| This dissertation examines motherhood as a discursive practice that has influenced American women's relationship to processes of militarization, albeit in different ways and to different effect across bodies and even differentially within the same bodies across time. There are three distinctive foreign policy moments it reviews: the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, the Gulf War of the early 1990s, and, most recently, the attack on Iraq. For each of these historical moments, it examines a particular, and somewhat emblematic, female mode of embodiment and traces the ways such bodily forms came to surface in and through popular discourses of motherhood and in relation to the sovereign articulations of power that were characteristic of the era. This dissertation has a particular interest in hegemonic, or otherwise emblematic, variations of the ways in which female bodies have negotiated cultural articulations of motherhood and 'reasons of state.' Thus, the bodies of white, middle-class women feature centrally in this analysis. However, unlike some of the seminal texts within the literature on 'women and militarization,' the primary intention of this study is not to trace the effects of mothering discourses and/or militarization on white, middle-class women as though these bodies might somehow precede the discourses and practices through which they emerge. Rather, this dissertation traces the processes through which particular bodies emerge as gendered, raced, and classed (and, even more specifically, as 'maternalized ') in, around, and through specific foreign policy moments and the implications for processes of militarization. |
