Americans today are confident of our country, confident of our future and most of all, confident about you. We promised you'd be given the means to fight. We promised not to look over your shoulder. We promised this would not be another Vietnam. And we kept that promise. The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.

Pres. George Bush U.S. Armed Forces Radio March 2, 1991

 

Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury to women in the U.S., more common than injuries sustained in car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. Every five years domestic violence kills as many women as the total number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War.

Kimberly K. Hornak Slat Lake County Attorney's Office Gov't Pub Office 1994

 

Course Description:

George Bush was far from the first or the last to refer to the US military involvement in Vietnam as a syndrome-a pathologized disease our whole country has been struck ill with causing psychic damage and disunity. What does it mean to speak of a protracted military engagement against another country as a disease of the US? How did the many people involved in the Vietnam war suffer, what were the causes, and how do we represent these sufferings in popular culture? What does it mean to name a syndrome after Vietnam, wage a war to cure it, and build a national monument to commemorate it, while at the same time ignoring the statistic Hornak sites? These are among the many questions we will seek to articulate answers to this semester.

This course begins with the assumption that gender is a socially constructed category used to organize individual subjects and power relationships. Based on this assumption, we will read fourteen Hollywood Vietnam War films through the lens of gender analysis in order to interpret how constructions of masculinity and femininity are produced and reproduced, how they exist in tension and relationship to each other, how they are disrupted and restabilized, and how they vary across different historical and social contexts. Although issues of historical truth and authenticity of experience will always concern us as we study Hollywood's renditions of the war, our focus will be on gender, not on "what really happened". As a class we will learn to articulate how history and shared cultural stories are gendered. The understandings that these articulations bring us to should complicate the stories we each tell about history, nation, war and warriors.

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