of monster specific to the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century context: the cyborg. A Factiva database search and a Google search using the keyword ―Hillary Clinton‖ and the word-stem ―cyborg-‖ were conducted to locate print, broadcast, and online media items which constructed Clinton as a cyborg.735 As with my analysis of other media items in this thesis, I am concerned here with the representation of Clinton as cyborg in media, not with public or voter reception of the images. It is not possible to gauge how many people read or saw each reference to Clinton as monster/cyborg, or whether these had an impact on the way people voted. Reception studies of representations of female candidates would help to shed light on the direct impact such representations may have on voter opinion. However, for the purposes of this chapter I have restricted my discussion to the use of the monster/cyborg motif and the fact that it was considered an appropriate motif for vilifying a female candidate. Examples of Clinton‘s cyborgisation are taken from both liberal and conservative media, and from mainstream and fringe media sources, regardless of potential audience size.
Clinton‘s cyborgisation was commonly linked in these media items to her supposed violent potential, which was manifest in her depiction as a robotic killing machine, an android bent on destruction, a ―homicidal cyborg from the future.‖736 In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd noted how a former aide to Clinton used to call her ―The Terminator;‖ Dowd extended the metaphor to criticise Clinton‘s refusal to concede the Democratic nomination to Obama. ―Unless every circuit is out,‖ Dowd wrote, ―she‘ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama‘s wall, hurl her
734 See pp. 105–7. 735 The search term ―cyborg*‖ incorporated the keywords ―cyborg,‖ ―cyborgs,‖ ―cyborgian,‖ and ―cyborgish.‖ Allison Muri collated numerous instances of Clinton‘s cyborgisation during the campaign on her weblog where she comments about cyborg-related issues in media (Cyberblog, http://www.headlesschicken.ca/cyborgblog/archive/2008_06_01_archive.html, accessed 27 November 2008). 736 Robinson, ―Race That Wouldn‘t Die.‖ 211
torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.‖737 Satirical fake news website NewsBiscuit ran a story claiming that ―a battle scarred cyborg Hillary Clinton‖ returned from the year 2039 ―to warn voters and super delegates that a victory for Obama creates a hellish future ruled by meta-droids intent on enslaving humanity.‖ The cyborgian Clinton was constructed out of bits of metal resembling baking foil, a food mixer, and ―a hub cap from a 2005 Chevrolet,‖ which fall off one by one due to the rigours of time travel.738 David Hauslaib wondered if Clinton was ―real woman or political cyborg,‖ as if politics and womanhood were somehow incommensurable, and puzzled over how to explain her display of emotion after the Iowa primary when ―machines don‘t cry.‖739 Jane Roh suggested that Clinton‘s appearance as ―a politically savvy cyborg‖ was what Democrats ―like least about her.‖740In a series of fabricated reports, Clinton was medicalised, her female, robotic body constructed as the Other of the human, male scientists who scanned and probed her to discover her true identity. In one report, an x-ray from a medical examination revealed the senator to be ―an indestructible robotic intelligence;‖741 another yielded the opposite result, shocking the scientific community by uncovering Clinton‘s humanity.742 Blogger Sam Boyd took a slightly different tack, arguing that Clinton is ―not a robot from the future,‖ but that she is in fact worse than the ―pitiless cyborg governing machine‖ she is often perceived to be.743
These comments, when read alongside Samantha Power‘s, beg the question as to why the cyborg was chosen as a metaphor to describe Clinton, and how Clinton–as–cyborg differs from Clinton–as–monster. Whether it was more accurate to liken Clinton to a cyborg or a monster itself formed part of the debate. Responding to Power‘s outburst, an anonymous blogger asserted that Clinton was not a monster at all but more closely resembled a cyborg, ―specifically Cyberdyne Systems Model 101.‖744 Constructions of Clinton as cyborg also reveal a lack of consensus over how the term cyborg should be defined. The most commonly understood definition of a cyborg is a being that is part organism and part machine.745 Central to the choice of the cyborg figure to describe Clinton
737 Dowd, ―Haunting Obama‘s Dreams.‖ 738 NewsBiscuit, ―‗Future Cyborg Clinton‘.‖ It is perhaps revealing that cyborg Clinton is constructed primarily out of kitchen appliances, connecting her to the more appropriately female domestic realm. 739 Hauslaib, ―Hillary Clinton.‖ 740 Roh, ―WH ‘08.‖ 741 Civilizer, ―Hillary Clinton.‖ 742 Crowley, ―Scientists Find Evidence.‖ 743 Boyd, ―Lightening Round;‖ my emphasis. Cyborgian rhetoric has not ended with Clinton‘s defeat in the primaries. Since becoming Secretary of State in the Obama administration, she has been referred to as ―saggingly Cyborgish‖ on a blog discussing her response to Iran‘s nuclear policy. Here, Clinton is cyborgian because she defies the cultural virtues of both masculinity and youth (Unexplained Mysteries, ―Clinton Cyborg‖). 744 Synthesis Blog, ―Hillary Clinton.‖ 745 Scholars who define cyborg in this way include Balsamo, ―Reading Cyborgs;‖ Gray, Cyborg Citizen; Haraway, ―Cyborg Manifesto;‖ Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; and Lykke, ―Between 212
is its mechanisation and its subsequent association with violence and destruction. In its reliance on newly developing technology, the cyborg is futuristic, forward-looking. In contrast, the monster is retrograde, representing a regression of natural humanity. While the monster seems to reach back to pre-human existence, the cyborg is perhaps more threatening because less familiar, hinting at apocalyptic, posthuman possibilities for an uncertain future marked by instability and collapse. Yet, in addition to this usage, commentators variously define the cyborg as a human capable of switching sex, or even simply as a woman who flouts gender stereotypes by taking a hard line on military issues, or by entering politics in the first place. Proof of Clinton‘s cyborgian identity was found in her combination of human male traits and robotic qualities, such as her ―manic facial expressions, bulldog front, pitiless emotions and a lust to kill. Combine these traits with her seemingly indestructible nature,‖ one blogger declared, ―and you‘ve got yourself a T-800 series Terminator.‖746 Kathleen Parker accused Clinton of utilizing ―the science of morphology‖ to prove to the public that ―she‘s their ‗man‘,‖ and her ability to morph from female to male was seen as indicative or her cyborgian nature.747 In the choice of the cyborg metaphor, therefore, Clinton was simultaneously mechanised and masculinised vis-à-vis the ideological conflation of both violence and technology (and hence, especially, technologised violence) with men. The media cyborgisation of Clinton was thus an attempt to suggest her simultaneous blurring of boundaries between organic and mechanised bodies and between male and female bodies. Both these examples of boundary crossing signify Clinton‘s supposedly unnatural relationship to violence and war.
