On the road home from South Carolina I posted notice of Laura Sjoberg’s critique of militarized masculinity in her analysis of DADT-repeal discourse. Now that I’m settled in, I’ve realized it’s the comments thread on that post where the real action is and I feel compelled to throw in my two cents.
Laura’s key argument:
That the military now includes gay people and (kind of) women openly does not mean that it is some how gender-equal or gender neutral. Instead, masculinity remains the standard of good soldiering in the United States military. Celebrating the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell the way it has been celebrated, I think, may obscure that point. It also obscures a long tradition in Western political systems of defining full citizenship by military participation/bravery.
Some important questions asked by commenters:
ProfPTJ:
So I wonder what a non-masculinist military would actually look like. Starfleet? Probably not. Do we have any models?… while I can easily think my way from a feminist analysis of the masculinized military to a call to replace the military and end the war system, I can’t quite think my way from that critique to an alternative military.
Dan Nexon:
I’m interested in your critical imagining of what a de-masculinized way of killing people would entail, and why that would be preferable to the kind of de-gendering of biological sex implied by allowing non-heterosexual men into the role of “masculine solider.”
Tallyrand:
I am quite interested in an answer to Dan’s question. I think the really fundamental point in this comment thread is whether killing can be ‘de-masculinized’. Given the problems I, PTJ, Dan and others are having imagining what on earth this would look like, it would be really helpful to have some suggestions, even if this means that you have to zoom out a little. What would a de-gendered war system look like?
Grigory Lukin:
Can you post a specific description of what a non-masculine and/or gender-free military would actually look like, how it would be different from what we have now, and how/why it would be more effective – in less than 100 words? Don’t refer to feminist IR or deconstruct history through feminist/progressive/whichever perspective – just answer the question.
Sjoberg:
I don’t entirely (yet) know the answer to your question, except to start with that it is the wrong question. Critique/deconstruction/ rethinking/reconstruction can’t start with a small portion of the war system, but the whole thing… it is not just militaries, but militarism (and by extension militaristic culture) that would need to radically change operations in order to see any real “change” in the gendering of strategic cultures….There is no simple answer.”
Hmm. Let me humbly offer one: it’s really about civil-military relations, not military culture or raison d’etre per se. A post-masculinized military, as I imagine it, would differ from the system she’s critiquing not in its ability to use violence (in other words, I don’t share Laura’s view, finally, that it would look like a ‘cross between the peace corps and a chain gang.’) And it would not merely be constituted by who is in the military or what kind of masculinity the military privileges in its soldiers (though these things matter). More significantly, one would know a post-masculinized military system by the character of the military’s relationship to the civilian world it serves. And I would argue with Sjoberg that there is further (beneficial) work to do, but also that we are heading in the right direction faster that she might acknowledge.
What exactly does that world look like?
Well, it is a world in which women and men both have the equal right to serve.
And it is a world in which hetero-normativity is not a requirement for the sort of archetype we valorize in soldiers. Women’s integration and the repeal of DADT therefore do take us in that direction.
And it is also a world in which “normal masculinity” is delinked from the attributes we associate with hyper-masculine military culture. This is happening in many places already: men’s groups, rap lyrics, third grade classrooms like my son’s, where students are taught to include everyone, to use I-statements when they have hurt feelings, bond without smack-talk, to value other cultures and the earth, and to see “bad” not in the guy but in the behavior. These things are also happening in the military.
And it is also a world in which militarism is de-linked from its historical raison d’etre “killing bad guys to protect innocent women and children on the home front.” But there are many ways to do that delinking short of letting “‘guys’ who do bad” run rampant, and these things are also happening already. Since at least the early 1990s, the US military has been intimately involved in a variety of humanitarian and stability operations worldwide, where the vulnerable being protected are “theirs” not “ours”; where the enemy are not “bad guys” so much as disease, starvation or natural disaster; where the goal is not to kill but to “peace-keep”; where the tactics involve very “feminine” traits such as listening, intercultural dialogue, and the provision of comfort; and where the “good” and “bad” “guys” (when there is killing to be done) may just as easily be children or women. All of this, for better or for worse, is already destabilizing the conventional gendered war narrative that IR feminists use as a foil.
