Battling Binaries: The Psychosocial Endurance of Gender Constructs in West Asian War Fiction

The archetypes of the heroic soldier and the caring mother, which dominate thesocial imaginary of war, reflect the essentially gendered nature of war discourse. However,violent masculinity and gentle femininity, though essential to the war discourse, are notbiological qualities but cultural constructions. The hegemonic “war story,” as Miriam Cookerefers to it, is built on these binaries of masculinity/femininity, civilian/combatant,home/front, etc. However, in postcolonial wars, these binaries are complicated by both theinclusion of women as combatants and the technological advancements that enable thepervasion of war into homes, endangering civilians just as much as combatants. In thisarticle, I will examine how select contemporary West Asian fictional narratives depict the warexperience of gendered subjects in occupied or war-torn territories like Iraq and Palestine.Exploring these texts in the light of war studies conducted by Miriam Cooke and Joshua S.Goldstein reveals that, despite the changing face of the new wars and the subversion ofgender binaries, psycho-social impacts of conventional gender roles persist. Men depicted inthe selected fictional texts continue to bear the pressure to protect and to resist violence usingviolence. Women’s changing roles in the new wars expose them to similar violence ascombatants, but the lack of social recognition metes out a double jeopardy, whereby they aresurvivors of war’s violence yet are denied the honour or aftercare received by malecombatants of war.