Abstract

War stories traditionally revolve around the figure of the soldier and cast military spouses in marginal roles. In the post-9/11 era, however, a diverse range of texts – including fiction, life writing, magazines, and television shows – construct the military wife as a heroic figure of national importance, endowing their protagonists with discursive authority and “affective agency” (R. Wanzo). The military spouse often serves to legitimize warfare and imperialism, to represent the US nation as the “victim-hero” of global politics (E. Anker), and to communicate military culture to a civilian audience.

My talk will exemplarily analyze the representation of military spouses in the magazine Military Spouse (published since 2004) and in the highly successful Lifetime television show Army Wives (2007-2013). While Military Spouse is mostly created by and exclusively addresses military spouses, Army Wives targets a wider audience and constitutes a form of “militainment” (R. Stahl) that promises its viewers insight into military life. Both texts promote a professionalized and glamorous image of military life and illustrate the contemporary cultural ideal of the military spouse which I have termed “happy home front heroine.” They also engage the trope of the waiting wife, negotiate the new seriality of warfare in both form and content, and draw attention to the home front (rather than the battlefields) of the so-called Forever Wars.