Double jeopardy: Women, the US military and the war in Iraq
Section snippets
Sexual domination and the military
Some feminist critics of the military and of militarization have pointed out not just that the military is a masculine institution, as are other institutions that women seek to enter such as the police force or fire service, but that it requires masculinity in order to function (Enloe, 1983, Enloe, 2000, Morgan, 1989). Men in male dominated organizations have a tendency to use what Laura Miller calls ‘gender harassment’, to distinguish it from sexual harassment, in order to resist the intrusion
Rapes of US military women
In recent years there have been a number of scandals about the serious sexual harassment of women in the US military. In the Tailhook affair the harassment seems to have been undertaken as a form of male bonding (Enloe, 2000). Tailhookers are navy carrier pilots. At their annual convention in 1991 Tailhookers engaged in behaviour where they made airforce women run through a hotel corridor whilst men on either side stripped off the women's clothes and sexually assaulted them. There have been
Sexual use of women as message bearers between men
It is not just the rate of rape and sexual harassment that suggests that there is something incorrigible about military masculinity. The use of US women soldiers by both the Iraqi combatants and the US military to send messages to the other side, shows that militaries see themselves as engaged in struggles between groups of masculine men for whom women are viewed as symbols of femininity. For instance in other side, for example being impregnated by their captors before being sent back, as were
Should feminists campaign for women's equal opportunities in the military?
One feminist theorist who has suggested that feminists should work towards equal opportunities in the military is Charlotte Hooper, author of Manly States, a critique of the masculinism of international relations in practice and in theory. She considers that it is worthwhile for women to enter such masculine spaces and suggests that even the ‘marginal appearance of women…together with feminist ideas…may sufficiently alter the overall ambience of such spaces that their masculine associations
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