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Article Excerpt
Supplementing the insights of Georgio Agamben with feminist research contributions, this article develops a biopolitical reading of the debate surrounding the "feminization" of the U.S. military. We argue that an examination of the role gender plays in myths of sacrifice reveals that the military is already fully "feminized." Critical engagement with the scripting of Jessica Lynch re-introduces the political to the question of military sacrifice by rendering its impossibility conspicuous. Keywords: Gender, war, politics, identity, U.S. military.
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I'm an American soldier, too. --U.S. Army Private Jessica D. Lynch
Private Jessica D. Lynch (1) became what many have referred to as a "modern American war myth," an "icon" of the U.S.-led war on Iraq. (2) Her experiences of being captured, held as a prisoner of war, and dramatically rescued from an Iraqi hospital by U.S. Special Operations forces can be read as the scripting of a war hero(ine)-in-the-making. (3) For many in the United States in particular, Lynch became a symbol of the righteousness of the U.S. "War on Terror," of "American values," of modern femininity. (4) Oliver North, for example, remarked that "the rescue of Private Lynch is a story from which the critics can learn a lesson. It is a story about the value of life and how the world's most powerful military employs its extensive resources and risks its most elite forces to save and rescue a single soldier--because they view every life as precious." (5)
However, the idolatry, as well as the many controversies, surrounding her "story" and "rescue" also offer us a window into the politics of what may be at stake in thinking about women in the U.S. military, the relationship between gender and war more generally, and, indeed, the relationship between sovereign power and bare life.
Georgio Agamben's claim that the "production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power" presents a deeply disturbing series of challenges to the "the story about the value of life" in Western political practice. (6) Drawing upon and supplementing Agamben's analysis, we aim to show the central role that gender plays in the constitution of homo sacer--Agamben's seminal figure of modern biopolitics--within the military.
We begin by highlighting the complex interplay of gender and war through a reading of the U.S. military's production of the Jessica Lynch rescue story in the context of the current war in Iraq. Secondly, we examine how the military may be understood as a "zone of indistinction" in order to highlight the ways in which notions of masculinity and femininity inform the constitution of homo sacer, on the one hand, and the myth of sacrifice on the other. (7) Finally, we argue that the recognizable controversies surrounding the debate on the "feminization" of the military have a limiting and narrow understanding of what the "feminization" of the military may encompass.
Instead, following the interpretation put forward by numerous feminist scholars that the "feminine" has been coded as belonging to the realm of the private, the apolitical--as outside of the public domain regulated by the laws and institutions that define "public," political life--we conclude that the military is already feminized. As critics, our hope is to offer a biopolitical reading that may serve to reintroduce the political into the debate and, as Oliver North invites us to do, "learn a lesson" from Lynch's rescue story.
Who Is Jessica Lynch?
According to most media depictions and the official account given by the U.S. military, Pfc. Jessica Lynch was a nineteen-year-old female supply clerk in the U.S. Army from Wirt County, West Virginia. She enlisted before finishing high school. Lynch was serving in Iraq when her division, the 507th Maintenance Company, was ambushed as they neared Nasiriya, Iraq, on March 23, 2003. Eleven soldiers (including one woman) were killed. Lynch was captured, as were six other soldiers. Lynch having suffered injuries, she was transferred as a prisoner of war (POW) to a nearby hospital, where she allegedly suffered abuse. "Mohammed," an Iraqi lawyer whose wife worked in the hospital, was disturbed by the treatment she received and, placing his family at risk, alerted the U.S. military to her whereabouts and condition. On April 1, U.S. Army special operators launched and successfully executed a rescue mission to "liberate" Lynch. This rescue mission was videotaped, and the five-minute film of her dramatic rescue was then released to media networks in the United States and broadcast to the public. After her rescue, Lynch was moved to a U.S. military hospital in Germany and later to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., before being transferred home. (8)
Lynch's rescue has come under considerable scrutiny. For example, the BBC aired a damning documentary that portrayed the Pentagon's version of the "rescue" as falsified and intended as war propaganda. (9) However, Lynch's story reflects more than just the difficulty of discerning "reality" from its virtual and textual representations. In addition to its relevance as an example of what James Der Derian has called MIME-net ("the military-industrial-media-entertainment network"), (10) Lynch's prominence has also been offered as a performance from which to review the gendered understandings of identity upon which the military is (im) possibly founded. (11)
In response to the question "Who is Jessica Lynch?" answers--possible and impossible answers--abound, and all of them, we contend, tell us a great deal about the gendered nature of the military and its reliance on a particular form of masculine identity that is both reinforced and unsettled, both at the same time, by representations of Lynch as woman in the fighting ranks.
