Description
Since WWII, women have increasingly been “included” in the American military through expanding roles and greater presence. While the “inclusion” of women is usually narrated as a progressive and liberal development; taking a more expansive view, this paper locates it in the history of wars fought by the United States during the post-WWII era. It argues that the increased “inclusion” of female American soldiers has been enabled by processes of domestic and international “exclusion” which, when studied, reveal the American empire’s “faces of domination”. While the “right to fight” is a right to be killed and grieved; it is also a right for American military women to kill "the other”. Throughout the ongoing integration of women into the US military, the US has been constituting/securitising/warring against enemies as “racial menaces” — deviant, threatening but inherently inferior. As this paper argues, the presence of military women is often used to demonstrate the “soft” in a war, constituting the paradoxical assemblage of conflicting tendencies and sensibilities inherent in the US post-war empire.
