Gendering Military Sacrifice

A Feminist Comparative Analysis

Cecilia Åse, Maria Wendt, Cecilia Åse, Maria Wendt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429826696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a feminist analysis of military sacrifice and reveals the importance of a gender perspective in understanding the idea of honourable death.

In present-day security discourses, traditional masculinised obligations to die for the homeland and its women and children are challenged and renegotiated. Working from a critical feminist perspective, this book examines the political and societal justifications for sacrifice in wars motivated by human rights and an international responsibility to protect. With original empirical research from six European countries, the volume demonstrates how gendered and nationalistic representations saturate contemporary notions of sacrifice and legitimate military violence. A key argument is that a gender perspective is necessary in order to understand, and to oppose, the idea of the honourable military death. Bringing together a wide range of materials – including public debates, rituals, monuments and artwork – to analyse the justifications for soldiers' deaths in the Afghanistan war (2002–14), the analysis challenges methodological nationalism. The authors develop a feminist comparative methodology and engage in cross-country and transdisciplinary analysis. This innovative approach generates new understandings of the ways in which both the idealisation and the political contestation of military violence depend on gendered national narratives.

This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, critical military studies, security studies and International Relations.

1 Introduction

Gender, war, and military sacrifice

Cecilia Åse

Introduction

Death is irrevocable. Therefore, a soldier’s death in a state-sponsored war calls not only for ethical reflection but also for political justification. For which values should the democratic state require its soldiers to risk their lives? What can justify the ultimate sacrifice? The state’s claim to authority fundamentally depends on soldiers’ willingness to sacrifice their lives to defend this claim. To avoid threatening state authority, war fatalities must appear legitimate and justifiable to the public.

Military losses require recognition, and extensive political and ideological work is done to provide the death of the state’s soldiers with meaning. This work occurs when civil and military institutions create rituals and monuments and when political leaders or heads of state articulate a nation’s grief. It also occurs in media reports that accentuate individual soldiers’ heroism and bereaved relatives’ pain, and it includes artistic interventions and individual narratives that bear witness to and protest against war experiences. Although all of these efforts attempt to confirm the meaning of military death, they are unable to fully resolve its implications. As Natalia Danilova (2015b, xi) notes, “fallen soldiers rarely sleep in peace”. From the perspective of the state, it is vital that the war dead are given adequate social and political meaning – that they are “properly” honoured and commemorated (Baggiarini 2015; Zehfuss 2009). The war dead are constantly appropriated by the living and utilised as political and rhetorical resources. “Like history, or as history, the dead do not belong solely to the past; they are a vital and active part of the present”, writes Idith Zertal (2005, 3).

The rationalisation of war requires that soldiers’ deaths be honoured and elevated. The ennoblement of sacrifice relies on “foundational narratives, protection myths, and symbols of masculinised courage” (Baggiarini 2015, 4; cf. Åse and Wendt 2017; Repo 2008). Death on the battlefield was the ultimate masculine duty in twentieth-century Europe, and in the nationalist beliefs that George Mosse (1990) termed “the cult of the fallen”, war heroes were worshipped. Sacrificial death has long been a central aspect of national identities (Anderson 1983), and the idea of the transcendental nation has been fundamental in narratives justifying war; the individual soldier dies so that the nation can live. The national community is imagined not only as an emotional bond based on shared geopolitical belonging but also as an association between the dead and the living, the historical past and the future (Mosse 1990; Yack 2001). The nation’s constancy through time – its timelessness – depends fundamentally on normative heterosexuality and a gendered citizenship. The traditional masculine duty to protect and die for the nation is equivalent to the feminine duty to ensure the rebirth of the nation through childbearing. Women’s obligations have thus been associated with the private sphere and connected to the identity of wife and mother (Pettman 1996; Ruddick 1989), causing reproduction and familial relationships to define their relation to national and state security (Managhan 2011; Pateman 1992; Yuval-Davis 1997).

What does military sacrifice mean in today’s globalised world? For what ethics and beliefs are we prepared to die and sacrifice our loved ones? Post-9/11 wars and military interventions use human rights and international values to rationalise war-making and legitimise military action. This new security discourse also emphasises gender and women’s rights, as drawn up in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. In one of these post-national wars, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operation in Afghanistan (2001–2014), more than 700 European soldiers lost their lives. This book examines how Europe has given meaning to these war deaths. The ISAF mission proclaimed cosmopolitan and humanitarian motivations, which incorporated support for gender equality. European soldiers in Afghanistan were not defending their individual homelands or their own states’ sovereignty; rather, the objective was to safeguard international security, ensure development, and promote democracy and human rights. The waging of war that refers to liberal and cosmopolitan values rather than territorial or national self-determination asks that soldiers be prepared to die for distant others and not for the nation or its future generations (Kronsell 2012, 78–80; cf. Bergman Rosamond 2013; Duncanson 2013). When the national homeland and its women and children are not the privileged reason for protection, what justifies military sacrifice? For what can one die with honour?

