Allarme to England!: Gender and militarism in early modern England

Abstract

This volume is concerned with issues of gender and power in early modern Europe. However, the relationship between gender and militarism, addressed in this chapter, also has a thoroughly contemporary relevance. In many places in the modern world, matters of gender and of sexual orientation have proved controversial in relation to the large and complex business of military organization. It could be argued that the power of the state, or indeed the power of groups of individuals intent upon resisting the state, is at its most material when it is linked to military organization as the machinery of defence or change. This chapter seeks to examine the basis of the naturalized soldier of modernity by suggesting that the history of the relationship between gender and militarism has, in fact, always been an inherently unstable one. Modern anxieties over women at the front, or gays in the ranks, to construct and maintain an 'obvious' ideal of the masculine military soldier.