“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater

Abstract

Building on Judith Butler's understanding of visibility as "the object of continuous regulation and contestation," art/aesthetics studies in international relations, and feminist theater studies, we identify feminist "herstory" theater as a unique site where Western "gender-/sexuality-inclusive" soldiering is visibilized, contested, and subverted. Drawing on ethnographic observations of two award-winning dramas, interviews with artists and military hosts, and findings from a wider research project on contemporary British military culture, we reveal the key role of heteronormative and patriarchal cultural discourses in reproducing the ambivalent positionalities of women/LGBT+ soldiers. We argue that the very visibility of women/LGBT+ soldiers on the stage paradoxically operates to make the complexities ofand struggles againstmasculinized heteronormative military cultures invisible. Furthermore, despite artists' attempts to dissociate empowerment through soldiering from the problematic context of modern conflicts, "herstory" theater ultimately entrenches gendered/racialized hierarchies that normalize Western military interventions. We conclude that only through sustained feminist reflection on the contours of "imagined" futures of female/ LGBT+ soldiering can this persistently problematic (in)visibility be productively disrupted.

A Rainbow Flag Worth Defending? Swedish Armed Forces’ Pride Campaigns 2017-2022

“…One arena in which this has happened is military recruiting and information campaigns. Military institutions across a number of countries have attempted to mobilize issues around gender and sexuality in efforts to broaden recruiting, to re-define their societal relevance as security organizations, to justify geopolitical interventions, and to re-arm and re-territorialize their national defense (Bulmer 2013;Strand and Kehl 2019;Spade and Belkin 2021;Baker 2023;Dolan and Danilova 2023).…”