“I Believe We Are the Fewer,the Prouder”: Women’s Agency in Meaning-Making after Military Sexual Assault

Introduction

Military sexual assault (MSA) has come to the attention of the American public in recent years following a string of high-profile scandals. ¹ The issue has been taken up by members of Congress that have further drawn the public’s attention to efforts to reform the military’s processes for handling MSA via legislation. ² Within the military supporting establishment there have been numerous policy changes ³ as well as the implementation of new sexual assault awareness training programs. ⁴ A dominant discourse about sexual assault in U.S. culture more broadly, but also present in the context of the military, positions women primarily or entirely as victims and as such, rhetorics of victimhood are evident throughout these efforts.

There is a vast scholarly tradition that rests up the idea that an understanding of how forms of discourse become institutionalized, or become a part of the lives of ordinary people, is what makes up social life (Aronson, Harré, and Way 1995; Bourdieu 1991; Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Davies and Harré 1990; Farnell 2000; Farnell and Varela 2008; Giddens 1984; Goffman 1963; Harré 1970, 1979, 1984;Varela 1999, 2009). What all of this literature demonstrates is that our lives and identities are constituted in and through language. Dominant ways of describing people become the ways that people can choose how and who to be, or, to put it another way, discursive practices are “constitutive of culture” (Farnell and Graham 1998, 411).

The problem discussed in this article is that a dominant discourse that positions women primarily or exclusively as victims in response to their experience of sexual assault not only works to re-victimize women but imposes unnecessary boundaries on the meaning of these experiences for the women involved. Instead of privileging the dominant discourse, this article seeks to privilege the voices of women who have experienced sexual assault and in doing so reveals that MSA does not necessarily entail or even imply victimhood. How women make sense of their experiences and themselves is constituted by their discourses (Bucholtz and Hall 2004)—how they choose to speak about it.

The Dominant Discourse in Talk about MSA

“Dominant discourse” refers to the dominant way of talking, thinking, and acting with respect to a particular feature of society. By contrast, “discourses” refer to the way in which people in their day-to-day lives talk about, think, and act with respect to a particular feature of society. Higher-order discourses are often inscribed into the daily discourses of people, but discourses may also subvert dominant discourse (Conley and O’Barr 1997, 19). Shared understandings of power give meaning to the way we talk, but the way we talk also shapes our understandings (Hall and Bucholtz 2012). The purpose of discourse-centered approaches, such as the one taken in this article, is to discover the social meaning in language forms and, perhaps, their relationship to identity, beliefs, and ideologies (Farnell and Graham 1998, 413).

Consider this example that illustrates the nature of the dominant discourse. A story in The Guardian reported that “Nearly one in three women is raped during her service” and “[t]hese assaults result in devastating long-term psychological injuries, most notably Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” ⁵ This way of thinking and talking focuses on probabilities—women are at risk and 1 in 3 will be raped—and makes explicit or implicit references to causal properties of being assaulted—trauma will result in long-term suffering. Where does this way of talking come from?

Researchers from a number of disciplines have argued that women who work in male-dominated professions such as law enforcement, fire-fighting, and the military face a greater risk of sexual assault than those who work in more gender-balanced environments (Frank, Brogan, and Schiffman 1998; Rosenberg, Perlstadt, and Philips 1993; Lillydahl 1986; see also Sadler et al. 2004, 800). The discursive framing of these environments as “risky” for women, and positioning women as “at risk,” is based on statistical probabilities. The presentation of probabilities creates expectations for ways of being a woman in such environments. One of the assumptions in the dominant discourse regarding military sexual assault is “risk” for women in a male-dominated profession and it is reinforced again and again when members of Congress and news stories report “1 out of 3” or “twenty times more likely . . . .”

In another example of the dominant discourse, Dr. Donna Washington, professor of medicine and physician at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Center, noted in a New York Times article that women veterans face a complex “web of vulnerability” and the story further suggests MSA puts women on the “path to homelessness.” ⁶ This way of talking emphasizes women’s vulnerability, how they are seemingly helpless in the face of complexities, and connects such features of women to a seemingly deterministic outcome.

