Male Combatants

Citation:

Larson, Janet. 2015. “Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17 (1): 77–99. doi:10.1080/14616742.2013.835527.

Author: Janet Larson

Abstract:

Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.

Keywords: Afghanistan, amnesia, bonding, Charlie Wilson, CIA, Cold War, film, image, imagination, imperial, intertext, masculinity, perform, proxy, Russians, visual, mujahidin

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Militarism, Rights, Women's Rights, Weapons /Arms Regions: Americas, North America, Asia, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, United States of America

Year: 2015

Citation:

Hoegaerts, Josephine. 2010. “Manoeuvring Men: Masculinity as Spatially Defined Readability at the Grandes Manoeuvres of the Belgian Army, 1882–1883.” Gender, Place & Culture 17 (2): 249–68. doi:10.1080/09663691003600330.

Author: Josephine Hoegaerts

Abstract:

This article uses the case study of the Belgian grandes manoeuvres of 1882 and 1883 to explore the ways in which self-defined ‘all male’ spaces can contribute to the study and deconstruction of historical masculinities. Using the manoeuvres of the Belgian army at the end of the nineteenth century as a theatre of (military as well as civilian) corporeal and discursive practices, the simultaneous enactment of masculinity and nation is analysed. The material spaces in which these military exercises took place are understood as contingent creators instead of passive containers of masculinity: that is, rather than as a passive background to soldiers' movements, the champ de manoeuvres appears as an active stage, aiding the construction of a gendered military identity, but also challenging dichotomous understandings of gender. Likewise, the gaze upon both landscape and soldiers by different audiences plays an active part in the story of the construction of masculinity and nation: the act of recognition, performed by male and female civilians, during and after the manoeuvres was crucial for the continuous repetition of the discourse that created and upheld notions of ‘man’ and of ‘Belgium’.

Keywords: masculinity, gender performance, military history, nation, Belgium

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Men, Masculinity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Militarism, Nationalism Regions: Europe, Western Europe Countries: Belgium

Year: 2010

Citation:

Author: Danny Hoffman

Abstract:

"In The War Machines, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor both on the battlefields and in the diamond mines, rubber plantations, and other unregulated industries of West Africa. Based on his ethnographic research with militia groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia during those countries’ recent civil wars, Hoffman traces the path of young fighters who moved from grassroots community-defense organizations in Sierra Leone during the mid-1990s into a large pool of mercenary labor.

Hoffman argues that in contemporary West Africa, space, sociality, and life itself are organized around making young men available for all manner of dangerous work. Drawing on his ethnographic research over the past nine years, as well as the anthropology of violence, interdisciplinary security studies, and contemporary critical theory, he maintains that the mobilization of West African men exemplifies a global trend in the outsourcing of warfare and security operations. A similar dynamic underlies the political economy of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a growing number of postcolonial spaces. An experienced photojournalist, Hoffman integrates more than fifty of his photographs of young West Africans into The War Machines."

(Duke University Press)

Annotation: Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction: War Machines 1 I. Histories 1. The Mano River War: A Chronology 27 2. Hunters, Lumpens, and War Boys: A Social History of the Kamajors 55 3. States of Conflict: A Social History of the Kamajors Continued 88 II. Building The Barracks 4. Big Men, Small Boys 127 5. The Barracks 162 6. The Hotel Kamajor 194 7. The Magic of War 224 Conclusion: A Laboratory of the Future 252 Notes 261 Bibliography 273 Index 289

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Men, Masculinity/ies, Livelihoods, Security, Violence Regions: Africa, West Africa Countries: Liberia, Sierra Leone

Year: 2011

Citation:

Urbatsch, R. “Interdependent Preferences, Militarism, and Child Gender.” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 1–21. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.01521.x.

Author: R. Urbatsch

Abstract:

Selection effects make it difficult to determine whether concern for other people genuinely affects individuals’ policy preferences. Child gender provides a conveniently exogenous means of exploring the issue, especially in contexts such as military policy where girls and boys face different risks; in many countries male children are disproportionately likely to become soldiers and thus bear the costs of militarism. This creates divergent effects: those in households with girls generally prefer more hawkish foreign policies than do members of households with boys. Data from the 2004 American National Election Study confirm these intuitions, both in general statements of policy preference and in evaluating the net costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Child Soldiers, Female Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Girls, Boys, Gender Balance, Elections, Households Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2009

Citation:

Daggett, Cara. 2015. “Drone Disorientations: How ‘Unmanned’ Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17 (3): 361–79. doi:10.1080/14616742.2015.1075317.

Author: Cara Daggett

Abstract:

Killing with drones produces queer moments of disorientation. Drawing on queer phenomenology, I show how militarized masculinities function as spatiotemporal landmarks that give killing in war its “orientation” and make it morally intelligible. These bearings no longer make sense for drone warfare, which radically deviates from two of its main axes: the home–combat and distance–intimacy binaries. Through a narrative methodology, I show how descriptions of drone warfare are rife with symptoms of an unresolved disorientation, often expressed as gender anxiety over the failure of the distance–intimacy and home–combat axes to orient killing with drones. The resulting vertigo sparks a frenzy of reorientation attempts, but disorientation can lead in multiple and sometimes surprising directions – including, but not exclusively, more violent ones. With drones, the point is that none have yet been reliably secured, and I conclude by arguing that, in the midst of this confusion, it is important not to lose sight of the possibility of new paths, and the “hope of new directions.”

