“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater

Building on Judith Butler’s understanding of visibility as “the object of continuous regulation and contestation,” art/aesthetics studies in international relations, and feminist theater studies, we identify feminist “her-story” theater as a unique site where Western “gender-/sexuality-inclusive” soldiering is visibilized, contested, and subverted. Drawing on ethnographic observations of two award-winning dramas, interviews with artists and military hosts, and findings from a wider research project on contemporary British military culture, we reveal the key role of heteronormative and patriarchal cultural discourses in reproducing the ambivalent positionalities of women/LGBT+ soldiers. We argue that the very visibility of women/LGBT+ soldiers on the stage paradoxically operates to make the complexities of–and struggles against–masculinized heteronormative military cultures invisible. Furthermore, despite artists’ attempts to dissociate empowerment through soldiering from the problematic context of modern conflicts, “her-story” theater ultimately entrenches gendered/racialized hierarchies that normalize Western military interventions. We conclude that only through sustained feminist reflection on the contours of “imagined” futures of female/LGBT+ soldiering can this persistently problematic (in)visibility be productively disrupted.