Vestiges of new battles: Linda Stein's sculpture after 9/11.(Cover story)

WHEN NEW FIREFIGHTERS WERE HIRED in New York in the months following September 11, out of six hundred recruits, only one was a woman. (1) The sculpture of Linda Stein imagines a corrective to the peculiar masculinization of protection that resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center. Her larger-than-life forms resemble armor but they are made of materials that tell other stories than those of war. She calls them Knights (see cover; figs. 1-3), hailing back to an era of ritualized relations between protectors and those they championed. In Stein's work, however, the bodies under the shields are decidedly female. Of course, a good many medieval and Renaissance literary works relayed the surprising news that female bodies could be hidden beneath steel armor and chainmail. Sometimes those bodies belonged to women who were fighting to protect their male lovers, and sometimes they belonged to androgynous warriors who could not be held back by social conventions. Armor does not, in these texts, necessarily masculinize its wearer. Rather, it frequently places her, like Joan of Arc, "beyond sexuality" and out of reach of gender constructions. (2) It responds to trauma by imagining safety--even from the constraints of being male or female. Stein's most recent series of "bodyguards" insist on their femaleness, however, not just through their curves, but through the connections forged in the materials out of which they are made: salvaged objects and calligraphic plates, fragments of wood splintered into the soft copper on which one can still read, backwards, the traces of invitations to weddings, christenings, anniversary festivities (fig. 2 and fig. 2 detail).

There is an irony to the way Stein folds these fragments of people's lives into her fantasies of protection for a world after 9/11: the intaglio plates of a business she once ran full-time work here like found objects, even ruins of a world whose celebratory messages hold no more meaning. The people who commissioned these hand-printed announcements long ago agreed that their stories would become part of Stein's sculpture, but one can't help imagining the fragility of the lives in which such important moments were marked with ceremonial writing. Where today are the parents of the child whose birth is heralded on one piece of metal? What has become of the fiance of the woman whose parents announced her upcoming marriage? Where were they on September 11? Did they run uptown too, like Stein, away from her studio in Tribeca? Were they covered with white ash like the figures in the photographic images from that morning taken by Susan Meiselas and Gilles Peress? (3) Did they know any of the people whose faces lined storefronts in lower Manhattan for days after the towers fell, their names slowly fading with the rain? Or were they, like nearly 2,300 men and 700 women, among those who perished in the tragedies of those days?

Rescue became a male occupation in the days and weeks after 9/11, or so the news media seemed to think. Erasing the presence of hundreds of female first-responders--doctors, nurses, paramedics, ambulance drivers, search-and-rescue workers, emergency-operators, firefighters, policewomen, and security officers--the press focused on male heroes and insisted, if poignantly, on the tragedy of nearly four hundred male New York Fire Department (FDNY) workers who lost their lives in the collapse of the towers. Three women responders died, one of them a policewoman who had just helped hundreds to safety. (4) The reluctance of the news media to celebrate the women on the scene in the days after the tragedy had parallels, scholars and journalists have pointed out, in the run-up to war by an administration obsessed with cowboy rhetoric and militaristic jingoism. Americans were being told they needed fathers, brothers, men with guns, guys with a mission, shock and awe. Women shied away from the impending war, supporting the project 20 percent less than their male counterparts. (5) But the news media didn't stop telling them they needed a hero with testosterone and bulging muscles, at the very least keeping watch in their local firehouse or excavating the ruins of Ground Zero. (6)

Stein's sculpture gives the lie to these narratives from a stunned news media in the thrall of a presidency bent on more wars. Stein speaks openly of her own antiwar stance and explores, through her art, alternatives to the values of an administration that has substituted war-mongering for protection. Her writings and interviews repeatedly evoke a female figure--Wonder Woman--who argued in another era of war to give courage to women as well as to men, to girls as well as to boys. (7) Wonder Woman was sent to save the world from the Nazis in 1941 by a Harvard-trained psychologist, William Moulton Marston, with some quirky ideas about matrilineal society and the view that men and women needed female role models. (8) The Amazon from Paradise Island--aka Diana Prince in her American street disguise--achieved such success in her first years that she outlived her inventor. Cycling in and out of a position of popularity just below Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, she attracted hundreds of thousands of fans. Her author claimed she hailed from a place where "Love and Justice make women strong beyond the dreams of men!" (9) but what made her approach to violence so unique among superheroes was that she did not kill. Instead, Wonder Woman used her magic lasso to coerce the truth out of her ...