Title: Violence and Women’s Empowerment: Female Soldier Narratives in the Twenty-first-century American War Writings

Abstract: Helen Benedict and Kirsten Holmstedt’s narratives of the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars relate women’s war stories in women’s voices to reshape the cultural imaginations about the identities of women and soldiers, hence they offer an alternative to or counter-narratives against the dominant gendered war discourse. The portrayals of U.S. female soldiers’ perpetrator/victim identity in Benedict’s The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq and Sand Queen and Holmstedt’s Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq disrupt war narrative traditions, expand the boundaries of feminist discourse, thereby facilitate women’s empowerment by unsettling the old gender order to engender a new one.

Keywords: war, violence, women’s empowerment, female soldier narratives

Author: Tian Liu, Ph.D. Candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China; Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha, Hunan, China.