ABSTRACT
In 2005, the United States Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) produced a video encouraging military health providers working at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to “Welcome home our military sisters, reach out and give them the best care possible” (National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 2005). I contend the “military sister” is a complex figure and her care more vexed than this straightforward call to healthcare providers can elucidate. The necessity of such an appeal gestures towards the ways in which care for women veterans with PTSD is compromised by their very state of “being female” (Simmons 2007: 86). I suggest that rather than being welcomed home, she is unhomed in the masculinist spaces of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), itself embedded in the psycho-social-spatial norms of western culture. As an alternative framing, I place the military sister in the context of the feminist psychoanalytic theories of Luce Irigaray; I assess what is gained when the military sister is read within an (im)possible landscape of sexual difference, that is, a “culture [no longer] elaborated above all by one sex” (Irigaray and Grosz 2008: 134), and I explore what is lost, and for whom.
