Abstract
Yvonne Tasker observes in Soldiers’ Stories that the early 21st century’s two most recognizable female soldiers are likely PFC Jessica Lynch and Specialist Lynndie England. Deployed as evidence in the international media discussion about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lynch and England came to represent opposing extremes in contemporary debates about women in the military. Are they victims or villains, examples of imperilled femininity or monstrous gender non-conformists? Tasker argues that, in contemporary media representations, female soldiers such as Lynch and England are never just soldiers. The military woman is inevitably ‘an overdetermined sign of impropriety … a feminine victim, an amusing conundrum, or a perverse masculinized bully’ (p. 278). As such, they come to ‘exemplify the policing of a hierarchical concept of gender’ as contemporary culture ‘negotiate[s] the meanings of the terms women and soldier’ (p. 280).
Soldiers’ Stories maps the history of those negotiations through an exhaustive and compelling analysis of the representation of military women in film and television during the second half of the 20th century. That history begins with the mobilization of auxiliary units during the Second World War and the films of individual and romantic transformation that dramatized the new opportunities available to women. In sharp, jargon-free analyses, Tasker reveals how films such as The Gentle Sex, Keep Your Powder Dry, and Marine Raiders position the military woman as integral yet auxiliary – necessary, but ultimately only supportive – and frequently as contained by a romantic narrative that reasserts traditional gender hierarchies destabilized by the female soldier’s apparent modernity and independence. The military woman’s ‘spirited attitude, her “mobility” in wartime terms, is … explicitly counterposed with more passive constructions of femininity prevalent in the war period (the woman who waits)’ (p. 56).
These war/romance hybrids of the 1940s underscore one of Tasker’s most shrewd observations about the military woman’s capacity to ‘disrupt genre’. A figure of ‘generic hybridity’ (p. 60), she crosses and blurs the boundaries among comedies, boot camp narratives, investigative dramas and thrillers even as she destabilizes traditional notions of gender, authority, and sexuality. Unfortunately, this observation is not developed as fully as it might have been in Tasker’s subsequent account of midcentury comedic films based in role reversal and gender confusion, such as I was a Male War Bride, ‘fish out of water’ narratives like Never Wave at a WAC, and sex comedies such as Operation Petticoat. Though they lack the innovation of her discussion of Second World War era films, these analyses admirably demonstrate how in the postwar period ‘the military woman stands for a world comically awry’ (p. 126) and necessarily prepare the ground for Tasker’s discussion of works emerging during the women’s movement – M.A.S.H. and Private Benjamin, and their subsequent television programmes – and the films, television and journalism from the 1990s and beyond.
It is in her analyses of texts from the past three decades that the full import of Tasker’s study can be understood. If Private Benjamin, China Beach, and other works from the 1980s harness the rhetoric of the women’s movement and celebrate the achievements of female soldiers while still containing them within narrowly defined spheres, 1990s thrillers and investigative dramas such as She Stood Alone: The Tailhook Scandal, JAG, Courage Under Fire, and The General’s Daughter directly address the controversies surrounding women in combat, unit morale, and sexual harassment and assault that dominate contemporary discussions of a gender-integrated military. Importantly, Tasker includes in this final section a discussion of recent media accounts of female soldiers from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Celebrated as figures of a positive modernity, bemoaned as victims of feminist extremism, and excoriated as scandalous and perverse, contemporary female soldiers, Tasker argues, are inevitably figured as noteworthy and ‘provocative, whether to military men and masculinity specifically or to deep seated ideas about gender identity, social status, and work’ (p. 277). These debates will not end anytime soon, and Tasker’s analysis of the contemporary scene would lose much of its import without the thorough and illuminating history of such representations from the Second World War to the present. Likewise, her inclusion of more recent texts adds force and depth to the Solders’ Stories account of mid-20th century representations of women in the military.