“Fashioning” the Post-War Self in Jessica Goodell’s Shade It Black

As a young woman who sets her eyes on “what men are capable of doing,” Jessica Goodell takes the challenge to serve the U.S. Marine Corps. She wants to serve the Corps as a tank crew member. Since the position is viewed inappropriate for a woman, she consents to serve as a heavy equipment mechanic instead. When she is deployed to Iraq, however, she finds herself serving as a mortuary clerk. She has written Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq (2011), five years after her return home. During her service, she is subjected to discrimination by both male and female Marines. Back home, as a veteran with PTSD, she feels tormented by the memories of and philosophical and moral questions about the war. She adopts feminine fashion codes as part of her survival strategy, giving up on the masculine Marine style symbolizing all that is associated with the war and her feeling of guilt resulting from her part in it. This article will focus on Goodell’s two identity conversions: her choosing of “proper femininity” after the military experience and her political journey from being a supporter of the military to a sober critic of the war. Taking her memoir as a text of physical and political self-fashioning, this study will observe the relationship between these two conversions by analyzing the gendered aspect of soldiering for female Marines who served in Iraq as well as Goodell’s unique military role as a mortuary clerk.