Case Study: Digital Image Analysis
While Clinton was frequently cyborgised in print, I turn my attention now to the construction of her body in digital imagery. Digital technology enabled the construction of Clinton–as– cyborg through the production and dissemination of photoshopped images online. In her discussion of the posthuman body in contemporary culture, Kim Toffoletti argues for the importance of studying posthuman images in a ―cybernetic age.‖
As products of the digital revolution...posthuman images...provoke questions about how reality is experienced and understood. In this respect, the way that the world is conceptualised through images becomes an important aspect of theorising the posthuman.... By the
Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs.‖ Jennifer González is unusual in proposing a distinction between an ―organic cyborg‖ (an organism of multiple species, more commonly referred to as a ―monster‖) and a ―mechanical cyborg‖ (a ―techno-human amalgamation‖) (―Envisioning Cyborg Bodies,‖ 58). 746 Synthesis Blog, ―Hillary Clinton.‖ 747 Parker, ―Senator Clinton.‖ 213
term ‗posthuman images‘, I am not referring to images as those things that depict or represent reality, but as performative acts/events/ processes in their own right that function to destroy coherent meaning about the human as an originary form.... The posthuman emerges at the moment where clear distinctions between things collapse. It is an effect of the hyperreal.748
Digital images are not mimetic but performative, productive, constitutive. Baudrillard‘s theories of simulation are central to Toffoletti‘s analysis of posthuman imagery. Not to be confused with the end of reality, simulation takes place when the ―reality principle‖—the idea that there is a structural relationship between ―reality‖ and its representation—collapses.749 Simulation does not reproduce reality nor, as Toffoletti explains, ―does it mask, hide or obscure reality.‖750 Rather, simulationproduces reality. Images in particular have a potent effect as reality producers; the image has the power to assume ―the force of that which it represents, to become the reality and erase therein the distinction of original and image.‖751 In a digital simulation culture, where images seem to replicate automatically, disseminating themselves ubiquitously throughout the virtual world of cyberspace, the image takes on additional power as producer of ―the real.‖
This ability to produce reality distinguishes simulation from representation. Hillary Clinton has been mocked and vilified through imagery in the press since her time as first lady. Charlotte Templin analysed over 400 cartoons of Clinton in mainstream publications between November 1992 and July 1996.752 The cartoons primarily displayed anxiety about Hillary usurping control from her husband. They constructed the first lady as radical feminist, lesbian, frigid, emasculating, uncontrollably aggressive and violent, and neglectful of her proper duties as wife and mother. A common tactic of satirists was to depict Clinton as a monster: part-human, part-animal; part-woman, part-man. She was drawn as a shark, ―a bizarre figure with a Pinocchio nose,‖ ―a criminal in a mug shot with a number,‖ a Queen of Hearts shrieking ―Off with his head,‖ a monstrous head comprised only of a mouth, and, on numerous occasions, Richard Nixon, ―a heavily jowled figure with arms raised and fingers spread.‖ Templin reads such images not just as personal attacks on Clinton but as part of a wider sexist backlash against powerful women. Clinton‘s monstrous image was used by social conservatives ―as a stick to beat feminism and to scapegoat feminism for various ills
748 Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 31. 749 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. 750 Toffoletti,Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 33. 751 Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, 30. 752 Templin, ―Hillary Clinton.‖ Ducat has also analysed images of Clinton as first lady, focusing on those that represent her as ―phallic woman‖ (Wimp Factor). 214
of the modern world.‖753 Digital productions of Clinton as presidential candidate thus draw upon a rich back-catalogue of anti-Hillary imagery.
Traditional media cartoons operate on the reality principle; generic convention dictates that political figures are represented metaphorically in ways that highlight and exaggerate their perceived weaknesses or vices. If Clinton is depicted as a shark, this is recognised as symbolic of her ruthlessness and her propensity to figuratively devour her enemies. Thus, while cartoons can do political damage by changing public perception of their targets, they do not alter reality but rather affirm the separation of the real and the representational. Digital images, in contrast, blur this distinction. In their attempt to replicate reality as closely as possible, they create a hyperreality which is more real than the real. It was not so much that the images of Clinton were mistaken as genuine but that they simultaneously were produced in and helped to create a virtual space in which a new reality could be conceived.
The images analysed below appeared on personal and political blogs and opinion- based websites in 2007 and 2008. This is not a quantitative analysis and the images discussed are not intended as a representative sample of images of Clinton circulating online. Rather, these images reflect and project electoral and gender politics in the online space that demand feminist interrogation. Images were chosen specifically for their construction of Clinton as a hybrid creature—collapsing distinctions between male and female, or between human and machine, or both—and the destructive potential suggested by this hybridity. As noted above, the goal of this analysis is not to deduce the impact these images had on their viewers, or to draw conclusions about their effect on popular opinion of Clinton and on the voting public (further research is required to establish the impact of online commentary on voter opinion and behaviour). However, the online creation and dissemination of images of Clinton as monster/cyborg raise important questions about the potential of the Internet to act as a space for the construction of political realities for women.