But “de-masculinizing the military” it’s also about at least three other things that are happening, if at all, much more slowly: a) balancing the esteem we pay to military service with the esteem we pay to traditionally feminized roles such as child-rearing b) making the same effort to gender-integrate traditionally feminized roles as we do to gender-integrate traditionally masculinized roles c) changing the relationship between the military and civilian sectors in security operations to be more collaborative and less hierarchical.
Let me expound a little on each, for they constitute answers to the question about how to translate feminist insights into policy.
1) In a De-Masculinized Military System, Child and Elder-Care Would Be Understood as Important a National Service as “Fighting Bad Guys.” A concrete way to de-link militarism from ‘national service’ in this way would be to provide a package similar to veterans’ benefits for parents who have taken time out from the paid labor force to rear children. Ann Crittenden laid out this entire agenda in her excellent book The Price of Motherhood. She also pointed out that the military already had the best child-care system in the United States ten years ago – for those who serve the military. What if non-military families were entitled to the same benefits? What if we privileged, remunerated and valorized the care and feeding of functional future citizens in the same way that we valorize soldiering? What if the US military functioned in such a way as to actually enable its personnel to effectively balance warrioring and family life?
2) In a De-Masculinized Military System, Policy-Makers Would Gender-Integrate Feminine/Civilian Roles as Aggressively as They Gender-Integrate Masculine/Military Ones. A way to delink militarism from hetero-normative masculinity is by delinking its binary opposite (‘child-rearing’) from hetero-normative femininity. You do this by making the benefits and obligations of rearing children or caring for elders gender neutral as well. Those parenting benefits? They need to apply to fathers as well as mothers and, if the Sweden experienceis any indication, men need to be required to actually take them if they father children. We can work to change the perception that men who seek positions as nurses or childcare workers or kindergarten teachers must be less than manly. We need to raise our sons to think of “real man-hood” in terms of fathering as well as soldiering or fighting fires, and we need to make sure they have the skills to succeed at these tasks, which is the only way their sisters will be fully free to participate on equal footing in national or military service. And now that gays have the right to serve openly in the military, perhaps we can move on to acknowledging they are fit to raise children as well.
3) A De-Masculinized Military System Would Emphasize Collaborative Relations Between the Military and the Civilian Sectors, Rather than Protecter/Protectee Relations. This too is already happening, but not necessarily in ways to destabilize militarized masculinity. What we see happening, as Colonel Matthew Moten has aptly described, are armed “civilian” contractors displacing uniformed troops in stability operations, exhibiting a renegade form of warrior masculinity delinked from the just war ethic of those socialized into military culture; and military personnel encroaching upon civilian political authority. What we need to see: increasing engagement by weapons-bearers with “civil society” groups, particularly women’s groups, who often have not only the contextual knowledge to detect threats and mobilize social capital but are frequently overlooked in stability ops because they are not perceived to have the expertise necessary to work with the military. (In fact, people in care-giving roles, historically mothers, have precisely what the military is realizing it needs most: socio-cultural intelligence. Cynthia Cockburn has great examples of this in her chapter on reconstruction in Bosnia in this book. Also see this.)
In short, at least in theory, it is in the equalizing of responsibility for “security” between weapons-bearing and non-weapons-bearing sectors, between protector and protected, that policymakers can begin to de-gender that militarized narrative and make militaries work better for human beings rather than primarily for the state.
[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]
Charli:
Although I think I see what you're saying, I'm pretty sure what you're saying is not what Laura wants to say. I, and nearly everyone else on that thread, thought that Laura was arguing for a change in the military qua military. You are arguing for a change in the valuation and valorization of the military and of the “soldier” relative to other public agencies and roles. Those seem to be different ideas altogether.
