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Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2015

KATHARINE M. MILLAR
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Abstract

Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, over 150 female American military personnel have been killed, over 70 following hostile fire. Given Western society’s long-standing practice of reserving the conduct of collective violence to men, these very public deaths are difficult to encompass within the normative and ideological structures of the contemporary American political system. This study examines the ways in which the public duty to commemorate the heroism of soldiers – and the private desire to accurately remember daughters and wives – poses a significant challenge to coherent discursive representation. In doing so, the study employs hermeneutical interpretation to analyse public representations of female soldiers and their relation to death in US popular culture. These representations are examined via Judith Butler’s concept of grievability – the possibility of receiving recognition as a worthy life within the existing social imaginary. It is argued that female soldiers are grievable as both ‘good soldiers’ and ‘good women’, but not as ‘good female soldiers’. The unified subject position of ‘good female soldier’ is liminal, and thus rendered socially and politically unintelligible. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of this liminality for collective mourning and the possibility of closure after trauma.

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Articles
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Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 757 - 779
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© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Critical Voices in Swiss International Relations Conference (Geneva, 2012) and the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference (Edmonton, 2012). I would like to thank the conference discussants, Krystel Carrier-Sabourin, Xavier Guillaume, and Marysia Zalewski, as well as the excellent anonymous RIS reviewers for their very discerning comments. Thanks are also due to Elizabeth Frazer, Elisabeth Prügl, Julia Costa-Lopez, and Aiko Holvikivi for their insightful engagement with various drafts of this article.

References

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2 As classifications of ‘hostile’/ ‘nonhostile’ deaths are often matters of interpretation, and various countries and branches of the armed forces have different reporting practices, such figures are a ‘best estimate’ at time of writing only.

3 Davey, Monica, ‘For 1,000 troops, there is no going home’, New York Times (9 September 2004)Google Scholar; Mark Thompson, ‘Women not-quite-in combat’, TIME, available at: {http://nation.time.com/2012/02/10/women-not-quite-in-combat/} accessed 16 October 2012.

4 Thompson, ‘Combat’.

5 David F. Burelli, ‘Women in Combat: Issues for Congress’, Congressional Research Service Report R42075 (9 May 2013), available at: {http://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42075.pdf} accessed 14 October 2014.

6 Enloe, Cynthia, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007)Google Scholar, p. 82.

7 In 1993, restrictions prohibiting women from serving as combat pilots, or serving on combat ships were lifted. In 2011, women became eligible for deployment on US submarines, ending the last gender segregation in the US Navy. See Zeigler, Sara L. and Gunderson, Gregory G., Moving Beyond G.I. Jane: Women and the US Military (Lanham: University Press of America, 2005)Google Scholar, p. 43; Phil Stewart, ‘Women to start serving on US Navy submarines, Reuters (29 April 2010).

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11 Thanks to the anonymous RIS reviewer who provided this insight.

12 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), p. 12.

13 Butler, , ‘Precarious’, p. 20 Google Scholar.

14 The ‘Western-ness’ of this relationship between death and political community bears repeating, as does Butler’s own qualification of her original conceptualisation and analysis of grievability as a ‘first world critique’. While grievability and ontological security offer an exceptionally useful lens for considering contemporary American discourses relating to ‘women in combat’, they ought not, at least in this specific formulation, be generalised across place and time. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 93. For more on this point, please refer to Maja Zehfuss, ‘Hierarchies of grief and the possibility of war: Remembering UK fatalities in Iraq’, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 38:2 (2009), p. 423.

15 Huysmans, Jef, ‘Security! What do you mean? From concept to thick signifier’, European Journal of International Relations, 4:2 (1998), pp. 235CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 238.

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19 Talal Asad, cited in Butler, ‘Frames’, p. 41. For the original, please refer to Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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24 Cited in Kinsella, Helen A., ‘Securing the civilian: Sex and gender in the laws of war’, in Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (eds), Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 253–254 Google Scholar. For the original, please refer to Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women in War (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

25 Mälksoo, Maria, ‘The challenge of liminality for International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 38:2 (April 2002), p. 485Google Scholar.