This volume provides original research regarding the political framing of war deaths in Afghanistan and the cultural and societal meanings assigned to them. We begin with the idea that, when the state’s decision to participate in a war or military intervention leads to soldiers’ deaths, society is required to readdress the national and gender constructs that have historically underpinned military sacrifice. Using a comparative approach, the examination covers six national contexts: Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (UK). Although participating countries differed with regard to their specific strategic and political motives for involvement as well as their level of military engagement, substantial efforts were required in all national contexts to justify the war deaths. These efforts included state and privately organised commemoration initiatives, such as monuments, new war rituals, medals and digital tributes, as well as cultural appropriations and visualisations of military loss (cf. Dahl Martinsen 2013).

Recognising that the political and societal implications of military fatalities are fundamentally contested, this book demonstrates how reformulated gender representations and constructions of national self-identity became essential as a wide range of actors and institutions struggled to give meaning to the military losses in Afghanistan. A key finding is that invoking the specific ­gendered nation – and not a blueprint of liberal principles or values – is what granted meaning to military sacrifice and legitimised European states’ war efforts in Afghanistan. By analysing empirical sites of meaning-making transnationally, we identify national similarities and pinpoint silences and absences within and across national divides. Our results show that, in manners that differed substantively by nation, it was by (re)constructing the gendered national community that meaning was ascribed to these war deaths. In the context of humanitarian and post-national wars, gender effectively nationalises war-making and is used to reconnect these wars to the nation. Other important results identify that the possibilities for critical perspectives and war-opposing narratives and dissent are fundamentally dependent on nationally different reconstructions of the gendered nation.

Feminist scholarship argues that the analysis of international relations and war-making should include emotions and sensory experiences, symbolic expressions, and artwork as well as sexuality, reproduction, and the family (see, inter alia, Åhäll and Gregory 2015; Cohn 1987; Eduards 2007; Eisenstein 2007; Shapiro 2011; Sylvester 2009; Yuval-Davis 1997). Reflecting on this widening scope of what is relevant to international politics, Christine Sylvester (2012) argues that bodies and experiences are crucial elements of war. She demonstrates how this perspective requires the conceptualisation of war not as a collapse of the global order or foreign relations but as an “intensification of social relations” (Sylvester 2012, 489). War and military conflicts are generative; they play a constitutive role in social and political relations and prompt intense societal meaning-making (Barkawi 2011). In studies of war-making today, this understanding underscores the need to include emotional and corporeal dimensions as well as symbolic and material practices and artefacts. Indeed, military fatalities in particular derive meaning from a very wide variety of social, cultural, and political expressions; their implications are not determined only by national security, military strategy, or political arguments. This work accordingly examines an extensive range of empirical sources in order to understand the meaning of war deaths and sacrifice today as it is expressed in areas such as political and media narratives, artwork, rituals, and ceremonial elements.

As critical feminist academics, our analysis is guided by a non-militaristic perspective. We situate our work within a feminist tradition that unremittingly rejects nationalism, criticises war-making, and works against violence in all its forms. Consequently, we want to identify war-opposing voices and the possibilities for counter-narratives. It is vital to expose how the possibilities for critical perspectives and war contestation diminish. Such exposure entails asking how individual soldiers’ suffering and sacrifices – and the agony of bereaved relatives and friends – ennoble state violence. Reflecting the increase in civilian fatalities in today’s wars (Duncanson 2017), Judith Butler (2009) has argued that invisibilising civilian suffering by constructing non-Western lives as ungrievable is necessary for the West’s military violence to appear just and reasonable. This examination of the justifications for military sacrifice insists that the glorification of “our” soldiers’ pain and death not only vindicates military violence, but also contributes to the lack of acknowledgement of the countless civilian deaths and the concealment of the human costs of “others’ ” suffering.

