Waging Gendered Wars

U.S. Military Women in Afghanistan and Iraq

Paige Whaley Eager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367605421
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317000693
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Waging Gendered Wars examines, through the analytical lens of feminist international relations theory, how U.S. military women have impacted and been affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although women were barred from serving formally in ground combat positions within the U.S. armed forces during both wars, U.S. female soldiers are being killed in action. By examining how U.S. military women's agency as soldiers, veterans, and casualties of war affect the planning and execution of war, Whaley Eager assesses the ways in which the global world of international politics and warfare has become localized in the life and death narratives of female service personnel impacted by combat experience, homelessness, military sexual trauma, PTSD, and the deaths of fellow soldiers.

Chapter 1 The Road to Research

DOI: 10.4324/9781315547794-1

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have consumed more than a decade of U.S. foreign policy attention. Although President Obama officially brought combat operations to a close in Iraq in December 2011, significant violence still continues to wreak havoc in the fragile country. The “war of necessity” or Operation Enduring Freedom (the war in Afghanistan) has been waged since early October 2001. President Obama has pledged to remove tens of thousands of combat troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Both wars have cost over one trillion dollars to wage and will cost millions more in the long-term future to adequately address the pressing needs of U.S. veterans, who will need long-term care for more traditional physical battlefield injuries as well as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI), the two signature psychic and physiological traumas of these wars.

While most of the general public still equates the word “soldier” with a male body, the unprecedented roles of U.S. women soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan warrant significant empirical and theoretical analysis. In 2008, a sobering “milestone” was reached when a headline in The New York Times stated that over 100 U.S. female soldiers had been killed in the military theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan. During both wars, women were barred from serving formally in ground combat positions within the U.S. armed forces, such as infantry and artillery; however, more women soldiers have been killed in these wars than all female casualties in the U.S. led wars of the twentieth century. Moreover, over 600 U.S. female soldiers to date have been awarded the Purple Heart, and other female soldiers have returned home as amputees such as former Assistant Secretary of Veteran Affairs and Congresswoman Major Tammy Duckworth. ¹ In addition, many female veterans are struggling to reintegrate into civilian society and are experiencing PTSD brought on by exposure to combat and/or military sexual assault or rape.

1 Duckworth was elected in November 2012 to serve as the House Representative for Illinois’ 8th District.

The contribution this book will make is situated within the empirical and theoretical framework of feminist international relations theory and the rich literature on militarism, hegemonic and subordinate femininities, and civilian-military relations. Even though a single unified theory cannot and should not attempt to address the myriad roles of U.S. women soldiers over the past decade, this book seeks to inform discussions across various academic disciplines including political science, sociology, and women’s/gender studies. Within feminist international relations theory, various strands of feminist thought including liberal, difference, Marxist, radical, and post-modern feminism are utilized to provide theoretical and empirical analytical leverage. The commonality of the feminist international relations enterprise is the utilization of gender as the privileged category of analysis to highlight women’s perspectives on social issues and research. Moreover, feminist international relations theory is often explicitly normative, meaning it seeks empirically to understand and redress gender inequalities which often remain hidden or ignored in a state-centric focus of traditional and male-centric international relations theory.

Thus, in the spirit of Cynthia Enloe’s research, one of the first questions asked is “where are the women” in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? In answering this question, I chose to examine U.S. military women only—a significant, yet admittedly narrow segment of the general population considering less than 1 percent of the U.S. population serves in the military at any given time. A more robust analysis would examine the impact of female soldiers from other coalition and NATO countries which participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively. In addition, the impact of Afghan women, Iraqi women, U.S. female civilians, U.S. military wives, ² U.S. peace activists, ³ U.S. female aid experts, and female private security contractors all merit analysis in a future holistic research agenda. However, I chose to focus on U.S. women in combat because the unprecedented roles assumed by female service personnel over the past decade fundamentally challenges the dominant and patriarchal social constructions of terms such as soldier, veteran, and war casualty.

2 See Houppert, Karen. (2005), Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military for Better or Worse. New York: Ballatine Books. 3 See Sheehan, Cindy. (2006), Peace Mom_ A Mother’s Journey Through Heartache to Activism. New York: Atria Books.

