Blog #2

Blog Post 2

            I decided for this month’s blog post I would write and analyze the narrative written by Boise State’s own professor Manda V. Hicks. The narrative is titled Making my Narrative mine: Unconventional Articulations of a Female Soldier, and tackles the concept of what it is like to be a female soldier in today’s United States military system. This document stood out to me from week seven more than any other thing we read this year, simple because I admittedly know nothing about the female soldier and their role in our military. To go even further I’ve never really gotten to see or read any soldier’s “narrative” so naturally I was intrigued.

            In her writings Hicks talks about how although she was ascending the ranks in her profession, and doing all the same work as many of the other soldiers, people still naturally associated her with the societal roles assigned to women in our country. In relating the topic of what it is like to be a female in the army, Hicks describes it as listening to an argument and knowing the correct answer but neither side will listen to you. She is quoted saying, “The Army is a long, boring, arduous, frustrating, conversation, where no one listens to you and it doesn’t matter what you know” (Hicks 462). I found this to be interesting but somewhat not surprising as sad as that sounds. Traditionally when one thinks of the army you think of young, tough, brave men that are very macho, and unfortunately many of these characteristics are not drawn in comparison to the women of our society, no matter how “badass” they are. She continues to expand upon many of her experiences in the army with a very poetic sense, and it all comes back to the fact that people will at the end of the day respect her, but at the same time whether it is a conscious thought or subconscious, think that she is not as good as a man of her same abilities. At the very end of her narrative she had a poetic quote that I found to be very eye opening, and I think it describes her personal motivation in her experiences, “What is it like to be a female soldier? Well, it is making the unintelligible intelligible. It is going where you don’t belong. It is being who you are not supposed to be. It is creating new meaning” (Hicks 465).

            After I was finished reading her narrative I was curious to see if these experiences paralleled other female soldiers. I found a Huffington Post article titled “What is it Like to be a Woman in the Military,” written by Stacy Bare. Many of the same principles and issues brought up in Professor Hicks’ narrative were clearly apparent in many of these women’s stories and experience. The author of a book entitled The Dressmaker, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, was quoted in the article saying, “Change is hard. The truth is that women have been out fighting for years, but we haven’t been paying attention as a country . . . The reality is that women have been out there getting silver stars, purple hearts, and bronze stars with a valor device” (Lemmon 11). It is evident that there is a clear issue here in recognizing the true abilities of our female soldiers, and it is about time we as a nation fix the way we think.

Bare, Stacy. “What It's Like to Be a Woman in the Military.” The Huffington Post,            TheHuffingtonPost.com, 24 Sept. 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-bare/ashleys-        war-an-interview-_b_8183280.html.