Women Breaking the Silence: Military Service, Gender, and Antiwar Protest

Citation:

Sasson-Levy, Orna, Yagil Levy, and Edna Lomsky-Feder. 2011. "Women Breaking the Silence: Military Service, Gender, and Antiwar Protest." Gender & Society 25 (6): 740-63.

Authors: Orna Sasson-Levy, Yagil Levy, Edna Lomsky-Feder

Abstract:

This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women’s antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of “Women Breaking the Silence” (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women’s antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women’s antiwar discourse from the gendered marginalized position of “outsiders within” the military. From this contradictory standpoint, the women soldiers offer a critical gendered voice, which focuses on criticism of the combat masculinity and gendered identification with the Palestinian “other.” While they reaffirm the republican ethos that grants political dominance to male soldiers, they also deconstruct the image of hegemonic masculinity as the emblem of the nation and undermine gendered militarized norms.

Keywords: military, state, nationalism, politics, collective behavior, social movements

Topics: Combatants, Female Combatants, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gender Analysis, Gendered Discourses, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Hierarchies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Israel, Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories

Year: 2011

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