Author: Stephanie Szitanyi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030212254
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Get Book
Book Description
This book investigates challenges to the U.S. military’s gender regime of hetero-male privilege. Examining a broad set of discursive maneuvers in a series of cases as focal points—integration of open homosexuality, the end of the combat ban on women, and the epidemic nature of military sexual assault within its units—Stephanie Szitanyi examines the contemporary link between gender and military service in the United States, and comprehensively analyzes forms of gendering produced by the military as an institution. Using feminist interpretivist methods to analyze an impressive combination of visual, textual, archival, and cultural materials, the book argues that despite policy changes since 2013 that may be positioned as explicit episodes of degendering, military officials have simultaneously moved to counteract them and reinforce the institution’s gender regime of hetero-male privilege. Importantly, these (re)gendering processes continue to prioritize certain forms of service and sacrifice, through which a specific version of masculinity—the masculine warrior—is continuously promoted, preserved, and cemented.
Author: Rita James Simon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351299026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Get Book
Book Description
The role, status, and treatment of women is one of the major issues confronting the military today. This volume provides a range of perspectives on the magnitude of concerns, the sources of problems, how issues might best be addressed, and the future for women in the armed services. It is based on a special issue of the journal Gender Issues, supplemented with additional contributions from leading scholars. Historical and theoretical perspectives are provided by Lorry M. Fenner and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Fenner focuses on the role of women in the military since 1940, and argues for broader inclusion of women as well as other groups that have previously been restricted from full participation. Elshtain analyzes the extraordinary ability of war to draw both women and men into civic life, and observes how it calls forth and establishes a sense of particular identity for both men and women. Critical views are provided by other scholars. Laura L. Miller examines the feminist movement's insistence on full participation in combat units. Former Army chaplain Marie deYoung provides qualitative and quantitative data on military readiness and unit cohesion in mixed gender units. Leading military scholars (Mady W. Segal, David R. Segal, Jerald G. Bachman, Peter Freedman-Doan, and Patrick M. O'Malley) review national surveys comparing male and female high school seniors' responses to surveys conducted on questions about their propensity to enlist. Male-female differences are also addressed by Judith Hicks Steihm, who looks at the opinions each group has about the capabilities and performance of women. She finds differences by rank on questions as to how hard female soldiers work as compared to male soldiers and whether women are ready for combat duty. Historically, the military has provided minorities equal opportunity. Brenda L. Moore and Schulyler C. Webb examine whether or not this is still perceived to be the case in today's Navy. They focus on different perceptions by women and men, and by African American women in particular. Finally, William O'Neill examines whether the post-cold war downsized military will find women soldiers more or less important. Drawing upon social science research, historical data, and contemporary opinion surveys, Women in the Military is a cutting-edge assessment of a major gender issue in the United States. It will be valuable to researchers in women's studies, as well as those teaching courses in sociology, history, and military studies. Rita James Simon is University Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the Washington College of Law at American University. She is the editor of Gender Issues and author of The American Jury, the Insanity Defense: A Critical Assessment of Law and Policy in the Post-Hinkley Era (with David Aaronson), Adoption, Race and Identity (with Howard Alstein), In the Golden Land: A Century of Russian and Soviet Jewish Immigration, Social Science Data and Supreme Court Decisions (with Rosemary Erickson), and Abortion: Statutes, Policies, and Public Attitudes the World Over.
Author: Rosemarie Skaine
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786481730
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Get Book
Book Description
The Persian Gulf War changed the face of combat. It brought women’s military roles into the spotlight, in large part via the mass media, and showed that many women performed combat roles similar to those of men during the conflict. The war was thus an impetus for changes in laws that had prevented women from serving in combat assignments. In past centuries, because it was not culturally acceptable for women to serve in combat, surprising numbers joined secretly under assumed male names. After defining exactly what is meant by “war” and “combat,” this work presents historical and present-day views of the involvement of women in the military. The impact of regulations on women in combat is analyzed, as is the role of the American public in the controversy. Female combat is put into context with sociological theory; also discussed are readiness, cohesion, ability, sexuality, equal opportunity and family issues.
Author: Beth Bailey
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496230868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Get Book
Book Description
The U.S. military is a massive institution, and its policies on sex, gender, and sexuality have shaped the experiences of tens of millions of Americans, sometimes in life-altering fashion. The essays in Managing Sex in the U.S. Military examine historical and contemporary military policies and offer different perspectives on the broad question: “How does the U.S. military attempt to manage sex?” This collection focuses on the U.S. military’s historical and contemporary attempts to manage sex—a term that is, in practice, slippery and indefinite, encompassing gender and gender identity, sexuality and sexual orientation, and sexual behaviors and practices, along with their outcomes. In each chapter, the authors analyze the military’s evolving definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender, and the significance of those definitions to both the military and American society.
