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

Abstract

The archetypes of the heroic soldier and the caring mother, which dominate the social imaginary of war, reflect the essentially  gendered nature of war discourse. However, violent masculinity and gentle femininity, though essential to the war discourse, are not biological qualities but cultural constructions. The hegemonic “war story,” as Miriam Cooke refers 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 the inclusion of women as combatants and the technological advancements that enable the pervasion of war into homes, endangering civilians just as much as combatants. In this article, I will examine how select contemporary West Asian fictional narratives depict the war experience 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  of gender binaries, psycho-social impacts of conventional gender roles persist. Men depicted in the selected fictional texts continue to bear the pressure to protect and to resist violence using violence. Women’s changing roles in the new wars expose them to similar violence as combatants, but the lack of social recognition metes out a double jeopardy, whereby they are survivors of war’s violence yet are denied the honour or aftercare received by male combatants of war.