| Chapter 1: | Gatekeepers and Categories: Gender in Military Life |
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In order to explore the impact of a clearly delineated hierarchy on the conversational styles of military women and men, six volunteer informants audiorecorded their interactions for a duty day or part of it. All informants were Air Force officers: three women and three men, parallel in rank and job status.
Informing my analysis of primary-source data gleaned from members of the Air Force are the overlapping and diverging roles of women and men in the military—roles which have been well researched from historical and sociological perspectives. The social roles and historical experiences of women as minority members of the military are now widely researched and continue to be so. The field of study we call “military history” is logically and predominantly the history of males in warfare and has taught us much about war’s tactics and motivations. However, what happens when we closely examine the roles of men and women, and masculine and feminine, in today’s military members’ interactions? Unlike observers who pretend to understand women and men in the military, I am simply observing that which most defines identity, institutional or otherwise: expression of that identity in interaction with others.
The American Military as a Context for Linguistic Study
The American military is an institution as old as the United States itself. The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps officially date to 1775. The military is notable not just for its long history, but also for the number of people impacted by military service. According to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the 2000 census indicates that there are well over 26 million veterans living in the United States and Puerto Rico. That number will, of course, increase by well over one million by the time the United States has largely withdrawn from Iraq. Today, more than 1.3 million people serve on active duty, and the total expense to the nation’s budget is approaching 400 billion dollars per year, irrespective of the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.