Soldiers' Stories: Women and Military Masculinities in Courage Under Fire

Both images and narratives focused on military women disrupt very directly assumptions that behaviors or qualities designated masculine are reserved only for men. Obviously they are also framed by ongoing, hard-fought arguments concerning the proper role of women in the US military, arguments that involve factors including combat and noncombat roles, new technologies and (in Hollywood films at least) shifting political ideas about the role of US intervention. I don’t want to argue here that cinematic images of military women should be understood in any straightforward way as “transgressive.” After all, a respect for rules and order as well as fantasies of inclusion and belonging are so central and so powerful in the films I’ll be discussing. Indeed what strikes me most forcibly about the two most high profile American films of the 1990s to focus on military women in combat, Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996) a melodramatic war movie which provides the main focus for this essay, and the Ridley Scott-directed G.I. Jane (1997) is that whilst the central female characters are tough and masculine-coded, they are also both normalized and revered. To the extent that such images are transgressive at all then, I would argue that this lies not only in the act of proposing a viable female masculinity, but in their construction of heroic female protagonists whose very desire to be part of a masculine conformity troubles both the cinematic world in which they operate and many assumptions that have come to be conventional within feminist film criticism. I want to suggest here that masculinity is important for understanding contemporary cinematic representations of women, and not only when the female protagonist appears explicitly in male guise. As such this paper is part of an ongoing attempt to untangle gendered concepts, terms and images that are regularly used in both feminist-informed (typically psychoanalytic) film studies, and more sociological explorations of masculinities, not to mention popular discourses about gender. In effect I’m trying to think through a critical slippage that occurs between talking about gender as a set of qualities or characteristics culturally aligned with men or women, and the ways in which both images and identities regularly transgress these borders or boundaries. The paper argues for a more flexible model of gender in thinking about popular cinema (or indeed art cinema).