26 Huysmans, , ‘Security’, p. 242 Google Scholar.

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28 It should be acknowledged, of course, that there are several theoretical difficulties inherent to combining the insights of cultural anthropologists and poststructural theorists, the most significant being the ontological status of ‘structure’. While acknowledging that cultural anthropologists tend to be interested in structure as universally ordering, whereas poststructuralists are more concerned with processes of contingent marginalisation, this article attempts to combine the insights of the two by bringing the anthropological concept of ‘liminality’ to bear on the ‘manifest’ structures investigated by poststructuralists ( Neumann, Iver B., ‘Introduction to the Forum on liminality’, Review of International Studies, 38:2 (April 2002), p. 474Google Scholar).

29 Butler, , ‘Frames’, p. 39 Google Scholar.

30 Vermont State Legislature, ‘House Concurrent Resolution in Memory of the American Military Personnel Who Have Died in the Service of Their Nation in Iraq from December 20, 2005 to December 29, 2006’, HCR 17, 2006–7 Session.

31 Vermont State Legislature, ‘House Concurrent Resolution in Memory of the American Military and Central Intelligence Agency Personnel Who Have Died in the Service of Their Nation in Iraq or Afghanistan from January 21, 2009 to December 31, 2009’, HCR 219, 2009–10 Session.

32 Joanne Fowler et al., ‘Honoring the fallen’, People Magazine (28 December 2009).

33 For more on this point, please refer to Edkins, Jenny, ‘The rush to memory and the rhetoric of war’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31:2 (Winter 2003), pp. 238–245Google Scholar.

34 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2009) pp. 94–95 Google Scholar.

35 Quoted in Maslin, Janet, ‘Bearing witness to the fallen and the grieving’, New York Times (5 June 2008)Google Scholar.

36 Butler, , ‘Precarious’, p. 145 Google Scholar.

37 Butler, , ‘Frames’, p. 38 Google Scholar.

38 Butler, , ‘Precarious’, p. 37 Google Scholar.

39 Edkins, , ‘Memory’, p. 233 Google Scholar. For the original, please refer to Cannadine, David, ‘War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain’, in Whaley and Jaochim (ed.), Mirror of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981)Google Scholar.

40 For more on the relationship between universalised unmarked and inherently particularistic marked social categories, please refer to Waugh, Linda A., ‘Marked and unmarked: A choice between unequals in semiotic structure’, Semiotica, 38:3–4 (1982), pp. 299–318 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 309–10.

41 Davey, ‘Troops’.

42 Post, ‘Army’.

43 Tyson, Ann Scott, ‘For female GIs, combat is a fact; many duties in Iraq put women at risk despite restrictive policy’, Washington Post (13 May 2005)Google Scholar.

44 Such practices are compounded, of course, by the changing nature of combat itself, wherein the diffuse deployment of troops across a large area in an attempt to both pacify a guerilla opponent and win civilian ‘hearts and minds’ renders the traditional notion of a fixed frontline increasingly meaningless.

45 Davey, ‘Troops’.

46 United States Department of Defense, ‘Defense Department Expands Women’s Combat Role’, available at: {http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=119098} accessed 21 October 2013.

47 Joan Soley, ‘Marines to train women for combat’, BBC News, available at: {http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17762042} accessed 21 April 2012.

48 As the Marine Corps administration has gone to great lengths to assert that female Marines will only be qualified in infantry training if they can meet the rigorous physical and mental standards required of ‘all Marines’, it remains to be seen whether this policy change will actually result in the greater inclusion of women in direct combat in practice. James Sanborn, ‘USMC 4-Star – women to attend infantry school’, Military Times (18 April 2012).

49 Bulmiller and Shanker, ‘Pentagon’.

50 For more on the end of the Vietnam War, the state of the American military establishment, and the increasing inclusion of women in the US military throughout the 1970s, please refer to Enloe, ‘Link’; Judith Hicks Stiehm, ‘Women, women, everywhere’, in Derek A. Reveron and udith Hicks Stiehm (eds), Inside Defence: Understanding the US Military in the 21 st Century (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); Morgan, Jand Matthew J., The American Military After 9/11: Society, State and Empire (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Tyson, Ann Scott, ‘Woman gains Silver Star – and removal from combat; case shows contradictions of Army rules’, Washington Post (1 May 2008)Google Scholar.

