The Sexual Economy of War: Discipline and Desire in the U.S. Army

Abstract

Andrew Byers presents a comprehensive study of how the U.S. Army perceived and sought to regulate its soldiers’ sexuality and sexual experiences in the early half of the twentieth century. The book opens with a journalistic exposé of the brothels established by the U.S. Army in the Philippines in 1900 and ends with the army's regulation of sexuality among its soldiers stationed in Hawaii from 1909 to 1940. By “sexual experiences,” Byers means prostitution, rape, venereal disease, sexual violence, and sodomy. Among other sources, Byers uses courts-martial records to reveal how the army regulated and enforced discipline and punished sexual misconduct. By “sexual economy,” Byers means the exchanges—and the regulation of those exchanges—that took place among soldiers and between soldiers and their civilian partners both within and outside the military garrisons established in the United States and overseas. The United States’ new imperialistic role in the world could not have been sustained through the twentieth century without the military's hegemonic establishment of a sexual economy. But this was a contested phenomenon, negotiated and resisted by those whose sexuality the army sought to regulate.