Bloody war: menstruation, soldiering, and the ‘gender-integrated’ United States military

ABSTRACT

Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying in a new array of roles in the so-called “global war on terror“ and the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation can tell us about the banal and bodily nature of women’s militarization as a deeply affective, sensorial, and embodied process, and the tensions these anxieties reveal within liberal promises of a gender-integrated US military. Drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine efforts within US military medicine to hormonally regulate women soldiers’ menstrual cycles as a matter of military operational concern, alongside public narratives by women soldiers who deny the significance of menstruation to the work of soldiering. I argue that both of these discourses enact a conflation between womanhood and menstruation in the debate over women’s role in and at war, in a manner that circumscribes the possibilities of what we can apprehend – and feel – about war and soldiering as gendered experience.

KEYWORDS:

• gender-integrated military
• menstruation
• blood
• combat
• militarization

Acknowledgments

The research on which this article is based was funded by a Carolina Women’s Faculty Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My sincere thanks to my interlocutors who generously contributed their time, knowledge, and experience to this project. I am grateful to my research assistants, Lacy Jo Evans and Amanda Tucker, for their assistance with interviews and focus groups, and for their boundless enthusiasm and collaboration in the research endeavor. I thank Mara Buchbinder, Peter Redfield, and Harris Solomon, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their insightful suggestions and feedback as this article took shape. Finally, a special thanks to Amber Mathwig for our wide-ranging discussions on these topics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.quora.com/What-do-female-soldiers-do-when-they-get-their-periods-on-the-front-lines. Accessed 27 September 2019.

2. I use the term ‘soldier’ to refer broadly to enlisted military service personnel serving in combat or in combat support roles. While I recognize that this term privileges the US Army, here I use it strategically to reflect colloquial speech. I otherwise indicate the military branch of specific individuals.

3. The US officially deployed women soldiers to a combat zone for the first time in the 1991 Gulf War. In 1994, the Department of Defense technically barred women from ground combat jobs and from being assigned to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground. Advocates have celebrated the repeal as a case of policy catching up with reality, for in spite of official restrictions, over the past two decades women service members have de facto found themselves serving in combat and combat support roles, in part because the distinction between ‘rear’ and ‘front’ is increasingly untenable and artificial given shifts in modern warfare.

4. This article is also informed more broadly by ongoing ethnographic fieldwork exploring the uptake, use, and embodied effects of psychoactive medications in deployment.

5. Williams is also the author of Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army, an autobiographical account that details her life and experiences in and out of the military. She has been a public and vocal supporter of women’s service in combat.

6. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/19/us/gingrich-s-piggies-poked.html. Accessed 15 October 2019.

7. Given that military institutions are often built on stark and dichotomous constructions of ‘male’ and ‘female,’ scholars have suggested the potential for trans bodies to expose the constructedness of this sex/gender system and to disrupt the militarization of gender. As Yi and Gitzen (2018, 388) write with respect to trans bodies in the South Korean military, ‘Bodies, like gender, are fluid, and when set against an anatomical deterministic model of sex/gender, transitioning is itself a military transgression.’

8. https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/08/politics/donald-trump-cnn-megyn-kelly-comment/index.html. Accessed 15 October 2019.

9. This mainstreaming is evident, not only in the widespread inclusion of women into the armed forces around the globe, but in the international commitment to women’s participation in peace and security, as advanced by the Women, Peace and Security resolutions as part of the United Nations agenda.

10. The very notion of ‘menstrual hygiene’ is contested, with feminist scholars arguing that menstruation was made into a hygiene concern by the feminine hygiene industry (Brumberg 1993; Kissling 2013).

11. https://www.quora.com/What-do-female-soldiers-do-when-they-get-their-periods-on-the-front-lines. Accessed 3 October 2019.

12. https://www.quora.com/What-do-female-soldiers-do-when-they-get-their-periods-on-the-front-lines. Accessed 3 October 2019.

13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvwbG7luDDA. Accessed 3 October 2019.