Through a critical analysis of the public discourse surrounding the capture and rescue of Jessica Lynch, this essay investigates how Lynch's body "comes to matter" in political debates regarding women in combat. This article argues that popular representations of Lynch's natural femaleness rearticulate the seemingly biological distinctions between male and female bodies and suggest that women are inherently ill-suited for combat operations. Drawing on the theory of gender performativity, this project explores how Lynch's body becomes marked as innately female by her previous performances of femininity as well as by the norms of military culture, a culture that is always already gendered. In sum, this case study demonstrates how potentially transgressive performances (i.e. women performing the role of masculine soldier) are often recuperated back into a two-sex/gender schema for the purpose of "making sense" of those performances and of institutions that are founded upon the disciplining of gendered bodies. (Contains 72 endnotes.)