Enlisting Masculinity

Author : Melissa T. Brown
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199842833
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Enlisting Masculinity written by Melissa T. Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is today's All-Volunteer Force still "This Man's Army"? In a nation that has seen the rise of feminism, the decline of blue-collar employment, military defeat in Vietnam, and a general upheaval of traditional gender norms, what kind of man is today's military man? What kind does the military want him to be? In Enlisting Masculinity, Melissa Brown asks whether appeals to and constructions of masculinity remain the underlying basis of military recruiting-and if so, what that notion of masculinity actually is. Are the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines courting warriors or breadwinners; patriots or pragmatists; dominant masters of technology, or strong yet compassionate masters of themselves? Is each military branch recruiting the same model of masculinity? Based on an analysis of more than 300 print advertisements published between the early 1970s and 2007, as well as television commercials, recruiting websites, and media coverage of recruiting, Enlisting Masculinity argues that masculinity is still a foundation of the appeals made by the military, but that each branch deploys various constructions of masculinity that serve its particular personnel needs and culture, with conventional martial masculinity being only one among them. The inclusion of a few token women in recruiting advertisements has become routine, but the representations of service make it clear that men are the primary audience and combat their exclusive domain. Each branch constructs soldiering upon a slightly different foundation of masculine ideals and Brown delves into why, how, and what that looks like. The military is an important site for the creation and propagation of ideas of masculinity in American culture, and it is often not given the attention that it warrants as a nexus of gender and citizenship. Although most Americans believe they can ignore the military in the era of the all-volunteer force, when it comes to popular culture and ideas about gender, the military is not a thing apart from society. Building a fighting force, Brown shows, also means constructing a gender. Enlisting Masculinity gives us a unique and important perspective on both military service and prevailing conceptions of masculinity in America.

Author : Jeremiah Favara
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252056582
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tactical Inclusion written by Jeremiah Favara and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of color and women played an essential role in making the US military one of the most diverse institutions in the United States. Starting at the dawn of the all-volunteer era, Jeremiah Favara illuminates the challenges at the heart of military inclusion by analyzing recruitment ads published in three commercial magazines: Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony. Favara draws on Black feminism, critical race theory, and queer of color critique to reveal how the military and advertisers affected change by deploying a set of strategies and practices called tactical inclusion. As Favara shows, tactical inclusion used representations of servicemembers in the new military to connect with people susceptible to recruiting efforts and rendered these new audiences vulnerable to, valuable to, and subject to state violence. Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising’s role in building the all-volunteer military.

Author : David Kieran
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 147989236X
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Signature Wounds written by David Kieran and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising story of the Army’s efforts to combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the mental health of our troops. In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama took to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues that “many of our injured soldiers are returning from Iraq with traumatic brain injury,” which doctors were calling the “signature wound” of the Iraq War. Alarming stories of veterans taking their own lives raised a host of vital questions: Why hadn’t the military been better prepared to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI)? Why were troops being denied care and sent back to Iraq? Why weren’t the Army and the VA doing more to address these issues? Drawing on previously unreleased documents and oral histories, David Kieran tells the broad and nuanced story of the Army’s efforts to understand and address these issues, challenging the popular media view that the Iraq War was mismanaged by a callous military unwilling to address the human toll of the wars. The story of mental health during this war is the story of how different groups—soldiers, veterans and their families, anti-war politicians, researchers and clinicians, and military leaders—approached these issues from different perspectives and with different agendas. It is the story of how the advancement of medical knowledge moves at a different pace than the needs of an Army at war, and it is the story of how medical conditions intersect with larger political questions about militarism and foreign policy. This book shows how PTSD, TBI, and suicide became the signature wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how they prompted change within the Army itself, and how mental health became a factor in the debates about the impact of these conflicts on US culture.

Author : Megan D. McFarlane
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520975626
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Militarized Maternity written by Megan D. McFarlane and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rights of pregnant workers as well as (the lack of) paid maternity leave have increasingly become topics of a major policy debate in the United States. Yet, few discussions have focused on the U.S. military, where many of the latest policy changes focus on these very issues. Despite the armed forces' increases to maternity-related benefits, servicewomen continue to be stigmatized for being pregnant and taking advantage of maternity policies. In an effort to understand this disconnect, Megan McFarlane analyzes military documents and conducts interviews with enlisted servicewomen and female officers. She finds a policy/culture disparity within the military that pregnant servicewomen themselves often co-construct, making the policy changes significantly less effective. McFarlane ends by offering suggestions for how these policy changes can have more impact and how they could potentially serve as an example for the broader societal debate.