The images of Clinton discussed here are characterised by their repetition across a number of different websites. All the images appeared on multiple websites, ranging from politically motivated sites with relatively wide readerships to personal blogs with only a small number of visitors. The proliferation of these images in cyberspace highlights the difficulties of researching online content. Images can easily be lifted from one site and posted on another, making original sources virtually impossible to trace. As noted above, material is often posted anonymously and authorship can be difficult to establish. While most blogs have a creator profile, bloggers regularly create pseudonymous usernames and there is no
753 Templin, ―Hillary Clinton,‖ 31; 32. 215
guarantee that the personal information provided in a profile is an accurate reflection of the person behind it. The transitory nature of Internet content generates further methodological problems. Blogs can be changed by their creators at will, and an image posted one day may be altered or removed the next. Yet these difficulties with research in cyberspace also point to the unique power of the medium to construct political reality. The proliferation and modification of information without author—that is, without source, without origin—is the distinguishing feature of the simulation culture in which virtual reality is produced.
* * *
In February 2007, liberal blog DownWithTyranny! posted a photoshopped image of Hillary Clinton designed to resemble promotional material for a Hollywood movie (Figure 5).754
Figure 5.Hillary Clinton as ―Rambabe.‖
Depicting Clinton‘s head spliced onto a hulking male torso draped with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and sporting a machine gun, the epic is titled ―Rambabe: Conservative Body Count.‖ The accompanying post characterises Clinton as a warmonger due to her support of the Iraq War in 2002. Within the next year, the image would spread to numerous other blogs. Bad Attitudes used a cropped version of the picture without titles to accompany anti-Hillary commentary in September.755 El Borak‘s Myopia (December) and Shooting the Messenger (March 2008) both intended it as a mockery of Clinton‘s ―misspeak‖ about disembarking from
754 http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/02/hillary-makes-it-clear-shes-no-flip.html. All websites discussed in this section were accessed in October 2009. 755 http://www.badattitudes.com/MT/archives/2007/09/. 216
a helicopter under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996.756 The latter blog, created by male blogger ―Fits‖ from Gainesville, Florida, contains numerous posts attacking Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea, and ―liberated‖ women in general, along with copious pro-gun sentiment. Last to reproduce the picture was ―Dr Tom‖ (April 2008) whose HipHappy Times blog espoused two principal goals: the election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States and the legalising of marijuana. While most bloggers used this image simply as a visual illustration of points made in text, Dr Tom explicitly intended this and other anti-Clinton images to speak for themselves, anticipating they would ―engage and enrage all concerned citizens to ensure that the Clintons accept the will of the people.‖ He encouraged his visitors to comment on the images, in the hope that Hillary Clinton would be persuaded to concede the Democratic nomination to Obama.757
In its possession of female head and male body, the Rambabe figure constitutes a monstrous subversion of dichotomous gender identity, destabilising the connection between subjectivity and sexed embodiment that is central to humanist ideologies in modernity. Clinton is both criminal outlaw—signified by the police cars and helicopters in the background—and sexual outlaw; her actions are deemed to resemble behaviour more appropriate in men than women, as indicated by her male body. Not only is the monstrous Clinton depicted as corporeally male but as hypermale, his/her muscles bulging obscenely, the gun a phallic extension of him/herself. The splicing of Clinton‘s head onto a male body or torso was a common tactic among creators of digital imagery during the campaign, a corporal manifestation of the pervasive belief that the power Clinton hoped to wield is naturally the prerogative of men. Images that depict Clinton‘s head on the bodies of Napoleon Bonaparte (Figure 6) and George Washington (Figure 7)—with its accompanying declaration that Clinton is the ―right man‖ to be president— recognise that political and military leadership has historically been the preserve of males.
756 http://elborak.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive .html; http://shootingmessengers.blogspot.com/ 2008_03_01_archive.html. 757 http://hiphappy.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/concerned-citizens-must-challenge-clinton-craziness/. 217
Figure 6.―Napollary.‖758 Figure 7. ―Hillary Clinton: The Right Man for the Job!‖759
Similarly, ―Billary‖ images (Figures 8 and 9), which depict the bodies of Hillary and Bill Clinton morphed together, do more than reiterate the Clinton-propagated notion of a ―twofer‖ presidency; they also create the impression that the presidency is the appropriate domain of men only, while the first spouse role is by nature a female one. Reversing the time-tested arrangement, these images suggest, produces only freaks and monsters.
Figure 8.―Billary.‖760 Figure 9.―Billary for President 2008.‖761
758 About.com, http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blpic-napollary.htm; The Apology of Jim, http://manthepoliticalanimal.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html; El Borak‘s Myopia, http://elborak.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html; Free Republic, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1406948/posts. 759 About.com, http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blpic-hillaryrightman.htm; Hot Rodham Blog, http://stophernow.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/hillary-the-right-man/; Barbara Busby‘s Portfolio, http://barbbusby.moguling.com/. 760 Freaking News, http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/24500/Bill-and-Hillary-Clinton--24886.jpg; Funny and Jokes, http://www.funnyandjokes.com/cat/jokes/political/page/5; Citizen Crain, http://citizenchris.typepad.com/citizenchris/hivaids/. 761 Southern Zen, http://www.seanrox.com/southernzen/labels/media.php. 218
Images which combine the bodies of Clinton and her husband have the dual effect of masculinising Hillary and emasculating Bill; as such, they comprise an attack on both figures at once. Both Clintons are explicitly sexualised, as indicated not just by their gender reversals but also by signifiers such as a cigar in Hillary‘s hand (Figure 9), alluding to her husband‘s infidelities with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Here Hillary subverts the gender order by assuming the roles of political leader and sexual aggressor, twin pillars of masculine potency and authority. These images exhibit a sexual anxiety aroused by powerful women comparable to that provoked by women‘s earlier attempts to enter the political realm. Anti-suffrage propaganda in the early twentieth century depicted the suffragist‘s body as a monstrous hybrid of male and female and, sometimes, human and animal. Suffragettes were caricatured as lacking feminine curves, resembling men in stature, hypersexual, ugly, aggressive, violent, and hysterical.762 The doctored pictures of Clinton thus form part of a long tradition of using humour and ridicule to manage and dispel sexual anxiety. Images which show Hillary and Bill switching gender roles (and sexed bodies) are at once anxiety-producing and anxiety-relieving.
