Abstract
Since early 2000, UN edicts and NGO awareness-raising campaigns have resulted in the increasing global visibility of child soldiers. Their lives have been presented in both fictional and documentary formats in films such as Blood Diamond (Zwick, 2006), Innocent Voices (Mandoki, 2004), Soldier Child (Abramson, 1998), Ezra (Aduaka, 2007), War Child (Chrobog, 2008), and Kassim the Dream (Davidson, 2008). However, in the act of making visible the realities of the child soldier, what has too frequently happened is that the life and experiences of the girl has been ignored in favor of her male counterparts.1 Girls constitute as much as 40 percent of all child soldiers,2 yet they are infrequent focal points, with a large majority of films centering on the male experience. This chapter will examine how these complex female figures have been inflected in the fictional cinematic space and debate why the presentation of the girl soldier has, to date, been limited and constrained by dominant gender narratives related to girlhood, childhood, and the global North’s engagement with Africa. Whilst there have been several documentaries made on child soldiers (both feature-length and short), there is not enough space here to fully engage with both formats (since overall there are some key areas of divergence) and I am keen to avoid the sin of generality. Hence, this chapter focuses on the fictional space and on films that have been made by international filmmakers and distributed globally.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mark A. Drumbl, Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 8.
See David. M. Rosen, Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005),
Jean Comadroff and John Comadroff, “Reflections on Youth from the past to the postcolony,” in Child and Youth in Postcolonial Africa edited by Alcinda Honwana and Filip De Boeck (Tenton NJ: African World Press, 2005), pp. 19–30
and Alicinda Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
Torben Grodal, “Film Narrative,” in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 168–72 (169).
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. xi.
Henry Jenkins, The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 2.
Emma Wilson, “Children, emotion and viewing in contemporary European film,” Screen 46:3 (2005), 329–334 (329).
See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990),
and Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage Press, 1997).
Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 110.
Meda Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin, Beyond Bad Girl: Gender Violence and Hype (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)
and Christine Alder and Anne Worrell, eds. Girl’s Violence: Myths and Realities (New York: SUNY Press, 2004).
In terms of wider work on women, girlhood, and violence in the media, see also the work of Drew Humphries, Women, Violence, and the Media: Readings in Feminist Criminology (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern Press, 2009),
Hilary Neroni, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema (New York: SUNY Press, 2005)
and Cynthia Carter and C. Kay Weaver, eds. Violence and the Media (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003).
See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases and Véronique Pin-fat and Maria Stern, “The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch: Biopolitics, Gender and the Feminization of the US Military,” Alternatives 20:1 (2005), 25–53.
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 12.
Philip Kilbride, “A Cultural and Gender Perspective on Marginal Children on the Streets of Kenya,” Childhood in African, December 2:1 (2010), 38–47.
Alicinda Honwana, “Innocent & Guilty: Child-Soldiers as Interstitial and Tactical Agents,” in Child and Youth in a Global Era edited by Alicinda Honwana and Félix De Boeck (Oxford: James Curry, 2005), p. 96.
See Harry G. West “Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of FRELIMO’s ‘female detachment’,” Anthropological Quarterly 73:4, Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa, Part 2 (October 2000), 180–194, and Angela Veale, From Child Soldier to Ex-fighter, Female Fighters, Demobilisation and Reintegration in Ethiopia (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2003)
and Chris Coutler, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
Kristen Cheney, “Deconstructing Childhood Vulnerability: An Introduction,” Childhood in African, December 2:1 (2010), 4–7, p. 5.
Catarina Martins, “The Dangers of the Single Story: Child-soldiers in Literary Fiction and Film,” Childhood 18:4 (2011), 434–446 (440).
Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 16.
Jasbir K. Puar, “Nicaraguan Women, Resistance and the Politics of Aid,” in Women and Politics in the Third World edited by Hed Afsher (London and New York: Routledge Press, 1996), p. 74.
Susan Mckay and Dyan Mazurana, Where are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique: Their Lives During and After War (Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2004), p. 11.
Erica Burman, “Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography of Emergencies,” Disasters 19:3 (1994), 238–253 (28).
Myrian Demov, “Child Soldiers and Iconography: Portrays and (Mis)represen-tations,” Children and Society 26: 4 (July 2012), 280–292 (283).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2016 Fiona Handyside and Kate Taylor-Jones
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Taylor-Jones, K. (2016). Girlhood in a Warzone: African Child Soldiers in Film. In: Handyside, F., Taylor-Jones, K. (eds) International Cinema and the Girl. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388926_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388926_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56368-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-38892-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)