Militarized Masculinities and the Erasure of Violence

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Notes

Wootton Bassett is a small town in Wiltshire honoured with ‘Royal’ patronage (the first since 1909) in March 2011 in recognition of the role the townspeople played in marking the occasions when convoys of military vehicles moved through it. They were en route from a nearby airbase to a hospital morgue at Oxford where the repatriated remains of UK service personnel could be claimed for subsequent funerals. The route through the town happened to be the only one available, and the spontaneous displays of respect grew into nationally reported events as families and others gathered amid a line of national and military flags dipped firmly onto the ground. On the whole participants and observers were left to draw whatever conclusions they wished about the politics of the wars involved, amid an ‘activity’ of largely silent mourning for the dead.

BBC television news broadcast recording a drone-strike in Afghanistan.

‘You Are There!’ was a network television show (based on an earlier radio dramatization) hosted by Walter Cronkite of CBS News, on the air between 1953 and 1957. Using a news format it ‘reported’ on historical events (e.g. the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, the death of Socrates in 399 BCE, etc.) as if they were happening in the present, including ‘live’ interviews staged between actors and ‘TV reporters’ who were ‘on the scene’.

One of the iconic photographs of the Vietnam War was taken in 1968 by Eddie Adams, showing the moment at which the South Vietnamese National Police Chief put a pistol to the head of an alleged Viet Cong fighter and executed him summarily; this was also captured by NBC news. The picture can be found on numerous websites, generally captioned as ‘Tet Execution’.

Costa Rica maintains a police guard but has had no standing army since that time, and the national constitution reflects this.

Certainly in the UK and the USA the military issued near-hysterical claims about ‘breakdowns in discipline’ in response to legal and political challenges to the ban on recruitment, and continuing service, of ‘out’ gay personnel. For a vivid account of events in the USA, see Belkin (2011).

Masculinity and femininity are oftentimes experienced and projected in the ‘wrong’ body and normalized as such. Female priests in Christian denominations are not ‘priestesses’ but priests in a masculinized way, albeit representing a kindly, patriarchal masculinity of care rather than one of macho aggression and violence. Female soldiers are similarly situated, though with respect to masculinity of the latter sort. Of course many feminists have questioned the masculine gendering of organizations of both sorts in the first place, and it is also the case that tensions between gender-role assumptions and consciousness of sexed bodies remain in practice.