Gendered discourses of war: deconstructing gender and the warrior myth in postmodern warfare

© 2011 Dr. Jessica RitchieThis thesis seeks to integrate a gender theoretical perspective into the study of gender and war. Scholarship on gender and war in the disciplines of history and political science has typically endorsed a binary model of gender whereby “gender” has been conflated with the oppositional and incommensurable categories “male” and “female.” Such approaches have resulted in a lack of critical engagement with the varying roles of men and women in war as they have tended to bifurcate wartime populations into male perpetrators and female victims. In contrast, this thesis employs a poststructuralist feminist approach to uncover the ways in which the Western gender binary is constructed through the mechanisms of postmodern war. I explore the interaction between symbolic and material manifestations of gender through a focus on the sexing of the human body at war. Biological discourse that insists on the ontology of sexual difference combines with gendered war mythologies to construct the warrior as an exclusively male embodied identity. This thesis examines the interaction of these discursive and narrative processes in the postmodern mediascape. Media are a central and constitutive component of the postmodern war machine. They also play a central role in the perpetuation of gender hegemony in the postmodern period, shaping gendered reality in ways that have material implications for men and women. I analyse fictional and non-fictional, and traditional and new media forms, in recognition that these all combine to comprise the postmodern media landscape. I argue that representations of postmodern war in Western media are characterised by an underlying tension between gender conservatism and gender transgression. Media reinforce the male/female binary by constructing the warzone as an exclusively male space and the warrior as an exclusively male identity. Yet through their engagement with the unstable identities that characterise postmodern war—particularly that of the female combatant—media also suggest the possibility of subverting the gender binary in the context of war. New posthuman technologies are changing the nature of both the physical and the virtual battlefield, with potential ramifications for the future of war, sexed embodiment, and the relationship between the two