Warring Subjects: Gender, Liberalism, and the Global War on Terror

Over the past decade, the role of women in the U.S. military has changed dramatically. Since 2003, female soldiers and marines have been used in both official and ad hoc capacities to support U.S. counterinsurgency and counterterrorism objectives, enacting duties that include searching and calming women and children during home raids, gleaning intelligence from and exerting influence on the local population, and interrogating suspected male combatants. In addition to their work as counterinsurgents, women served in combat despite the official policy that banned women from participating in infantry and field artillery positions, a ban that was lifted in January 2013. This dissertation argues that the instrumentalization of gender for U.S. imperialism is achieved through the liberal enfranchisement of racial and sexual minorities, re-scripting previous injurious identities into the ultimate performance of national belonging.;The first half of the dissertation analyzes congressional reports on diversity in the military alongside interviews I conducted with the intellectual authors of the military's "new diversity vision" and the creator of the first official female counterinsurgency teams, known as Female Engagement Teams or FETs. In these chapters I argue that the strategic instrumentalization of gender is indicative of a greater shift in military policy in line with neoliberal multiculturalism. I trace the historical transformation from Cold War liberalism, where the U.S. military assimilated and subsumed minority difference, to a post-Cold War security regime in which differences are valorized as instruments of warfare. I read military doctrine for the ways in which old colonial logics have been re-appropriated in accordance with neocolonialism and for the subsequent production of a new warring subject: the female counterinsurgent.;The latter half of the dissertation analyzes the interviews I conducted with U.S. servicewomen and asks how the military's leveraging of femininity paradoxically enables a kind of liberal equality in line with the masculinist foundation of liberalism which defines women as difference. I read these interviews for how the women engage in different modes of feminist consciousness in their efforts to process their perceived enfranchisement and liberty within a multicultural U.S. society and in opposition to Iraqi and Afghan women, and their simultaneous exploitation within a discriminatory military.