It was not very long ago that I wanted to be a female soldier. I thought it was something different, glamorous, and gender transgressive. I would be able to travel, earn money for college, and take pride in a collective identity. In my last semester of high school, I signed the contract to join the Army Reserves; but six months later I broke the agreement and decided to attend the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. At that time, I did not feel ready to confront the harsh realities of war. I am now an artist, filmmaker, and animator working and living in New York City. My films have been shown in film festivals and galleries across the United States and Europe. Yet these women and the Iraq War have never left my mind. The March 23rd ambush coincided with my signing of the contract, and the incident made me question women’s role in combat. The women of the March 23rd incident, Lynndie England, and I are all about the same age. They joined the military for more or less the same reasons I did. I constantly remind myself of the fact that I could have experienced the same predicament if I chose the other path. It is from this position of desire and ambivalence that I approach my own reconstruction of these public narratives.
My current personal thematic obsessions include women in relation to power, female desire/sexuality and women’s voyeuristic relationship to pornography, women who commit violence, issues of intimacy, and doctor/patient relationships in psychotherapy/hypnosis.
I begin my investigation with the three female POWs involved in the March 23rd 2003 ambush and the women implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. I see their stories and personas in the context of a simulacrum, their identities fractured into countless hollow shells that take on a life of its own without ever referencing the original. In my efforts to reconstruct my own version of these narratives, I would much rather concentrate on how I, as a spectator, receive and consume the narratives disseminated by the media.Who chooses what story to tell? If memory is a highly selective process, then what do I, along with the American public, choose to remember about these women, about the Iraq War? How do these choices reflect American’s anxieties or fantasies about women in war? Hopefully my simulated copies of these women will be more than just a quotation of the infinite other duplicates floating around.
Through these projects I aim to help Americans “re-remember”, in particular young female and male soldiers in the U.S. military, by generating new connections/meaning within existing cultural memory. In my efforts to reconstruct and reenact these shared narratives, I wish to unearth forgotten or suppressed memories, facts, and histories from the past in order to reactivate them in the context of the present. I hope to participate in ongoing dialogues within the veterans community by suggesting new alternative ways of narrativizing their military experience outside of the mainstream media. For instance through the sensational stories of Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, the military and media were able to propagate the ideal military female: she is able to fight like a man but need men to save her. Furthermore, she is sexually enticing, but not a whore. I seek to investigate new images and vocabulary to counter the current gender subordinating discourse surrounding militarized femininity.
