Postfeminist War

Women in the Media-Military-Industrial Complex

Mary Douglas Vavrus

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780813576817
  9780813576824
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813576848
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Social Sciences

Media representations and practices that have emerged out of contemporary wars have been well documented by a wide array of books and articles. These treatments, however, have been less attentive to how cultural constructions of military personnel and war itself figure in the depiction of the incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Post-Feminist War, Mary Douglas Vavrus argues that all of these identity categories are integral to our understanding of those fighting, saved, or victimized by war. She considers two important questions: how the construction of gender, race, and class in media are productive of régimes of truth regarding war and military life, and how such constructions may also intensify militarism. By examining news and documentary media produced since September 11, 2001, Vavrus demonstrates that news narratives that include women use feminism selectively in gender equality narratives, which tend to reinforce historically resonant gender, race, and class identity constructions. She ultimately asserts that such reporting advances post-feminism, which, in tandem with banal militarism, subtly pushes military solutions for an array of problems women and girls face. 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Lifetime’s Army Wives, or, I Married the Media-Military-Industrial Complex
• Chapter 2. Counterintuitive Mothering in the Media-Military-Industrial Complex
• Chapter 3. “No Longer Women, but Soldiers”
• Chapter 4. “This Wasn’t the Intended Sacrifice”
• Conclusion: Banality’s Fatalities
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author