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

The restrictions upon women’s participation in the military are consistent with gender theorists’ observation that formation of masculine identity requires distance from, or renunciation of, the feminine (Kimmel; McGuffey and Rich); or, as Walter Ong relates, to prove his physical and psychological masculinity, a male must, in effect, prove he is not female. In the case of combat roles, women remain, by men’s decree, distanced from that which is most masculine: hand-to-hand combat. As Goffman (“The Arrangement Between the Sexes”) states, “A considerable amount of what persons who are men do in affirmation of their sense of identity requires their doing something that can be seen as what a woman by her nature could not do, or at least could not do well” (326). This notion that men must be able to do something that women cannot do is, I believe, at the heart of the resistance to women’s participation in the military, and especially women’s participation in “combat” roles. Brian Mitchell, former Army officer and author of Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, for example, argues that women are only needed in the military medical professions, and that women’s presence in the military will create a military which is no more threatening than the United States Postal Service. Such beliefs are important and problematic underpinnings to intersections of the military, language, and gender. If the military is definitively masculine, and masculinity requires denigration or exclusion of the feminine, then military identity requires exclusion of the feminine. This leaves military women in a potentially paradoxical, or at least ambiguous, sphere of identity.

This ambiguity in military identity may extend as well to homosexual men in the military who, like women, are subject to a policy which, in practice, denies full membership in the military as an institution. Kimmel notes the tie of renunciation of the feminine to homophobia, also a requisite for masculine construction. In the military, in which the feminine is renounced in the form of various restrictions, and in which some may argue that the feminine is masculinized via wearing of “unisex” (meaning male-like) uniforms, the feminine is also renounced in the institution’s compulsory heterosexuality.