How America Justifies Its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity and Sovereignty

Abstract

The lies about the reasons for the U.S. war against Iraq provoked no mass public outcry in the United States against the war. What is the process of justification for this war, a process that seems to need no reasons? Mann argues that the process of justification is not a process of rational deliberation but one of aesthetic self-constitution, of rebuilding a masculine national identity. Included is a feminist reading of the National Defense University document Shock and Awe.

The hero's journey: tracing the history of the myth to the celebrity

“…It is therefore necessary to acknowledge the definitions and history of masculinity within social, political, and armed conflict contexts. Within the context of war it is important to identify current studies, such as Bonnie Mann's (2006) gendered analysis of America's justification of the current Iraq war. Mann argues, "when war becomes the way that a hyper-masculine national style is constituted and reconstituted, then it is beyond the mundane structures of international law" (159).…”

Military Masculinity and the Act of Killing in Hamlet and Afghanistan

“…Thus, even as a singular act, it must necessarily signal the deeply political, structurally gendered consequences of state-sanctioned killing (Sjoberg 2014). If the audio recording on YouTube is understood as a play within a play, the politically constituted framing of war is the larger piece of gendered aesthetics and theatricality (Mann 2006). The citational expression, evoking Hamlet, contributes to a particular aesthetic event and "aesthetic events register a double moment, which, at its most basic, is both a destabilizing aesthetic or performative experience where thought is made strange to itself and a moment of reflection on the aesthetic, political or ethical consequences of this experience" (Frost 2010, 436).…”

Protecting the World: Military Humanitarian Intervention and the Ethics of Care

“…The early refusal of states to relinquish some extent of control over the institution perhaps most closely associated with masculinity—their national militaries—and the general decentralization of enforcement decision‐making and conduct helped to ensure states' continued use of war and intervention in terms of their own national interests and projects or ambitions. Bonnie Mann has written of the Iraq War as an example of how “war becomes the way that a hypermasculine national style is constituted and re‐constituted, beyond the mundane structures of international law” (Mann , 159). Yet even the Kosovo intervention, subject to far less criticism domestically and internationally than Iraq, involved the gendered constitution and reconstitution of both NATO and the United States.…”

“…Importantly, interventions take on the character of national wars, and “winning” becomes the objective, even displacing humanitarian concerns. Mann writes of winning that it is “the telos of the masculine nation, and losing is its unmanning” (Mann , 159). Winning meant, during Kosovo, NATO's decision to engage high‐altitude bombing to avoid NATO casualties.…”

“…The so‐called “CNN effect” refers to the ability of news media to mobilize support for intervention even when imprudent (Freedman ). And, if Mann is correct to assert that war's masculine‐identity‐re/constituting aesthetic can displace rational justification (Mann , 149–50), then “paternalist militarism” may encourage individuals to leave reason behind altogether. All of these factors make the allocation of judgments of exceptional interventions directly under care's jurisdiction a worrying approach.…”