52 The only potential exception to this statement is the memorial for 1st Lt Sharon Ann Lane, a nurse and the only American woman killed by enemy action in Vietnam, raised by the Aultman Hospital in Canton, Ohio. The memorial consists of a statue of 1st Lt Lane and lists the 110 local men who also died in the Vietnam War. Doroty Spelts, ‘Nurses who served: and did not return’, The American Journal of Nursing, 86:9 (1986), p. 1038; and Robert F. Dorr, ‘Nurse Sharon Lane paid the highest price in Vietnam’, Defense Media Network, available at: {http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/nurse-sharon-lane-paid-the-highest-price-in-vietnam/} accessed 20 June 2014.

53 For photographs of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, please refer to Appendix A.

54 The abstract listing of names on the Wall, itself a response to the difficulty of concretely representing a controversial and traumatic war, thus alleviated the difficulty of accurately commemmorating dead female soldiers by failing, initially and unusually, to provide embodied representation of deceased male soldiers. The male and female casualties of Vietnam could thus coexist in abstract equality – at least, until the commissioning of the three-figure statue of male combatants that now also comprises part of the overall Memorial. For the names of the deceased female soldiers, please refer to The Wall-USA, ‘American military women who died in the Vietnam War’, The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, available at: {http://thewall-usa.com/women.asp} accessed 20 June 2014.

55 Marling, Karal Ann and Wetenhall, John, ‘The sexual politics of memory: the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project and “The Wall”’, Prospects, 14 (1989), p. 348 Google Scholar.

56 Wetenhall, Marling and, ‘Politics’, p. 345 Google Scholar.

57 Ibid., pp. 358–9.

58 Dianne Carlson Evans, ‘The fight for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial’, On Patrol: The Magazine of the USO, available at: {http://usoonpatrol.org/archives/2012/04/02/the-fight-for-the-vietnam-wome} accessed 25 April 2012.

59 For photographs of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, please refer to Appendix B.

60 WIMSA, ‘Facts’, Women in Military Service for America Foundation, Inc., available at: {http://www.womensmemorial.org/About/facts.html} accessed 4 June 2010.

61 Ibid.

62 Biesecker, Barbara, ‘Remembering World War II: the rhetoric and politics of national commemoration in the 21st Century’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88:4 (November 2002), pp. 402–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Ibid.

64 See Bulmiller and Shanker, ‘Pentagon’.

65 WIMSA, ‘Facts’.

66 Butler, , ‘Frames’, p. 75 Google Scholar.

67 This point, while important, should not be overdrawn, as, obviously, fewer women have been killed in war, and even fewer as a result of combat, than men over the course of American history, thus lessening, in some ways, the necessity of organised collective mourning. That said, the comparatively lesser number of female casualties does not mean there were none, and the inability of these commemorative practice to incorporate that reality further speaks to the very ambivalence at hand.

68 Butler, , ‘Precarious’, p. 34 Google Scholar.

69 Please note that in the original text this insight is drawn with reference to the relationship between poetry and monuments, a logic that is extended here to encompass the obituary, another culturally specific form of textual communication in which the medium is a message in itself. Annika Demosthenous, ‘Poetry and national identity in Cyprus and Scotland’ (draft doctoral thesis, University of Oxford), p. 306 (at time of writing in 2014).

70 Turner, , ‘Ritual’, p. 95 Google Scholar.

71 Associated Press Newswires, ‘Iraq US toll capsules’, Associated Press (2 August 2003).

72 Johnson, Marilyn, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), pp. 31–33Google Scholar.

73 Soldedad O’Brien et al., ‘Republican congressman Mark Foley forced to resign; women in combat’, CNN: American Morning, Transcript (2 October 2006).

74 Omaha World-Herald, ‘Paid obits’, Omaha World-Herald (22 July 2005).

75 Alcindor, Yamiche, ‘So much to do, so many lives to touch; highest ranking soldier killed at Fort Hood is buried at Arlington’, Washington Post (24 November 2009)Google Scholar.

