Soldier Girls: Popular representations of America's women in uniform from World War II to the 'War on Terror'

Despite the long history of American women's participation in combat, gender-bound myths have eclipsed their actual wartime work and experience in America's popular consciousness. Using historical materials such as war memorials, congressional records, memoirs, archived letters, and recruitment materials, I build on the work of military historians and media scholars to map some broad differences between military women's actual experiences and the cultural myths deployed to neutralize the challenges to both traditional conceptions of masculine warriors and feminine domesticity that women in uniform inspire. "Soldier Girls" examines the figural and rhetorical strategies by which American popular cultural forms--film, television, popular magazines, internet media--represented the American servicewoman from World War II to the "Global War on Terror." This dissertation investigates the methods by which American popular culture assimilates the woman in uniform into conventions of domesticated femininity and tropes of romantic heterosexual relationships. By scrutinizing popular conceptions of women's military history, my project brings to light the pervasive effects of cultural anxieties about gender on American military policy.;To illuminate the ways women in uniform problematize and even subvert patriarchal military values, "Soldier Girls" analyzes the various cultural, mythological, political, symbolic, and masculine-heroic meanings vested in the military uniform. Within an interdisciplinary framework informed by film and media studies as well as cultural studies, trauma theory, and feminist theory, my study expands the scope of feminist film theory through an extensive examination of the female who challenges the popular historiography of the monomythic American hero in such films as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and We Were Soldiers (2002). Elucidating the narrative and imagistic tropes by which Hollywood films transform the threat posed by military women into traditionally gendered stereotypes of citizenship and nationhood, of virgin and whore, "Soldier Girls" explores the thesis that American popular culture perpetuates a cultural amnesia that has buried women's vast contributions to the U.S. Armed Forces, the better to mythologize our "boys in uniform.";Keywords: Women, Military, Popular Culture, War, American Culture...