Keywords: drones, militarized masculinities, queer phenomenology, robotic war, narrative

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Female Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, LGBTQ, Livelihoods, Militarized Livelihoods, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Violence

Year: 2015

Citation:

Welland, Julia. 2015. “Liberal Warriors and the Violent Colonial Logics of ‘Partnering and Advising.’” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17 (2): 289–307. doi:10.1080/14616742.2014.890775.

Author: Julia Welland

Abstract:

Building on the feminist literature that traces the (re)production of militarized masculinities in and through military interventions, this article details some of the ways British soldiering subjects are being shaped in today's counterinsurgency context. Required now to be both nation builders and war fighters, contemporary soldiers are a “softer,” less masculinized subjectivity, and what Alison Howell has termed “liberal warriors.” British troops with their long history of colonialism and frequent overseas military campaigns are understood to be particularly suited to this role. Taking the British military's involvement in the “partnering and advising” of the Afghan National Army (ANA), this article pays attention to the interlocking gendered, raced, and sexualized discourses through which the British/Afghan encounter is experienced. Exploring first British troops' preoccupation with the perceived femininity and homosexuality of their Afghan counterparts, and second, Afghan hypermasculinity as demonstrated by the characterizations of their violent and chaotic fighting tactics, colonial logics are revealed. While British liberal warriors come to know “who they are” through these logics, (mis)represented Afghan soldiers are rendered increasingly vulnerable to the very “real,” very material violences of war.

Keywords: militarized masculinities, counterinsurgency, Afghanistan, ANA, colonial logics

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Men, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Livelihoods, Militarized Livelihoods, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan

Year: 2015

Citation:

Mäki-Rahkola, Anne, and Henri Myrttinen. 2014. “Reliable Professionals, Sensitive Dads and Tough Fighters.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16 (3): 470–89. doi:10.1080/14616742.2012.755834.

Authors: Anne Mäki-Rahkola, Henri Myrttinen

Abstract:

The significance and complexity of mostly male-dominated military peacekeeping forces continues to grow globally, as does the complexity of the masculinities performed in them. This article discusses the discourses and performances of peacekeeper masculinities, drawing on a qualitative case study of Finnish peacekeeping forces. The self-image of Finland as a provider of ideal peacekeepers and practising progressive gender policy is critically analysed. Taking the notion of multiple masculinities as a starting point, three indicative categories of Finnish peacekeeper masculinities are examined. Discourses of ‘amateur professionals’ and ‘peacekeeper fathers’ create space for military peacekeepers to show aspects of masculinity not associated with traditional military masculinities. The third discourse of ‘tough fighters’, however, harks back to more traditional ‘warrior’ concepts. Official gender mainstreaming efforts and assumptions that these attitudes are internalized ‘naturally’ by Finns are put into question by deprecatory or ambiguous attitudes towards gender equity and sexual exploitation. Despite being part of multi-national forces, peacekeeper masculinities are defined based on presumed notions of ‘national character’.

Keywords: Finland, gender mainstreaming, masculinities, peacekeeping, performativity

Topics: Male Combatants, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gender Mainstreaming, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equity, Peacekeeping, Sexual Violence, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Regions: Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Finland

Year: 2014

Citation:

Duriesmith, David. 2014. “Is Manhood a Causal Factor in the Shifting Nature of War?” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16 (2): 236–54. doi:10.1080/14616742.2013.773718.

Author: David Duriesmith

Abstract:

Existing accounts of new war have not actively engaged with feminist analysis. Protest masculinity is suggested as an alternative explanatory framework to conventional explanations of violence in new war. To explore the intersection between masculinity and new wars the example of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front has been investigated. The article concludes that masculinity is an essential cause to the creation of new war and to the form that new war takes once it has originated.

Keywords: new wars, protect masculinity, Revolutionary United Front, Sierra Leone

Topics: Armed Conflict, "New Wars", Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Men, Masculinity/ies Regions: Africa, West Africa Countries: Sierra Leone

Year: 2014

Citation:

Conway, Daniel. 2012. Masculinities, Militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Author: Daniel Conway

Annotation:

Topics: Armed Conflict, Civil Wars, Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Men, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Discourses, Livelihoods, Militarized Livelihoods, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Nationalism Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: South Africa

Year: 2012

Citation:

Chisholm, Amanda. 2014. “The Silenced and Indispensible.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16 (1): 26–47. 

Author: Amanda Chisholm

Abstract:

Using postcolonial analysis coupled with fieldwork in both Afghanistan and Nepal, I argue that contemporary colonial relations within private security make possible a gender and racial hierarchy of security contractors. This hierarchy of contractors results in vastly different conditions of possibilities depending on the contractors' histories and nationalities. Empirically documenting perspectives from Gurkhas, constituted as third country national (TCNs) security contractors, this article contributes to the existing critical theory and gender in both private military security company literature and postcolonial studies by (1) providing a needed racial and gendered analysis from the position of the racialized security contractors and (2) empirically documenting a growing subaltern group of men participating as security contractors.

Keywords: private security, private military security companies, third country nationals, Gurkhas, Afghanistan, martial race, postcolonial, masculinities, Gender

Topics: Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Livelihoods, Militarized Livelihoods, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Private Military & Security, Privatization Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, Nepal

Year: 2014