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A woman, soldier, dies in Afghanistan...

 
 
MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!
13:12 / 19.05.06
So a Canadian soldier died in Afghanistan the other day, and since then there's been a media furor about it. This is the 17th Canadian to die on military duty in Afghanistan since the beginning of "Operation Clean Up After The Americans Who Are Too Busy Chasing Vendettas In A Totally Unrelated Country That Is Purely Coincidentally Filthy With Oil"

To date -- to my knowledge -- no soldier's death has been marked with multiple news reports, a play-by-play of the base-side funeral, a sonorous "thousands of soldiers stand united in grief as the coffin is loaded onto the chopper" national news bit, and windy speeches in the House of Commons.

The difference between this soldier, and the first 16, is that this soldier was a woman.

I'm trying to work out why this annoys the piss out of me. I find something tooth-gratingly irritating about the fact that soldiers have been getting done in by roadside bombs, etc. for years with a "three soldiers died in Afghanistan today" news bit, here and gone, but the first female soldier to die gets the stop-the-presses treatment.

So far, I've come up with a few things:

(a) I'm offended at the sexism of the fact that a female soldier dying is somehow sensational. She should be treated equally, with an equal amount of fuss, as any other soldier dying in the line of duty, and the "OMG" reaction is somehow as patronizing as telling women they shouldn't or can't be soldiers in the first place;

(b) While I try not to be overtly/consciously sexist, there's a certain amount of upbringing/surroundings/society that I still need to grapple with. So maybe this is just me being sexist, and reacting negatively to a woman getting "special treatment".

I'm leaning towards (a), but mixing a bit of (b) in for colour and texture. It's why I find this sexist that's proving troublesome... it feels like the same sort of annoyance I have when universities call their sports teams, say, the Drywalls, and all the women's teams are called the Lady Drywalls. But I'm not certain if it really is condescending, or if I'm projecting the condescension because I'm personally aggravated that a woman is getting "special treatment." Maybe it's just notable because it's statistically interesting.

Maybe, hey, it's actually a good thing because it highlights the fact that women are soldiers, can take the same risks and face the same consequences. Maybe this will be inspiring for legions of young women.

Mitigating factor, to be fair: there was a contentious vote in Parliament this week about extending the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, so it was higher up in the news cycle in general than it normally would have been. But I can't shake the feeling that this was a "LADY soldier" story, not a "soldier" story.

So I've spent all morning tossing it around in my head, and I still can't work out clearly why it bugs me so much. One thing I like about Barbelith, and one of the reasons I was eager to join, is that there seems to be a lot of consciousness and discussion about gender roles, societal stereotypes, etc. I'm hoping some of you deeper thinkers might have some insight here.
 
 
Ticker
17:14 / 19.05.06
I would like to take two approaches on this if I may.

The first is your emotional response. Sounds like you're angry because you feel manipulated into having a reaction. As if the intent of the story/news/thingus is not just to say event A happened, but to charge it with a cultural significance. Perhaps you resent just being nudged to perceive something a certain way, to be outraged or what have you.

The second is to drill into the issue of gender loading. If we approach things as 'a person was killed' we get a different cultural response than 'a woman was killed'. I'd hazard to say it is not sexist to be aware of these nuances, they're real and they affect people's perceptions. Now are they needful in our current era? Personally I'd say no, as actions are not ok for one half of the human race and bad for the other.
 
 
alas
23:28 / 25.05.06
I'm still giggling over the Lady Drywalls. Heh heh. [I suspect one might have to be US--or Canadian maybe (do they do that in Canada?) to really appreciate how annoying and ubiquitous that practice is...] Anyway, I really will write a proper response at some point--because this is an interesting posting--but am not quite there yet.

Oh, but one quick and slightly tangential point--I admit that when I saw the topic I thought "This should be in the Switchboard, no?" but your approach to the topic seems sufficiently headshoppy, to me, so, well, cheers...And I promise I'll be back with my full hand of feminist cards on the table soon.

Oh. What the hell. A quickie: My initial gut reaction says I think I pretty much agree with both your reading and xk's response, and additionally think that we can maybe open this up to

a) the whole complexity of women in the military and other parts of the military industrial complex, given,

b), conflicting understandings of what the goals of feminism are or should be (we could spend some time sorting out some of the different strands of feminism and why they are sometimes at odds), and, um,

c) the ubiquity and use of the endlessly repeated captivity narratives, assuming that's part of what's going on here?, that virtually always circle around a (white) female figure captured or killed by "savages".... The most recent US version was probably the Jessica Lynch story--but things like the Patty Hearst kidnapping can also be read this way.

Here's a quick overview of the captivity narrative as a genre. Is this possibly a captivity narrative? (Are there other such stories in Canadian literature/history/media that you can think of? Although there are definitely European versions of this story, I thought of it as a more US phenomenon....)
 
  
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