It has been speculated that legends and myths are usually born out of everyday life. Surprisingly, it could be argued that the legend of the Amazons mirrors contemporary life in that women who actively participate in warfare are considered “out of place” with the normative landscape. As Enloe argues, the Amazonian world is a place apart, where gender roles are inverted, or worse, “what is wrong about the Amazons is not only that they are women who fight using military equipment and tactics, but that they live without men.” However, unlike the Amazons, Western societies are comforted by men being the soldiers, warriors, and heroes of war, while women are either victims or seraphic icons of war. As a society, we are consoled by nurturing images of women in the role of nurses on the battlefield or, most important, as champions of the home front. Cock contends that when people go to war, they do so specifically as men and women, rather than in nationalist solidarity. She argues that the military, as a masculine power structure, actually magnifies how masculinity and femininity are defined within society. This seems to hold constant even in the exceptional case of the Amazons. Many feminists argue that throughout history representations of these female warriors have been dichotomous in nature. On the one hand, Amazonian images mark women’s emotional and physical strength while simultaneously rendering them erotic, thereby reinforcing men’s virility. As Kleinbaum argued, “As surely as no spider’s web was built for the glorification of flies, the Amazon idea was not designed to enhance women.” In his book War and Gender Goldstein details some popular representations of the myth to illustrate this point. In the 1931 play The Warrior’s Husband, Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of the warrior queen Antiope radically challenged contemporary understandings of gender roles of her time. However, the play’s reviews overlooked these questions of identity in favor of essentializing Hepburn’s body with such statements as the play where “she first bared her lovely legs.”
Contextual Factors that Heighten Interest in Coalitional Alliances with Men Possessing Formidable Facial Structures
