In January 2013, U.S. military officials announced the lifting of the long-standing combat ban, a policy that curtailed women service membersâ access to the most coveted positions within the organization for nearly five decades. As a result of the impending change, the military embarked on a series of gender-integrated unit experiments to ensure combat effectiveness would remain unimpaired. The results of those investigations would determine whether the four branches of the military under the Department of Defenseâthe Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navyâwould request exemptions toward preserving some 220,000 jobs as open to men only.
Of the four branches, the Marine Corps was the only branch to request exemptions. Specifically, the Corps argued adamantly against womenâs inclusion in ground combat, reconnaissance and intelligence units, as well as the prestigious Special Forces. The request was made based on the results of a Marine Corps experiment on gender integration, which indicated all-male units outperformed gender-integrated units in 69% of tasks (93 of 134)1 including overall speed, firing accuracy, and casualty evacuation (Department of Defense 2015). Although the experiment was rife with methodological flaws, the timing of its release shortly after the Armyâs own announcement that three women had passed its grueling Ranger school training course counteracted any and all fanfare associated with womenâs ability to meet the necessary standards to serve side by side with their male counterparts.
The Marine Corpsâ vehement request for exemptions was ultimately denied in December 2015 when then Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, declared âthere would be no exceptionsâŚwomen will be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars, lead infantry soldiers into combat. Theyâll be able to serve as Army Rangers, Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else previously open only to menâ (Rosenberg and Phillips 2015, 2). As a result, the Marine Corps instituted new physical standards that were positioned as necessary for the branch to accommodate the more gender-inclusive policy. Headlined by Militarytimes.âcom as âNew Marine Corps Fitness Standards for Combat Weed out Men, Women Alike,â the article framed the new physical standards as beneficial for determining who the best performing Marines were, whether women or men (Baldor 2016). But the new standards seemed to overwhelmingly target women for exclusion. While only 40 out of 1500 (3%) male recruits were reported as not meeting the necessary standards, 6 out of every 7 females (86%) were failing the test, inhibiting their ability to choose from infantry, artillery, and other combat-related occupations (2).
The Marine Corpsâ sustained insistence that women are unqualified2 for specific forms of combat service foregrounds an institutional conviction concerning the putative strength of the male body and a corollary belief in the inferiority of womenâs bodies. Despite the official elimination of the combat ban, the task of gender integration may be read critically as âgender troubleâ for the branch in this environment; it challenges and threatens an institutional principle that views it necessary that masculinity be preserved as the cornerstone of military identity.
This tension between the institutionâs gendered identity and the behavior of service membersâ bodies in the above example is but one of several instances of âgender troubleâ the contemporary U.S. military has had to face. Accounts of high percentages of sexual assault in both the military branches and the military academies alike, along with Congressional efforts to address institutional sexual violence, have flooded the media. After nearly two decades, the government officially abandoned its âDonât Ask, Donât Tellâ (DADT) policy in September 2011,3 a policy which mandated compulsory public heterosexuality and closeted homosexuality in the military. âGender troubleâ was also rife in the trial of Army Private First Class Bradley/Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of espionage, theft, and fraud for leaking classified documents to the online information source WikiLeaks. Manningâs decision to leak more than 750,000 classified documents was attributed by some to struggles with gender identity. Her incarceration in a male prison and initial denial of access to hormone treatment raised significant ethical issues concerning the militaryâs treatment of enlisted transgender personnel.
How does the military cope with such episodes of âgender troubleâ in an era of increased gender and sexual equality? And, perhaps more importantly, what do the ways in which it deals with these episodes tell us about the contemporary relationship between masculinity and military service in the United States?
