Making The Man: Militarized Masculinity and The Queer Glitches

Military masculinities can produce complex trauma in male soldiers––even for those who are seemingly welladjusted. Men are expected to represent the utopian nation-state as they join and participate in their ranks… and they are expected to remain in the same idealist (abled, heterosexual) state once they are no longer military personnel.1

The military promises that men can become the “realest” and most authentic version of themselves through their resources.2 It claims to provide the unique resources to build an ultimate masculine identity defined by “emotional control, overt heterosexual desire, physical fitness, self-discipline, selfreliance, the willingness to use aggression and physical violence, and risk-taking.”3 This military promise, however, essentially collapses in on itself as war in fact cultivates disability and queerness (of a general sense) by opening up bodies to debilitation and interdependence.4 With the inevitable failure in upholding the mandatory personal and social standards of ideal military masculinity (not “manning up”) often comes the experience the psychological distress and of being associated with the not-masculine which is often categorized as feminine, disabled, and queer. As dictated by military masculinities, men must continually reject from themselves and others all that is considered not-masculine––if not, they risk becoming what is viewed as abject in their community.

Herbert Andrew Paus. The United States Army builds men. Apply nearest recruiting office / Herbert Paus. United States, 1919. Library of Congress.

Men are not born; they are made. They do not follow a predetermined biological trajectory encoded in their DNA: “they do not inevitably grow from infants through boyhood to manhood,”5 instead, they are socialized, co-constructed, and “masculinized” by performing as men through consistent, obedient participation in the cultural signifiers of what manhood is seen to be (for their particular cultural and contextualized moment). Masculinity is often constructed in relation to the hegemonic masculinity which is a dominant socially constructed form of masculinity that is culturally exalted above other expressions of masculinity as well as femininity: it is presented as primarily “heterosexual, aggressive, authoritative, and courageous.”6

According to social-constructionist theory, men are not born soldiers; they become soldiers under the “military gaze.”7 Like other masculinist institutions,8 the military encourages the pursuit and maintenance of hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is not a function of a male-dominated military simply because of its male majority, but is a function of the ongoing narrative formation whereby military personnel are each encouraged (either explicitly or implicitly) to actively situate themselves as sitting atop these loosely structured hierarchies.9 Anyone who participates in these kinds of institutions is absorbed into the constant, daily struggle of hegemonic masculine identity (even if one is a women, queer, person of colour, etc.). Their own characteristics become appropriated and weaponized for the military’s own ends including the preservation of its “paternal protector” public reputation, the tightknit group unity, and for the assurance of wartime success10: it becomes necessary to participate in hegemonic masculinity so one’s position and social status can be successfully acquired and maintained.11 Military women are also tasked with upholding dominant military masculinities.12

Ideal masculinity must remain a “desirable attainment”13 in order for its symbolic power to function in favour of the military institution. While many enlisted soldiers may choose to overlook the traumatic effects of this system as if it is a harmless incentive for productivity, strength-building, and community bonding for the group––the weaponization of hegemonic masculinity by the military is not a forgiving structural system by any means.

Herbert Andrew Paus. The United States Army builds men. Apply nearest recruiting office / Herbert Paus. United States, 1919. Library of Congress.

The military is not interested in coddling those who give up in this struggle to be atop the pyramid: it is ruthless in excluding those who fail to comply and those who do not “mesh” well with the community. While its members seek to comply with the ideal masculinity, there is no reward awaiting them except the expectation to keep up or get quickly forgotten and punished at the bottom of the hierarchy. As the purpose of the institution is to fight and defend, its members “can afford no deviation,”14 therefore the brutal ordeal of hierarchical masculinities is ultimately necessary for the military’s mission.

