The Mini-Skirt Brigade: Distorting Women’s Participation in Armed Conflict

Abstract

The process of imagining a nation is reflective of the gender order in the society from which the nation is dreamt (McClintock 1993; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). One’s role in that process is dictated by hegemonic gender norms and reinforced by supplementary iconography of the nation. Typically, women are found outside this process and their contribution to the nation defined on the basis of a patriarchal gender order. How women’s relationship to the nation is defined has implications for how they are then regarded (or not) as actors. Women’s association to the nation is consistently constructed on the basis of their assumed mothering and nurturing capabilities. Similarly, women’s relationship to national conflict is defined as that of victim — passive, lacking agency or voice, often grieving. Media depictions of conflict often rely on the faces of women to relay the human costs. Margaret Steitz (2000) observes in her article ‘Woman as Mother in a Headscarf’ how media images of women in conflict zones produce a ‘one-dimensional image of women in war’, namely the image of a woman in a headscarf. Often, these women in headscarves are mothers, caring or weeping for injured children, or languishing from the loss of their son through political violence. This has facilitated the acceptance of the notion that women in conflict zones are helpless victims of circumstance, to be pitied (Steitz 2000:66).