Consoling Display of Strength or Emotional Overstrain?

This contribution addresses the diverging discourses of the United States, France and Germany in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001 in New York and Washington, with a focus on gender. As a discourse analysis, it explores the ways in which the different narratives instantiate dichotomous conceptions of gender. It is argued that owing to the centrality of gendered constructions for identity, and owing to the mutually constitutive nature of the relation between identity and foreign policy, the comparative perspective adopted adds to the understanding of the disparities in enacting foreign policy between these three close transatlantic allies. Not only does this paper expose the contingency of the gendered underpinnings of the US, French and German high-level policy discourses that were constitutive of the early war on terrorism but it also shows how these stories matter. The three countries' foreign policy formulations in response to 9/11, particularly their respective choices between identifying the attacks as acts of war or crime, pursuit or rejection of regime change, and unilateralism and multilateralism, make explicit that the varying degrees of dichotomously gendered framings of identity are constitutively significant for foreign policy formulations.