“Archipelagic Penal Spaces”: The Iraqi Muslim Woman and the Abject Female Soldier in Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen

Abstract:The US war story is conventionally one of nation and of masculinity. Literary fiction and nonfiction by US women writers who address the war on terror and focus on women serving in the military have problematized this paradigm. Given the high number of women who joined the US military to serve in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, texts such as Love my Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army by Kayla Williams (2006), Flashes of War by Katey Schultz (2013), Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq by Jessica Goodell (2013), and Sand Queen by Helen Benedict (2011) highlight the challenges the US female soldier encounters not only on the battlefield, but also in being accepted by her male peers because she is a woman performing a masculine job. Benedict’s Sand Queen adds a twist to this still emerging literary tradition by portraying the sexually harassed US female soldier Kate Brady concurrent with the Iraqi viewpoint of the civilian, a Muslim woman named Naema al-Jubur. In this essay, I propose an archipelagic theoretical framework to examine the war on terror as it is portrayed from the perspective of the sexually harassed US female soldier and the civilian Iraqi woman, while paying close attention to the main setting of the story, Camp De Bucca. I examine the characters of Kate and Naema in light of Julia Kristeva’s feminist theory of the “abject” and Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of political violence, specifically his definition of the “sovereign sphere.”