Blog #3

In the article Making My Narrative Mine: Unconventional Articulations of a Female Soldier, Manda V. Hicks she explains that “being a female soldier is a built in assumption of many that you could not have done what a man has done and you could not possibly have given the same that a man gave,” (462). This was a meaningful sentence to me and explanation of the life of a female soldier. This sentence, in particular, you could see that in this culture or organization if you will, not only do women not get credit for their work but based on this sentence it is shown that Hicks felt like women were seen to be completely incapable of doing work in the army. I pride myself on being a strong, independent and capable women and when I see a situation like this it is hard for me to face and accept as reality and something that does happen in a specific culture.

Something that I have discussed in a few of my other classes is positionality which means “the occupation or adoption of a particular position in relation to others, usually with reference to issues of culture, ethnicity, or gender,” (English Oxford Living Dictionaries). This also touches on the idea of intersectionality, which means when people of other genders, social classes, and levels of privilege come together as multiple identities to become more of a whole. In this moment when Hicks indicated that the life of a female soldier is assuming that she as a female could not have done what a man has done, showed me the lack of intersectionality, just very different identities that do merge together. However, this emergence is very demonstrative, where the males feel like they must show their dominance in a culture like the army. In this military culture, we could make the claim that women are oppressed in this setting, they are not given credit or appreciated as useful members of the military, rather just something that the males can make jokes or be insensitive about. Women in the military are proud to represent and fight for their country, this is especially, not the place where oppression should be visible, nevermind exist. In the magazine Everyday Feminism,  “intersectionality is a framework that must be applied to all social justice work, a frame that recognizes the multiple aspects of identity that enrich our lives and experiences and that compound and complicate oppressions and marginalizations,” (Jarune Uwujaren & Jamie Utt, 2015). In my mind, this one short sentence regarding what it is like to be a female soldier brings up countless issues regarding equality, positionality, intersectionality, identity, meaning, oppression and privilege. Which is way more than I would have thought when I began writing this.