The pictorial monsterisation of Hillary Clinton evidences the powerful mixture of sex and violence that the female leader embodies in the cultural imagination. Inherent in the belief that Clinton is usurping masculine roles is the ever-recurring fear of her violent potential. The ―Rambabe‖ image does more than suggest that Clinton is a monstrous hybrid of male and female bodies. With no clear indication of where body ends and weapon begins, ―Rambabe‖ also blurs the distinction between human and machine to construct Clinton as the ultimate destroyer. According to this image, Clinton‘s preferred strategy is annihilation; unprepared to negotiate with or take mercy on her enemies, she will simply slaughter them all in her mad rampage towards the White House. Clinton‘s purported bloodlust was a key feature of her cyborgisation in many digital images, with suggestions that she more closely resembled a futuristic killing machine than a human being. Richard Blakeley of Gawker.com photoshopped an image of the Terminator to resemble Clinton. Dubbed ―Hillerator,‖ the picture appeared alongside a post about Maureen Dowd‘s reference to Clinton as a cyborg in the New York Times (discussed above).763 Conservative blog Fort Hard Knox posted an image of Clinton‘s head on Darth Vader‘s body, accompanying text declaring that Clinton had switched to the ―dark side‖ (raised Republican, she later joined the Democrats) and was using the ―dark force‖ to create her own empire.764 Black Folks Don‘t Swim replicated the picture, citing ―her passion to control and manipulate‖ and her lust for power as evidence of
762 Tickner, Spectacle of Women. 763 http://gawker.com/5004438/ maureen-dowd-calls-hillary-clinton-sci+fi-monster. 764 http://forthardknox.com/2007/09/19/ how-hillary-clinton-is-like-darth-vader/. 219
her resemblance of the Dark Lord.765 Democratic Underground posted a picture of a figure in a Darth Vader costume, with its face obscured, with the caption ―Hillary Clinton in her traditional garb.‖766 The nod to popular movie characters is partly pragmatic: the images, along with their allusions of merciless violence and lack of humanity, are instantly recognisable to a large proportion of viewers. Yet the use of movie imagery also helps to reinforce the received unnaturalness of a woman‘s bid for the White House, implying that such an occurrence is more fitting in the context of a science-fiction fantasy than the real world of American politics.
Clinton‘s violence has both literal and symbolic meaning in these images. It references her militaristic policies and her aggressive stance concerning international relations. Additionally, it signifies the belief that Clinton is prepared to destroy careers and reputations in her drive for power. At the most extreme level, it alludes to rumours about her physical violence, such as that spread by conservative opponents that she had Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster—whom she was also purportedly having an affair with— killed during the Travelgate controversy of 1993.Yet implicit in these images is the anxiety that Clinton threatens to destroy not just other people or nations but the entire fabric of American society. A female president, particularly one who appears to possess traditionally masculine characteristics such as personal ambition, aggression and emotional detachment, goes against the natural order and therefore threatens the very existence of humankind. What is most concerning, however, is not Clinton‘s refusal to remain within the female sex category but her ability to oscillate between categories seemingly at will. Like the Terminator she is made to resemble, her dangerousness lies in her propensity to shape-shift, to take on characteristics of both sexes. Clinton transforms effortlessly from the feminist who refuses to ―stay home and bake cookies,‖ to the dutiful wife ―standing by her man‖ during his infidelities, and back to the career woman vying for the highest office in the land. By continually crossing category boundaries, Clinton signifies that which cannot be contained within the limits of conventional systems of classification.
These online media attacks can thus be read as part of an attempt by their creators to construct Clinton as a monstrous effigy for both female empowerment and the boundary crossing this encompasses. The images constitute the creation of aberrant monsters against which to define ―normal‖ masculinity and femininity; to this end they serve the conservative purpose of forcing Clinton (and other women like her) outside the margins of acceptable humanity. As Gilmore writes of the monster in the cultural imagination, ―Transcending normal
765 http://blackfolksdontswim.blogspot.com/2008_01_01 _archive.html. 766 http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4761667. 220
limits and domains, the monster-figure appears to be invincible or unstoppable;‖ the monster ―becomes a perfect metaphor not only for the limitless power of evil, but also for dissolving of the boundaries that separate us from chaos.‖767 As a result, a kind of ritualised violence took place against the figure of Clinton through her construction as a monstrous cyborg bent on destruction, which could only be stopped by violence equal to or greater than its own. Hillary Clinton was a sacrificial victim upon which socially conservative components of American society took out their frustration and expressed their fear of powerful women. For the creators of these images, the survival of humanity, and the binary, heteronormative gender order upon which Western human identity is based, came to depend on her extermination.