76 Butler, , ‘Precarious’, p. 34 Google Scholar.

77 It should be noted that as this piece does not explicitly engage with the issue of gender, and very few British women (five) were killed in Operation TELIC, Zehfuss’ arguments are understood here to relate predominately to male soldiers. Maja Zehfuss, ‘Hierarchies of grief and the possibility of war: Remembering UK fatalities in Iraq’, Millennium, Journal of Internaitonal Studies, 38 (October 2009), pp. 419–40; and ‘British military deaths in Iraq’, BBC News UK, available at: {http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10637526} accessed 23 June 2014.

78 Zehfuss, , ‘Hierarchies’, p. 431 Google Scholar.

79 Dennen, Rusty, ‘Vigil will mark anniversary of local marine’s death’, The FreeLance Star (8 May 2012)Google Scholar.

80 The Hunstville Times, ‘Obituary: Joseph O. Behnke’, Obits.al.com, available at: {http://obits.al.com/obituaries/huntsville/obituary.aspx?n=joseph-o-behnke&pid=3098299} accessed 2 June 2014.

81 Zehfuss, , ‘Hierarchies’, p. 432 Google Scholar.

82 Rumelili, , ‘Identities’, p. 503 Google Scholar.

83 For more on the listing of military accomplishments and personal patriotism and the furtherance of war, please refer to Zehfuss, ‘Hierarchies’, pp. 428–9.

84 Edkins, , ‘Memory’, p. 234 Google Scholar.

85 Ibid.

86 Tille Fong, ‘Profiles of courage’, Rocky Mountain News (Denver) (19 March 2004).

87 Zehfuss, , ‘Hierarchies’, p. 427 Google Scholar.

88 Upon his death, the family of Army Spc Irving Medina noted to the press that he had ‘befriended several Iraqi children in his spare time […] including a 10-year old boy who was killed in a bombing’. Associated Press, ‘Army Spc. Irving Medina’, Military Times, available at: {http://projects.militarytimes.com/valor/army-spc-irving-medina/256938} accessed 2 June 2014.

89 Zehfuss, , ‘Hierarchies’, p. 431 Google Scholar.

90 Associated Press, ‘Army Staff Sgt. Alex French IV’, Military Times, available at: {http://projects.militarytimes.com/valor/army-staff-sgt-alex-french/4306972} accessed 2 June 2014.

91 Zehfuss, , ‘Hierarchies’, p. 428 Google Scholar.

92 Rusty Dennen, ‘“Marine’s Marine” combat fatality’, Fredericksburg.com, available at: {http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2010/052010/05142010/547931} accessed 2 June 2014.

93 Associated Press, ‘French’.

94 Providence Journal, ‘Obituaries-Coventry-Charette’, Providence Journal (30 June 2005).

95 Beverly Reid, ‘Army Sgt. Trista Moretti, June 25 2007’, Star-Ledger (27 June 2007).

96 Butler, , ‘Precarious’, p. 32 Google Scholar; Edkins, ‘Memory’, p. 240 Google Scholar.

97 It is thus completely possible, though unnecessary, to exist as a ‘good male soldier’, as from the perspective of normative social intelligibility, if one is the latter, one is also, by definition, the former. For more on this point, see Zehfuss, ‘Hierarchies’, p. 439.

98 ‘Lillian L. Clamens, Miami Sun-Herald and Legacy.com, available at: {http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/herald/obituary.aspx?n=lillian-l-clamens&pid=96313076} accessed 5 June 2010.

99 For more on the connection between liminality, fear and the perception of threat, please refer to Turner, ‘Ritual’, pp. 108–9 and Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul Limited, 1969), pp. 1–7Google Scholar.

100 See Rumelili, Bahar, ‘Liminal identities and processes of domestication and subversion in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 38:2 (April 2002)Google Scholar, p. 496; Neumann, , ‘Introduction’, p. 477 Google Scholar.

101 For an interesting perspective on the ordeal of living liminality of a different order – that of returned survivors of Soviet camps – and its relation to broader social grievability, please refer to Etkind, Alexander, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead from the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

102 Edkins, , ‘Memory’, p. 245 Google Scholar.

103 See Mälksoo, ‘Liminality’, p. 487; Turner, ‘Ritual’, pp. 94–5.