The Reality of Women Soldiers' Violence in Peter Morris's Guardians

Abstract

This paper examines the reality of women soldiers' violence in Peter Morris's play, Guardians, because the societies look at woman as vulnerable to many kinds of violence including sexual harassment, abuse and assault. Brutality is solely ascribed to men due to the binary narrative of gender which renders woman as the weaker whereas man as the powerful. Thus, the possibility of woman’s acting violence is excluded from any consideration in most of the past written literature. Therefore the current paper aims to examine the reality of women soldiers’ violence to demystify the binary narrative of gender in light of Judith Butler's theory Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and its concept of Performativity (1999). Accordingly, the present study argues that women soldiers can be perpetrators as men can be according to their repeated actions and performance. The behaviors of the female soldier in the play are out of the binary narrative of gender then out of the social construction of violence. This paper approves the de-gendered nature of violence, in other words, a de-construction of the binary system of gender and in turn violence in the military. It concludes that gender is a matter of acting, and performance decides the individual’s identity not his/her sex. Moreover, the present paper finds that women soldiers' behaviors are affected by their cultural and social environment. The righteousness of Butler’s statement that gender is socially and culturally constructed is proved throughout the present study. Accordingly, the binary system of understanding violence fuels the inequalities between male and female.