Embattled agencies—How mass mediated comparisons of Lynndie England and Jessica Lynch affect the identity positions available to female soldiers in the US army

This article explores the co-constitutive relationship between individual and collective actors and texts. Identity formation is often studied by means of discourse analysis, which explains how subjects are positioned in and through recurrent features of discourse. The present article suggests that attention to such discursive regularities be supplemented with the study of the rhetorical strategies of individual texts. It is suggested that such investigation may lead to the understanding that offered representations and actual enactments of individual and collective identities are interdependent at both the empirical and the theoretical level. The claim is grounded in a rhetorical analysis of how mass mediated comparisons of Lynndie England and Jessica Lynch affect the identity positions available to the two individuals and the group of female soldiers they are made to represent.