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

Perhaps foremost in this line of reasoning is the notion that the military exists to fight national enemies and that, as Ong stipulates, not only must a man be willing to die in combat with his enemies, but a man’s death in such circumstances is also more to the “point”—the “point” being, seemingly, masculine performance. This is consistent with researchers’ (Goffman, “The Arrangement Between the Sexes”; Kimmel; Connell) observations that a key aspect of masculine identity is the ritual willingness to fight or use violence, even though many men never actually engage in, nor intend to engage in, combat.

Many researchers (Goffman, “The Arrangement Between the Sexes”; Ong; Howard and Alamilla; McGuffey and Rich) have noted the role of fighting or contest in the development of men’s gender identity, starting from boyhood. Sociologist and gender scholar R. W. Connell devotes a lengthy discussion to the historic role of armies and related bureaucratized institutionalizations of violence and the establishment of modern masculinity. Goffman argues that not only are women not trained in fighting, but they are also encouraged to passively avoid fights, thus furthering the argument that any institution devoted to fighting, like the military, is masculine, or at least not feminine. This cultural desire for women to be passive is, I believe, a key and disguised element in the debate regarding the extent of women’s roles in military service. Even while many try to argue that physiological limitations present a basis for restrictions upon women’s military service, women face a paradox whereby they may very well be the first victims of hostility, as we saw in the devastation of 9/11, but should not generally be trained to fire back or defend themselves through violent means, all in the name of preserving some notion of femininity. A second paradox lies in the pragmatic reality that those women in the military who serve in positions in which they draw or return fire are either marked as “female soldiers,” signifying the “other” as compared to a “soldier,” or, when subsumed by the term “soldier,” become invisible because of the semiotic association between “soldier” and maleness. As Butler (Gender Trouble) postulates, “The relation between masculine and feminine cannot be represented in a signifying economy in which the masculine constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified” (15).