Gender Trouble in the U.S. Military: Challenges to Regimes of Male Privilege

By Stephanie Szitanyi

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. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030212254

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© The Author(s) 2020

S. SzitanyiGender Trouble in the U.S. Militaryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21225-4_1

1. Introduction

Stephanie Szitanyi¹  

(1)

Schools of Public Engagement, The New School, New York, NY, USA

Stephanie Szitanyi

Email: [e-mail]

In January 2013, U.S. military officials announced the lifting of the long-standing combat ban, a policy that curtailed women service members’ 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 Defense—the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navy—would 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 women’s 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 Army’s own announcement that three women had passed its grueling Ranger school training course counteracted any and all fanfare associated with women’s ability to meet the necessary standards to serve side by side with their male counterparts.

The Marine Corps’ vehement request for exemptions was ultimately denied in December 2015 when then Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, declared there would be no exceptions…women will be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars, lead infantry soldiers into combat. They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers, Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else previously open only to men (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.​com as New Marine Corps Fitness Standards for Combat Weed out Men, Women Alike, 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 Corps’ 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 women’s bodies. Despite the official elimination of the combat ban, the task of gender integration may be read critically as gender trouble 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 institution’s gendered identity and the behavior of service members’ bodies in the above example is but one of several instances of gender trouble 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 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy in September 2011,³ a policy which mandated compulsory public heterosexuality and closeted homosexuality in the military. Gender trouble 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. Manning’s 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 military’s treatment of enlisted transgender personnel.

How does the military cope with such episodes of gender trouble 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. military’s gender regime, that is organizational practices—both formal and informal—that structure gender relations and gender power within the institution (Connell 1987). These challenges—which the book refers to as gender trouble⁴—exist, 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 deviant manifestations of gender that challenge the institution’s existing gender logics of appropriateness (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 DADT 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 women’s 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 institution’s 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 Manning’s 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 military’s power to contain how institutionally labeled heroic 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 literature—feminist international relations (IR) and feminist institutionalism—prove 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 military’s authority to shore up and convey a particular gender order. Gendered institutions—such as militaries—operate in accordance with norms that construct and maintain power dynamics that favor men of the dominant race, ethnicity, and sexuality (Hawkesworth 2012, 2018). They have been characterized as embodying male dominance, a masculinist culture, and homosociality—the 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 nation’s 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. military—if not militaries more generally—as 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, sophisticated and hidden (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 discursive multiplicity (106) associated with these simultaneously seen/veiled, visible/invisible, heard/silenced processes, and the often contradictory messages embedded in (sometimes simultaneous) processes of (re and de)gendering, requires tracing a diverse set of military public discourses against the grain (Ferguson and Turnbull 1999, 46),⁸ that is interrogating gendered, social meanings (Millar in Woodward and Duncanson 2017, Carver 2002) behind those messages rather than accepting them at face value. This critical approach to reading the military’s self-representational material foregrounds the dexterity of gendered power, revealing how the institution and its ideas on gender move to subtly reconstruct and reinforce hierarchical gender differences (Sasson-Levy and Amram-Katz 2007, 1) both internally to the organization and externally beyond the walls of the apparatus. In the case of the U.S. military, the hierarchical orders of value which the military projects, and which become embedded in society, subordinate the lives and contributions of ordinary individuals to the potent sacrifice of the manly warriors who risk everything for national defense (Sasson-Levy and Amram-Katz 2007). Ultimately, such careful feminist analysis provides a more nuanced understanding of the military, both as a gendered and gendering institution, that actively communicates social norms that become embedded in the lives of ordinary citizens—purely descriptive accounts of the military as an institution cannot suffice if the objective is to understand how military purposes and ideals are normalized and placed beyond question. Uncovering and understanding those nuances becomes a critical step for identifying possible pathways toward institutional change.

Both displays and representations of gender that reside within institutionally approved and prescribed structures are profoundly influential on wider social understandings of what gender is (Woodward and Duncanson 2017, 3), deeply reverberating outside the confines of the typically imagined institutional apparatus. How and what the institution communicates outwardly about its views on gender through presentations deemed acceptable and appropriate are particularly critical in non-conscription based militaries; the volunteer-soldier model of military service requires that the military and society co-exist in an intimate relationship where one is reliant on the other for its existence and maintenance. In so doing, an era of growing sexual and gender equality forces the institution to consider what its relationship with masculinity is and how it positions its relationship with masculinity to the general public from which it draws individuals to serve. As such, militaries [are] sources for understanding gender (Woodward and Duncanson 2017, 3) and gendered power.