Author : Stephanie Szitanyi
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030212254
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gender Trouble in the U.S. Military written by Stephanie Szitanyi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates challenges to the U.S. military’s gender regime of hetero-male privilege. Examining a broad set of discursive maneuvers in a series of cases as focal points—integration of open homosexuality, the end of the combat ban on women, and the epidemic nature of military sexual assault within its units—Stephanie Szitanyi examines the contemporary link between gender and military service in the United States, and comprehensively analyzes forms of gendering produced by the military as an institution. Using feminist interpretivist methods to analyze an impressive combination of visual, textual, archival, and cultural materials, the book argues that despite policy changes since 2013 that may be positioned as explicit episodes of degendering, military officials have simultaneously moved to counteract them and reinforce the institution’s gender regime of hetero-male privilege. Importantly, these (re)gendering processes continue to prioritize certain forms of service and sacrifice, through which a specific version of masculinity—the masculine warrior—is continuously promoted, preserved, and cemented.

Author : Kara D. Vuic
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317449088
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military written by Kara D. Vuic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military is the first examination of the interdisciplinary, intersecting fields of gender studies and the history of the United States military. In twenty-one original essays, the contributors tackle themes including gendering the "other," gender and war disability, gender and sexual violence, gender and American foreign relations, and veterans and soldiers in the public imagination, and lay out a chronological examination of gender and America’s wars from the American Revolution to Iraq. This important collection is essential reading for all those interested in how the military has influenced America's views and experiences of gender.

Author : Steffen Hantke
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317383249
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War Gothic in Literature and Culture written by Steffen Hantke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others," psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.

Author : Mrinalini Sinha
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526162938
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Colonial masculinity written by Mrinalini Sinha and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Steven Rosales
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
ISBN 13 : 0816536201
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Soldados Razos at War written by Steven Rosales and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the catalysts that motivated Mexican American youth to enlist or readily accept their draft notices in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam? In Soldados Razos at War, historian and veteran Steven Rosales chronicles the experiences of Chicano servicemen who fought for the United States, explaining why these men served, how they served, and the impact of their service on their identity and political consciousness. As a social space imbued with its own martial and masculine ethos, the U.S. military offers an ideal way to study the aspirations and behaviors that carried over into the civilian lives of these young men. A tradition of martial citizenship forms the core of the book. Using rich oral histories and archival research, Rosales investigates the military’s transformative potential with a particular focus on socioeconomic mobility, masculinity, and postwar political activism across three generations. The national collective effort characteristic of World War II and Korea differed sharply from the highly divisive nature of American involvement in Vietnam. Thus, for Mexican Americans, military service produced a wide range of ideological reactions, with the ideals of each often in opposition to the others. Yet a critical thread connecting these diverse outcomes was a redefined sense of self and a willingness to engage in individual and collective action to secure first-class citizenship.

Author : Edward M. Adams
Publisher : Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1523088974
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reinventing Masculinity written by Edward M. Adams and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wonderful book for thinking about how to release ourselves from crippling processes. It's time for men—and for all of us—to stand up and say, ‘Give us back our full humanity, give us back our dignity.'” —Paul Gilbert, PhD, author of The Compassionate Mind In a recent FiveThirtyEight poll, 60 percent of men surveyed said society puts pressure on men to behave in a way that is unhealthy or bad. Men account for 80 percent of suicides in the United States, and three in ten American men have suffered from depression. Ed Adams and Ed Frauenheim say a big part of the problem is a model of masculinity that's become outmoded and even dangerous, to both men and women. The conventional notion of what it means to be a man—what Adams and Frauenheim call “Confined Masculinity”—traps men in an emotional straitjacket; steers them toward selfishness, misogyny, and violence; and severely limits their possibilities. As an antidote, they propose a new paradigm: Liberating Masculinity. It builds on traditional masculine roles like the protector and provider, expanding men's options to include caring, collaboration, emotional expressivity, an inclusive spirit, and environmental stewardship. Through hopeful stories of men who have freed themselves from the strictures of Confined Masculinity, interviews with both leaders and everyday men, and practical exercises, this book shows the power of a masculinity defined by what the authors call the five Cs: curiosity, courage, compassion, connection, and commitment. Men will discover a way of being that fosters healthy, harmonious relationships at home, at work, and in the world.