The majority of the academic research done to date on MSA comes from the medical and psychological communities (e.g., Bullock and Beckson 2011; Sadler et al. 2003; Shipherd et al. 2009; and Wolfe et al. 1998), and takes up not only a particular way of talking about women and MSA, but in doing so takes up a particular ontological position in which agentic persons are removed in favor of a focus on environmental conditions that supposedly cause women to be vulnerable or at risk on the one hand, and internal bio-psychological mechanisms that supposedly are damaged or malfunctioning after trauma on the other. In short, this dominant discourse I am pointing to is underpinned by a bio-psychological reductionism.

For example, researchers claim to have identified:

In talking about persons as if they were merely victims of environmental conditions and/or their faulty biology, researchers illegitimately destroy the integrity of the person by assuming a defunct Cartesianism in which what people are (organically and psychologically) is somehow fundamentally separable from who people are in their social roles as military members, parents, soccer players, pianists, women, men, and so forth.

Though the medical community may be justified in focusing on the biological aspects of persons in some cases, and policy makers may be well intentioned in picking up the reductionistic language of victimhood in an effort to rally supporters to their cause, this underlying ontological position effectively blocks us from understanding the agentic role of people in creatively generating the meaning of their own experience. We are blocked from seeing women as agents. When the meaning of the experience of people is defined for them, and often in spite of them, by doctors, psychiatrists, military officials, members of Congress, and even social scientists, what happens to the person and her ability to choose? According to the dominant discourse, things happen to people, but apparently not because of people and their choices so the freedom to choose is threatened by this way of talking and thinking. What are the implications in conveying, as it does, the sense that certain things happen to women regardless of their intentions and actions?

Implications of the Dominant Discourse Regarding MSA

In the various military contexts where the women I interviewed lived and worked, trust and teamwork were central value orientations. In such environments, harmful consequences can and do emerge when women are positioned as potential or actual victims. Why? Because positioning women as victims closes off a conception of women as capable of producing the kinds of value-oriented choices prized by the military community and indeed central to the survival of the military community. The assumed weakness and vulnerability, as articulated by the VA doctor quoted in the New York Times, is case in point.

The potential for reinforcing cultural stereotypes that rely on gender dichotomies (i.e., men are strong/women are weak) or capability stereotypes (i.e., women can’t do the job/men can’t adapt to women’s presence in the military ⁷ ) may have a deleterious effect on efforts to further integrate women in the military. ⁸ These implications are significant for the women who serve, and are important for consideration by the military writ large. ⁹ Biopsychological reductionism tends to only achieve statements about classes of people (like the class “women”) through aggregative methodologies and not through the methods that respect interpersonal, value-oriented, meaning-making semantic activities. ¹⁰ Women as a class of people are subject—and subjected to—the conditions of their environment and/or the automated functioning of their biology or psychology, which make them more likely victims, and thus any talk of agency or resilience is impossible or at least improbable.

In this context, susceptibility (to external threats or internal weakness) becomes an inherent and defining feature of being a woman in the military when women as individuals and varying contexts and social dynamics are ignored in favor of “women” (i.e., homogenous and interchangeable) who are assumed to be “at risk” in static “risky” male environments. ¹¹ Again, this view is instantiated by the style and content of much of the research on MSA. For example, “[M]any studies examining lifetime prevalence rates have identified several characteristics that can be conceptualized as precursors to sexual assault while on active duty” (Suris and Lind 2008, 252). “Precursor” is a term used to mark a thing or an event that generates another thing or event causally—that is to say, deterministically. The stereotype of women as liabilities for military effectiveness (insofar as they are inherently susceptible to being victimized) can become naturalized and perpetually reinforced given this kind of talk.

Civilian policy makers and military leaders may rely on these probabilistic forms of data and what they believe to be proper scientific evidence. Probability statistics and correlations between characteristics and victimization, however, should not be construed as facts that somehow speak for themselves. As Ehrenreich and English (1978) note in For Her Own Good, the “attraction of medicine is that it’s based on the natural sciences, which should contain no room for bias, ideology, or subjective judgment. Yet doctors routinely err . . . [and] doctors’ own unexamined biases almost certainly helped lure them into a vast and reckless experiment with women’s lives” (xii). ¹²

Women’s Discourses Regarding Their Experience with MSA

Analyzing women’s actual talk about their experiences provides evidence to counter assumptions about women’s vulnerability, weakness, and suffering as somehow natural or due to their faulty biology. It allows us to recognize variations in meaning-making that denote personal agency instead of passive victimhood. How do women understand their experiences and (re)construct their identities following the experience of MSA? A former Marine shared with me the following,

What happened in my situation was [it was called] PTSD from the start . . . [but when I was in a inpatient therapy program] a doctor at the VA literally tried to change my diagnosis from PTSD to borderline personality disorder. . . . I fought like hell and won and was glad. . . . I was able to call back to my regular VA doctor and [tell them] what was happening and they made a phone call and got it stopped. . . . What they want is to get somebody completely tranquilized to the point where they have no brain to talk back.