The soldier’s body is “war matter.”15 Values of self-discipline are often conflated with physical fitness and, the military has become known as a place “where bodies are transformed”16 into a “proper” shape, fit for warfare. The image of the Rambo warrior17 and other muscularly oriented imagery are still dominant visions of the male body in military service.18 The male-soldier-body has long functioned as abstractions for the nation-state. Nations rely upon their militaries to defend themselves so a strong connection is constructed between the military, soldiers, and the nation. Belkin makes an argument on how this occurs:

When the normativity of the soldier, military, state, and empire are lined up such that the cleansing of the troops purifies the other entities simultaneously… Accordingly, constructions of the soldier’s toughness, masculinity, dominance, heterosexuality, and stoicism can conjure images of military strength, state, legitimacy, and imperial righteousness, while depictions of the soldier’s flaws can implicate notions of military weakness and state and imperial illegitimacy.19

Military personnel are designated with the resolute duty to protect the women, children, and their home country. Once whipped into shape, the esteemed militarized male body is endowed with glory and set for service “to his fatherland, and perhaps most importantly, ready to serve an in-need-of-protection, feminized motherland.”20

Over the last two centuries, the ideal male military body has embodied everything to do with “hyperpatriotism, military values, rehabilitation protocols, or conventional heterosexual masculinity.”21 This fixation with able-bodied, heterosexual, virile standards is anything but a static process: those engaged in obeying the military gaze must adapt to the “constantly shifting category of embodied experience.”22 Everything that challenges or stands in the way of this ideal is disavowed, excluded, and rigorously excised.

Starting in the eighteenth century, the military began to use eugenics, sexological tools, and various pseudosciences to filter out those viewed as “threats to the heteronormative able-bodiedness of its ranks.”23 The inspection and recruitment process depended on “fantasies and fears about race and nation… to maintain its own integrity as an institution.”24 Queerness and body non-normativity25 was rooted out of the military culture by turning away recruits if their physical or psychological makeup contradicted the mythic ideal. These pseudosciences drew strong comparisons between the beautiful male body and a selfdisciplined character: the recruitment process ensured that only those who passed the “erotics of inspection”26 could enlist. These classifications of physical differences were critical strategies utilized by the military to “rationalize assumptions about queerness and disability” that forbid the so-called unfit from military ranks.27

McClelland Barclay. Man the guns-Join the Navy. United States, 1941-1945. Records of the Office of Government Reports, Record Group 44. National Archives and Records Administration.

The public image of military male bodies is portrayed primarily as heterosexual.28 In this British pro-war propaganda postcard from 1916, a conscientious objector is being bullied by a buff German soldier.29 The feminine man is characterized in the cartoon with visibly identifiable disabilities––his lack of bodily strength and physical non-normativity––that are meant to be traced to his femininity and queerness. For instance, his queerly limp-wristed hand is ineffective in combat, but it is also a deformity that corresponds to his misshapen fingers, twisted limbs, and feeble frame.30

The military is an “exclusive culture” that mandates31 that each soldier embody a self presentation that represents (to a certain standard) their nation’s idealist image. The military is deeply invested in various forms of normativity and this manifests itself in men’s selfpresentation.32 This robust process starts before one is recruited or drafted to participate in war. War propaganda often insists on a narrow, unattainable, vision of masculinity that most men fail to embody.

To be part of the military community, men are put through a rigorous process of training and communal bonding to acquire a glimpse of the ideal masculine identity required of them. To prove one’s greater self-discipline, military personnel must become set apart from civilians,33 women, queers,34 and even against other military personnel.35 These differences must be internalized to authentically perform one’s masculine identity which is necessary for their mission.

The Conscientious Objector at the Front. Austria, Germany, 1914-1918. Collection of German postcards relating to the First World War, 1914-1918. Library of Congress.

For example, one’s posture, gaze, and movement are vital pieces in differentiating oneself from civilians and those of other military training.36 Military environments encourage the “policing of gender presentation… rewarding hypermasculinity” among both women and men.37 Hypermasculine performance, however, is not the foolproof key to the top of this discursively constructed hegemony. Another tactic to maintain one’s position in the hierarchical pyramid involves the ridicule of men from other branches who engage in over-the-top aggression.38 This example of inter-branch rivalry problematizes masculine self-presentation and complicates the journey to “[come] out on top.”39

By discursively measuring themselves against others by their actions, perceived virtues, motivations, and behaviours, they wage “ideological warfare”40 on civilians and other military personnel.”41 In wielding symbolic power, military personnel invariably get cut by the same sword. Mere participation in these masculinist institutions (which require playing into hierarchical masculinities) produces unique trauma because of its nearly unattainable and ever-morphing definition of peak personhood. Those who engage with the tools and resources of hegemonic masculinity will inevitably and ironically be subordinated or marginalized.42 Whoever is the most emotionally controlled, motivated by honour, or more intelligent one day may not be the next.

