‘War-fighting and left-wing feminist agendas’: gender and change in the Australian Defence Force

ABSTRACT

Western military institutions are reforming to enhance gender inclusion. This imperative is driven by the need to sustain a volunteer force in a society with rapidly changing values coupled with a recognition that sustainability and legitimacy requires diverse representation from the community from which they draw their human resources. Our recent research has considered the changing character of the Australian Defence Force (ADF)’s disposition towards women, and discourse of gender and gender reform. In this paper we critically evaluate these discourses on gender equality across the ADF and outline the salient ideas and claims within institutional reviews and in academic papers written by ADF soldier–scholars. Our purpose is to interrogate current ways of framing and articulating key ideas on gender, sexuality, and equality to scrutinize the implications for the ADF’s stated purpose of creating a gender-inclusive workplace. We find that the driving functional imperative of military effectiveness limits and shapes the extent to which the ADF can become a genuinely gender-inclusive workplace.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian Defence Force
• women in the military
• women in combat
• gender equality
• sexuality
• military misconduct
• sameness/difference
• left wing feminism

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The ‘Skype’ scandal involved the non-consensual broadcast by the male protagonist to fellow male cadets of consensual sex between him and a female officer cadet at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). The (initial) lack of action taken against the offenders caused the female victim to speak out to the media and is widely perceived as a catalyst for a change.

2. Public scandals disrupt the trust placed in the relevant institutional context (Gamson 2001; Thompson 2000; Sherman 1978). Lawrence Sherman (1978, xvii) explains that scandals are not confined to the organization itself; rather they ‘can encompass all those interests, groups and other organisations that have a stake in the conduct of the organisation in question’ (1978, 66–7).

3. This is a predominant theoretical idea used by contemporary Western militaries.

4. Military organizations are slower to respond to broad social change.

5. Hansonism is an expression of contemporary global recuperative politics (angry white men).