Effectively opposing war-making entails challenging ideas of military heroism in terms of selfless sacrifice. What understandings of military sacrifice can speak effectively against the idealisation of violence? How can democratic engagement turn against the state’s war efforts? Such interventions cause anxiety and risk being perceived as disrespectful vis-à-vis those who have died and their relatives. In this regard, we take inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s (2010; 2017) idea of “the feminist killjoy”: someone who disturbs what others think of as good and noble and does not conceal the violence that lies beneath the language of civility and love/respect. When seeking knowledge about contemporary war deaths, the feminist killjoy neither honours nor idolises soldiers’ sacrifices or deaths. Rather, she questions how it is at all possible that the violence, destruction and suffering of war have come to be idealised and perceived as honourable.

The gender challenges of the ISAF

From the perspective of feminist theorisations of war-making and military death, the ISAF mission in Afghanistan is particularly interesting. Because of its universal or cosmopolitan underpinnings and its international scope – 47 countries contributed military personnel – this military mission confronts a number of the constructions of gender and nation that feminist theory has identified as central to justifications of war and military violence. The post-national motivations of military violence contest the idea of gendered protection and its concomitant myth. The archetypal myth of protection involves a masculine protector/soldier who uses military violence to defend the women and children who are associated with “his” nation and home front (Åse 2018; Tickner 2001; Young 2003). This myth depends on the supposedly indisputable idea that (the nation’s) women and children need protection, which in turn naturalises the gender binary and privileges heterosexual relations (Jansson and Eduards 2016; Peterson [1977] 1985; cf. Puechguirbal 2010).

The protection myth ennobles war-making and reinforces the nation as a community that unites generations through biological lineage, thereby supporting nativist and racialist ideas of national belonging. When heteronormativity and the gendered family are positioned as the necessary foundations for the national community, women’s bodies are placed under masculine protection and national control (Eduards 2007; McClintock 1995; Young 2003; Yuval-Davis 1997). These constructions of the nation privilege white heterosexualised femininity (Shome 2001), while women who do not conform to this norm are considered unworthy of protection. The corollary of the white, fertile and heterosexually desirable woman whose reproductive capacities guarantee the continued existence of the nation’s biological lineage is the honoured and elevated manly soldier who is prepared to die for the nation, to spill his blood to protect the national home and the nationalised white female body.

The overt motivations and organisation of the ISAF mission contrast with important aspects of such gendered protection in terms of who or what is the protected and who is the protector. The European soldiers in Afghanistan did not directly fight to protect their national homelands or independence. Instead, the reliance on specific values to justify the mission, in combination with multinational military cooperation, loosened the archetypical and gendered connection between the nation-state and its soldiers. Notably, this development led to gendered tensions surrounding military deaths because it contested the idea of national protectors who risk their lives to protect and defend “their” women and children “back home”. Additionally, the growing impact of the UN’s WPS agenda indicated that references to women’s rights and gender equality supported the ISAF mission and figured in the war narratives of the European nations that contributed troops (cf. De Graaf, Dimitriu, and Ringsmose 2015). In the war rhetoric and justifications of European nations’ participation in the ISAF, gender equality reappeared in several national contexts.

For many feminist scholars, engaging in a war to safeguard security and human rights and institute gender equality appears to be a fundamentally self-contradictory undertaking. If military violence rests on and is constituted by racialised gender hierarchies as well as the disavowal of women’s agency through the claim that women need protection, then the references to gender equality are merely a mask that obscures strengthened hierarchies and a continuation of gendered protection through the feminisation and victimisation of the identity of the protected (Eduards 2007; Messerschmidt 2013; Young 2003). US war discourses in particular have been analysed from this perspective (Hunt 2002; Shepherd 2006; von der Lippe 2012; Ware 2006). This analysis emphasises how references to human rights and gender equality cooperate with the orientalist frames through which the West’s military violence is justified in terms of “saving” (other men’s) women and girls (Nayak 2006; Spivak 1988, 296) or even as a “feminist war” (Wibben 2016). It is an open question as to how these new motivations for military activities, as well as the orientalist version of gendered protection – which motivates war by claiming to protect (other men’s) women – have influenced European societies’ handli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: gender, war, and military sacrifice
• 2 Comparison as feminist method: denaturalizing gender and nation
• 3 The politics of war rituals: military sacrifice and gendered meaning-making
• 4 The new national war monuments: interrogating gendered narratives in commemorative sculpture
• 5 Artistic interventions: gender and nation in contemporary war art
• 6 Debating deaths: the possibility of dissent in the face of military sacrifice
• 7 Gendered grief: mourners’ politicisation of military death
• 8 Conclusion: the gendered politics of contemporary military sacrifice
• Index