PM
@Paul – you're right that what Charli is proposing here is not at all what I meant, and, in fact, part of what I was critiquing. That said, I'm interested in the thoughtful articulation she's put forth, and look forward to continuing the conversation.
While I agree that Charli's post widens the conversation, it does seem to directly speak to issues raised in Laura's post. Laura's post: “While the US military of the 21st century is, in many ways, “not your father's military,” it remains heavily masculinist in its values, performances, and practices . . . It also obscures a long tradition in Western political systems of defining full citizenship by military participation/bravery.” Charli's post offers specific policy proposals for the military that would decrease the “heavy masculinity in its values, performances and practices”, as well as lessening the relationship between full citizenship and military participation/bravery. Charli also argues that these issues won't be addressed by military policies alone, but by changing the way the military is situated in relation to other societal institutions and customs. I dunno, seemed pretty germane to Laura's post.
But Charli's post does, I think, fall into a trap that Laura's doesn't. While Charli wants to decrease the harms of militarism by de-coupling it from notions of gender and “let's all go kill bad guys”, her specific notions of how to do so would probably have the effect of extending and further entrenching militarism, both in the society supplying the military and the society the military is operating in.
Valorizing child care as national service, as “raising the young of the state”, encourages thinking about children as pawns for state interests including military service. Increased cooperation with social groups within an area the military is operating would further entrench the military into the social fabric of that area.
Those policies would have benefits, but increasing militarism in society is certainly a cost (I hope a parade of horribles isn't necessary). Especially when these policies can be de-coupled from the military in order to minimize the increase in militarism. Policies aimed at making child care easier don't need to be linked to national service. And while it would be somewhat more inefficient, working with social groups on the ground could be handled by civilian groups or NGOs or other groups that are removed from the military somewhat. These policies would capture the de-gendering while mitigating the militarism increase.
It seems prudent to keep these issues in mind. If the goal is mitigating the harms of militarism, further entrenching it wouldn't help.
Ben, glad to see you understood my post. You make an interesting point about how de-linking masculinity from military culture without ending militaries as such altogether implicitly assumes militaries retain a normatively important role. But I don't see why this is a “trap” unless you reject the very basis of PTJ's question I was answering: what would an alternative military system look like that did not entail a rejection of militarism altogether but which no longer relied upon / reified “heavy” masculinities?
OK. Then I'm interested in your answer to PTJ's question. Perhaps it is that you reject the notion of alternative militaries not founded on gender hierarchies entirely. But I don't. I think there is more than enough gender variation in the history of warfare to support the conclusion that militaries per se do not require a specific gendered war narrative such as the one that you, Tickner and Elshtain use as a foil. And so I think the question is, what configuration of gendered notions leads to a world in which militaries maximally function to promote human security rather than to threaten it? Because the gendered war narrative you describe is really about the relationship of warriors to the home front, I would argue that configuration needs to involve changes in civil-military relations. I'm curious to hear more about how you would develop your answer.
They are inter-related ideas. The military doesn't operate in a vacuum. Changes in civil-military relations would involve and necessitate changes in the military qua military. Indeed, I am arguing that thinking about changes in the military in a vacuum without looking at the broader social context in which it's embedded is missing the point.
It does look like my answer to the 'broader social context' is not radical enough for Laura, but I think it goes much farther toward taking her idea seriously than the notion of killing without masculinism. I'm not arguing soldiers should never kill nor that killing doesn't require, as MAG points out, a set of skills we conventionally associate with men and manliness. What I'm arguing though is that those skills could be retained and limited in ways that temper the worst of militarism, without continuing to be associated with the most valued form of masculinity in our culture. Strength, endurance, the protection of the vulnerable can also be understood as feminine traits. Truth be told, they are human traits. So it's not about whether we stop killing altogether. It's about the meaning we assign to those acts and the implications for politics and society more generally.
I think terminology is introducing unnecessary confusion here.