Conclusion: Cyber-Technology and Gender Identity
As history now tells us, Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Obama after a hard- fought and very close battle and accepted the position of Secretary of State in the Obama administration. For the opponents responsible for her cyborgisation, the laws of gender dictated that Clinton must not win, and her defeat at the polls represented the restoration of the natural order.The monsterisation of Clinton suggests opportunities for further research into whether other female leaders and candidates have been subject to this particular form of mockery and undermining. While this discussion has focused specifically on a detailed study of one candidate, comparisons between treatment of other candidates in different countries, at different time periods, and across different media (traditional and new) would provide more information on the potential utilisation of the monster/cyborg motif as a political tool and on the connections between monsterisation, technology, and gender in the electoral environment.
Whether Clinton‘s success at proceeding further in the race than any female chief (or whether media efforts to dehumanise her have decreased their willingness) remains to be seen. What can be said for certain is that new media technologies will continue to play a central role in political campaigns and in the construction of candidates, as well as in the construction of gender identity more broadly, and in the representation of war. Traditional media remain a key source of news information and, for the moment, print and broadcast media outlets exist side-by-side with anonymous websites and blogs as part of an ever- changing media landscape. Yet there is no doubt the Internet is gradually decreasing the control of large media conglomerates as the public increasingly conduct their own research and create their own ―news.‖ This has important implications for the military–media complex
767 Gilmore, Monsters, 19. 221
as it is likely it will become more difficult for governments and militaries to control a decentralised, unregulated media. Combat videos and soldier blogs (Chapter 4) provide one example of how the Internet is being used as a space for the construction of counter- narratives that resist military propaganda. Internet technology will complicate the relationship between gender and war, and the Internet may be a space where the gender–violence relationship can be renegotiated and redefined.
As discussed throughout this thesis, traditional ―top-down‖ media structures serve to confirm the sexual status quo in their representations of men and women. Yet ―bottom-up‖ media outlets like the Internet do not automatically resolve this problem. While the Internet may allow for more diverse and disparate opinions, in the cyber cyborgisation of Hillary Clinton we continue to see hegemonic forces at work in online media. Online commentators regulate gender even in the absence of government and mass media control, policing their own identities in their reinforcement of the binary gender system. In the panoptic space of the Internet, users simultaneously occupy the watchtower and the cells, watching each other watching themselves.768 The power to regulate behaviour shifts from a centralised observer to a decentralised mass that disciplines itself on the basis of hegemonic gender definitions. The ―democratisation‖ of media is thus more complicated than a simple equation of democracy with freedom from control. The Warrior Myth, and the ideologies of militarised masculinity it gives rise to, continues to influence constructions of sex and gender even within the unstable flux of virtuality.
An analysis of digital imagery of Hillary Clinton reveals how cyber-technology can be used within simulation culture to reify the Western gender system and undermine women‘s attempts to achieve gender equality. Yet, precisely because of their status as reality producers, these images can also be viewed as subverting traditional gender identity. The very construction of gender-bending monsters in cyberspace suggests the possibility for the existence of such transgressive identities in the material world. Doctored photographs of Clinton produce and exist within a space where gender identities that fall outside the male/female binary can take shape. Dangerous, cyborgian Hillary will lurk in cyberspace indefinitely, constantly producing and reproducing herself as a challenge to male-dominated politics. Her propensity to shape-shift constitutes her biggest threat because it is exactly what ensures her ability to survive. Thus, while the immediate material impact of images like these is likely to be detrimental to the women who inspire them, implicit in the images is the
768 For a discussion of the Panopticon as instrument of power, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The functions of the Panopticon as surveillance mechanism, instrument of regulation and containment, and laboratory make it a useful metaphor to apply to the Internet. Unlike the physical Panopticon, however, in the virtual space one is at once permanently visible and invisible due to the anonymity the Internet provides. 222
potential for alternative identity construction. Opponents of women and feminism can use the virtual space to attempt to destroy women, but women themselves can employ it to positive political effect, as evidenced by Clinton‘s own use of online media to advance her campaign and by the development of feminist networks in cyberspace.769 In destabilising gender roles and sexed bodies, the Internet functions as a forum in which the figure of ―Madam President‖ might thus be discursively realised. If the monster is a promise for the future, as Haraway has suggested,770 then Clinton‘s monsterisation in online media, while intended to prevent a woman from entering the White House today, may instead signal the prospect of a female commander-in-chief tomorrow.
The tension intrinsic in the symbolic cyborg figure also inheres in the medium that gives rise to it. The Internet produces and houses cyborgs but it is also cyborgian itself, crossing borders and collapsing identity boundaries. The Internet ―creates a crisis of boundaries‖ between ―bodies and technologies, between our sense of self and our sense of changing roles: the personae we may play or the ‗hats we wear‘ in different situations are altered.‖771 Cyberspace produces identity instability and multiplicity. Specifically, it gives users more flexibility to construct their own multifarious identities. As Sherry Turkle writes, ―The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create.‖772 The Internet will continue to alter construction of the self, the body and gender in the twenty-first century. What effect this may have on the stability of the Western gender system, only the future can tell.
769 Cyberspace has played an important role in the development of feminist identity politics, with a thriving community of activists and scholars converging online. Examples of feminist uses of the Internet include Feminist.com (http://www.feminist.com/, accessed November 2010), which describes itself as a ―feminist Google‖ designed to promote awareness of women‘s issues and foster activism. Internet technology has also been utilised by established feminist networks like the Sisterhood is Global Institute (http://sigi.org/, accessed November 2010) and the Feminist Peace Network (http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/, accessed November 2010) to cultivate transnational connections. For more on the ways marginalised women are using the Internet to engage in feminist dialogue, see Mitra, ―Voice of the Marginalized;‖ and Rapp, Button, Fleury-Steiner, and Fleury- Steiner, ―Internet as a Tool.‖See also Youngs, ―Cyberspace: The New Feminist Frontier?‖ 770 Haraway, ―Promise of Monsters.‖ 771 Shields, ―Introduction: Virtual Spaces,‖ 7. 772 Turkle, Life on Screen, 180. 223
Conclusion
While war discourse is certainly not totally under our control, we humans can intervene in the system physically or verbally in ways that help restructure that very discourse. For example, war is not peace, it is not machines that die in war but people, and the real motivations for war are never the official ones. Just explaining these elements of postmodern war deconstructs much of its justification.... Such an intervention can be thought of as challenging the rules of the conversation or, better yet, the metarules of war‘s discourse.