In exploring the possibility of the contemporary U.S. military’s gender regime shifting away from promoting heteromale privilege, the goal of this book is twofold: to trace and analyze the nuances of gendered and gendering processes within the military, and to investigate how those are communicated by and through the institution with material which are, at least in part, created and used for the general public’s consumption. Situated in postpositivist presuppositions associated with knowledge production,⁹ it does so through a feminist interpretivist analysis, providing a strategy to make gender visible (Woodward and Duncanson 2017, 5). Feminist interpretivist methods illuminate gender and gendered relations where they might otherwise be overlooked and reveal how gender may be manipulated by institutions to achieve certain goals.

More specifically, the interpretivist methods deployed by the book¹⁰ analyze visual, textual, archival, and cultural materials¹¹ disseminated and accessible to the public at large; they communicate the military’s views on gender broadly, and masculinity specifically. In so doing, the military’s cultural production—its words, arguments, justifications, and visual messages—is used to explore dimensions of meaning that exceed the intentions of individual speakers. Rather than taking words or images at face value, it explores tensions, ambiguities, inconsistencies, contexts, and subtexts that affect the messages conveyed. By using gender as an analytical category and tool for inquiry, the book brings into view not only the formal structures that produce inequalities, but the rules, procedures, discourses, and practices (Lovenduski 2005, 147) that contribute, maintain, or (re)produce those inequalities. As the forthcoming chapters convey, forms of masculinity dominate not only at the individual level, but as a prevailing gender (power) regime, an underlying logic that sustains judgments of what is normal, natural, and permissible. As a result, investigating the images and narratives the U.S. military circulates to explain its changing gender(ed) policies, it becomes possible to test claims about the degendering and regendering of the apparatus.

The messages that the military conveys about gender are complex, and at times, contradictory. In certain instances, these complexities are related to competing views and policies of various military organizations (Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Department of Defense) that are contributing to emerging discourses. At other times, the contradictions reflect gaps between explicit commitments and actual practices. And often, these tensions are grounded in the clash of multiple forms of militarized masculinities and femininities vying for ascendancy, which challenge the contemporary form of hegemonic military masculinity.

As a result, readers should navigate the chapters of the book with a feminist curiosity (Enloe 2004, 220) searching underneath the surface of military messages for systematic deception or manipulation. As the book demonstrates, the military actively works to construct public discourses that favor and legitimate particular versions of masculinity—the male protector of hearth, home, and nation—and the feminine correlates—the protected wife, mother, daughter—that percolate from military ranks to the larger society. At times, the military as a whole uses those discourses to promote a hegemonic version of militarized masculinity—that is, in Western contexts, the ideal form of masculinity produced through (gendered) practices of military apparatuses, and primarily embodied by the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, male soldier—and at times different branches of the military purposefully promote varying versions of militarized masculinity (see Chap. 6 on social media military advertising). By insinuating that women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender troops are subpar or barriers to the efficient operations of the armed services, the military may practice a form of exclusion that relies upon selective, deliberate, and carefully orchestrated patterns of inclusion , complicating liberal feminist’s right to fight rationale (Kennedy-Pipe in Woodward and Duncanson 2017). Those who create gender trouble for the established regime are allowed to serve but not on equal terms. Then, quite perversely, unequal performance is attributed to defects in those who diverge from hegemonic norms as the unequal conditions in the terms of their service are masked.

Whichever the case, these discursive maneuvers—which the book refers to as gendered mechanisms of exclusion—demonstrate how the cementing of certain masculinized narratives dialectically works to erase women’s roles in the military from public consciousness, rendering military service performed by women invisible. At other times, discourses do note women’s presence but simultaneously suggest feminine weakness, lack of ability, or lack of courage, thereby shoring up the image of heteromale service members as the nation’s ultimate defenders, reliable and trustworthy warriors who have earned a privileged status among citizens.

Ultimately, the book is interested in identifying mechanisms for organizational transformation (Carreiras in Woodward and Duncanson 2017, 115), which scholars of the feminist institutionalism paradigm have noted as one fruitful direction for future research. Doing so, however, first requires uncovering: if discourses produced by the military (and other gendered institutions, generally) actively work to reproduce inequalities within the organization despite external pressures that try to push it toward change (Britton and Logan 2008), exposing the processes through which the institution masks its work on reifying and maintaining inequality becomes critical for identifying pathways toward lasting change.

