ABSTRACT
War and combat images tend to fall into normative gender categories: men depicted as heroic fighters, defenders, and rescuers; women depicted as mourning mothers or wives, as the victims of violence or as symbols of the vulnerability of the nation. These gender archetypes (the male “Just Warrior” and the female “Beautiful Soul” in the tradition of the Christian jus bellum iustum), haunt war broadcasting in the West, despite the changing politics of inclusion in warfare (Adelman, 2007; Der Derian, 2000; Elshtain, 1987). Foucault theorized the disciplining of the male soldier’s body through military training, flesh molded into an “esprit de corps” through technologies of power.1 We follow this narrative from early childhood as war movies, computer games, and male-only soldier action figures groom boys for manhood and prime girls to groom the male soldiers. Women soldiers continue to be depicted as physically weak, indecisive, and lacking emotional resilience, or as compassionate and incapable of violence. Rather than combatants waging war, women are represented as advocates for peace and reconciliation (Cockburn, 2007 and 2010). Women-led peace and disarmament movements like Women in Black, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Code Pink), and the Women’s Network against Militarism have proved indispensable as tools to critique patriarchal institutional militancy and its ethos of domination, aggression, and coercion.