To answer these questions, this book investigates challenges to the U.S. militaryâs gender regime, that is organizational practicesâboth formal and informalâthat structure gender relations and gender power within the institution (Connell 1987). These challengesâwhich the book refers to as âgender troubleâ4âexist, primarily, in two forms; as gender-related (historical) policies previously set by the military that have been complicated by demands for gender equality, and by âdeviantâ manifestations of gender that challenge the institutionâs âexisting gender logics of appropriatenessâ (Chappell and Waylen 2013, 603), and in so doing, resist conforming to its system of heteromale privilege. In the tension between institutional identity and demands for equality, the military faces a choice: to respond to calls to end gender and sex discrimination and shift its gender regime toward eliminating male, heterosexual privilege from all its operations (degendering), or instead, to reinforce specific forms of militarized masculinity as its primary organizing principle and value system (regendering).
How are we to know whether a gender regime is shifting? Recent repeals of institutional policies, namely âDADTâ in 2011, the initial repeal of the transgender ban under the Obama administration in 2016,5 and the ban against women in combat in 2016 may signal openings toward change. Indeed, open homosexuality and womenâs full inclusion in the most coveted roles of the military system may destabilize hegemonic and other militarized masculinity archetypes by expanding military identities to encompass multiple gendered subjects. But this may not be an outright cause for celebration. The elimination of long-standing, outdated policies, and equally, the creation of (seemingly) progressive, alternative policies should be considered with caution as they may not provide a full picture of the institutionâs intentions.
As this book suggests, some policy changes that appear to promote gender equality may in actuality be accompanied by measures that reinforce gender norms associated with militarized masculinities. Similarly, Chelsea Manningâs pursuit of sex reassignment treatments while serving in military prison, attention to sexual assault in the military branches and academies, and official recognition of cognitive and psychological injuries sustained in combat, trouble the militaryâs power to contain how institutionally labeled âheroicâ military bodies behave. As these examples suggest, regendering may involve changes in official narratives about gender and service, nation and sacrifice, valor and citizenship by providing new modes of inclusion that simultaneously (re)affirm the centrality of gender (read as masculinity) to the military as an organization. And as earlier policies make clear, the military can also silence expansive manifestations of gender within its own ranks, and mask open articulation of gender nonconformity and diverse sexual orientations among its troops, promoting conservative modes of male dominance within and outside of the military apparatus. Although the military has worked to generate explicit narratives that depict it as an inclusive organization, freed from past strictures barring women and gays from the armed services, closer examination of recurring tropes within these narratives indicate that the military continues to actively reinforce heteronormative masculinity in ways that marginalize not only women, but lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender military personnel as well.
Two bodies of literatureâfeminist international relations (IR) and feminist institutionalismâprove useful in uncovering potential gender regime shifts. The study presented in the book is grounded in both as they provide a robust understanding of the militaryâs authority to shore up and convey a particular gender order. Gendered institutionsâsuch as militariesâoperate in accordance with norms that âconstruct and maintain power dynamics that favor men of the dominant race, ethnicity, and sexualityâ (Hawkesworth 2012, 2018). They have been characterized as embodying male dominance, a masculinist culture, and homosocialityâthe establishment of intense bonds among men through the carefully orchestrated regulation of access to women (Belkin 2012; Brown 2012; Burke 2002; Enloe 1983, 1990, 2000; Cohn 2000; Francke 1997; Goldstein 2001; Kronsell 2012; Levy 1997; Lutz 2002; MacKenzie 2015). Charged with the nationâs security, the military plays a crucial role in defining and upholding particular constructions of manhood and masculinized citizenship, while historically barring women, on the other hand, from the military, combat duty, and the revered valorization of that service.
Importantly, both feminist IR and feminist institutionalism help us move toward thinking of the U.S. militaryâif not militaries more generallyâas not only a gendered institution, but rather a gendering6 institution7 (Cohn 2000; Segal 1982, 1995), an active producer and communicator of social and cultural norms associated with gender. In gendered institutions, processes of gendering are often subtle, invisible, âsophisticated and hiddenâ (Sasson-Levy and Amram-Katz 2007, 107); they occur not necessarily through the implementation of policies themselves, but through discursive tools associated with the communication of those policies. As such, the book argues that the âdiscursive multiplicityâ (106) associated with these simultaneously seen/veiled, visi...