What do we do now? Examining civilian masculinity/ies in contemporary liberal civil-military relations

Abstract

In contemporary Western, liberal democratic societies, the soldier is frequently regarded as ‘the best of us’, taking on the unlimited liability for the protection and betterment of the whole. In the context of volunteer militaries and distant conflicts, the construction of men (and the universalised masculine citizen) as ‘always-already’ soldiers (or potential soldiers) poses a substantial obstacle to the identification or performance of ‘good’ civilian masculinity – particularly during wartime. The theorisation and articulation of a positive, substantive civilian masculinity, or masculinities, rather than one defined simply by an absence of military service and implication in the collective use of violence, is a central challenge of contemporary politics. As a means of illuminating the complex dynamics of this challenge, this article examines charitable practices of civilian support for the military, and corresponding constructions of masculinity, in the UK during the ‘war on terror’. In doing so, the article demonstrates the ways in which gendered ‘civilian anxiety’, through its connection to citizenship, comes to condition the political possibilities and subjectivities of all those who seek belonging in the liberal political community. The article concludes by arguing for the essentiality of a research programme oriented around ‘civilianness’, and civilian masculinity/ies.

No Right to Be Wrong: What Americans Think about Civil-Military Relations

“…More likely a significant part of the problem lies in rampant militarism in modern America, sustained by the nation's elites. Militarism is woven into America's everyday practices and national rituals as well as its political discourse (Bacevich 2005;Enloe 2000;Lutz 2001;Mann 1987;Millar 2019b): politicians routinely and exclusively narrate soldiering in terms of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotism, rather than professionalism, and they regularly declare their "support for the troops," even when criticizing ongoing missions (Krebs 2009;Millar 2019a). Deference to the military may derive from a deep tension between this dominant militaristic public narrative of soldiering and the modern military's market-based mode of recruitment.…”

Racial militarism and civilizational anxiety at the imperial encounter: From metropole to the postcolonial state

“…Feminist scholarship has already expanded the way we understand militarism as having a deeper sociopolitical function within the state beyond a basic military one, playing a unifying role and reinforcing the cohesion of an 'insider' group. Thus, European nation-states depend on militarism to produce 'communities of feeling' through acts of war commemoration (Berezin, 2002: 44, cited in Basham, 2016; see also Mills, 2020), donations to veteran charities (Millar, 2018), or via communal spaces celebrating the country's military past (Partis-Jennings, 2020). These acts create stories of service and duty, which are packaged within the 'everyday' and localized in order to humanize soldiers and foster greater ownership of national histories of war and sacrifice.…”

Militarizing antimilitarism? Exploring the gendered representation of military service in German recruitment videos on social media

“…Although some scholars rightly criticize the concept of (hegemonic) military masculinity itself (Chisholm and Tidy 2017;Howell 2018;Kirby and Henry 2012;Zalewski 2017), we concur with Duncanson (2015), who considers abandoning the concept altogether as premature. In our opinion, masculinities, and particularly those associated with the military as opposed to civilian masculinities (see Millar 2019), are indispensable in making sense of how military service is rendered attractive and how armed forces and their activities are legitimized. Moreover, in our view, it is possible to distinguish between hegemonic and subordinate forms of masculinities within a specific context, and the gendered positioning of subjects is crucial in making the military attractive.…”