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theses

Investigating the US military’s changing self-representations over five decades, this dissertation examines shifting gender regimes in an era of growing gender and sexual equality and explores how these changing gender representations affect civilian-military relations. By using gender as an analytical category, I offer new insights into military operations, which in turn inform practices of citizenship in the contemporary US. Building upon analyses of male dominance, masculinist culture, and homosociality in the military, I depict the constant struggle within the military to preserve and promote particular constructions of masculinity. Using the recent integration of open homosexuality within military ranks, the end of the combat ban for women, and the military’s public acknowledgement of the epidemic nature of sexual assault within its units as focal points, the dissertation analyzes how hegemonic military masculinity attempts to cope with explicit episodes of “degendering” and how it works directly and indirectly to “regender” itself as a system of hetero-male privilege. Informed by interpretivist methodologies, I develop a postpositivist analysis of gendered mechanisms of exclusion within the US military. Analyzing diverse military public discourses “against the grain,” I demonstrate how certain masculinized narratives erase women’s roles in the military from public consciousness, placing military service performed by women below a threshold of visibility. Contributing to feminist scholarship that traces the profound effects of militarization, I suggest that these pervasive military discourses sustain a value hierarchy that subordinates the lives and contributions of ordinary individuals to the potent sacrifice of the ultimate (masculine) warriors.

ETD_7189

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Stephanie Szitanyi

doi:10.7282/T3SQ92JW

ETD doctoral

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