The tension here is between the doctor’s attempt to wield diagnostic authority and so impose a vision of who and what this woman is that is contradicted by who she knows she is (i.e., someone who can know who she is). Tempted by reductionist ideology, the doctor appears to have believed that what he or she knew about this woman’s neuropsychology was more real than what the woman herself knew. According to the bio-psychological reductionism underpinning the dominant discourse, there is no room for an agentic woman in choosing the meaning of her experience. All there can be is a patient to be diagnosed and treated.

In her words, she “fought like hell.” What she did under these circumstances was due to her agentic enactment of valuing herself as someone who can know who she is based on a personal concept of who she was and was not, and a value orientation toward herself as someone worth the trouble of fighting for. Her choosing to act are particularly courageous in light of the cultural expectation to trust and submit to the care of doctors. ¹³ Women, in particular, are culturally expected to trust and submit to the care of doctors. This former Marine chose to identify not as a patient and passively submit, nor to identify as the diagnosis and act out the illness she supposedly had, but as someone who can fight an inappropriate positioning of herself. In her talk to me about MSA she did not ever use the words victim, or weak, or suffering. Perhaps she did suffer but that is not how she chose to make sense of her experience in telling of it to me.

A woman who served in the Air Force and reported sexual harassment to her chain of command shared the following with me,

[S]o when they said, “You have a personality disorder,” I immediately said, “No, you’re wrong. That’s something that manifests in early childhood. Here’s how I behaved in early childhood and throughout adolescence and this doesn’t match. You’re giving me this because I’m being grotesquely harassed.” So I said “I have PTSD.” So they gave me both [diagnoses], and then by the time they decided on compensation they were pretty clear that I was, you know, clear on what they were doing and they, they retired me rather than kicking me out, and they gave me a determination of PTSD. So, I was very lucky because a lot of women have been kicked out.

Like the former Marine quoted above, she fought the personality disorder diagnosis and did not stop until they understood that she was aware, not only about who she was and was not, but also about what they were doing (i.e., diagnosing her as a way to kick her out and deny her benefits). These women were looking out for themselves in a very practical sense by allowing for a PTSD diagnosis such that they could be medically discharged but maintain their benefits in a situation where they knew they would be discharged anyway. This activity is theoretically important in that it demonstrates their agency.

The following is from another woman who served in the Air Force.

[T]hen what they did was, they had this evaluation officer, like a psychiatrist evaluation, and when I started saying well, “this happened to me, this happened to me . . . this guy came after me. . . . ” Well then, I was the one that became the bad person. And they said I had a defective attitude and that I had apathy and I was unacceptable because of my defective attitude . . . that’s why I was not allowed to stay [in the military] and [the perpetrator] was.

I carried that label for a long time. When I got out of the military, in fact, until . . . let’s see, I got out in 1980 and [it wasn’t] until 2006 when I saw my first poster on the wall at the VA about military sexual trauma . . . and it said “did this happen?” or “did this happen?” and it was on that day, it was so profound, that I realized, “Hey wait a minute, that was me. This is not ok.” All along I thought it was my fault, that I caused it, I created it and that I was messed up for it. It was at that point when I finally realized that it wasn’t me. That I wasn’t crazy. That it had a name.

She talks about carrying the defective label for many years and in this talk she illustrates agency in distinguishing between a label and a bio-psychological state. She also illustrates agency in choosing to (re)construct her understanding of her experience and herself when introduced to a new concept. She uses the words, “it wasn’t me.” People constitute agency by ascribing capabilities, responsibilities, liabilities, actions and so on, to themselves. The suffering she spoke to me about was not due to faulty biology, but rather to her construction of a particular identity offered by the military community—that of “defective.” For this woman, her suffering began to ease once she courageously chose to discard that identity and (re)construct herself.

