Gendered Language of War

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Gendered Language of War

The ways in which we have come to understand, explain and react to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 are coded by our linguistic system and the meanings it constructs. Words mediate between internal, cognitive responses to war and external, behavioral responses (Beer 9). These words, and the complex system of meaning and power that they constitute, are gendered: "in this symbolic system, human characteristics are dichotomized, divided into polar opposites that are supposedly mutually exclusive…[and associated] with a gender" (Cohn 229). In this paper, I will explore how this gendered and dichotomized discourse has unfolded in the dominant discourse of war, shaping and limiting our response to the September 11th attacks both militarily and on the homefront. In this process I will seek to answer several questions: How has the gendered discourse of war been understood historically? What is different about the present conflict and what is being revisited? What are we as a nation saying and not saying in our response to the events on September 11th? How is gender constructed in ideas about war? How are men's and women's experiences of and feelings about war articulated through language? What are women's roles purported to be during wartime?

From Vietnam to Desert Storm: Remything American Military Prowess

The United States' involvement in the war in Vietnam fundamentally changed our national, historical and political understanding of war. The women's movement and the peace marches that accompanied it left an indelible mark; the "loss" in Vietnam emasculated the American consciousness, and the former mobilizations bore the brunt of the blame. 1980s Cold War politics attempted to reinstate American masculinity and nationalism by combating communism. The U.S. military and national security rhetoric of the eighties "depended on segregating the residual anti-war discourse along often unconscious but deeply culturated associations of gender" (Boose 70). The pacifist, antiviolence ethos of "bleeding heart liberals" and Congressional "doves" that had "lost us the war" was identified with the "feminine." Anti-war consciousness was demonized and Vietnam was reconceived: "the problem was no longer the excessive deployment of militarized values but the failure to deploy them strongly enough" (Boose 72). George H. W. Bush attempted to see that this would not happen again through the escalation of Desert Storm.

Once George H.W. Bush had set a deadline for military action against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait, discussions about the potential conflict shifted from whether the U.

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