— Chris Hables Gray773
This thesis has been a feminist intervention into the discourses of war. It has deconstructed war discourses in order to understand not just how these discourses are gendered but specifically how they shape the logic of gender within the Western gender system. Such an intervention enables the beginning of new conceptualisations of the gender–war relationship that move beyond an ideological reliance on a prediscursive binary gender model. Yet Gray‘s observation that humans can intervene in discourse seems to assume that discourse somehow pre-dates human involvement, as if the metarules of war simply appear out of nowhere, fully developed and formed. He forgets to say that the discourse system humans must intervene in was also created by humans in the first instance, and that that intervention also requires discourse to take place. Who is controlling war discourses, after all, it not human beings? Perhaps the ―we humans‖ Gray refers to are those outside the war discourse system, those who did not make the rules but are forced to live by them. Perhaps the intervention he envisages is a form of resistance, of dissonance, against those ―other humans‖ who orchestrate war. Yet in the postmodern period, does anyone exist outside the war system? Are we not all implicated in the construction and maintenance of war discourses and of war itself?
In addition to my own intervention, then—indeed, as part of my intervention—this thesis has interrogated the ways in which ―other humans‖ (namely the interrelated institutions of military, government, and media) control and intervene in the discourses of war in order to shape sex and gender, while suggesting that such hegemonic forces exist as part of the same discourse system as those who might make efforts to resist them. Regular soldiers on the ground in Iraq construct their identities in opposition to military and media representations using the same tools and discursive rules they attempt to contest. Feminist
773 Gray, Postmodern War, 255. 224
re-imaginings of ancient female warriors draw on the very mythologies and ideologies that have upheld centuries of male rule. Yet the process also works in reverse. Militaries attempting to reinforce notions of heteropatriarchy find themselves engaging in contradictory renegotiations of female identity and sexuality in their representations of female soldiers. Upholders of the sexual status quo unwittingly construct gender-bending identities with subversive potential in their simulations of female politicians online. All these interventions take place within the same war discourse system.
Scholars of gender and war across disciplines need to be aware that such interventions are continually shaping and reshaping our understandings of war, gender, and the relationship between the two. They also need to make their own interventions into the gendered discourses of war. We must resist falling into the trap of assuming gender pre- dates war discourses by applying ―gendered approaches‖ to war, or looking at war through ―gendered lenses.‖ Instead we must understand how the war discourses we are studying actively construct gender. Once we recognise that war discourses produce the gender binary we can stop approaching war in ways that reify that binary. This will eliminate reductive arguments that bifurcate male and female experiences of war, as if they are always and everywhere ontologically different, by understanding the ways this difference is discursively constructed. In our efforts to understand how militarism and war are gendered we must not lose sight of the fact that gender is also militarised. The constructs ―gender‖ and ―war‖ are mutually constitutive; war shapes gender as much as gender shapes war.
This thesis has focused on how this mutual construction takes place in the discursive and representational space of postmodern media. In many ways, media determine our reality in the postmodern period. I have argued that media play a fundamental role in the construction of gender identity and in the maintenance of gendered war mythologies. We cannot understand the construction of gender or the construction of war in the postmodern period independent of media. In postmodern war, what takes place on the virtual media battlefield is as important as what takes place on the literal battlefield. As media technologies rapidly develop, we must also develop new understandings of the role new media discourse plays in war and in processes of militarisation.
At the same time as it focused on discourse, this thesis has argued for the centrality of the human body at war. In the Introduction I argued that the material body must be incorporated into any study of gender and war, given the very real experiences of the body in situations of violent conflict. I also argued that a poststructuralist approach does not necessitate a neglect of the material body; rather, it posits new ways of understanding the body‘s materiality that take discursive construction into account. The discursive construction 225
of gender difference is realised corporeally in the human body; it has a material impact on the ways in which men and women experience themselves as sexed beings. The argument that postmodern war is constructed entirely through discourse has led some theorists to contend that the material body has disappeared from war in postmodernity. This thesis has argued against this hypothesis; arguments for the post-material or post-bodied nature of war are surely premature. In addition, arguments which focus on the erasure of the discursive body from war, such as in discussions of media censorship and propaganda, ignore the important ways the symbolic body continues to be employed in war discourses. By shifting our attention from the dead/injured body to the sexed body, we can see how the body remains at the core of war in both material and representational forms, on both literal and virtual battlefields.
Gray argues above that human intervention in the discourses of war challenges war‘s metarules. Yet this thesis has shown how such intervention can both dispute and reinforce the rules of the conversation. Theories of postmodernism and postmodernity tend to focus on boundary collapse and subversion at the expense of conservatism. I have used the terminology of postmodernity instead to discuss the interconnections between experience and representation and the changing nature of bodies at war as regards their relationship to both media discourse and technology. While this thesis has argued for an inherent tension between gender containment and transgression in postmodern war, conservative ideologies would still seem to be triumphing. The media analyses conducted in this thesis suggest theorists who argue that postmodern war is transforming gender, in both material and discursive senses, have spoken too soon.774 In many ways, the discourses of postmodern war maintain the gender status quo, reinforcing the Warrior Myth and the Western gender binary via combat exclusion policies that reinforce natural sexual difference based on women‘s reproductive function, fictional representations of women warriors that emphasise their sexuality and rarity, and representations of real soldiers that deny female agency and denaturalise women‘s violence. The principal motivation behind such conservatism would appear to be continuing anxiety about allowing women access to legitimate violence, and the threat to male dominance this would entail. Thus, while throughout this thesis I have demonstrated that postmodern war provides a context in which the collapse of the Western gender binary might occur, it seems hasty to say this collapse is already happening or has already taken place. Postmodern war as a vehicle for the overturning of the gender order remains just the germ of an idea.
