Combat as a moving target: masculinities, the heroic soldier myth, and normative martial violence

ABSTRACT

This article problematizes the conceptualization and use of ‘combat’ within critical scholarship on masculinities, militaries, and war. We trace, firstly, how combat appears as an empirical category within traditional war studies scholarship, describing an ostensibly self-evident physical practice. We then examine how feminist and gender approaches – in contrast – reveal ‘combat’ as a normative imagination of martial violence. This imagination of violence is key to the constitution of the masculine ideal, and normalization of military force, through the heroic soldier myth. We argue, however, that despite this critical impulse, much of feminist and gender analysis exhibits conceptual ‘slippage’: combat is still often treated as a ‘common-sense’ empirical category – a thing that ‘is’ – in masculinities theorizing. This treatment of gendered-imaginary-as-empirics imports a set of normative investments that limit the extent to which the heroic soldier myth, and the political work that it undertakes, can be deconstructed. As a consequence, whilst we know how masculinities are constituted in relation to ‘combat’, we lack the corollary understanding of how masculinities constitute combat, and how the resulting imagination sustains military authority and the broader social acceptance of war. We argue that unpacking these dynamics and addressing this lacuna is key to the articulation of a meaningfully ‘critical’ gender and military studies.

KEYWORDS:

• combat
• military masculinities
• critical
• soldiers
• violence

Acknowlgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and guidance, Victoria Basham at Critical Military Studies, and participants at the “Masculinities at the Margins: War Beyond Hypermasculinity” workshop (Newcastle University, April 22–24, 2015).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. When we refer to soldiers we mean here a martial figure encompassing the different branches of the modern western military (i.e. army, navy, and air force).

2. Indeed, this understanding of ‘war as fighting’, albeit in a more open and contingent sense than articulated by Clausewitz, has been proposed as a key aspect of the nascent field of ‘critical war studies’, which otherwise departs from the assumptions of classical theories of war. See Barkawi and Brighton (2011).

3. As we will discuss later, it should also be understood as operating in the other direction: the ideals of martial masculinity organize this imagination of violence in particular ways that undertake specific political tasks.

4. And, indeed, femininity as well – though this conceptual assemblage will likely take substantial empirical work to unravel.