Gendered Language of War :: Free Essays Online

Gendered Language of WarThe ways in which we allow come to understand, explain and react to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade amount of money on September 11, 2001 ar coded by our linguistic scheme and the meanings it constructs. nomenclature mediate between internal, cognitive results to struggle and external, behavioral responses (Beer 9). These words, and the complex system of meaning and power that they constitute, are gendered in this symbolic system, human characteristics are dichotomized, divided into polar opposites that are supposedly mutually exclusiveand associated with a gender (Cohn 229). In this paper, I go out explore how this gendered and dichotomized discourse has unfolded in the dominant discourse of war, shaping and limiting our response to the September eleventh attacks both militarily and on the homefront. In this process I will seek to answer several questions How has the gendered discourse of war been understood historically? What is diff erent about the present conflict and what is being revisited? What are we as a nation saying and not saying in our response to the events on September 11th? How is gender constructed in ideas about war? How are mens and womens experiences of and feelings about war articulated through verbiage? What are womens roles purported to be during wartime?From Vietnam to Desert Storm Remything American Military artistryThe United States involvement in the war in Vietnam fundamentally changed our national, historical and political understanding of war. The womens movement and the peace marches that accompanied it left an indelible mark the loss in Vietnam emasculated the American consciousness, and the fountain mobilizations bore the brunt of the blame. 1980s Cold War politics attempted to restitute American masculinity and nationalism by combating communism. The U.S. military and national gage rhetoric of the eighties depended on segregating the residual anti-war discourse along practi cally unconscious but deeply culturated associations of gender (Boose 70). The pacifist, antiviolence ethos of bleeding heart liberals and congressional doves that had lost us the war was identified with the feminine. Anti-war consciousness was demonized and Vietnam was reconceived the problem was no longer the excessive positionment of militarized values but the failure to deploy them strongly enough (Boose 72). George H. W. Bush attempted to see that this would not chance again through the escalation of Desert Storm. Once George H.W. Bush had set a deadline for military action against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait, discussions about the potential conflict shifted from whether the U.