Why not just term the ooh-rah attitude for what it is—machismo masquerading as militarism—and avoid the “masculinism” altogether? To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, I don't see gender, but people tell me I'm a man because I read “Maxim.” And as a man, I'm not entirely happy with the idea that “masculinity” includes killing as a core value!
At this point, we seem to be disputing not whether the military is an essentially or an incidentally gendered institution but whether strength, fortitude, and bravery are masculine or feminine attributes. That seems to be not only unproductive but untheoretical.
Your comment to Laura about the relationship between the military and the civilian populace is interesting. Yet it presumes that there is a valid “civilian/military” distinction, which I think is actually rather more dubious in the post-Napoleonic states system. (I registered for the draft, I supported at least the beginning of at least one of the wars the U.S.A. is currently fighting, and there's probably even odds that I will wind up in a “policy” career that will have as its central focus the question of when and how the U.S. should use force; am I more “military” than the famous Special Forces veterinarians or the Marine Band? How about an Air Force mechanic? Etc.)
So a civilian controlled militia with childcare is the answer?
I think the trap is in increasing the risk of harm from militarism while trying to de-gender it. A de-gendered militarism still carries harmful effects, and if we're talking about specific de-gendering proposals we should be careful to consider the effects on militarism in general those specific proposals would have. Instead of rejecting PTJ's question, this thread of analysis completely accepts it: given an alternative vision of a de-gendered military, what proposals would get us there with the least harmful effects?
You write about trying to promote healthy civil-military relations and human security through the de-gendering of militarism. It seems they both would be harmed (or at least needlessly put at risk) by the specific de-gendering policies you advocate.
Treating child-rearing as national service implicitly puts the child in the service of the state, full-stop. Needless to say, this seems like a dangerous notion to cultivate. All sorts of mischief could be caused by a state apparatus with a population which has been conditioned to accept being tools of the state. And while not specifically about civilian-military relations, because of its effectiveness and centrality to action the military will be one of the core institutions for state service regardless of social attitudes about what “service” means. Thus, increasing the notion of service to the state will probably empower the military at the expense of civilian authority.
Similarly, for societies in which the military is operating, increased participation with the military by social groups legitimizes the military's role in the social fabric. This normalizes military action and creates the expectation that the military will and should be a part of day-to-day social society. In a world where the military only deals with humanitarian crises and the like, this is helpful. In a world where the military is also a coercive institution of a foreign country, this is probably detrimental. If nothing else, tt warps the relationship between the domestic government and its military, and probably puts human security at risk: normalizing military intrusion into the social fabric for the US military may not have terrible consequences, but if that normalization transferred to domestic military forces all kinds of risks start being incurred.
So your proposals to de-gender militarism carry risks, risks that have to do with militarism in general. But I don't think this line of analysis rejects the idea of de-gendering militarism because those risks can be mitigated by tweaking your proposals while still keeping their de-gendering effects. Using these tweaks would still break down the reified masculinities in the manner you describe in your post, but avoid the risks that I've outlined:
Child care services could be improved without valorizing child-rearing as being a service to the state. And some kind of civilian group or NGO, working in conjunction with the military, could interact with social groups and act as a buffer between social society and the military. Both these tweaks to your proposals would capture the de-gendering effects while minimizing the risks of increased militarization.
There are problems with these tweaks, too; child care services probably wouldn't be improved as rapidly, and having a buffer between the military and social society would create bureaucratic complications and inefficiencies. But the risks and tweaks I've outlined seem worth thinking about, since (duh) civil military relations and human security themselves are important things to protect.
In this debate thread, I see far too much emphasis on the needs of individuluals in the society. Militaries exist to provide “common defense”. When that need arises, I want the very best defense possible, and I won't be too fussy about how it is provided. You all are discussing radical revisions to the military and I am not comfortable with using our military as a testing ground for social experimentation.
The military is a profoundly conservative organization, and is virtually the last institution in our society to accept social change. I am completely Ok with this and think that this is as it should be. In our eagerness to advance our society, we are bound to explore some blind allys. That's Ok. I expect we will make mistakes. But we should not be making those mistakes with our military. Too much is at stake.
