BROTHERHOOD

Abstract

In April 2011 a group of young male Australian Defence Force Academy Cadets conspired to prey upon an unsuspecting female colleague. Their plan was to broadcast one of their mates having consensual sex with an unsuspecting female cadet colleague for their viewing pleasure and fratriarchal bonding. The incident generated a strong and heated public debate about military culture and the ways soldiers behave. But it also marked a long end enduring history of such scandals that have developed into a reputation for the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) as obdurate and resistant to reform. Indeed, the ADF has consistently neutralised their responsibility for such practices by naming bad behaviour as merely the practices of a few bad apples. This paper unpacks the technologies of camouflage that the ADF and its military subjects' use to justify the role and place of militarism in contemporary Australian cultural relations. The paper focuses on the ideal of brotherhood and the way in which the Skype men, and the ADF as an institution, engage in forms of homosociality to naturalise the inherently violent disposition of the military. The practices and forms of fratriarchal bonding are implicated in the desire to generate and sustain a totalising masculinist economy that seeks wholeness and certainty at the expense of difference and otherness. These concerns are explored through the investigation of the sexual predation of six cadets and the manner in which the ADF accounts for its cultural practices.

Notes

1. It was 10 weeks in fact. This is two weeks shy of the 12-week recruit training at Kapooka. It is the time frame in which one is turned form a civilian to a soldier.

2. As a result of the Skype incident a suite of cultural reviews were undertaken. Those reviews culminated in the 212 Pathways to Change document. Notably, the CDF General Hurley, and the tenor of the reports in general, shifted away from the bad apples theory and towards a position of institutional responsibility. How far that has gone is difficult to judge at this point, given the status quo has been about neutralizing and minimizing responsibility until 2012.

3. The institution is very large and distributed across many cultural and physical landscapes, and there is great diversity within this highly monocultural and monological institution. Having said that, the subjectivity and institutional disposition I am going to explore and explain across the institution reaches its strongest impulse and potential in the infantry and other closed cultural contexts such as Navy Ships or training institutions like ADFA. I am describing the hegemonic form of these relations and their subjects, and I will not try to manage the hierarchy of relations in this paper.

4. ‘Personality’ is Wolfendale's nomenclature. I use the term ‘subjectivity’.