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

In addition, queer linguistic theory would be useful for the study of homosocial environments, with which the military is rife, despite the wide presence of women. In their recent work, scholars Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick observe that much language and gender research is based on observations of, specifically, language and sexual identity. They explore a broadening of the scope to “language and sexuality,” which “encompasses not only questions about how people enact sexuality and perform sexual identity in their talk, but also questions about how sexuality and sexual identity are represented linguistically in a variety of discourse genres” (12). Such analytic techniques deserve exploration in the military environment, given that a sexually charged environment is attendant to its hypermasculinity—some military discourse communities moreso than others. As I found in my data, Air Force pilots, for example, often employ a word game in which any word or reference with potential for sexual innuendo is marked with the phrase, “so to speak.”

An important concept in queer theory, and equally important in applying gender theory to the intersection of language and gender in the military context, is Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance (see 10–11) or “performativity.” Using as an example the performance of drag, Butler illustrates that the corporeality that observers perceive is three dimensional, being composed of anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. Butler’s concept of performativity parallels Goffman’s (“The Arrangement Between the Sexes”) concept of sex-class. Goffman asserts that behaviors we normally associate with sex (referred to as anatomical sex by Butler) are actually traits associated with the class of men or women, that is, Butler’s gender performance. Goffman regards “gender identity,” also an aspect of Butler’s three-faceted model, to be an individual’s sense of self based upon her or his own judgments in terms of ideals of masculinity or femininity. “It seems that this source of self-identification” Goffman states, “is one of the most profound our society provides, perhaps even more so than age-grade, and never is its disturbance or change to be anticipated as an easy matter” (304). A change in the American sociocultural construction of masculine identity via the removal of restrictions on women’s roles in the American military would, therefore, not be “an easy matter.”