Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in “Masculine” Roles

Abstract

Women's military service is the focus of an ongoing controversy because of its implications for the gendered nature of citizenship. While liberal feminists endorse equal service as a venue for equal citizenship, radical feminists see women's service as a reification of martial citizenship and cooperation with a hierarchical and sexist institution. These debates, however, tend to ignore the perspective of the women soldiers themselves.This paper seeks to add to the contemporary debate on women's military service the subjective dimension of gender and national identities of women soldiers serving in "masculine" roles. I use a theory of identity practices in order to analyze the interaction between state institutions and identity construction. Based on in-depth interviews, I argue that Israeli women soldiers in "masculine" roles shape their gender identities according to the hegemonic masculinity of the combat soldier through three interrelated practices:(1) mimicry of combat soldiers' bodily and discursive practices; (2) distancing from "traditional femininity"; and (3) trivialization of sexual harassment.These practices signify both resistance and compliance with the military dichotomized gender order. While these transgender performances subvert the hegemonic norms of masculinity and femininity, they also collaborate with the military androcentric norms. Thus, although these women soldiers individually transgress gender boundaries, they internalize the military's masculine ideology and values and learn to identify with the patriarchal order of the army and the state. This accounts for a pattern of "limited inclusion" that reaffirms their marginalization, thus prohibiting them from developing a collective consciousness that would challenge the gendered structure of citizenship. This paper seeks to add to the contemporary debate on women's military service the subjective dimension of gender and national identities of women soldiers serving in "masculine" roles. The ongoing debate regarding women's military service tends to view women soldiers as pawns in a bigger game: the military often regards women soldiers in combat roles as hindering the military gender system and therefore damaging the efficiency of the masculine war machine (Katzenstein 1998; Mitchell 1989, p. 218; Peach 1996, pp. 164-74). Feminist observers, on the other hand, tend to see women soldiers as either serving or harming women's interests as a whole. The most dominant question in this debate is whether military service is a venue for equal citizenship for women or a reinforcement and reification of masculine concepts of martial citizenship. Thus, the contemporary debate on women in the military tends to remain on the macrolevel and ignores the gender experience of women soldiers themselves (for an exception, see Herbert 1998).My paper focuses on the subjective gender experience of women soldiers in "nontraditional" military roles and the meaning of those experiences at both the microlevel of women's lives and the macrolevel of the military and st...

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