Designing the Pentagon Memorial: gendered statecraft, heroic victimhood and site authenticity in War on Terror commemoration

ABSTRACT

How does a memorial curate an image of conflict when it is dwarfed by 6.5 million square feet of the Department of Defence, when it is tasked with commemorating simultaneous military and civilian deaths, and when its public access consists of a sliver cut through one of the most secure sites on earth? Given the uniquely inconvenient siting of the Pentagon Memorial, this article argues that the Pentagon Memorial was itself curated by two memorial grammars: contemporary expectations that disaster sites resonate with ‘authenticity’; and that civilians are incorporated into commemorative rhetoric of heroic victimhood, during the War on Terror. These memorial grammars constitute the Pentagon Memorial through gendered logics of statecraft. The memorial is crafted as a response to the sudden violation of the domestic realm on 9/11, as well as the violent entangling of civilian and military victims at the crash site. Its design encircles this moment of violation, where the bodies of ‘protectors’ were entangled with those of the ‘protected’. The memorial freezes time a moment prior to impact – so that the masculine, militarized agents of state defence might once again be distinguished from civilians, and the distinction of inside/outside re-established. The Pentagon Memorial encircles the disruption of gendered logics of statecraft on 9/11, and their restitution.

KEYWORDS:

• Memorialisation
• War on Terror
• Pentagon Memorial
• gendered statecraft
• 9/11

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the comments made by the two anonymous peer-reviewers and the audience of the LSE’s IR Theory Research Seminar series, from whom this paper received very useful feedback. The paper is significantly stronger, thanks to the input of you all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The minutes of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation board and advisory council meetings, regarding the World Trade Centre site reconstruction, are available from: http://www.renewnyc.com/AboutUs/BoardMeetingsArch.aspx & http://www.renewnyc.com/AboutUs/AdvisoryMeetings.aspx.

2. However, the Pentagon Memorial does conform to other memorial conventions – such as the placement of names within commemorative architecture, the architectural object standing in for the human, and the erasure of the enemy from representation. My thanks to reviewer one for emphasizing this point.

3. The National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Website (undated): https://pentagonmemorial.org/plan/frequently-asked-questions/where-can-visitors-park (last accessed 30 April 2018). Capitalization in original.

4. ‘Families Statement’ (undated), available at: https://pentagonmemorial.org/explore/biographies/memorial-construction-timeline, last accessed 30 April 2018.

5. Thank you to reviewer #1 for this point.

6. This research was conducted as part of a comparative study of War on Terror memorialization, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC): ES/N002407/1.

7. I am using the verb ‘to queer’ to signify the disruption of binary, gendered memorial grammars. War memorials performatively reproduce (Butler 1990) statist assumptions about the domesticated inside versus the anarchic external domain of war (Basham 2013; Elshtain 1982; Enloe 2007; Weber 2016; Young 2003). Queer interventions replace the heteronormative ‘grammar’ of ‘either/or’ with ‘and/or’ (Weber 2016) – although it must be noted that I am using the term more broadly than Weber does, by stretching it to signify architectural disruptions of militarism.

8. In a parallel example of military/civilian distinctions being made in death, the commemorative landscape of Pearl Harbour was eventually extended beyond the USS Arizona Memorial – with the addition of a plaque to the 48 civilians killed, located away from the sacred sites at the visitor centre (White 2004).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/N002407/1].