Gendered Narrative in Female War Literature: Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen

Abstract

US novelist and journalist Helen Benedict’s 2011 fictional work Sand Queen, the first novel about the Iraq War (2003–11) written by a woman, has great potential for feminist approaches, especially regarding its use of gender-identity models. Through her positioning of the narrators, her multiple narratives, and the linguistic elements in this work, Benedict has created a unique artistic structure that has broad implications for the study of narrative, the themes of war, displacement, and trauma, and cross-cultural understanding. The current study examines Benedict’s work to demonstrate her gender-conscious view of war in her depiction of US soldier Kate Brady and Iraqi medical student and interpreter Naema Jassim as the central consciousnesses through which the narrative is told. Taking advantage of third-wave feminist approaches to gender, the study discovers diverse perspectives and distinctive viewpoints on the concept of gender identity. Offered by the novel’s first-person character-narrators, these viewpoints explore the fictional universe mapped out by Benedict in the text. In the context of the Iraq War, based on models of gender identity interspersed throughout the narrative, the study reveals how the challenges and/or reaffirmations of normative gender ideologies dominated patriarchal systems of military institutions.

She Thinks, He Says: The Voice of the Other in Nobel Laureates’ Gendered Literature

“…It is only then in the succeeding parts of the story does the reader find out that it refers to Brady when the narrator-character denotatively reveals her female gender by describing how the sight of a female soldier will win hearts and minds. Here, Benedict allows gender to be produced through narrative processes (Moosavi, Ghandeharion and Sabbagh, 2019). The presence of the ambiguity of gender through the use of the pronoun 'I' is then removed with the use of gender markers.…”