Worlds Apart: an Evolving Woman, One Female's Assimilation into Patriarchal Spaces and the Grief Coda, with Critical Introduction

This creative thesis is using poetry and narrative prose to express issues relating to a female Marine navigating and assimilating within the male-dominated bastion of the American Military. The marginalization of women in the military who encounter sexism and gender struggles is often a taboo subject and this important military woman’s voice is largely missing in current American literature and writing. Fear of reprisal and the expectation that women must be subservient are some of the reasons why military women, veterans and active duty, refuse to share their experiences. My project seeks to release these repressed voices without fear of reprisal and address the validity of the current gender struggles of female Marines. For this thesis, I draw on the emblematic feminist theories of Helene Cixcous, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvior as examples of fierce women’s writing, in posterity, to encourage women to write for women, with realness, rawness and with fervor. Along with the stories about my military career, my poetry and narrative prose describe the worlds of an evolving woman who navigates the spaces of her childhood, her twenty-year career in the Marines, and her life outside of the military. I also address topics associated with death, which are depicted in the final section called the “Grief Coda.” I argue that poetry and narrative prose can be an empowering vehicle for military women to be heard, and expose stories about sensitive subjects that are too often silenced, including Military Sexual Trauma (MST), sexism, and gender related experiences and struggles. It is my goal and hope that this creative project will be the start of a larger conversation for women in the armed forces who have experienced these taboo struggles, and deconstruct the patriarchal stigma of the silent female Marine. It is only if we bravely write for each other that our collective voices may be heard in order to break the silence and fear about our experiences in a male-dominated environment.