The internalization of differences (from civilians, queers, women, etc.) is encouraged even beyond one’s time of service (in terms of self-presentation and the ideal male body). Men are to remain pristine and shining examples of normalcy and heterosexual able-bodiedness. For instance, there is a long history of concern for soldier’s sexual lives, and that men might fulfill heteronormative roles of husband and fatherhood.43 Once released from service, men are told to “man up” and take controlof their (apparently) lower parts of emotion and unruly body by shaking off the negative impacts of warfare as if nothing ever happened.44 After one’s service is complete, men are still expected to maintain self-discipline. Soldiers are men of war so long as they “sacrifice their lives by going to war” and “[return] as if they never left.”45 I propose that most men of military personnel are traumatized to some degree by these expectations whether on a conscious level or not.

Central Recruiting Committee, Funder/Sponsor. Your Chums Are Fighting -- Why Aren’t You?. Canada, 1917. Library of Congress.

The crisis of shell-shock in the First World War is a distinctive event where men’s trauma was distrusted, feminized, and dismissed. Medical officers doubted the acute distress these men suffered and interpreted their symptoms through the lens of failed masculinity. Men who claimed to be shellshocked were seen by doctors at the time to be “avoiding their duty as men,”46 “malingering to avoid economic hardship,”47 and/or due to inherited or pre-existing defects.48 Only a minority of shell-shock cases were deemed to be legitimate because of this medical gatekeeping. Medical authorities constructed trauma as “an individual failure to meet masculine ideals in order to parry a larger challenge to idealized masculinity.”49 These messages regarding War Is Trauma” by Jesse Purcell (2011) is part of the “Operation Exposure” portfolio produced by how men should deal Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative in collaboration with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Jesse with trauma prevail in Purcell. War Is Trauma. 2011. “Operation Exposure: War Is Trauma”, Justseeds. conversations around war-related PTSD.

Men’s wartime trauma is a unique phenomenon as it tests and questions the nation-state’s control over the male body.50 Mental and/or physical disabilities due to combat trauma fail to comply with the ableist, heteronormative institution for the military, one’s self-conception, and one’s expectations for relationship with the world.51 A man experiencing trauma is seen to be displaying feminine characteristics—as not being himself.52 Returning soldiers who struggle with a “manly homecoming”53 are deemed as pitiful examples of undisciplined masculinity.

The pursuit of a “manly” recovery to wartime trauma––whether major or minor trauma––contributes to the worsening of one’s trauma. Because the message of “pulling up one’s bootstraps” quickly becomes ingrained in military personnel while in community with each other, anything other than strict emotional control is viewed as deviant. Reckoning with one’s various experiences of warfare interferes with the constant upkeep for hegemonic masculinities, so healing is a fraught, delayed, and repressed work.

The male body is “feminized when seen as sick, weak, or wounded”54 so dealing with trauma means confronting the idea of personal emasculation: as the male gaze is turned inwards on ‘the man,’ men become “figures of crisis”55 who are no longer images of composure or self-control. A soldier No Such Thing as a Toy Soldier” by Marshall Weber (2011) is part of the “Operation Recovery” portfolio produced by Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative in collaboration with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Marshall Weber. No Such Thing as a Toy Soldier. 2011. “Operation Recovery,” Justseeds. experiencing trauma becomes subject to a “conversation of which he should not be the object nor a participant—a conversation about feminine behaviour… he becomes an object of—and experiences—shame.”56 The former soldier cannot successfully fulfill the mountain of requirements for manhood in his traumatized state. From here, he cannot reasonably convince himself to seek charity from others as this requires further emasculation.57 Any step in the direction of healing from trauma calls forth the searing eye of the “military gaze”58 which still operates on him, even while he is out of service. He continues to draw from his internalized skills that helped him succeed in topping the pyramid of hegemonic masculinities––although Carter Sawatzky (they/them) English Honours; Gender it no longer serves him to do so. Studies minor