Fashioning the Gentlemanly State

Disparities and Diversification: Feminists in Europe Study War and/or Militaries

“…), and Finland (Lehtonen 2015), among others. In addition, European-based scholars have also engaged with military constructions of gender in non-European locations including Thailand (Streicher 2012), Myanmar (Hedström 2020), the DRC (Eriksson Stern 2009, 2012;Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen 2017), Burundi (Friðriksdóttir 2018), Kashmir and Sri Lanka (Parashar 2014), andPeru, Columbia, andEl Salvador (Dietrich Ortega 2012). While there are exceptions (Brown 2017;Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2012), scholarship on the Global North is more likely to focus on state militaries, while that on the Global South focuses on non-state armed groups.…”

“…While it is certainly possible to trace this coherent story about military masculinity in much of the feminist literature, much recent scholarship works to trouble this narrative through specific exploration of the multiplicity, fluidity, and contingency of military masculinities. Scholars have explored the multiplicity of masculinities performed or aspired to by Western military men (Chisholm and Tidy 2017;Millar and Tidy 2017: 153), as well as the irrelevance of Western-centric aggressive warrior archetypes to many contexts in the Global South (Dietrich Ortega 2012; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2008;Friðriksdóttir 2018;Streicher 2012). Others have charted how military masculinities are further complicated (and racialized) when they are enmeshed with global labor supply chains in the workings of private military security companies (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016;Higate 2012a, b;Joachim and Schneiker 2012); how the particular experiences of peacekeeping might reshape military masculinities (Duncanson 2013;Holvikivi 2021); and how contemporary "soldier-scholar" masculinities might legitimate liberal internationalist warfare (Khalili 2011(Khalili : 1486(Khalili -1488.…”

9. Images of Insurgency: Reading the Cuban Revolution through Military Aesthetics and Embodiment

“…In its more traditional forms, the soldier hero is ordained by a Christian God, represents a sovereign state, and ideally embodies the gentlemanly state through a convincing image of a 'civilizing force'. 27 In both colonial and anti-colonial military action, bodies can be fashioned to legitimise extreme actions, and the uniform's abstraction from violence is what allows it to authorise the use of violence while maintaining an image of fashionable progress. Impeccably uniformed, formally presented, white and sexually restrained, the gentleman soldier embodied colonial power and its claims of superiority.…”

DRS2018: Catalyst

“…while concealing others (class, and other forms of social status); it serves as a symbol of legitimacy and marks the wearer as harbouring special skills and prerogatives; and it suppresses, or at least sublimates (Bhugra & Silva, 1996;Craik, 2003), individual idiosyncrasy. These processes serve as mechanisms of social placement which provides a framework for mutually negotiated forms of social interaction (Paperman, 2003), including self-formation (Matthews David, 2003;Streicher, 2012;Ugolini, 2010), transgression (Craik, 2005), and resistance (De Camargo, 2016).…”