“I’m a Soldier, not a Gender”:¹ Iraq War Literature and the Double Bind of Being a Woman in Combat

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Notes

¹ Spoken by Mickiela Montoya in The Lonely Soldier by Helen Benedict (174).

² See Judy Woodruff’s July 2007 segment on the PBS NewsHour, in which Kirsten Holmstedt appears as a guest.

³ Kelly Oliver relates, “Abu Ghraib rekindled debates over whether women should be in the military and debates over gender equality” (23). Oliver also argues that Lynch “is the ideal hero because she is a woman who suffers, the ideal of feminine self-sacrifice and suffering” (41). For additional studies of the media representation of Lynch and England, see Marita Gronnvoll, “Gender (In)Visibility at Abu Ghraib”; John Howard and Laura Prividera, “Rescuing Patriarchy or Saving ‘Jessica Lynch’: The Rhetorical Construction of the American Woman Soldier”; and Bruce Tucker and Priscilla Walton, “From General’s Daughter to Coal-Miner’s Daughter: Spinning and Counter-Spinning Jessica Lynch.”

⁴ Joshua Goldstein addresses the Greek myth of the Amazon “female armies” (11) and the European colonialist accounts of “women warriors” in South America (16). He also addresses women’s participation in the English colonial conflicts with Native Americans, as well as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War (87–88). Similarly, Laura Sjoberg asserts, “many women have served as traditional soldiers in traditional wars,” and she gives examples ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the wars of early American history (39). While informative, these instances lie outside the historical scope of this essay.

⁵ Of course, American war literature is traditionally a male-dominated genre, in terms of both authorship and subject matter. See, for example, the works of Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Joseph Heller, and Anthony Swofford. Women do appear in these male-centered narratives, although typically in the form of mothers, wives, girlfriends, or prostitutes and not as protagonists. Jennifer Haytock notes the significance of the break Helen Benedict makes with this tradition in her novel Sand Queen (2012), in which “Benedict imagines the trauma experienced by women who participate in the Iraq War, both that of female U.S. soldiers and of Iraqi citizens” (2).

⁶ This double bind also produces the compound traumas of sexual harassment and assault that several servicewomen featured in these narratives suffer. Benedict’s The Lonely Soldier, in particular, focuses on the issue of sexual trauma. For studies of this troubling pattern in the military, see Sheila Jeffreys’s “Double Jeopardy: Women, the US Military and the War in Iraq”; Jana Pershing, “Why Women Don’t Report Sexual Harassment: A Case Study of an Elite Military Institution”; and Judith Stiehm; Arms and the Enlisted Woman.

⁷ For an account of one of these female POWs, see She Went to War: The Rhonda Cornum Story, by Rhonda Cornum and Peter Copeland.

⁸ See the article in the New York Times by Matthew Rosenberg and Dave Philipps covering Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s announcement in December 2015.

⁹ Laura Prividera and John Howard see the military as a microcosm of American society: “The hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the military epitomizes social organizing in American society” (“Rescuing” 89). In the US military and in society at large, women “are culturally defined as being in need of protection and become symbolic constructions of what men need to fight for” (“Rescuing” 89).

¹⁰ Prividera and Howard argue that the rhetoric in which the reporting of the Jessica Lynch story was cast is a prime example of the male-warrior/female-nurturer archetypes (“Rescuing” 91–94). Lynch was repeatedly represented not as an agent but as an object of men’s actions, not as a soldier but a victim (91–94). Sjoberg concurs, “Though she was a soldier, Jessica Lynch was the stereotypical feminized other in the war: innocent, in need of protection, …” (29).

¹¹ Holmstedt herself struggles to negotiate this dynamic: on one hand, she acknowledges that “these women warriors insist they are no different from their male counterparts” (xxi), and on the other, she concedes that women are biologically and emotionally different from men (xxii).

¹² See especially the works of Michael Herr and Tim O’Brien.

¹³ Fenner asserts, “female military casualties have barely warranted mention in our history books” (6). Elshtain concurs, “We think rarely of women who have actually fought, who have signed up by disguising themselves as men or volunteering their services to resistance and guerilla movements” (173, author’s italics). The absence of women fighters from history is mirrored in war narratives. Jeffrey Walsh notes, “War films … have always privileged the male point of view, masculine initiation rituals, and male spectatorship” (197). Similarly, Sjoberg argues that traditional war narratives omit “many of the women who are in wars and many of the roles that women play in them” (25).