Women Warfare And Representation

Women, Warfare and Representation considers the various ways the American servicewoman has been represented throughout the 20th century and how those representations impact the roles she is permitted to inhabit. While women have a relatively short history in the American military, the last century shows an evolution of women's direct participation in war despite the need to overcome societal sex-role expectations. The primary focus is on the American case, but Emerald Archer also introduces a comparative element, showing how women's integration in the military differs in other countries, including Great Britain, Canada and Israel. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws on military history, theory and social psychology to offer a more complete and integrated history of women in the military and their representation in society.

Women, Warfare and Representation considers the various ways the American servicewoman has been represented throughout the 20th century and how those representations impact the roles she is permitted to inhabit. While women have a relatively short history in the American military, the last century shows an evolution of women's direct participation in war despite the need to overcome societal sex-role expectations. The primary focus is on the American case, but Emerald Archer also introduces a comparative element, showing how women's integration in the military differs in other countries, including Great Britain, Canada and Israel. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws on military history, theory and social psychology to offer a more complete and integrated history of women in the military and their representation in society.

Although the themes of women's complicity in and resistance to war have been part of literature from early times, they have not been fully integrated into conventional conceptions of the war narrative. Combining feminist literary criticism with the emerging field of feminist war theory, this collection explores the role of gender as an organizing principle in the war system and reveals how literature perpetuates the ancient myth of "arms and the man." The volume shows how the gendered conception of war has both shaped literary texts and formed the literary canon. It identifies and interrogates the conventional war text, with its culturally determined split between warlike men and peaceful women, and it confirms that women's role in relation to war is much more complex and complicitous than such essentializing suggests. The contributors examine a wide range of familiar texts from fresh perspectives and bring new texts to light. Collectively, these essays range in time from the Trojan War to the nuclear age. The contributors are June Jordan, Lorraine Helms, Patricia Francis Cholakian, Jane E. Schultz, Margaret R. Higonnet, James Longenbach, Laura Stempel Mumford, Sharon O'Brien, Jane Marcus, Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Susan Schweik, Carol J. Adams, Esther Fuchs, Barbara Freeman, Gillian Brown, Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier.

In the Eyes of many Westerners, Muslim women are hidden behind a veil of negative stereotypes that portray them as either oppressed, subservient wives and daughters or, more recently, as potential terrorists. Yet many Muslim women defy these stereotypes by taking active roles in their families and communities and working to create a more just society. This book introduces eighteen Muslim women activsts from the United States and Canada who have worked in fields from social services, to marital counseling, to political advocacy, in order to further social justice within the Muslim community and in the greater North American society. --

Spanning the 20th century, this collection of accessible and very readable essays explores the ways in which men and women have both represented warfare, and represented themselves as participants in warfare.

Discursive practices during war polarize and politicize gender: they normally require men to fulfill a single, overriding task destroy the enemy but impose a series of often contradictory expectations on women. The essays in the book establish links between political ideology, history, psychology, cultural studies, cinema, literature, and gender studies and addresses questions such as what is the role of women in war or military conflicts beyond the well-studied victimization? Can the often contradictory expectations of women and their traditional roles be (re)thought and (re)constructed? How do cultural representations of women during war times reveal conflicting desires and poke holes in the ideological apparatus of the state and society? Geographically, focuses on the USSR / Russia, Central Europe, and the Balkans; historically, on WWII; the secessionist war(s) in Chechnya (1994 96, 1999 ); and the Bosnia / Croatia / Serbia war (1992 95).

Women in ancient Greece and Rome played a much more active role in battle than previously assumed. The martial virtues—courage, loyalty, cunning, and strength—were central to male identity in the ancient world, and antique literature is replete with depictions of men cultivating and exercising these virtues on the battlefield. In Women and War in Antiquity, sixteen scholars reexamine classical sources to uncover the complex but hitherto unexplored relationship between women and war in ancient Greece and Rome. They reveal that women played a much more active role in battle than previously assumed, embodying martial virtues in both real and mythological combat. The essays in the collection, taken from the first meeting of the European Research Network on Gender Studies in Antiquity, approach the topic from philological, historical, and material culture perspectives. The contributors examine discussions of women and war in works that span the ancient canon, from Homer’s epics and the major tragedies in Greece to Seneca’s stoic writings in first-century Rome. They consider a vast panorama of scenes in which women are portrayed as spectators, critics, victims, causes, and beneficiaries of war. This deft volume, which ultimately challenges the conventional scholarly opposition of standards of masculinity and femininity, will appeal to scholars and students of the classical world, European warfare, and gender studies.