The Constitution of a Gendered Enemy

Abstract

Gender is being taken up as an analytical category towards the end of the twentieth century. In a famous 1986 article, the American historian Joan W. Scott defined it as a mode of referring to the social organization of the relation between the sexes, a notion introduced in order to ‘discover the range in sex roles and in sexual symbolism in different societies and periods, to find what meanings they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote its change’.¹ Often the term ‘gender’ has been used to refer to the areas (whether structural or ideological) that concern women, children and the family, while areas like diplomacy, international relations, high politics and war have not yet been explicitly tested against the touchstone of the relation between the sexes: men, understood as ‘public men’ (J. Elshtain Bethke), seem in fact to exist ‘beyond gender relations to the same degree they dominate them. While the imperative that women’s history always be related to men’s has become commonplace, up to now the reverse has hardly been true. Military history and the history of warfare are a case in point. They have dealt exclusively with men — and for good reason, since in the Western world (at least within Europe) war has generally been a form of direct confrontation between groups of men. Nonetheless, explicitly male-specific issues have not been raised in this field, for example in its connection with the history of masculinity’.²

Who was Penthesilea? Clearly, I have not done justice to her, nor she to me. With her piercing eyes and cutting tongue, for me she was a little too sharp. Every appearance, every phrase of hers was a challenge to someone or other…. The inhabited world, as far as we knew it, had revolted against us, with ever more cruelty, ever more fervour. Against us women, said Penthesilea. Against us humans, retorted Arisbe. Penthesilea: The men will be satisfied. Arisbe: You call them satisfied at reducing themselves to butchers? Penthesilea: They are butchers. They are just doing what turns them on. Arisbe: And us? What if we became butchers too? Penthesilea: We do what has to be done. But it does not amuse us. Arisbe: Ought we to do what they do in order to demonstrate our difference? Penthesilea: Yes. Aeno: But that’s no way to live. Penthesilea: Not to live. But to die, yes…. I rebuked Penthesilea fiercely: You want to die, so you make the others keep you company…. Cheek!, shrieked Penthesilea. And you are the one to say that! You, are neither fish nor flesh! A little more and we’d have been tooth and nail at each other…. Until now, I had forgotten all that.

(Author’s translation from the German: Christa Wolf, Kassandra (Hamburg: Lutherhand, 1992, 13th edn))