Although war has become a too-common occurrence in twenty-first century America, cultural representations of women in the military manifested far slower. Daily, I see women in uniform working in many different roles on the base where my family is stationed. I view countless articles and newsreels regarding women in the military. Yet the proliferation of wartime dramas in literature, popular culture, and performing arts often perpetuates the gendered binary of war narratives by focusing attention on male combatants. Stories about women in the military are short-sighted and in short supply. The few women who earn recognition as warriors become sensationalized exceptions, such as Lynndie England, the female interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison, and in popular culture, Demi Moore's character in the movie G.I. Jane..

Women in the military play an essential role in revising nationalist narratives. More complex cultural representations of female soldiers, especially the ones on twenty-first century American stages, make bold statements about women's contradictory complicity in acting as tools for progress, freedom, and American neo-imperialism. In this dissertation I argue that the onstage image of the female soldier offers the most resonant and divisive cultural strategy today for interrogating twenty-first century American society shaped by September 11th and the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. While American news media and popular entertainment showcase female soldiers as eternal victims in cycles of sexual, psychological, economic, and social oppression, theatrical representations of female soldiers forge a new frontier of activist theater that engages feminist methodologies to incite audiences to alter the current political culture of the United States. Given the historical exclusion of U.S. women in the military and, more recently, their increased visibility in national news media, plays engaging women's varied and complex engagement in war raise the stakes of the need for revised nationalist narratives of inclusion.

The female soldier in performance manipulates the binary of men-in-battle and women-on-the-home front in order to bring the wars home in impactful ways. I title this project "Incendiary Operations" because the female soldier infiltrates traditional narratives of war and sets them ablaze to stage a battle against simplistic notions of women as only ever victims of war. In each of the plays I examine, the female service member character begins her journey at a point of implosion. She returns from the stress of battle filled with the adrenaline of combat, yet with no means of expressing that energy within the confines of civilian society. In addition, society demands that she return to an "acceptable" role as a woman: caretaker of the private, domestic sphere (even if she may have additional occupational duties beyond the home). She must find ways to channel her post-battle energy, or risk collapse. Through the course of each character's journey, the potential energy she carries becomes the spark of her incendiary operations, which range from refusing orders, reconstructing family structures as a means of oppositional solidarity, and rewriting the narratives about women and soldiers that frame her.