Language and Gender in the Military: Honorifics, Narrative, and I ...

The very notion of gender is subject to much debate. On a day-to-day basis, those who fill out various forms or respond to an online survey may be asked to specify whether their “gender” is female or male. However, I take the feminine and the masculine to anchor two ends of a continuum which renders gender as a social construct. One might be male, but not masculine; female, but not feminine. The gender identities of most lie somewhere between the ends of that continuum and at different points on the continuum at different times. Judith Butler argues that gender is portrayed in “three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance” (175). Clearly, social constructions of masculinity and femininity are key in the sanctioned and well-respected sociocultural institution of the American military, where masculine gender performance is veritably an institutional trait. I would even argue that one cannot overestimate the importance of the U.S. military in interdiscursively creating and sustaining American notions of masculinity. Butler asks whether it is possible to “identify a monolithic as well as a monologic economy that traverses the array of cultural and historical contexts in which sexual difference takes place” (18). I offer that the U.S. military is indeed a monolith in American constructions of sexual difference. Some might argue that professional male sports are such a monolith; however, unlike the most masculine of professional sports, the military is generally not tainted by drugs, monetary influence, or undisciplined and excessive behavior.

The military’s conspicuously masculine environment makes it particularly interesting for linguistic study. Walter Ong succinctly states that “[a] man must be willing to die for his country or for other causes. Of course, so must a woman, but somehow there is less point in a woman’s being willing to do so” (99). Interestingly, we can read this observation that a “man” must be willing to die for his country as critical to the performance of “manhood,” or as a requirement for a person with a male-sexed corporeality. Either way, Ong’s observation is but one clue that the military is arguably synonymous with the definitive traits characteristic of masculine identity and, in the case of defending a nation, citizenship.