Charli
You were answering ProfPTJ’s question.
I wonder what a non-masculinist military would actually look like?
To answer ProfPTJ’s question I think that maybe there is prior question that needs to be asked.
Military organizations exhibit a number or traits that are often assumed to masculine since traditionally most of the military has been male. But are these traits there because the of the predominate male membership or because of the nature of the work? As some wag said “with no notice we will got exotic places and meet strange people who will try to kill me before we kill them.” Living with this reality, it would seem to me have a major role in shaping the military independent of any gender considerations. Removing military specific traits on an incorrect assumption that they are masculine could turn out to be a disaster.
The point is that before we answer PJT’s question we need to answer “What is specifically military before considering gender issues.”
I suspect it might look pretty much the same.
Ha! Should have read this post before commenting on the other one. I agree that peacekeeping is the opposite of the masculinized military model. However, I think that one of the fundamental reasons why it is demasculinized – and pro-humanized – is because it is denationalized. Bringing caregiving work into the military won't change it. Childcare and the home life already are part of the existing national military model. Bearing, raising, and then willingly sacrificing her children are the primary duties of the gold-star mom. Childcare and education are managed and subsidized on military bases. Care for the aging is also a big part of the military, for that matter – the VA offers a more comprehensive and sensible approach to the needs of its aging constituency than any other national institution (while simultaneously serving as the only American implementation of truly socialized healthcare, of course!) Military nurses, the angels of the battlefield – quintessentially military. Performing these caregiving duties does not demasculinize the military, since caregiving activities are integrated in order to allow the military to achieve its existing goals with greater efficiency and comfort.
As long as the goals pursued by the military remain fundamentally national, there's no reason to believe they will escape their association with the heroic national mission, and thus remain fundamentally tied to the masculine, conquering image. I entirely agree that there's great and exciting change happening in military. I've been following the implementation of the “security bubble” strategy in Afghanistan and think that it exemplifies the kind of grounded, considered, community-oriented approach to “fighting” that the best of the future-of-military holds. However, Afghanistan is no longer a primarily American project. It is a multi-national project, where lasting outcomes can be more important than the flashy heroic conquering of “bad guys,” because the honor of individual countries is less implicated in success or failure.
Writers of fiction, arguably our canaries in the mine, have no difficulty imagining a post-masculine military, evidenced by a couple of sci-fi flicks (Alien II, Avatar). Give us a few decades and we won't even think to call the government's organized violence business “masculinized.”
I think this is a very good response to the issues raised in the comment thread on Laura's post. To me, a novice, Laura's response seemed to both have the cake of delinking the military from masculinity at a theoretical level, yet also eat it in the form of not actually putting forward a concrete example of a feminized military that still was supposed to kill people. Charli's ideas here are ways of conceiving of a military that either 1) does things other than killing people (putatively masculine), like peacekeeping and intercultural dialogue; and 2) goes about killing people in less hyper-stereotypical-masculine ways, like not using violent hazing for team-building and providing childcare for soldiers.
I want to agree with Paul in several respects. First, I reject the automatic association of killing people with masculinity. Unless we reify masculinity, there is the possibility of masculinity being defined without this feature. Second, it really is unproductive theoretically to argue about the inescapable gender of certain values, or even the gender of institutions, like the military. Explanatorily, exposing the gendered assumptions upon which social/political decisions are made is a productive and important activity (as it is for other types of assumptions). The normative thrust of feminism in IR is to show how certain things are valued that are contingently associated with men over those associated with women, as well as show that the effect of international relations on women is both ignored and important. Arguing about the transcendent properties of masculinity in the international system strikes me as being useless as deep debates about the effects of anarchy.
