‘It Changed Me As A Man:’ Reframing Military Masculinity in the Army’s ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ Suicide Prevention Campaign

Abstract

As the suicide rate among U.S. active-duty troops surpassed the national average for the first time. Responding to what was widely perceived as a crisis brought on in part by indifference to soldiers’ suffering, media coverage increasingly criticized the Army’s hypermasculine culture as a barrier to soldiers needing mental health care faced. The Army’s 2010 ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ campaign, however, represents one location in which the Army challenged dominant discourses of military masculinity, privileging familial and homosocial responsibility over stoicism, toughness, and self-reliance and casting suicide as a failure to be appropriately masculine.