Abstract
List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xiii A Provocative Presence: Military Women in Visual Culture 1 Part One 19 1. Auxiliary Military Women 23 2. Invisible Soldiers: Representing Military Nursing 71 Part Two 3. Musical Military Women 115 4. Women on Top: Comedy, Hierarchy, and the Military Woman 139 5. Military Women and Service Comedy: M*A*S*H and Private Benjamin 173 Part Three 201 6. Controversy, Celebration, and Scandal: Military Women in the News Media 205 7. Conflict over Combat: Training and Testing Military Women 235 8. Scandalous Stories: Military Women as Victims, Avengers, and Investigators 255 Afterword 277 Notes 281 Bibliography 301 Index 309
Highlights
This book begins with a relatively straightforward question: How have military women been represented in the cinema and subsequently in television? In answering this question, I aim to provide a comprehensive study of military women in American and British cinema and television from the Second World War to the present
As the focus moves from the emphasis on necessary but temporary service which characterizes the period during the Second World War, it becomes clear that narratives featuring military women orchestrate a tension between professional and romantic possibilities
The term clearly has a metaphoric significance—one not lost on politicians at the time—which serves to qualify the potent image of the military woman as a sign of modernity
Summary
Among the advertisements for cosmetics and cigarettes in an issue of the British fan magazine Picture Show in 1953 the (young) female reader is addressed directly in this way: “There’s a place for You in the W.R.A.F.” (figure 1). A WRAF member, Joan Pears, smiles while the text informs us, “She wanted to stand on her own feet; to meet different people; to travel abroad.” Having left her civilian training as a hairdresser in favor of her new role as a fighter plotter in an operations room, Pears suggests the exciting possibilities of military service for women, a potential migration from feminized labor (hair and beauty) to a position of agency and responsibility (an “important life”). I aim to provide a comprehensive study of military women in American and British cinema and television from the Second World War to the present My goal is both to make the military woman a more visible figure within film and television history, and feminist media studies more broadly, and to suggest ways we might understand the formations of gender and power that she thematizes. I argue, for instance, that gendered discourses of the military woman as potentially masculinized (a recurrent trope) have informed fictional representations, but public, military, and policy debates regarding the “proper” utilization of women in the armed forces It follows that film and television are my major focus, an understanding of the cinematic and televisual career of the military woman cannot be separated from an exploration of the wider discursive deployment of this figure. Our two male Marines are taken quite by surprise; one pushes
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