@Talleyrand: A couple of quick notes: 1) I didn't ever link killing people with masculinity; 2) I didn't ever posit “the inescapable gender of certain values” 3) the second paragraph above confuses/intermixes sex and gender 4) Charli (I think inappropriately) assumes a positive normative value for militarism and assumes that patriotism/nationalism are themselves not highly gendered concepts (see the great work on this by Anne McClintock, Nira Yuval-Davis, Floya Antias, and Spike Peterson, among others) 5) (more about this soon) militarizing reproduction actually plays into the gendered nature of militarized nationalism, and, I think, ultimately reifies militarism/encourages war-fighting.
@Hank – actually, my answer to the TRIP survey article about women in Politics and Gender talks a lot about this sort of thing, if you didn't want to read the early feminist books. What a “military” is was constructed by men, for men, in service of how men were interested in solving problems (and sometimes making them), and in a way that glorifies masculinity. Therefore there is nothing “specifically military” “before considering gender issues” – and thinking about gender/being gender inclusive/even being sex inclusive requires a rethinking of (if not a redefinition of) what “specifically military” is – methodologically, on this, I like Sandra Harding's Is Science Multicultural? which gives a whole lot of good ideas on the “how” and a lot of examples from the hard sciences about how to do inclusive rethinking/”strong objectivity.”
@Roy – writing this will probably come back to bite me @ some point, but its not “our” military – because it certainly isn't mine. Its relationship with me, if it exists, is paternalistic, involuntary, and against my wishes – it has values I don't espouse, offers me “protection” I don't feel protected by (and in fact often feel threatened by), and fights wars I would do anything to prevent.
Treating childcare as a service to the state also entrenches the feminist critique of the nationalist state's use of women as biological and cultural reproducers of the national collective, and the use of that “important, patriotic” role as an excuse to assert state control over reproductive capacities. Also, as Jessica Peet and I argue in recent work on targeting civilians in wars, emphasizing the importance of women as bearers of the collective makes them an easy (and logical) target for victimization in war. This is shorter than it should be – in part because I'm late for a noon meeting, and in part because I don't want to “publish” unpublished by copyrighted work on this subject here ….
on 3): No, it doesn't. Gender is a set of socially constructed symbols/rhetorical commonplaces that are defined by their stereotypical relation to or association with masculinity (and femininity), which is itself defined as a social construction of male-ness or the appropriate role and behaviors of men (and women). Biological sex (itself constructed as an immutable contrast to the contingent gender) is only referenced in my paragraph when saying that IR feminism directs attention to the role of women in international relations. This does not confuse gender with sex.
on 4): I would be interested to see how nationalism is gendered. I don't doubt that there are ways in which gendered discourse is used for nationalist purposes and that there are behavioral consequences to this, but I currently think that nationalism is a gender-neutral concept. Would it be possible to give me a more complete citation for an entry into this idea?
BTW: I also think that militarism is normatively negative.
Laura
Thank you for your response.
Well that may not have been the best way to express it. One thing I have leaned from my time in the military and as a student of the subject is that war has a reality that over turns any attempt to construct something different, much more so than most other endeavors, especially political endeavors, which is one more good reason to avoid going to war. I am sure we could construct a military to your specifications in peace time: but could it fight and win?
Laura, – You are confusing the military with the political leadership. The military is just the weapon. How and when it gets used is not decided by the military.
@Roy, I didn't “confuse” anything – I simply made an argument about military change that also required political change, in response to your (political) argument that the military is “ours” and “too much is at stake” in changing/risking it – I was arguing that it is not mine, and that I see little if anything at stake in changing it/do not see a worse outcome than the oneI see right here. Also, my feeling threatened not protected by the military is in part a political issue (e.g., the wars that are made by the military as a result of political decisions) but also in part a military operational issue (e.g., the ways that the military trains is soldiers that …if unintentionally…encourage aggression and sexual violence). In sum, your argument that the military is the last mace “we” should be “eager to advance our society” as a part of a cost/benefit analysis is uncompelling to me because I see the costs/benefits differently, and because that sort of logic bites the critique I made in the original post about the military as a privileged location of citizenship which is based on and entrenches militarized masculinity/ies.