The Masculine Warrior: Militarized Masculinities and Gender Regimes

Abstract

Accepting the notion of the military as an exclusively male institution would position any policy changes that increase the number of women who serve in the military as progressive. To dispel this, the chapter offers a brief review of women’s historical participation in the military before considering discursive mechanisms that attempt to construe the institution as all-male despite women’s service. It then broadens in scope to incorporate sexual orientation and policies related to regulating soldiers’ sexualities to showcase the heteronormative nature of the military’s gender regime. Finally, the chapter bridges the two bodies of literature that ground the overall study of the book—feminist institutionalism and feminist international relations—to examine what role processes of militarism and militarization play in enabling and maintaining the military’s gender regime of heteromale privilege.