Another woman who served in the Air Force shared with me,

I got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder . . . which is kind of an interesting thing, because all of us [women who experienced MSA], well a big majority of us, got that diagnosis . . . and the meds they put us on . . . they would put everyone on it who would report [sexual assault].

Like the other women quoted above, she also rejected the diagnosis and talked to me about the strategy to silence those who reported sexual assault by diagnosing and medicating them. The bio-psychological research and way of talking is attractive to military leaders and doctors because it carries with it a kind of power. The unity in these women’s discourses may also be that military officials, in some cases via doctors, were looking for ways to kick these women out because they think women are defective inherently and didn’t belong in the military to begin with. Their way of talking to these women could be interpreted as examples of the deleterious effects of the dominant discourse.

For this woman, her understanding of what happened to her, and later what she discovered had happened to many other women, was possible because she did not accept the diagnosis as who she was. She knew that what she experienced, her interpretation of the meaning of her experience, and that personal construction held a validity that those in her command and in charge of her “care” at the VA did not want to acknowledge. Her experience of MSA was largely explained to me via her narrative about this kind of re-victimization. Most of the women I interviewed, in fact, spent very little time talking about the circumstances—the environmental conditions—surrounding the occurrence of sexual assault but instead spent much time on the kinds of re-victimization illustrated in these narratives.

The practice of medicating women who have experienced MSA with psychotropic drugs is not consistent with the Department of Veteran’s Affairs own definition of sexual assault (they use the term military sexual trauma, or, MST): “MST is an experience, not a diagnosis or a mental health condition, and as with other forms of trauma, there are a variety of reactions that Veterans can have in response to MST.” ¹⁴ Why have doctors and psychologists responded in the way reported by the women I interviewed as if MSA were a mental health condition? I contend they responded this way based on the dominant discourse regarding women and sexual assault. It is underpinned by an ontological position. This position takes up and applies the mistaken notion that certain kinds of feelings and actions are really just indicators of biological malfunction, and also that symptoms of traumatization are neuropsychological. According to this way of thinking, women who have experienced trauma are therefore, necessarily, traumatized. The over-prescription of psychotropic drugs is emblematic of a commitment to the idea that it is the brain that is broken and requires chemical methods to be fixed (see also Ehrenreich and English 1978; Frances 2013; Nelson 2015). This is not a scientific approach; it is an ideological one.

Why Should We Listen to Women?

Why should we listen to these untrained, non-expert military women regarding MSA? In other words, what is the value of an ethnographic approach to women’s agency in response to their experience of MSA? When we listen to women they tell us that their experiences and meaning-making vary (see also Dunn 1998; Hauser 2011). Many of them stood up for who they believed themselves to be in contexts where a powerful dominant discourse was offering—if not imposing—an identity for them to take on: that of the victim/sufferer/patient. Indeed, the poverty of the viewpoint that assumes the primary or only way for women who have been victimized to identify is as victims (not only to the trauma they experienced, but also victims to their own biology) is illuminated by the women’s own talk about their experiences.

The problem I am pointing to is of course that the women I interviewed should never have been treated as if they were merely victims or patients to begin with and many of them knew it. How could they know it without expert medical training? Because they are agents who can decide what labels to take on and because they can know who they are. We are led down a deterministic path—from susceptibility to victimization to victim/sufferer/patient status—by a powerful dominant discourse. The variation in women’s responses to the experience of MSA and enactment of their agency in refusing to be defined as a diagnosis, or as “broken” or “defective,” is evidence that the dominant discourse does not represent reality of the lived experiences of women. In short, we should listen to these women because their talk subverts the dominant ways of thinking about MSA by demonstrating their resilience, agency, and value as persons.

Victim versus Victimization

MSA is neither a disease nor a mental health condition, as the official definition by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs notes. It is an experience and persons can respond to experiences in many ways, including choosing to not identify as a victim despite being victimized. There is a linguistic distinction between the noun “a victim” versus the verb “to be victimized.” The latter refers to an event that happened at some point in time, whereas the former provides a label for a person. The distinction, or lack thereof, is at the heart of the disjuncture between the women’s experiences and their treatment by the military, doctors, the media, members of Congress, and researchers. To say “I was victimized” is very different from saying “I am a victim.”

