(Gendered) War

Women and girls do not have an option about fighting in the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The vast majority of war casualties today are average citizens and the preponderance of these are women and children. Political violence has moved over the last century from trench warfare to assaults on the very domestic stability that gives a society shape and meaning. But these are invisible tactics: they are at one and the same time thought by military leaders to be effective, and as well to be heinous. Today's warfare globally is entrenched in a double set of betrayals: placing women at the epicenters of war and simultaneously denying this. What, then, does it mean to be a female combatant?