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Miriam Cooke 12 Subverting the Gender and Military Paradigms Was has become a constant presence in our lives, whether through telecasting of "ethnic cleansings" in Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda or through experiencing militarization here at home. We may seem further away from nucleas night than we were as recently as 1989, but smallerscale , widespread explosions of violence force us to ask why people who were living together in "peace" suddenly begin killing one another. The causes ofwas must be explored; surely, war is not inevitable; it is only made to seem that way. Two Paradigms A bumper sticker on the car in front of me reads, "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm." My mind wanders from the "Morning Edition" story about Serbian aggressions in Gorazda to the two dominant paradigms I study: war and gender. Was is conventionally defined as organized, armed conflict among states, that is, political entities having or aspiring to have a monopoly on armed force within their territory. The goal ofwas is definitive resolution-victory. Even when such a resolution is not reached, and it rarely is, it is often said to have been reached. Victory is declared; fighting ceases. The war is "over." Therefore, the new state must be one of "peace." During peace, society need no longer be divided between spaces where certain tasks are performed by men and others where tasks are performed by women. Copyrighted Material 236 Miriam Cooke Previously. sex segregation was so accepted that few questioned what the philosopher J. Glenn Gray called the "artificial separation of the sexes or, at best. a maldistribution" 1970, 62). Unlike convents and monasteries or boys' and girls' schools. the front and homefront have not usually been analyzed as gendered spaces. Maybe this is because these emergency, genderspecific spaces are not, in fact, so different from peacetime, patriarchal arrangements. Like war and peace, gender is thought of in binary terms that are said to be "natural." But gender, far from being natural. is a cultural code that describes , prescribes, and thus shapes social expectations for sexed bodies: men and women grow up differently, and most act in ways consonant with their culture's prevalent images and values. Gender is constructed in a discourse that the psychologist Carol Cohn describes as being "not only about words or language but about a system ofmeanings, ofways of thinking. images and words that first shape how we experience, understand and represent ourselves as men and women, but that also do more than that; they shape many other aspects of our lives and culture. In this symbolic system. human characteristics are dichotomized" (1993, 228-29). Thus, both war and gender are thought of as polarized. If war and gender so powerfully organize the world dyadically, then their reconception and rearticulation may become the instrument for recreating the world. I am interested in the blurring ofbinaries in contemporary wars. I am also concerned with how people who have lived through wars tell their stories, because stories profoundly influence how the next wars will be foughtand then told. Until quite recently. most wars were recounted within a narrative frame that the British military historian John Keegan argues has remained essentially unchanged since Thucydides. This frame I call the War Story. The War Story gives order to wars that are generally experienced as confusion . Nevertheless. military historians force a grid on the anarchy; they arrange experience and actors into neat pairs: beginning and ending. foe and friend. aggression and defense, war and peace, front and home, combatant and civilian. Women are important to emphasizing that such splits occur; in particular, it is said that women's need for protection is the reason men must fight. Thus, the War Story reinforces mythic wartime roles. Outworn essentialist cliches of men's aggressivity and women's pacifism are revived. The world is described as divided between the politikon, where men play "political " roles. and the oikon, where women are lovers or mothers. including the Copyrighted Material .128.79.88] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 04:27 GMT) Subverting the Gender and Military Paradigms 237 materdolorosa (weeping madonna) and the patriotic mothers who proudly sacrifice their wombs and their sons for their country. The War Story proclaims that this sex segregation is justified for biological reasons: the men are strong; therefore, they must protect the women, who are weak.' It is written in their genes that men shall be active and women passive. Telling the War Story War is messy, but until recently it has rarely been...

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