There are also different types of victimization at play. When someone is sexually assaulted, they have been victimized and there ought to be no disagreement about that. Positioning women as primarily victims—either by researchers, the military, or society writ large—can be a kind of re-victimization, especially when that ascription is exclusive or naturalized. Indeed, choosing to position women as victims can be taking up a certain kind of ideological position that is quite separate from the incidence of sexual assault that the woman experienced. Such a stance insists that the only way of positioning women who have experienced sexual assault is as victims. This is an intentional re-victimization of the kind noted by some women who have endured the further degradation of an investigative process, legal proceedings, or interaction with a colleague or leadership who blamed them for their victimization (see Du Mont, Miller, and Myhr 2003; Maier 2008, 2012; see also Conley and O’Barr 1997, 15–38).

Many of the women I interviewed chose to not see themselves primarily or merely as victims despite being victimized and despite being told by authorities that they were broken, defective, sufferers, and so on. That they were victimized is not in question. They did not choose that. What they did choose, however, was how to make meaning of their experience and how to (re)construct themselves. That possibility is erased when there is no linguistic distinction made between “victim” and “victimization.”

There was a summit in DC where we all went and . . . I really felt I had a voice . . . my life has completely changed and I’ve actually, I actually really, I stood up to everything. I decided no more, I am not a victim anymore. . . . I am not the same person. I’m actually living and thriving. . . . This stuff isn’t going to hold me anymore. I’m done with it. I’m not letting it win. . . . So now, finally, I’m ready to talk about it and share it . . . and hope that more people can find the healing and the hope. . . . I’m doing a lot of heavy duty advocacy work now . . . and I’m getting a lot of joy out of helping others find their way out of the darkness that swallows you up.

Here, a former member of the Air Force uses the words “had a voice” and “stood up” and “isn’t going to hold me” and “living and thriving,” which suggest action as well as movement away from her former identity as a victim and toward an identity as an advocate and someone who experiences the joy of helping others. She also uses the words “I decided” and “I’m done” and “I’m not letting it win,” wherein she positions herself as the source of choosing her life’s path. Once she decided she was not a victim, she told me she has been able to focus her energy to be of service to others and does so as part of a community of survivors. This was only one of many powerful stories told to me of women turning their experience of MSA into advocacy for other military women and redefining “victim” as “survivor” by creating a shared understanding of who they are in conversation with other women.

The evidence that women can generate tremendous resolve and maintain or reclaim their dignity is a powerful counter-balance to the dominant discourse that positions women as primarily or exclusively victims. When faced with traumatic events, some women may show resilience and resolve rather than vulnerability and distress. Some women define themselves as survivors and not vicitms. This choice any particular woman makes as the meaning of her experience is a matter quite separate from that of the victimizing experience of MSA.

Alternative Discourses for Meaning-Making of MSA

A former Marine shared with me her experience with MSA.

The person who attacked me [was] staying overnight in our barracks because he was drunk. . . . [He] came into my room . . . while we were sleeping, through an unlocked door of the people that shared a bathroom with us . . . There was a lot of trust between members of the same unit. You know, a lot of trust . . . we always kept our bathroom door unlocked. In the mornings whoever woke up first was the one who went around and woke up everybody for PT 9physical training) . . . but [he] gained access to our room that way. I always look back and say, “I’m glad it was me and not my roommate.”

In telling of the circumstances of her victimization, this former Marine chooses to focus on the trust between the women she served with. There is hardly any mention of her in her story.

Notice also what she chooses to focus on when looking back on what happened. It is not to be angry that her attacker gained access through a door someone left unlocked, or to blame those she shared a bathroom with, nor is it to dwell on the fact that she was the one who was victimized out of everyone in the barracks that night. She looks back and is glad it was her and not her roommate. She chooses, whenever she looks back on it, to enact selflessness. In the way she tells of her victimization and in this choice to be selfless, she exemplifies Marine Corps values. I do not mean this metaphorically. In her talk, she is living her values as a Marine by choosing to enact selfless sacrifice. This was something that was very important to who she believed herself to be.

