Critical Military Studies as Method: An Approach to Studying Gender and the Military

Basham, Victoria M.; Bulmer, Sarah

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-51677-0_4

Cited by 20 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…feminist IR, feminist security studies, critical military studies, and intersectional research), and takes a field study approach by applying especially qualitative methods, mainly in the form of narrative interviews. I am therefore in line with critical military scholars Victoria Basham and Sarah Bulmer (2017), who argue that there is much to be gained by approaching gendered dynamics within a military setting through the skeptical eyes of critical military studies. This means that in the case of the Danish military and examining the constructions and negotiations of soldier narratives, it is important to give attention to the particularities of the personal stories and the links and disconnects between the empirical data and previously used understandings of masculinities within feminist IR.…”

Section: Taking a Narrative Approachsupporting

confidence: 68%

“…Although gender relations are contextual and intersectionally specific (Christensen and Jensen 2014), the storyline seems to cross over geographical space, place, and time. Basham and Bulmer (2017) acknowledge in their critique that feminist scholars have contributed to building the field in questioning and unraveling the relationships between war, gender, and the military. What critical military studies suggest, however, is that some feminist work risks blind spots in their analyses.…”

Section: Taking a Narrative Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“We Don’t See Gender, Only Soldiers!” - Negotiating Military Identities in Narratives on Gender, Peace, and Security

Bennike¹

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October 31. 2000 marked a significant date in work on gender, peace, and security. Until then, women's experiences, perspectives, and the particular consequences of conflict and war for women were more or less absent from military work in peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions. However, this was about to change, as the Security Council on this date adopted United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) on Women, Peace, and Security, which marked the first of nine UN resolutions as of 2021 that have the intention of bringing gender perspectives to international peacekeeping (and peacebuilding) missions. With UNSCR 1325, gendered implications of conflict, peace, and security, which had been part of feminist activists and Feminist International Relations scholars' agenda for decades (Cohn 2004;Schott 2013;Shepherd 2008;Gibbings 2011) began to gain influence in UN military missions, and later NATO missions, and grew into an element of peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions, which today is difficult for member states to disregard.Being part of the ´friendly´ and cosmopolitan-minded North in terms of military work and politically manifesting a commitment to international military work through alliances with NATO and the UN, Denmark situates itself as a military force that albeit it relatively small size, is an active player on the international area and stresses a commitment to UNSCR 1325 i.e. by being the first country in 2005 to adopt the resolution. Nonetheless, despite articulating a national and institutional position as a frontrunner in regard to gender and military work, Denmark has faced critique from the UN, as well as scholars and practitioners. One of the main points has been the lack of focus on domestic issues with gender equality in the Danish Armed Forces as well as the lack of concrete actions to combat discrimination. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defence, and Ministry of Justice 2014). In the National Action Plan (NAP) from 2020, which covers the period 2020-2024, the Ministries have taken this critique into account and presents an ambition to "walk the talk" (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defence, and Ministry of Justice 2000).These contradicting national and institutional narratives of being a frontrunner on gender equality and at the same time face critique for this particular point in regard to how the Danish military works internally create certain conflicting narratives on military work and military identities within the Danish Armed Forces. These conflicting narratives have the potential to influence the everyday lives of Danish soldiers and their understandings of their military identities, military work, and duties. It also leads to challenges in the negotiations over military identities including the incorporation of other gendered bodies into the force, let alone adapting to management policies at the local level and the potential discrepancies between practice and policy.

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Section: Taking a Narrative Approachsupporting

confidence: 68%

Section: Taking a Narrative Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We Don’t See Gender, Only Soldiers!” - Negotiating Military Identities in Narratives on Gender, Peace, and Security

Bennike¹

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“…This is perhaps unsurprising given the recent change in government policy which has opened up close combat roles to women (Farmer 2016). An ephemera(l) approach to militarism, therefore, is a useful opportunity to avoid a 'short-hand' labelling of social behaviors in a way that fits convenient gender narratives (Basham and Bulmer 2017) and to embrace a more nuanced understanding of how gendered military identities are played out situationally. This theme will be returned to in the conclusion.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ephemera(l) Geopolitics: The Material Cultures of British Military Recruitment

Rech

2019

Geopolitics

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This paper explores contemporary cultures of British military recruitment and considers the domestication of geopolitics as matters of the ephemeral (fleeting, sensory encounters), and of ephemera (everyday objects). It employs an auto/ethnographic approach toward spaces critical to recruitmentthe airshow, the home and the body. Three central contributions are developed: first, building on a recent turn to the material in political geography, the paper argues that taking seriously materiality, objects, and 'stuff' enhances our understanding of the connections between geopolitical, militarised and everyday; second, deploying a notion of the geopolitical social, it explores the geopolitical as it is situated in everyday lives and spaces; third, it investigates the tendency for militarised objects to find their way onto and around bodies and into domestic spaces. Set at the interface of literatures in critical geopolitics and critical military studies, the paper concludes that material encounters and everyday objects are matters central to the business of geopolitics and militarism.

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“…Indeed, it is now widely used to unpack the multiple modes of masculinities both with formal military settings and increasingly militarised cultural spaces, such as sport, film and literature, and as it articulates with specific cultural and historical 'moments' and National contexts (Henry, 2017). Following important contributions from feminist and disability scholars (see Tasker, 2002;Caso, 2017), and empirical insights from the burgeoning field of Critical Military Studies (see Basham and Bulmer, 2017), the term military masculinity has evolved as a heuristic tool in exploring the complex and often contradictory (re-)articulations and evolutions of the militarised masculine body politic, how it comes into being, and the important cultural work the military masculine body does within the increasing militarised discursive spaces of contemporary life.…”

Section: The Paralympic Body Politicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disability, Masculinity, Militarism: The Paralympics and the Cultural (Re-)production of the Para-athlete-soldier

Pullen

Silk

2020

Journal of War & Culture Studies

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In this paper, we unpack the body politic of the para-athlete-soldier and its positioning within masculinising, militarised, national, popular cultural discourses. Drawing on an integrated methodological approach that explored the media production, representation and consumption of the 2016 Paralympics, we focus on the inscription of a disabled masculinity onto the bodies of ex-military personnel that inculcate normative notions of heterosexuality and the neoliberal ('inclusive') national and ableist body politic. The data set indicate that the hyper-and hypo-visibility of Paralympians construct inclusive cultural collective imaginaries around disability inclusion and the 'progressive' state whilst at the same time structuring forms of disciplinary exclusion. We conclude that the gendered, technologized and commodified bodies (Pullen & Silk, 2020) of National Paralympic bodies offers compelling insights into contemporary disability biopolitics where sport, militarisation, gender and the neoliberal national body intersect.

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Critical Military Studies as Method: An Approach to Studying Gender and the Military

Cited by 20 publications

References 25 publications

“We Don’t See Gender, Only Soldiers!” - Negotiating Military Identities in Narratives on Gender, Peace, and Security

“We Don’t See Gender, Only Soldiers!” - Negotiating Military Identities in Narratives on Gender, Peace, and Security

Ephemera(l) Geopolitics: The Material Cultures of British Military Recruitment

Disability, Masculinity, Militarism: The Paralympics and the Cultural (Re-)production of the Para-athlete-soldier

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