‘Man(ne)’s world’: explaining the paradoxical nature of attitudes towards women in combat

ABSTRACT

Enduring resistance to women joining combat roles, ostensibly to protect those women, is paradoxical when juxtaposed against the everyday dangers that women face. This paper draws attention to such sites of contradiction, summarizing the literature that investigates these before bringing Kate Manne’s ‘logic of misogyny’ into the conversation. Manne’s characterization of misogyny as a ‘hostile forcefield’, and her assertion that women are essentialised as givers, not takers, provide additional traction for understanding why women in combat roles are subject to an array of impossible inconsistencies, whilst the notion of ‘regendering’ provides some promise for beginning to unravel these contradictions.

KEYWORDS:

• Women in combat
• misogyny
• militarized masculinities
• gendered states

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Shine Choi, Will Fish, Kate Lewis, Megan Mackenzie and the anonymous referees for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Notably, in contrast to the experiences of such liberal democratic states, some armed groups have often more genuinely embraced women in these roles. Guerilla forces in Latin America, for example, express more concern about class consciousness than about gender, and their experiences on the ground in hostile contexts have demonstrated that women were often observed as ‘coping better’ than their male colleagues (Ortega, L.M.D.2012. “Looking Beyond Violent Militarized Masculinities: Guerilla Gender Regimes in Latin America”. International Feminist Journal of Politics. 14: 489-507). The infamy and effectiveness of female Kurdish fighters, rendered more rather than less potent by their gender in the fight against ISIS, also demonstrates that acceptance of women in combat can differ according to context (Aragones 2020), but it is also clear that in many countries resistance to women in combat roles remains.

2. It is also not unimportant that COVID-19 has also brought increased rates of domestic violence and disproportionate job losses for women too.

3. Discussions with military women over many years of research has revealed an informal, anecdotal finding that was nonetheless often repeated: a number of military women marry early, and often to military men, to remove themselves from being sexually available.

4. Manne (2018: 121–6) provides examples of ‘family annihilators’ where men who have lost status take out their shame by killing their families.