As she continued to tell me her story, she said,

You know, I had way too much pride to go to the VA . . . and that pride is instilled in the military. . . . I don’t want to take the VA’s time away from a veteran that really needs help, compared to what I thought of myself. I really [didn’t] know what was wrong with me . . . but I knew there were many more deserving people who needed help.

Again she chooses to place the well-being of other veterans above her own, even as she is struggling to make sense of her experience and herself. Her talk about the meaning-making of her experience did not strike me as taking up the discourse of Marine Corps values when I did the interview nor when I read and re-read the transcription. It struck me three years later after spending a fellowship year with the Marine Corps. ¹⁵

Consider the words she uses to describe her military experience.

I really appreciate that slogan, [The Few. The Proud. The Marines.], because I believe we [women] are the fewer, the prouder. Yes, we are proud of what we accomplished . . . hey, not many people make it through boot camp being a female . . . or a male, for that matter . . . [and] there’s a lot less women in the military in general. . . . I wanted to be a shining star, you know, and be the best Marine possible.

She went on to tell me that her experience in the Corps

was very different [as a woman and as compared to a man]. That’s why I can really appreciate that slogan.

By talking in this way, she positions herself and the women she served with as different, not just from civilians, but also from the men in the Corps. Her meaning-making elevates the few women as having accomplished something qualitatively more significant than their male counterparts, and so provides the basis of her claim to be proud(er) to be Marines.

She chose to define herself not in terms of being a victim, but in terms of the exceptional accomplishment of not only being a Marine but being a female Marine. Perhaps even more importantly, she claims exceptional fortitude based on exactly the kind of perseverance in the face of extreme adversity that military members generally mark as the context for courageous action. The point here is her agency as a person to enact her Marine life as an exceptional personal accomplishment and to focus on that meaning rather than the options of blaming others, blaming herself, lamenting her entire Marine Corps experience, and so on.

As a civilian, or a scholar, or a feminist, one might be tempted to suggest this woman has adopted rape myths or must find some kind of treatment intervention so she can come to grips with her “true feelings” toward the Marine Corps. Why would we insist on an imposition that requires her to view her experience other than the way she chooses? And wouldn’t such an imposition suggest we are not permitting her agency and choice, but rather reducing her to a patient like the doctors and officers noted in the previous sections? It occurred to me that many of the women I interviewed drew not on the dominant discourse to make meaning of their experience of MSA but on an alternative discourse—that of the military branch they were a part of.

Hoyt, Klosterman Rielage, and Williams (2011) argue that the pressure on men to be “stoic warriors” inhibits them from reporting their experiences of sexual assault (255). Note the implication here: that men choose to take on the identity of “stoic warrior” when choosing not to report sexual assault. Somehow, despite military women having access to the same cultural repertoires of identity as their male counterparts, they apparently cannot choose to adopt the identity “stoic warriors.” Men as “stoic warriors” fits with the dominant discourse and so is used to interpret men’s response to a sexual assault experience (i.e., not reporting MSA). That same dominant discourse does not allow for us to talk about military women as “stoic warriors.” What happens when we listen to the way military women actually talk? The women I interviewed said the following:

Once it’s behind you, you just let it stay behind you.

So I took control of that situation on my own.

I used to walk around on post in Iraq with a K-bar, a knife on me . . . and one of the guys asked me, “Why do you carry this stuff with you?” And I said, “To protect myself.” And he said, “But you’re inside the wire.” I said, “Exactly. I’m protecting myself against you, all you people. I have to protect myself.”

These seem to me the words of warriors—perhaps even stoic warriors. A woman who served in the Navy described her experience with MSA to me as “the personal combat of being somebody who was female and in the military.” A woman who served in the Air Force said of her experience being sexually assaulted, “I was no different than a battle buddy that was lying on the battlefield . . . my wounds were obvious.” When I asked a former Marine if she had ever seen combat during her service she laughed and said, “I have to smile at that question. The only combat I saw was the combat that I endure in my mind every day. So, no . . . no actual . . . overseas in-the-sandbox kind of combat. That would be the textbook definition, but yes . . . [I have experienced] a lot of combat.”

Consider the ways in which women told me about who they are today.

