The operation and subversion of gendered war discourses: soldierhood, motherhood and military dissent in the public production of Kimberly Rivera

ABSTRACT

This article undertakes a discourse analysis of texts concerning a recent high profile case of opposition to war by Kimberly Rivera, a US soldier and a mother of five. Developing on previous research concerning how female soldiers, anti-war women and anti-war soldiers have been made intelligible within understandings of war and gender, the analysis traces the discursive repertoires constituting Rivera as a political subject. The article considers how, when and with what implications for broader discourses of gender and war, and their transformation, the categories of soldierhood and motherhood were invoked to construct and obstruct Rivera as an intelligible dissenting subject. The most common presentation of Rivera centered on her motherhood, understood to be in crisis due to her military role. With motherhood and soldierhood seen to be antithetical this crisis could be “solved” through opposition to war. This limited the extent to which Rivera was intelligible as a “thinking citizen” and reproduced motherhood and soldierhood as stable categories leaving their immanent discourses concerning war and gender untroubled. The article then considers ways in which alternative avenues for transformative interventions could open up if dissenters like Rivera were “written” as other than fundamentally contradictory figures.

KEYWORDS:

• Military dissent
• military mothers
• soldierhood
• subjectivity
• anti-war

Acknowledgments

I thank Jamie Melrose and Elisa Wynne-Hughes for comments on earlier drafts and the journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. This piece is dedicated to my mother, Julie Walker.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joanna Tidy is Anniversary Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield. Across her research work she examines the gendered politics of what is known and knowable about war and soldierly experience, particularly how these configurations underpin the possibility, conduct and contestation of war. Her most recent publications have appeared in Critical Military Studies, International Political Sociology, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Review of International Studies.

Notes

1. Material such as this points to the presence of classed as well as gendered dynamics in the case of Kimberly Rivera. A full discussion is beyond the remit of this article but deserving of further attention.