Unmaking militarized masculinity: veterans and the project of military-to-civilian transition

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholarship on war and militarization has typically focussed on the making of militarized masculinity. However, in this article, we shed light on the process of ‘unmaking’ militarized masculinity through the experiences of veterans transitioning from military to civilian life. We argue that in the twenty-first century, veterans’ successful reintegration into civilian society is integral to the legitimacy of armed force in Western polities and is therefore a central concern of policymakers, third-sector service providers, and the media. But militarized masculinity is not easily unmade. Veterans often struggle with their transition to civilian life and the negotiation of military and civilian gender norms. They may have an ambivalent relationship with the state and the military. Furthermore, militarized masculinity is embodied and experienced, and has a long and contradictory afterlife in veterans themselves. Attempts to unmake militarized masculinity in the figure of the veteran challenge some of the key concepts currently employed by feminist scholars of war and militarization. In practice, embodied veteran identities refuse a totalizing conception of what militarized masculinity might be, and demonstrate the limits of efforts to exceptionalize the military, as opposed to the civilian, aspects of veteran identity. In turn, the very liminality of this ‘unmaking’ troubles and undoes neat categorizations of military/civilian and their implied masculine/feminine gendering. We suggest that an excessive focus on the making of militarized masculinity has limited our capacity to engage with the dynamic, co-constitutive, and contradictory processes which shape veterans’ post-military lives.

KEYWORDS:

• militarized masculinity
• veterans
• experience
• gender
• military-to-civilian transitions
• militarization

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge Faiz Sheik and Owen Thomas for reading several drafts of this paper at different stages of its development, and Timothy Cooper, Bethany Cuffe-Fuller, and Alexandra Hyde, who offered extensive comments on a later draft of this article. We also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and constructive feedback, as well as Kimberley Smith-Evans for help with copy-editing. Maya Eichler gratefully acknowledges funding received through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (435-2016-1242) and the Canada Research Chair Program of the Canadian federal government during the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this article we refer to veterans as those who have been released from the military, whether or not they deployed during their military service. We limit our discussion to Western countries which typically have professional volunteer forces which engage in operations overseas. Our discussion does not extend to post-conflict situations in the global South, as these are very different contexts in terms of both the types of war and the organization and recruitment of armed forces. Usually called ‘ex-combatants’, veterans in societies which have been engaged in civil war face different challenges when integrating back into society, and pose different questions for feminist investigations (for example see MacKenzie 2012; Ní Aoláin, Haynes, and Cahn 2011).

2. Often these terms are used interchangeably when talking about gender within militaries, but we use the term ‘militarized masculinity’ in this article as we think it more adequately emphasizes that militarization is a process, and that it affects men and women outside of the military institution.

3. We thank Bethany Cuffe-Fuller for bringing this point to our attention.