I mean, I’m 26 years old now and I think I’m still coming to terms with . . . what happened [in the military]. It absolutely changed my life and shaped it in both positive and negative ways. I mean, definitely more positive than negative because that’s actually why I had such a huge interest in becoming a women’s studies minor and a poli[tical] sci[ence] major. And I’ve been such an activist for sexual and gender minorities in the military and I interned in DC for a non-profit to be able to work with these issues.

The way this former sailor talks about herself focuses on making choices to understand herself and to help others—particularly those in a community that was a source of strength for her when she was in the Navy. When she spoke of “coming to terms with . . . what happened” she was not referring to the assault, but that events following it resulted in her not staying in the Navy, which had been her life’s goal. She had to choose to (re)construct who she was after the Navy. Choosing to study and become involved in political activism for others suggests selfless service was a way of identifying and of valuing herself.

Another woman shared with me her reflections not on what her life in the Army had been, but what her life now is about.

My goal from this point on, [what] my life is about, is that if I could prevent just one female from ever going through what I did, or living for 26 years with that shame and guilt, then my embarrassment and humiliation and pain has been worth it.

This woman talks about her shame and guilt, her embarrassment and humiliation and pain, but then visualizes it being a sacrifice for other military women’s lives. She chooses to make meaning of her experience in this way. She takes on a particular way of being, an identity, that translates her own experience of pain into a way to defend others from harm. In my interview with this woman, she talked extensively about preventing women from being hurt or victimized, from her sons’ girlfriends to other veterans. Her (re)constructed identity as a mother/protector came, in part, from her meaning-making of her Army experience and her experience with MSA.

To interpret these women’s discourses about their experiences with MSA by recognizing that their meaning-making draws upon military values or identities that were meaningful to them does not diminish the power of their talk in subverting the dominant discourse. It enhances it. The public, military and civic leaders, doctors, and researchers may not only be hesitant to recognize military women’s enactment of courage and resilience as a result of their agency, but blocked from doing so when relying upon the dominant discourse and its underlying bio-psychological reductionism when it comes to women’s experience of MSA. Perhaps listening to women, and then thinking about understanding their experiences via the other cultural discourses available to them, opens the space to privilege their meaning-making instead of trading one kind of reductionism for another.

Conclusion

In their discourses, the women I interviewed do not identify as merely or primarily victims, despite being victimized, and the variation in their choices to make meaning of their experience and (re)construct their identity is evidence of their agency. Their talk about their experiences of MSA subverts the dominant discourse regarding women and military sexual assault. Privileging the dominant discourse inappropriately impoverishes discussions about women in the military, primarily because it accesses illegitimate naturalizations of women as susceptible or vulnerable to injury, weak, and thus victims/sufferers/patients. By listening to how women actually talk about their experiences, we find evidence such that we can deny reductionistic assumptions and instead recognize the variation in meaning-making as evidence of agentic personhood.

As noted by Zraly and Nyirazinyoye (2010), women “inhabit multiple and overlapping identities and roles” during and after violent conflict, including warriors, soldiers, mothers, and wives that socialize men for/against war, political leaders, feminists, heroes, war reporters, spies, and the dead (1657; and see also Enloe 2000). The dominant discourse regarding women who have experienced military sexual assault in the United States is reductionistic—removing the possibilities that women inhabit multiple and overlapping identities. Reductive talk can be found in current military training efforts with regard to MSA, as well as in media reports, from members of Congress, and some military leaders who rely on research from the bio-psychological communities. The dominant discourse has operated similarly in other areas involving women’s sexuality (e.g., Herbst Lewis 2010) and reproductive health (e.g., Martin 2001; Nelson 2015). According to this way of thinking and talking, women can only be patients, not agents. They can only ever be a victim to the circumstances around them (i.e., risky male-dominated environments that invite trauma) and internal to them (i.e., brains and psychological mechanisms that are traumatized following trauma). The evidence from military women’s discourses subvert this way of thinking and talking.

The activity of meaning-making with regard to the experience of MSA is quite separate from recognizing the demeaning act of MSA itself. There should be no question that such a violation is morally wrong as well as a criminal act. What should be questioned, however, is the potential for revictimization by insisting on positioning women primarily as victims. While we as researchers may want to retain discursive space to call out the degrading character of MSA, we must also allow discursive space for women to have a different kind of conversation with themselves and others—one that acknowledges their choices in generating the meaning of their experiences.