774 See discussion of postmodern war theorists, Chapter 1, pp. 46–47 of this thesis. 226
Nonetheless, I maintain that there inheres within the figure of the female combatant the potential for transgression. In Chapter 1, I argued that feminist and gender scholarship needs to engage with the violent woman in the context of war, resisting the logic that binarises gendered identities into male perpetrators and female victims. The recognition of women‘s violent agency is vital to undermining systems of dominance that have kept women subjugated. As both giver and taker of life, the woman warrior provides an inherent challenge to the Warrior Myth, destabilising the gender binary and the logic of natural sexual difference upon which it is based. She provides not only a symbolic challenge but also a material one; as noted in Chapter 1, women‘s engagement with violent agency can ―transform...the way it feels to inhabit a female body.‖775 Through their performance of agentic violence and other behaviours once only permissible for men, female soldiers are quite literally changing the experience of female embodiment. They are also changing war, re-sexing the battlefield which was once an exclusively male space. It seems that if the potential for transgression of the gender binary exists anywhere in postmodern war, it is in the figure of the female soldier.
The potential of the female soldier as a transgressive figure, of course, depends on her future in the postmodern military. There are two possibilities for the female soldier in the armed forces of tomorrow: either integration will continue and the number of female soldiers will increase, along with the gradual relaxing of combat bans, or there will be a backlash against the ―feminisation‖ of the military and a reintroduction of restrictions on positions open to women. Assuming the current trend continues (as seems most likely, if only because of ongoing manpower shortages) what might be the implications of this further integration? If the very existence of the female soldier is transgressive, what is she transgressing toward? What sort of identity is she signalling? If, as I have argued, the gender binary is based in the logic of the Warrior Myth then the introduction of women into combat in significant numbers should go a way to collapsing this Myth and thus, potentially, the gender binary itself. How would this affect the material manifestations of (in)equality? And the embodied experiences of sexual difference?
As introduced in Chapter 6, posthumanist theorists have located the answer in technology. Technology is reinventing both humanity and war, and it seems to be the key to the reinvention of sex and gender as well, paving the way for post-gender potentialities. The post-gender subject transcends the biological distinction between male and female corporealities; the amalgamation of the organic with the machine destabilises sexual boundaries through its interference in the logic of the ―natural‖ human body. As such, post-
775 McCaughey, Real Knockouts, 2. See Chapter 1, p. 50 of this thesis. 227
gender is also a theory of post-sex, or post-sexed-body. Posthumanist theories are based on an assumption that technology does not itself have gender and thus it works upon gender (as independent of it) to change its expression in the human body. Technology resists gender in posthuman theory; arguments are based on the logic that as the human body becomes more technologised it necessarily becomes less gendered. Gray, for instance, speculates that military technology will lead to armies of cyborg soldiers for whom sex and gender are ―irrelevant‖: ―the line between men and women is rapidly dissolving. When integrated intimately with machines, mechanical and computer skills are much more important attributes than protruding genitalia.‖776 For posthumanists, this material reconstruction of the sexed body through cybernetics is mirrored in the discursive reconstruction of gender brought about by technological media, resulting in the sorts of virtual post-gender possibilities discussed in Chapter 6.
This idea that technology resists gender is not without its problems. As we have seen, technology (particularly militarised technology) is closely materially and symbolically aligned with male bodies and masculinity. At the same time, technology is often conceived of as something used to alter female bodies, a tool imposed upon women by dominant powers to make them ―more female‖ (cosmetic surgery, breast implants) or ―less female‖ (reproductive technologies that ―replace‖ the female body). While ecofeminists insist technology is male, cyberfeminists equally emphatically declare it to be female, arguing that cyber-technology opposes male domination and masculine logic. Even if we were to assume technology has no gender, the technologisation and virtualisation of the human body does not automatically mean people would stop experiencing themselves as sexed beings. Virtual gender and virtual war may both be constructed in the virtual space, but I have shown that this virtualisation does not preclude materiality. It seems likely that men and women will continue to experience their bodies in highly sexed ways in spite of post-gender simulations and the continuing amalgamation of technology with the human body.
While it is useful for exploring alternative gender potentialities, posthumanism falls short of a direct and extended questioning of gender as a construct. Like gender and war scholarship more generally, post-gender theories conflate ―gender‖ with the male/female binary; their argument that technology is without gender is an argument that technology is neither male nor female. Just as ―posthuman‖ does not refer to a condition after humanity, in these theories ―post-gender‖ does not signify a rejection of gender itself but simply a surpassing of the categories which give it meaning in a Western context by collapsing those categories into one another. Posthumanism rejects the ontology of the male/female binary
776 Gray, Postmodern War, 188. 228
but not its epistemological status as gender. Hence, posthuman theories that explore gender potentialities might more accurately be referred to as ―post-binary‖ rather than post-gender theories. A post-binary future is signalled by the sorts of monstrous gender combinations we see in the images of Hillary Clinton discussed in the previous chapter. Monsters, cyborgs, aliens and mutants, along with queer, bisexual, and transgender bodies, all of which blur distinctions between male and female corporealities and subjectivities, comprise the posthuman/post-binary identity.777 Post-gender as opposed to post-binary would necessitate a rethinking of human identity that moves beyond not just the dialectical structure of the Western gender system but the construct of gender itself as a meaningful way of classifying human populations.
