Segregated brotherhood: the military masculinities of Afghan interpreters and other locally employed civilians

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers an innovative contribution to research on military masculinities by – counterintuitively – drawing on the experience of civilians, namely Afghan locally employed civilians (LECs), such as patrol interpreters. Centering the analysis on Afghan LECs’ own gendered experience of war, this article forms an important counterpoint to the racialized hypervisibility of Afghan men in the discourses structuring the “War on Terror.” The article’s argument unfolds along two lines. On the one hand, it disrupts discourses that portray Afghan men as radically Other by demonstrating the parallels between Afghan LECs and Western soldiers, such as in their military coming-of-age stories and motivations for enlistment. On the other hand, it introduces the notion of “segregated brotherhood” to capture the everyday differentiations and inequalities that frame the relationship between LECs and Western soldiers. While this article’s primary aim is to analyze the gendered experiences of LECs as under-researched but essential actors in the military missions in Afghanistan, by “returning the gaze” I also cast new light on the masculinities of Western soldiers, exposing their dependencies on locally recruited civilians, especially interpreters, thereby challenging masculinized accounts of Western soldiers’ autonomy and neo-imperial power/knowledge.