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This essay interrogates the representational violence that accompanied the material violence of the US-led war in Iraq (2003-2011) by examining how ideological constructions of "home," war waging, and child-rearing function in the memoir and subsequent film American Sniper by Chris Kyle and the memoir by his wife, Taya Kyle. Read in public debates as uncontroversial, lauded from ideologues leftand right, the role of the military spouse in the American Sniper oeuvre shores up a politics of redemption that venerates American exceptionalism while claiming a status of universalized and depoliticized womanhood. Highlighting the role of Taya Kyle as a military spouse and war widow illustrates how the trope of nationalist white womanhood becomes key to the operations not only of homefront biopolitical projects, but also of warfront necropolitical projects of empire.

Keywords: biopolitics / domesticity / homefront / Iraq War /necropolitics / reproductive futurity

"To me, the home I was in was just another part of the battlefield. The apartments and everything in them were just things to be used to accomplish our goal."

-Chris Kyle (2012, 140)

In November 2004, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle participated in the so-called second battle for Fallujah of the US-led war in Iraq,1 considered "the fiercest during the Iraq War and the deadliest urban combat for the Marines since Vietnam" (Murphy 2014). US and British armed forces violently transformed the homes and neighborhoods of Iraqi civilians into a war zone. In his memoir, American Sniper (2012), Kyle describes using a baby's crib to construct a platform for his sniper rifle:

I was going to be shooting out of the windows, so I needed to be elevated. As I searched through the apartment, I found a room that had a baby crib in it. It was a rare find, and one I could put to good use. Ryan and I took it and flipped it over. That gave us a base. Then we pulled the door of the room offits hinges and put it on top. We now had a stable platform to work on. (140)

Kyle's appropriation of an object designed to protect and nurture an infant in a seized Fallujah residence points to one of the central tensions of war: how "homefront" spaces become simultaneously biopolitical and necropolitical "frontline"...

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