In Chapter 1 of this thesis I suggested that collapsing the male/female binary is just the first step towards new understandings of human subjectivity and embodiment. The next step is to attempt to re-imagine gender independent of the categories that give it meaning in Western epistemology. Could we conceive of gender as comprised of additional categories to male and female? Or of different categories altogether? And, to push this to its logical extension, could we conceive of humanity without the construct of gender at all, without needing to divide humankind into gendered categories? If gender gives meaning to humanity, would we cease to be human without it? If war and gender are mutually determinative, then as war changes so gender will change, and vice versa. Does this mean the end of gender would signify the end of war? Gender in its binary form has developed around a segregation of the human population into violent men and non-violent women, and the theatre of war is the most physical and symbolic manifestation of the belief in natural sexual difference. Perhaps the end of war would thus signal the need to reconsider notions of sexual difference and of the concept of gender itself. A post-war world might give rise to a post-gender world.
The logic of post-war existence begs further critical investigation. With the end of combat operations in Iraq in August 2010 and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan due to begin in July 2011, the West could be considered to be entering a post- war period. The Iraq War in particular is now entering history and a retrospective analysis of this conflict may lead to new insights that were inaccessible to those of us who studied it as it progressed. Yet in the condition of postmodern war there is no such thing as post-war; there is simply ongoing military activity, a state of permanent war. As I write this Conclusion in March 2011, the United States military (along with the forces of the United Kingdom, France and other allies) is conducting airstrikes to establish a no-fly zone over Libya in
777 See Halberstam and Livingstone, Posthuman Bodies; and Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls. 229
response to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi‘s brutal repression of civilian uprisings—not a declaration of war, but transnational military intervention all the same. It becomes impossible to pinpoint a post-war period in a condition where there is often no clear indication where one war ends and the next begins. For instance, it has been argued that the First Gulf War and the Iraq War were not two separate conflicts but rather comprise one ongoing military intervention spanning two decades.778 The period following the end of the Second World War was filled with hundreds of small, relatively isolated conflicts (civil, interstate, genocidal, revolutionary) across the globe. If we argue for the constitutive relationship between politics and war—where ―politics‖ refers both to the organisation of government and identity groupings within nation states—then it follows the war will continue as long as politics does, because wars are waged both by and against the instruments and apparatuses of politics in the form of states, regimes, governments, and ethnic or sexual groups. A post-war condition might necessitate both a post-gender and a post-political condition, in other words, a condition that does not insist on identity segregation.
One does not have to accept reductive arguments that war is natural to mankind to recognise that it is with us for the long haul. What next, then, for war? Will postmodern war continue or will it be replaced by a new type of war—post-postmodern war, perhaps? In 1997 Gray argued there were only two possible bipolar futures for war: either ―some form of horrific apocalypse or the even less likely possibility of general disarmament and peace.‖779 Both scenarios seem unlikely today. In the post-9/11 period, one might hypothesise religiously motivated terrorism as the beginning of post-postmodern war. It has been noted that the tactics of terrorist organisations are mirrored in today‘s regular militaries which increasingly rely on small, professional units to do their fighting, and in this sense that all war has come to resemble a form of terrorism. Islamic fundamentalist terrorism resists (post)modern political organisation. Its targets are not states, regimes, or governments, but ideologies, cultures, and ways of life, reflecting ―the general drift of the world toward more global structures of relationship and away from nation-states that have dominated political life since the Renaissance.‖780 Yet these ideologies remain inextricably connected to political systems, and religious fundamentalism ultimately aims to change the instruments of politics, such as with the introduction of Sharia law and the instating of Islamic councils as political bodies. Responses to the attacks of 9/11, and later 7/7, have also been highly political in nature; postmodern war/politics remains the preferred weapon for fighting terrorism. Besides, conflict in the name of religious ideology is nothing new; pre-modern and classical wars were also fought for ideological reasons, and terrorism draws heavily on the symbolism
778 See, for example, Altheide, Terrorism, chapter 8. 779 Gray, Postmodern War, 243. 780 Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 544. 230
of an ancient warrior tradition. Perhaps war has come full circle, with past collapsing into future in a present that resists ―post‖ prefixes entirely.
This thesis began with a quotation from Leo Braudy whose work charts the development from pre-modern ritualised warfare to postmodern terrorism by documenting the history of the relationship between war and masculinity. War and gender are discursive systems that are based on the interaction between the mythological past and the technological future. When we look at where the technological future may lead us, therefore, we should not forget about the mythology that gave rise to it. Technology is typically viewed as an endpoint: humanity will amalgamate with machines in creatures like the cyborg until, perhaps, it is subsumed by technology altogether. Technology is the future. Yet it is also part of the ongoing gendered mythology of war. Technology may intervene in the logic of gender, enabling conceptualisations of posthuman or post-gender identities, but we must also intervene in the logic of technology, as in that of nature, interrogating its role in the constitution of human being. Gender construction is taking place in an increasingly technologised battleground. Future warriors must be clear exactly what—and who—they are fighting for. 231
Postscript
In April 2011, the Australian Defence Minister announced his intention to begin a process of removing combat restrictions on women in the ADF. The review of combat exclusion policies is being conducted alongside a series of inquiries prompted by military scandals involving alcohol, drugs, sexual misconduct, and sexual assaults on military women by servicemen. The announcement has reignited debates about women in combat, with opponents continuing to voice concerns about disruption to unit cohesion, men‘s ―instincts‖ to protect women, and how the rape of female troops would affect the men in their units. At time of writing, women remain excluded from combat in the ADF.
May 2011 232
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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne
Author/s: RITCHIE, JESSICA
Title: Gendered discourses of war: deconstructing gender and the warrior myth in postmodern warfare
Date: 2011
Citation: Ritchie, J. (2011). Gendered discourses of war: deconstructing gender and the warrior myth in postmodern warfare. PhD thesis, Arts, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne.
Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/36736
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