Author: Kara D. Vuic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317449088
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Get Book
Book Description
The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military is the first examination of the interdisciplinary, intersecting fields of gender studies and the history of the United States military. In twenty-one original essays, the contributors tackle themes including gendering the "other," gender and war disability, gender and sexual violence, gender and American foreign relations, and veterans and soldiers in the public imagination, and lay out a chronological examination of gender and America’s wars from the American Revolution to Iraq. This important collection is essential reading for all those interested in how the military has influenced America's views and experiences of gender.
Author: Katharine A.M. Wright
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429952066
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Get Book
Book Description
This book examines NATO's engagement with gender issues through its military structures. Drawing on newly declassified NATO documents, this volume provides the first comprehensive account of NATO’s long-established engagement with gender issues. These documents bring to the fore the stories of the NATO women and ‘gendermen’ who have organised within NATO across the decades to advocate on gender issues and highlights the continued challenges to pursuing transformative agendas within resistant institutions. The book argues that NATO is an institution of international hegemonic masculinity, with gender norms and values learned by member and partner states through socialisation and the engagement of a masculinist protection logic. It therefore provides an important context for NATO’s recent implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda encapsulated in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and the seven follow-up resolutions. The volume interrogates how Women, Peace and Security has mapped on to NATO’s pre-existing concerns as a global security actor, providing impetus for further critical knowledge building of NATO which centres on gender. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of NATO, Critical Military Studies, Gender Studies, Critical Security Studies and IR in general.
Author: Rachel Woodward
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134163622
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Get Book
Book Description
Sexing the Soldier takes a critical look at how gender - what it means to be a man or a woman - is understood within the contemporary British Army, and the political and practical consequences of this. Drawing on original research, this informaive volume looks at: the history and structure of the British Army as a masculine institution personnel policies which deal with gender issues the construction of ideas about military masculinities and femininities within the Army media representations of the figure of the soldier. Using case studies ranging from the exclusion of women from direct combat posts, to the issues surrounding bullying, this book argues that we need a fuller, more nuanced assessment of gender issues in the military that moves beyond the simplistic ideas about women's and men's 'natural' capacities for soldiering.
Author: United States. General Accounting Office
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428974210
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 39
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Paige Whaley Eager
Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers
ISBN: 9781409448471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Get Book
Book Description
Waging Gendered Wars examines, through the analytical lens of feminist international relations theory, how US military women have impacted and been affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By examining how U.S. military women's agency as soldiers, veterans, and casualties of war affect the planning and execution of war, Whaley Eager assesses the ways in which the global world of international politics and warfare has become localized in the life and death narratives of female service personnel impacted by combat experience, homelessness, military sexual trauma, PTSD, and the deaths of fellow soldiers.
Author: Melissa T. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199842833
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book
Book Description
Is today's All-Volunteer Force still "This Man's Army"? In a nation that has seen the rise of feminism, the decline of blue-collar employment, military defeat in Vietnam, and a general upheaval of traditional gender norms, what kind of man is today's military man? What kind does the military want him to be? In Enlisting Masculinity, Melissa Brown asks whether appeals to and constructions of masculinity remain the underlying basis of military recruiting-and if so, what that notion of masculinity actually is. Are the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines courting warriors or breadwinners; patriots or pragmatists; dominant masters of technology, or strong yet compassionate masters of themselves? Is each military branch recruiting the same model of masculinity? Based on an analysis of more than 300 print advertisements published between the early 1970s and 2007, as well as television commercials, recruiting websites, and media coverage of recruiting, Enlisting Masculinity argues that masculinity is still a foundation of the appeals made by the military, but that each branch deploys various constructions of masculinity that serve its particular personnel needs and culture, with conventional martial masculinity being only one among them. The inclusion of a few token women in recruiting advertisements has become routine, but the representations of service make it clear that men are the primary audience and combat their exclusive domain. Each branch constructs soldiering upon a slightly different foundation of masculine ideals and Brown delves into why, how, and what that looks like. The military is an important site for the creation and propagation of ideas of masculinity in American culture, and it is often not given the attention that it warrants as a nexus of gender and citizenship. Although most Americans believe they can ignore the military in the era of the all-volunteer force, when it comes to popular culture and ideas about gender, the military is not a thing apart from society. Building a fighting force, Brown shows, also means constructing a gender. Enlisting Masculinity gives us a unique and important perspective on both military service and prevailing conceptions of masculinity in America.
