W. Christensen Page 1 of 2
Current and Future Research
Wendy M. ChristensenMy research centers on how ideas about gender shape cultural and political issues. I see gender asframing how people think about war and peace, militarism, citizenship, and political engagement, and inturn, how people discuss these issues affects how gender inequality is maintained or challenged. My work owes much to Dorothy Smith’s approach to standpoint theory and Foucault’s understanding of discursive power. I am particularly interested in how gendered discourses shape institutions — both intheir material and ideological dimensions. I have been applying this approach to understand thedevelopments in interactive online technology (Web 2.0) and in how the homefront is mobilized insupport of the current US wars in the Middle East.In my dissertation, I take up my concern with how gender organizes political relationships by examining how the mothers of U.S. service members negotiate their personal/private concern for theirchildren, and the public/political issue of war. Mothers of service members provide personal support totheir deployed children and the troops, organizing in groups to send supplies and care packages to thetroops, while often considering that work separate from the public and political decisions about going to war. Feminist theory about gender and war has often assumed mothers to be either inherently peaceful and thus politically active against war (Ruddick 1995), or completely militarized (Enloe 2000) where their personal relationships with their children become a part of the war effort. However, my work shows that mothers of service members are prime examples of the contradictory identity of mothers in relation to politics and the public sphere, as they are either empowered to speak publicly and political vis-à-vis their maternal authority, or disempowered to speak publicly as mothers and as women in the male political sphere. For example, some of the mothers in my study evoke the ideology of separating the warrior from the war to justify their criticism of the war and to argue that they can doso without criticizing the troops. Other mothers evoke this ideology to ground their authority on theirpersonal relationship to the warrior, thereby depoliticizing their claims to public authority and limiting their work to supporting the warrior and thus disengaging from the public, political issue of war.I also show that in recruitment and deployment material, the Department of Defense attempts tomanage mothers’ dissent constructing their opinions as motherly, thus personal and not relevant to thepublic issue of war making. Mothers who internalize the military’s model of motherhood believe thatthey are being patriotic by unconditionally supporting the troops, and the war effort. These motherscriticize anyone who dissents publicly against war as unpatriotic. Constructing mothers’ political viewsabout war as oppositional to supporting the troops constructs the gendered homefront as war supportthat subordinates full citizenship practices to military authority. This process reinforces genderedpathways to citizenship as men’s citizenship is based on participation in politics and fighting in wars, while women’s citizenship is based on taking an explicitly apolitical supportive role.My dissertation developed from my master’s thesis, and subsequently published article, where Ianalyzed how the news media used gendered discourse to shape news debate surrounding the 2003 U.S.invasion of Iraq. Employing qualitative and quantitative coding techniques, I argued that both anti-warand pro-war speakers evoked gender—specifically ideas about whether or not a macho cowboy posture was appropriate—in making their case for or against war. In this framing, pro-war actors cast Europe,anti-war Americans, and the diplomatic process as feminine, and thus devalued. My findings showedthat the use of gendered binaries structured the debate itself around notions of appropriate masculinity,but also may have lowered the quality of the debate since media actors who used gendered framestended to evoke other dichotomous frames and ad hominem attacks along with gender.
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