Representations of Lynch that reinforce the U.S. military's understanding and representation of its identity pervade the U.S. media as discursively dominant (possible) answers to who Jessica Lynch is. She has appeared on the cover of Newsweek against the backdrop of an enormous U.S. flag, and references to her as "female Rambo," "soldier," "American hero," and POW are common currency. (12)
On the one hand, it is clear that one implication of these possible Jessicas is that, as female soldier, she is the equal of her male counterparts in the U.S. Army. The message is overt: women, like Lynch, can be Rambo; they can be heroes. But equally, it is a specific masculine notion of soldiering that is being privileged here and against which Lynch is being measured. It is difficult to read references to Rambo as anything other than the evocation of a hypermasculinist, all-American, patriotic, hard guy. On the other hand, lest Lynch become a "butch"/sexually-deviant representation of the female soldier, her "femininity" is also highlighted in media and political portrayals.
This is interesting because, while required as an accompaniment to the marker "woman," her "femininity" is also simultaneously unsettling for the U.S. military. References to Lynch's desire to become a kindergarten teacher, where the nurture of children as a female role is implicitly emphasized, alongside descriptions of her as a "waif-like thing," a "poor girl," a child who played with Barbie, and so on, serve to add a "feminine" dimension to the Rambo-esque American-hero image. The message then becomes mixed: this is a Rambo who aspires to nurture other people's infants and to raise a family of her own, an example of the all-American, small-town girl-next-door.
Unsurprisingly, for feminist thinkers, these aspects of her "femininity" almost exclusively refer to her time outside the military--that is, to her "private" life. They are, in a sense, impossible Jessicas in the discursive space of the U.S. military (hence, the media focus on her "rescue" and homecoming); these "feminine" aspects of her identity, such as vulnerability and "softness," are precisely what the prototypical male U.S. soldier does not and should not possess for fear that he will no longer be able to soldier effectively. Thus, there appear to be at least two Jessica Lynches: the possible "masculine" soldier/hero and the impossible "feminine" girl-next-door who, like any other girl [sic], dreams of marriage and children. We refer to this tension between possible and impossible aspects of identity within the U.S. military as an (im)possible constitutive dynamic that constitutes not only the military's understanding of its own identity but also its attendant myths of sacrifice. To this, we now turn.
Gender and War as an (Im)possible Constitutive Dynamic
Claims that war depends upon representations of gender and that representations of war inform articulations of masculinity and femininity have become almost commonplace in the analysis of international relations. Similarly, the efforts of many scholars who have documented the particular ways in which war affects women, in both the long term and the short term, have enriched the composite of understandings about the workings of war and its aftermath upon societies and individuals.
The connections between gender and war are no longer mostly trivialized and disregarded. Gender obviously matters. Nevertheless, from claiming that gender bears significance to seriously engaging in the different ways gender informs the politics of war and the politics of war informs gender entails much unsettling of sedentary "truths" and reimagining the central concepts and practices of modern politics.
In order to explore the U.S. military as a gendered zone of indistinction, we aim to contribute to readings of the co-constitutive relations of the politics of gender and war by addressing gender and war as an (im)possible constitutive dynamic. (13) Such a dynamic shows how representations of gender make war possible, and vice versa. Addressing the connections between gender and war as relations of possibility highlights the ways in which attempts are made to create and sustain specific forms of knowledge, power, and identity in relation not only to war and gender as separate issues, but together. Implicated in these enabling possibilities is also that which is necessarily excluded in specific articulations of war, such as particular representations of "the feminine": that is to say, the impossible.
Whether implicitly or explicitly, what is taken to be possible not only implies what shall be taken as impossible, but more importantly what shall be kept at bay, excluded, as the "outside." Indeed, we contend that articulations of the possible are privileged as legitimate but that this can be adequately understood only by paying attention to the role that the impossible plays.
One implication of reading gender and war this way is that representations of, for example, "masculinity" or "femininity" can never be complete. Full representation is never possible because the inside/possible must always rely on the outside/impossible for its constitution, and vice versa. This means that what "masculinity" or "femininity" means will always include, by exclusion, its opposite and therefore, a clear demarcation between "masculinity" and "femininity" cannot be successfully maintained.
This may seem like a variation of the notion of gender as relational insofar as meaning is provided only in opposition. However, identifying an (im)possible constitutive dynamic differs in that (im)possibility implies that what is excluded is an integral, constitutive part of that which is included. (Im)possibility highlights that any seemingly coherent representation is always an unstable configuration insofar as "it" is constituted by, and indeed haunted by, that which is excluded. These hauntings, or constitutive outsides, are forever present. However, they are not rendered obvious except in the revelatory power of the exception, or the marginal, that threatens the stability and coherence of the subject. (14)
Anomalies are more than just exceptions; they are best understood as embodiments of hauntings where what is supposed to be excluded (the impossible) confronts us and hints at the co-constitutive dynamic of the normal and the deviant, the feminine and the masculine, the inside and the outside, and so on. These hauntings disturb and unsettle the ordering and seemingly stable...
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