Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China, and: No Time for Dreams: Living in Burma under Military Rule, and: Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region (review)

Despite long histories of women in interstate wars, civil wars, and wars of national liberation, the relationship between women and war has been clouded by what Jean Bethke Elshtain identifies in her classic work, Women and War (1987), as the governing mythology of the male "Just Warrior" on the battlefield and the female "Beautiful Soul" on the home front for which he fights. Susan Faludi's recent The Terror Dream (2007) attests to the continued potency of these tropes of masculine protection of feminine innocence, particularly in the Western and especially the U.S. imagination, as well as the necessity for them to justify and relentlessly wage the War on Terror. When women transgress the boundaries of feminine innocence to engage in political violence themselves, they are constructed as either monsters, whores, or mothers gone mad, as Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (2007) argue in their study of the female torturers at Abu Ghraib, genocidaires in Bosnia and Rwanda, and Chechen and Palestinian suicide bombers. Women who resist war are similarly vilified as wrong- or softheaded dupes or rendered apolitical as simply acting out their maternal instincts.

While the governing mythology of Just Warriors and Beautiful Souls in wartime has acted to enlist many women (and men) into performing gender-appropriate roles in service to primarily state violence, the mythology has also obscured the far more complex and gender-inappropriate roles that women have performed in wartime and the effects such role transgression has had on their self-identities. Even as war privileges male-led militaries and manly exploits to the point of completely invisibilizing women in war narratives, war also significantly destabilizes gender identities and relations as a consequence of the need to mass-mobilize citizenries and the societal breakdowns that occur in the wake of destructive forces. But even as war (de)rigidifies gender difference, it can also lessen or heighten class, race, ethnic, national, and sexual differences depending on the nature of the armed conflict. Thus there is no common narrative that can be ascribed to women in any war, as their experiences of and participation in it are heavily mediated by their other social positions and the saliences of various identity categories in relation to the conflict. Claims that war may indeed empower women, particularly as they are mobilized as workers and combatants, need to be tempered by questions of which women, what kinds of wars, and with what outcomes. Women and War in the Twentieth Century (2004), a collection edited by Nicole Ann Dombrowski that covers select historical armed conflicts in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, argues that women participating as agents in imperialist and nationalist armed struggles undergo personal transformations and make economic and political gains, even if temporary, under their newfound status as national subjects, provided that they stay within certain bounds, such as those of heteronormativity. However, women unable to exercise agencies privileged by a state, nation, or faction in wartime or who are on the "other side," particularly of successful imperialist or fascist campaigns, can lose everything.

Danke Li's Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China is highly sensitive to how women's varying socioeconomic conditions and political affiliations create significant differences in their experiences and memories of war. To excavate the stories of Chinese women missing from the official record of China's War of Resistance against Japan during World War II, she interviewed 50 of the...