Patriarchal Discomfort? The Representation of Women in the British Armed Forces in Civil and Military Discourses

The thesis explores the nexus of gender and war in modern society in the wake of the recent removal of the combat ban on women in the British Armed Forces. Building upon works on nontraditional bodies who transgress the normative boundaries of masculine/feminine, it investigates the ‘inbetweenness’ of female soldiers and the ambiguous spaces occupied by them. Setting as a focal point a sense of discomfort, it focuses on representations of women in the military, discourses through which their subject positions are constructed and rendered (un)intelligible. The thesis seeks to recover representations of female soldiers in the media and identifies a hermeneutical lacuna in the articulation of their existence and experiences. By conducting a discourse analysis of the media, the study also postulates that the incongruity between the perceived femininity of women and the masculine-coded profession of soldiering engenders a sense of discomfort, which, in consequence, coaxes women into ‘their place’. The thesis analyzes Soldier as well as four major British newspapers and argues that while women are now allowed to hold every role in the British Armed Forces and are ostensibly represented as equals to men in the military discourse, the sense of discomfort in recognizing women in military settings is manifested in subtle and nuanced manners in the civil discourse. ‘Female soldier’ is rendered an oxymoron as the social construct of ‘woman’ is not an appropriate subject of violence, and the representations of female soldiers in the media discourses continue to obscure the discursive structure of gender subordination.