Iraqi women die too: Exploring Iraq’s invisible female casualties

Abstract

Abstract In questioning the lack of gender-specific casualty data, this analysis helps to reveal the reasons responsible for the invisibility of Iraq’s female dead. Iraqi women, gleaning from existing casualty counts, are noticeably neglected, dwarfed by other female heroines: the foreign service woman, the suicide bomber and – not least – men in combat boots. The hierarchy that places occupying forces at a higher rank than occupied populations has long rendered Iraqi life inconsequential, or the death of its people ‘inevitable’, and therefore, ungrievable. However, this alone does not account for the absence of Iraq’s female dead. More fundamentally, what purpose does their exclusion from death counts serve, and when and why are female wartime casualties logged?