ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on female soldier’s increased vulnerability in the United States Military from both state legislation that restricts women from combat units and violent attacks by their male cohort. This exposure is a direct result of their bodies being viewed as foreign within an institution that embodies masculinity and virility. The lack of understanding of women’s bodies in militarized environments is illustrative of what the popular media has coined “the private war” of female soldiers (Benedict 2009). The focus of this chapter might seem out-of-place in a volume that concentrates on the critical theme of post-war reconstruction. However, as Kirsch and Flint argue in the introduction to this book, the spaces of conflict and reconstruction are not only interconnected; the hegemonic power relations that are heightened during war are subsequently reproduced in spaces of post-war reconstruction. One particularly disturbing illustration of this concept is a 2004 study of veterans from the Vietnam War onwards, which detailed that 71% of the women veterans seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder reported they were sexually assaulted or raped by a fellow solider (Murdach et al. 2004). To this end, trauma is a fluid process, which does not recognize the temporal boundaries of war and post war reconstruction.
