Deconstructing Gender and the Warrior Myth in Postmodern Warfare
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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 3 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 5 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 7 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 9 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 11 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 13 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.