Another objective of this book is to explore the utility of feminist analyses in international relations theory for understanding the lives of the women in the U.S. armed forces who died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feminist analysis is a useful academic analytical tool; however, this book will clearly demonstrate that an examination of U.S. military women’s impact on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan necessitates the analytical leverage provided by a diversity of feminist perspectives. While the noted feminist international relations scholar Laura Sjoberg argues that the Iraq War demonstrated acceptable narratives and examples of “militarized femininity” through the stories of Jessica Lynch, ⁴ the female general in charge of Abu Ghraib prison, and the U.S. military women who abused prisoners there, ⁵ this book seeks to marry the theoretical views on women “and/at/in” war with empirical data on how particular U.S. military women, who have in some cases been marginalized from the academic and public discourse, actually behaved during both wars.

4 See “One of the Boys? Gender Disorder in Times of Crisis” by Claire Turenne Sjolander and Kathryn Trevenen (2010). International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12:2: 158–76. 5 See “Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations from the War in Iraq” by Laura Sjoberg (2007). International Feminist Journal of Politics, 9:1: 82–101. Also see “The Woman in Peril and the Ruined Woman: Representations of Female Soldiers in the Iraq War” by Jennifer Lobasz (2008), Journal of Women, Politics, & Policy, 29, 3: 305–33.

It is important, therefore, to examine particular women’s stories at face value, and not ascribe unto them feminist labels they might eschew. Instead, the book strives to illuminate how U.S. military women have purposefully, and sometimes without purpose, influenced the debate and execution of policy in the most male-centric arena of foreign policy—war-making. We can no longer accept academic treatments that “airbrush” in women’s participation in foreign policy matters for gender tokenism. Rather we must advance the reality that women in high places of power, such as Secretary of State, and women in relatively low places of power, such as an enlisted woman who receives a Bronze Star for valor, have radically reshaped how states “make” war. Moreover, perhaps increased female participation in war will become a factor in reshaping the discursive and performative practices of the state, even liberal, hegemonic ones such as the United States. Thus, it is in this spirit that the following chapters will highlight the stories of “a polyphonic chorus of female voices whose disparate melodies are discernible sounds in the land” (Elshtain, in McGlen and Starkes 1993: 188).

Exploring Feminisms

The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike in discord, disease, and death…

Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1868

Helena Carreiras (2006) remarks, “Feminists have posited conflicting theories on the relation of women to war, peace, and revolution and women have, according to changing social and historical circumstances, responded to warfare and peace movements in a great variety of ways” (p. 62). As with most theoretical approaches to social inquiry, there is no singular definition of feminism. In fact, there are many feminism(s); however, despite this diversity the large tent of Feminism can agree on the following points as necessary elements to employing this theoretical approach: (1) providing critiques of misogyny and sexual hierarchy; (2) a focus on women as subjects of analysis; (3) an expanded account of and altered orientation as to what is important to study in political life; (4) a specific normative focus which critiques what is and offers a scenario of what ought to be; and (5) championing ethical/moral norms that provide a critical stance regarding the position of women and envisioning a more desirable state of affairs in social and political life for women (Beasley 1999: 26–36).

Feminism can be utilized to critique mainstream political thought which has been viewed as male-centric, since it has been written and analyzed primarily by men for most of human history. Beasley refers to this approach as “add Mary Wollstonecraft and stir” (pp. 4–5). Other feminists, however, challenge traditional political theory and do not think that mainstream/or “malestream” political theory can be analytically separated from its male-centric assumptions; hence, the need for a radical rethinking of political theory as we know it. Finally, other feminists, namely postmodernists, posit that our ontological and epistemological assumptions and knowledge in social sciences is utterly wrong because of a sexual hierarchy and male domination which has kept women in a subservient position. Hence, our male understanding of knowledge and human history is inherently anti-woman. ⁶

6 See Harding, Sandra. (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. New York: Cornell University Press.

Feminists also traditionally critique the false division, as they see it, between the public and private spheres of life. Men, according to feminists, have dominated in the public sphere through their participation in political and economic relations outside of the home. Obviously, women were not permitted in many countries to own property, vote, or run for political office until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women have been confined to the private sphere of life where they are viewed as being primarily responsible and biologically superior to men in regard to taking care of the physical and emotional needs of a husband and children. Feminists are quick to point out, however, that a woman’s supposedly natural inclination to keep the fire of the hearth burning while her male companion goes forth into the public sphere to make laws and do business is false and artificially constructed to serve the interests of men.

