Abstract
This chapter introduces cases of “gender trouble” as challenges to the U.S. military’s gender regime of heteromale privilege. It poses two key questions: how does the military cope with episodes of “gender trouble,” and what do they tell us about the contemporary relationship between masculinity and U.S. military service? It situates these questions within two bodies of literature—gendered institutions and feminist international relations, and introduces key concepts including “gendering,” “degendering,” and “regendering.” By examining how the military sustains a gender regime of heterosexual male dominance, the chapter demonstrates how the regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality within the military (in)forms hierarchies and practices of citizenship. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the other book chapters, showcasing specific patterns in the military’s responses to “gender trouble” over the past five decades that illustrate (gendered) mechanisms which position women as incompatible, or only selectively compatible with the military apparatus, at best.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the report, gender-mixed units performed better than all-male groups in two events, firing “hit & near miss with the M4” (Department of Defense 2015, 3) rifle, and firing accuracy with the M2 rifle.
- 2.
On January 4, 2019, Marine Corps Times reported that for the first time in history, male and female recruits would be integrated in boot camp training, a temporary move necessitated “because the recruiting classes are typically much smaller in the winter months” (Snow 2019a quoting Military Official, 6). A Marine Official noted that the adjustment in boot camp strategy would be “look[ed] at how the company performs in this model as we continually evaluate how we make Marines” (Snow 2019a quoting Military Official, 4). The limited integration includes female and male recruits sharing living quarters, but continues the long-standing tradition of female recruits being led by female drill instructors in boot camp. The cohort completed boot camp on March 16th, 2019 (Snow 2019b).
- 3.
The “DADT” policy was in effect from December 1993 until September 2011.
- 4.
The term “gender trouble” is borrowed from Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity to refer to instances of gender performativity and production in the context of the U.S. military.
- 5.
Though repealed by, at the time, President Barack Obama, the ban was reinstated by President Donald Trump in August of 2017 and portions went into effect in March 2018. The renewed ban under President Donald Trump initially banned all transgender individuals from serving openly in the military, then reversed course after federal courts stopped the policy, as written, from going into effect. Instead, the revised version of the policy declared “transgender persons with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria—individuals who the policies state may require substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery—are disqualified from military service except under certain limited circumstances” (The White House 2018, 3). As of January 2019, in a 5–4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court put several injunctions placed on the ban by the lower courts on hold, while fully maintaining one injunction. As of this writing, the Supreme Court had not yet decided whether or not it would directly hear a case on the policy.
- 6.
As outlined later in this introduction, Acker (1990) provides five mechanisms of “gendering,” that is processes through which gendering occurs. Her mechanisms view gender as a “constitutive element” (147) in which construction, revision, and change is constant. The constant ebb and flow associated with this understanding of gender suggests the possibility of not only processes of gendering, but also degendering and regendering.
- 7.
I use the term “institution” and “organization” somewhat interchangeably throughout the book. With indication of doing so, I also use the term “institution” to refer to the individual branches of the military, particularly in Chap. 6.
- 8.
For exemplary examples of analyzing/reading discourses “against the grain” see Ferguson and Turnbull (1999) and Faust (2008). What is important for the book here is not necessarily the use of gender analysis to determine whether those presentations of gender are deemed appropriate/inappropriate to the institution’s ideal form of masculinity (sex gender paradox Butler 1990; Benhabib et al. 1995; Riley 1988; Scott in Ferree et al. 2000; Stern and Zalewski 2009), but rather to identify cases that the institution does deem inappropriate, cases that it may view as destabilizing/challenge the institution’s ideas about ideal masculinity, and then to conduct gender analysis to investigate how it deals with those instances. Doing so, as the book argues, provides a more detailed and nuanced account of gendering processes of the institution, and a contemporary understanding of the relationship between masculinity and military service in the context of the United States.
- 9.
For postpositivist approaches to the study of war and gender, and IR more generally, gender is more than a mere variable to be controlled for when testing universal generalizations. Instead, gender is viewed as both relational and as a system of power. Among the advantages of this understanding of gender for this project specifically is the use of postpositivist methods such as interpretivist tools, that allow for broader conceptualizations of militarization than those provided by mainstream IR.
- 10.
These methods included historical analysis, discourse analysis, thick description, semiotics, and first-person observations.
- 11.
These materials include Congressional hearings, documentary movies, museum and memorial sites, or recruitment marketing campaigns on social media platforms. These are material that are accessible and often created for the general public’s consumption, providing a more nuanced understanding of how the military may convey messages related to gender to this audience.
- 12.
See also Pateman (1998).
- 13.
Following Goldstein (2001), the agenda for a degendered military institution is likely to look very different depending on the strand of feminism one refers to. Goldstein provides three strands of feminist theorizing on war and peace: liberal feminism, difference feminism, and postmodern feminism. Liberal feminism argues that women face sex-based discrimination in the military, and should be allowed to serve in all capacities, equally to their male counterparts, and can meet standards of warriorhood just like men. Liberal feminists have argued that any future draft apply equally to women as it would to men, and that women be required to register for the Selective Service. Liberal feminists have been criticized for promoting that women enact forms of militarized masculinity in order to serve ‘equally’ to male counterparts while not advocating that men serving in the military do the same. Doing so, critics of Liberal Feminism argue, works to “prop up a male-dominated world instead of transforming it” (41). Difference feminism echoes the sentiments of standpoint feminist theory, suggesting that there are fundamental differences between men and women. Difference feminists argue “feminine” traits associated women are devalued in sexist systems instead of “valuing, celebrating, and promoting them” (41). Difference feminists do not necessarily agree on whether these traits are biological or attained through social forces, but view these differences positively. In the context of war and peace, Difference feminists view women as more pacifist and men more violent and, therefore, more appropriate for military service and waging war. Lastly, postmodern feminism questions the category of gender—whether it produces similarities or differences—rejecting gender’s production through biology and instead urging for understandings of gender as social constructions, fluid and ever changing. Postmodern feminists (which, as Golstein points out, may typically include poststructuralists, postpositivists, postbehaviorists, and constructivists) view gender as being “everywhere” and some argue that gender is mapped onto the bodies of individuals through a series of “binary oppositions” (49). These binary categories (see Goldstein 2001 chart on p. 49) become particularly helpful for postmodern feminists in explaining socially constructed notions of masculinities and femininities across time and space. Critics of postmodern feminism, however, importantly point out that the fluidity and diversity associated with women’s experience as a result of gender being imagined as socially constructed limits the strands ability to advance arguments that would require “women” to be viewed as a “meaningful category” (51).
- 14.
- 15.
In the cases presented by this book, the best indication (and that too is very limited) of a military willingness to think about the lived experiences as intersectional can be found in Chap. 6 Recruiting the Military during a Time of Transition.
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Szitanyi, S. (2020). Introduction. In: Gender Trouble in the U.S. Military. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21225-4_1
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