No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article examines how scholarship on veterans has begun to incorporate gender as a relevant category of research. Drawing on feminist theory, it identifies different approaches to gender within the field of veterans studies and suggests avenues for advancing this aspect of research. The vast majority of gender research on veterans treats gender as a descriptive category or variable through a focus on female veterans or gender differences. This article argues that research on veterans can be enriched by employing gender as an analytical category. Focusing on gender norms, power and inequality based on gender, and the intersections of gender with other categories of social difference opens up new questions for gender research on veterans. This kind of broader, analytical conceptualization of gender reveals the ways in which gender shapes the transition to civilian life for all veterans and how veterans policies and programs impact gender relations.

LAY SUMMARY This study explores how gender and sex shape the military-to-civilian transition (MCT) for women. Thirty-three Canadian women Veterans were interviewed about their military service and post-military life. MCT research often emphasizes discontinuities between military and civilian life, but women’s accounts highlight continuities in gendered experiences. Military women are expected to fit the male norm and masculine ideal of the military member during service, but they are rarely recognized as Veterans after service. Women experience invisibility as military member and Veterans and simultaneously hypervisibility as (ex)military women who do not fit military or civilian gender norms. Gendered expectations of women as spouses and mothers exert an undue burden on them as serving members and as Veterans undergoing MCT. Women encounter care and support systems set up on the normative assumption of the military and Veteran man supported by a female spouse. The study findings point to a needed re-design of military and Veteran systems to remove sex and gender biases and better respond to the sex- and gender-specific MCT needs of women.