A Note on Butler and the Use of the Term Gender Trouble

The use of the term gender trouble up to this point in the introduction has likely conjured up Butlerian understandings of the term for the reader. It should, at least in part. To make clear, it is not gender itself—that is the stability of gender as a category, as Butler writes—that is being troubled in the cases contained in this book. Rather, it is the institution’s gender regime of heteronormative masculinity that is being troubled through trouble-makers whose performances reside outside the parameters of the institution’s stipulated and promoted gender regime. I do, however, use the term deliberately to invoke Butler’s (1990) theory of gender performativity and (re)production. While the military has historically been isolated from the pressures to change its gender regime, viewing gender through the lens of performativity provides the ever-present possibility of military transformations and the inherent instability within militaries’ gendered cultures and structures (Woodward and Duncanson 2017, 4). More specifically, performativity positions gender as never stable and always relational, (4) making transformation inevitable (4); it remains open to any manipulation and alteration by individual agency, it could be done, undone, and maintained through daily interaction (Yildirim et al. 2018, 664). Consequently, for the purposes of this study specifically, gender trouble refers to instances of gender nonconformity that contest the institutional gender regime, exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities, threatening to undermine it or destabilize it. Although obedient displays of gender help to reinforce the gendered practices of the institution, gender diversity and deviance challenges it (Lorber 2005, 17). As such, the cases chosen for the book are those which I argue pose as challenges to the military’s ability to maintain the gender regime of heteronormative warrior masculinity.

Other Key Terms of the Book

Gender Regime

Following R. W. Connell (1987), the book refers to the term gender regime as a system of principles and practices that determine how gender relations play out within an institution. As a social structure, gender relations materialize through an assemblage of operational policies and procedures, as well as cultural customs of the institution which, as I argue, establish and enable social hierarchies of privilege among groups of individuals associated with the organization (I return to this point below, and throughout the book, as it is an important one). Though these hierarchies generate different and unequal masculinities they are also always defined in relation…to women (Cockburn 2001, 16).¹²

Importantly, in the U.S. military—though, arguably, in the militaries of other contemporary Western democracies too—gender relations have habitually played out through the use of gender as an organizing tool, creating a bifurcated division and understanding of men and women, placing them in distinct and opposite categories (Lorber 2005). The result is a systemic regime of practices that attempt to neatly assign individuals to one of the two categories, mak[ing] one category of people subordinate to the other (11). In turn, this social bifurcation provides organizations with mechanisms for ordering and arranging its members, (socially) constructing and defining appropriate and inappropriate roles and behavior around gender difference. As Butler (1990) reminds us, both the possibility of maintaining and changing the regime rests on the ongoing, seemingly quotidian acts of gender (re)production and gendered relations between individuals within or outside of the parameters provided by the institution (see also Lorber 2000, 2005).

Most prominently, military policies and practices have used gender to organize groups into included and excluded categories, defining hard and fast boundaries of who is in and who is out based on biological understandings of gendered bodies’ capabilities and capacities. Part and parcel to this is a belief that women are inherently more pacifistic due to biological functions, and are therefore inappropriate—or, at the very least, less appropriate—for military service (Goldstein 2001). Over time, these models of inclusion and exclusion have cemented and entrenched institutionally deemed acceptable/unacceptable corresponding versions of masculinities and counter femininities, gendered scripts which have literally determined which bodies are deemed (officially) eligible to serve in the military and in what forms. Among these are assumed characteristics of toughness/weakness, aggression/sensitivity, violence/nurturance, and domination/submission. In short, military gender regimes shape their members’ behaviours through the construction and reproduction of norms, and the development of rules and policies governing individual activities (Woodward and Duncanson 2017, 2).

Besides, the prescribed parameters provided by military models of (gender) inclusion and exclusion can be found in nearly all core aspects of military life, from where bodies are allowed/not allowed to reside on military bases during boot camp and official service, setting pack load weight standards, deciding which sailors can or cannot serve on combat ships or submarines, or how women will deal with menstruation in remote combat environments. They are also found in policies related to where bodies are allowed/not allowed to be put to rest once they are deceased, thereby determining who is memorialized, valorized, and remembered. As the following chapter demonstrates, the binary organization of military bodies, through both formal institutional policies and socially constructed narratives, is one of the most fundamental characteristics associated with defining the military as a gendered institution.

Importantly, the impact of the tenets of the military’s gender regime are felt not only by the individuals traditionally associated with the institution—members of the armed forces serving in the military—but also individuals external to the organization. However, any existing line between internal and external is often undefined and blurred, particularly in non-conscription based military models where the official institution relies on tactics that incentivize service for the public citizenry. Feminist scholars remind us that the tools of militarism and the militarization of nations often take place outside of the four-wall confines of the official military apparatus, embedding themselves in societal values and mores; their ultimate power becomes most apparent when no longer visible at all, when citizens validate militaristic ideals without recognition, realization, or question. In thinking about institutional regimes then, the power of gender resides in the ability to dictate cultural scripts around acceptable versions of masculinity and femininity, both within the institution and the broader societies in which they exist. As the book argues, for the contemporary U.S. military, the accepted—indeed, heralded and valorized—performances of gender are those which adhere to a specific form of masculinity, that which is embodied by the white, heterosexual, heroic male warrior. I provide a review of some of these key rules and