Designing the Pentagon Memorial: gendered statecraft, heroic victimhood and site authenticity in War on Terror commemoration

Abstract

ABSTRACT How does a memorial curate an image of conflict when it is dwarfed by 6.5 million square feet of the Department of Defence, when it is tasked with commemorating simultaneous military and civilian deaths, and when its public access consists of a sliver cut through one of the most secure sites on earth? Given the uniquely inconvenient siting of the Pentagon Memorial, this article argues that the Pentagon Memorial was itself curated by two memorial grammars: contemporary expectations that disaster sites resonate with ‘authenticity’; and that civilians are incorporated into commemorative rhetoric of heroic victimhood, during the War on Terror. These memorial grammars constitute the Pentagon Memorial through gendered logics of statecraft. The memorial is crafted as a response to the sudden violation of the domestic realm on 9/11, as well as the violent entangling of civilian and military victims at the crash site. Its design encircles this moment of violation, where the bodies of ‘protectors’ were entangled with those of the ‘protected’. The memorial freezes time a moment prior to impact – so that the masculine, militarized agents of state defence might once again be distinguished from civilians, and the distinction of inside/outside re-established. The Pentagon Memorial encircles the disruption of gendered logics of statecraft on 9/11, and their restitution.