Moreover, women are still dominated and subjugated in the private sphere and are often victims of violence along with their children. For many women, including those who may even eschew the term feminism, what transpires in the private sphere of life is political as well. By the 1960s, women in the United States and Europe began challenging the false dichotomization between the public and private spheres. The rallying slogan became, “The personal is political.” The phrase was created to underscore the notion that what was happening in women’s personal lives such as: accessing reproductive health care services, being responsible for all of the housework, and facing sexual assault in their own homes were indeed political issues. Women, therefore, needed to become active in the public sphere by making elected officials aware of these issues and most importantly exchanging ideas and organizing strategies with other women to improve their lives. In short, what could be described as “political” in nature was now broadened tremendously. Moreover, “Feminism is not only a political theory. It is a political theory that coexists with and interacts with a political movement dedicated to eradicating the problems that women experience because of their sex” (Sjoberg 2006: 32). And one of those main problems is violence. “Feminists are not against violence because women are more peaceful; they are against violence because of its disproportionate impact on women and people at the margins of global politics” (Sjoberg 2006: 202).

Since the emergence of a robust academic field in feminist international relations and feminist security theory, scholars such as Cynthia Enloe, Christine Sylvester, V. Spike Peterson, and Laura Sjoberg ⁷ contend that women often occupy the margins of mainstream academic analysis of international politics. Some women can be at the center of international politics, but more women will be at the margins. To analyze women at the margins, I will investigate how U.S. military women have impacted and been impacted upon by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, U.S. military women certainly affected, both negatively and positively, the lives of women in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Even though we still think of war as a largely male-centric sociological, economic, psychological, and political set of processes, U.S. women have played key roles as soldiers, veterans, fatalities, stateswomen, ⁸ and peace activists. ⁹ However, the primary focus of this book is the role of U.S. women as enlisted soldiers, officers, female veterans, and female casualties of war. In order to examine these disparate positions and experiences, I draw on various strands of feminism—liberal feminism, difference feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, and postmodern feminism—to provide analytical leverage.

7 See Sylvester, Christine. (2012), War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis. Colorado: Routledge and Peterson, V. Spike (ed.). (1992). Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers. 8 See Lusane, Clarence. (2005), “What Color is Hegemony? Powell, Rice, and the New Global Strategists.” New Political Science, 27, 1: 23–41. Mabry, Marcus. (2007), Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power. New York: Modern Times. Rice, Condoleezza. (2011). No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington. New York: Crown Publishers. 9 See Cockburn, Cynthia. (2007), From Where We Stand: War, Women, Activism, and Feminist Analysis. New York: Zed Books. Cockburn, Cynthia. (June 2010), “Gender Relations as Casual in Militarization and War: A Feminist Standpoint.” International Journal of Politics, 12, 2: 139–57. Riley, Robin. (2005), “So Few of Us, So Many of Them_ U.S. Women Resisting Desert Storm.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7, 3: 341–57. Kutz-Flamembaum, Rachel. (2007), “Code Pink, Raging Grannies, and the Missile Dick Chicks”, NWSA Journal, 19,1: 89–105.

Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminists argue that women are equal to men in intellectual and physical abilities; women are capable of doing what men do, including participating actively in the public sphere of life. Liberal feminism, which is often viewed as the dominant strain of feminism in the United States, is primarily concerned with the issue of individual rights over the securing of the collective “good” and ensuring that women have access to the same opportunities as men. Seminal court cases, civil rights legislation, sexual discrimination battles, equal pay for equal work, and the Equal Rights Amendment were all important milestones for liberal feminists. Feminists from Mar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• 1 The Road to Research
• 2 History of U.S. Military Women
• 3 The Second Sex at War in Iraq and Afghanistan
• 4 Female Veterans: Challenging Dominant Paradigms
• 5 The Ultimate Sacrifice
• 6 The Long Wars
• Bibliography
• Index