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It's not that women can't be seen as heroines, it's that you have to do twice as much to bring attention to them in a crisis situation. ... In the collective consciousness, men handle this kind of catastrophe.
- Mary Carouba, Women at Ground Zero
A brief anecdote to begin: I had just watched the Hollywood movie G.I. Jane, featuring an amazingly buff Demi Moore, for the first time just before Donald Haase wrote to suggest the topic "Fantasies of War" for the sponsored Folk Narrative Section panel at the American Folklore Society 2011 meeting.1 G.I. Jane (1997) was directed by Ridley Scott, no stranger to female heroism, and tells the story of a government experiment to test the wisdom of gender equality in military elite forces. The Navy plans to enlist a beautiful (and capable) woman - Lieutenant Jordan O TM eil, played by Moore - into the all-male ranks of its Combined Reconnaissance Team (or CRT, a fictional version of the SEALs). Her appropriately gender-neutral name, Jordan, and a combination of striking feminine and masculine attributes make her an ideal candidate.2 The voluptuous Jordan shaves her head, pumps her body into a machine, and trains her bright smile into a scowl that would curdle milk. The movie positions itself as a heroic epic but unfolds in the form of a fairy-tale plot, and not an untraditional one at that. First, there is the glaring anatomical lack that keeps Jordan down in the military (for which she compensates by turning her biceps into tree trunks). Then, there are trials that test her resolve and her endurance. Finally, there is redress - she is eventually assimilated into the Navy CRT as an exception to the rule, which restores order in its own way. In the final scene the commander who most stridently doubted her (whose life she resourcefully saved) gives her his Navy Cross in private recognition of her valor and his misjudgment.
As I thought about a possible talk on the subject of fantasies of war, 1 realized how much the movie reminded me in significant ways of the three heroines in seventeenth-century fairy tales that were the subject of my dissertation. These women have been the subject of much discussion over the past...