The Evolution of Gendered Security State Logic since World War II

Writing in 2003 about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, feminist media scholar Jayne Rodgers declared “It is as if the twentieth century never happened” (210). She was describing the way women and men were portrayed after the tragedy, in media representations that seemed to recall stereotypes of men and women that hailed back to the 1950s (206). “While men… were being constructed as heroes,” said Rodgers, “women were being constructed as victims” (207). “The heroic myth… was based on a strong sense of restoring [myths of] gender, as well as social and political order” (207). The mythology was that reflecting the gendered icons of “action man and passive woman” (208), most probably resulting without the news media intentionally meaning to represent men and women this stereotypically. Rather, it was the result of too many decades since television’s inception without women being equally represented in the work force of the media (201) in a culture where gender is “a form of conditioning which affects individuals—women and men—at the structural and interpersonal level” (200). In short, gendered hierarchies in the media world had been shaping gendered representations of the tragedy and the ensuing geopolitical struggle that emerged from the maelstrom.