The present paper is a comparative reading of two war novels, One of Ours, by Willa Cather, and The Unvanquished, by William Faulkner. The comparison addresses gender construction and gender subversion in the socially disruptive context of military conflict. Focusing mainly on two characters, Claude Wheeler and Drusilla Hawk, I will investigate the war in the novels as a space chosen by both authors to test out the young characters’ gender (in-) conformity and the extent of their ability to challenge social and religious convention. Since both join the army voluntarily, the war clearly appears as a place for social destruction as much as for individual construction. I am interested in the fact that both writers chose a soldier-figure of the opposite sex and will be discussing the reasons for such options and possible theoretical implications. I start out by noting how at the time of publication Willa Cather was harshly criticised by male critics (especially by young modernists and most memorably by Ernest Hemingway) for “daring” to write about a young boy’s quest for identity and masculinity and for intruding upon such an exclusively male world. William Faulkner, on the other hand, having created a much more radical, almost implausible figure (a transvestite woman soldier who shoots her way through the rather exclusively male battlefields of the American Civil War) not only did not get reprimanded for his choice, but actually received praise for his historical inaccuracies. As Daniel Aaron wrote in his study of the Civil War, “[It] did not interest him much – only its aftereffects; but thanks to luck and genius, he was able to make literary capital out of it. . . .” (my emphasis). While Faulkner, the real-life military fraud, was tolerated and even admired for his portrayals of wars he never took part of, Cather, herself no less committed to historical investigation than Faulkner was, and probably much more methodical about it, suffered accusations of getting her war notions from The Birth of a Nation. Gender performatives (as defined in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble), transvestism and gender (re)inscriptions in the body, issues investigated by both authors in a context of social destruction and redefinition, are the main concern of my analysis.