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

We have learned the hard way that in a war on terror, our best weapons are our brainpower and claims of the advantages of Western civilization. Such claims, however, fall on deaf ears when a benevolent liberator becomes an occupier and when we declare that we have freed the Iraqis from the persecution of a dictator at the same moment that the images of abuses at Abu Ghraib are iconically broadcast to Arab audiences. Such claims ring hollow if national leaders consider suspending the protections of the constitution in the name of defending the constitution.

With this book I do not claim to be able to solve the U.S. military’s strategic or personnel dilemmas, except to ask readers to consider the contributions that linguistics in general, and discourse analysis in particular, can make to the understanding of the military as a social and intercultural institution. This is, more particularly, an insight into the place where language, gender, and the modern American military intersect. By taking a microview, I hope to motivate readers to reconsider their perceptions of daily interactions between and among military members, as well as the very notion of what it is to be “masculine” or “feminine.” The differentiation between the masculine and the feminine is difficult in that military policy restricts women’s participation based upon a dualistic notion of male and female, while relying upon socially constructed norms ranging along a continuum, if you will, from feminine to masculine, to help determine which jobs women may not perform, regardless of their ability to perform them. The most masculine endeavors supposedly involve close proximity to hostile fire and the ability to return fire. The fascinating reality is that those subjective notions of masculinity and femininity in turn dictate a policy which discriminates according to biological sex rather than ability, the realities of military conflict, or military necessity.

Still, this book offers but a glimpse into one military branch, the Air Force, using recorded interactions as primary-source data. As an Air Force officer of twenty-four years and an observer with a fascination for the workings of language, I speculated that the military’s system of ranks and hierarchy would help level, or at least diminish, the subjectivity of socially constructed dynamics of power. With at least a partial mitigation of the problem of socially constructed power dynamics, I hoped to discover a new perspective regarding the complex nature of the interplay between gender and language use.