Bloody war: menstruation, soldiering, and the ‘gender-integrated’ United States military

Abstract: Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying in a new array of roles in the so-called “global war on terror“ and the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation can tell us about the banal and bodily nature of women’s militarization as a deeply affective, sensorial, and embodied process, and the tensions these anxieties reveal within liberal promises of a gender-integrated US military. Drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine efforts within US military medicine to hormonally regulate women soldiers’ menstrual cycles as a matter of military operational concern, alongside public narratives by women soldiers who deny the significance of menstruation to the work of soldiering. I argue that both of these discourses enact a conflation between womanhood and menstruation in the debate over women’s role in and at war, in a manner that circumscribes the possibilities of what we can apprehend – and feel – about war and soldiering as gendered experience.