(Re)Producing American Soldiers in an Age of Empire

Abstract

While there has been little data gathered as to the presence of migrant workers in service occupations on U.S. military bases in Iraq, the data that do exist along with anecdotal evidence gathered by journalists suggest that the division of reproductive labor on military bases reflects an underexplored axis in the global organization of social reproductive labor. Due in part to the privatization of these services, the vast majority of vital support service labor is outsourced to and performed by men migrating from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal, and Pakistan. This globalized division of reproductive labor is a site of symbolic politics that reinforces the gendered dimensions of the national identity of the American soldier. This division builds off of a long tradition of gendered dynamics framing military service. The displacement of reproductive labor, which remains coded as effeminate, onto poor migrant men serves to reinforce the aggressive masculine version of American soldiering in a way that smoothes over differences among soldiers along the lines of race, class, rural or urban origin, and even gender. Echoing earlier colonizer -colonized relations, this division of labor in turn supports the increasingly imperial posture that the United States has assumed in the world.

Beyond “Market” and “State” Feminism: Gender Knowledge at the Intersections of Marketization and Securitization

“…Many of these companies “entirely depend on their host country for contracts” and view “themselves as extensions of their government's policies and interests” (Pingeot 2012, 14). Feminist approaches to PMSCs have identified security outsourcing as a gendered and racialized political project in neoliberalism that marginalizes women and racialized Others and reinvigorates masculinism (Barker 2009; Chisholm 2014a, 2014b; Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016; Eichler 2013, 2014, 2015a; Stachowitsch 2013, 2014, 2015).…”

Clients, contractors, and the everyday masculinities in global private security

“…Empirical focused analysis looks at the on the ground operations through a sociological/ethnographic based inquire that positions the men of the industry as the main site of inquiry. Scholars such as Higate (2012), Ware (2016), Barker (2009), Chisholm (2014a;2014b;, and Chisholm and Stachowitsch (2016) use such empirical insights to highlight how the industry categories the men (and sometimes women) who work as racialised, gendered and classed contractors. While this research remains important in understanding the gendered practices of the industry, the ways in which masculinities in the industry are produced through everyday encounters-and the researchers who write about them remain absent.…”

The Reconstruction of Masculinities in Global Politics

“…It builds on the ''freeing men for combat'' argument, which has been successfully employed to argue for women's integration into noncombat capacities of state militaries and solidified the ''feminine'' status of this labor. The feminization of menial (or particularly dangerous) security work has been shown to be deeply intertwined with processes of racialization and embedded within colonial legacies (Barker 2009;Chisholm 2014). Racialization as a gendering strategy legitimizes the exploitation of workforce from the global South for the benefit of Western geopolitical and business interests (Chisholm 2014).…”