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

However, as discussed earlier, males who bond while in military service, and particularly in combat, frequently liken their connections to those of family ties. Tannen explores at length her observation that men’s conversational rituals largely focus on status, while women’s conversational rituals focus on connection (Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand; Talking from 9 to 5). Or, as indicated by Thorne, women do the work of caring in arrangements of both paid and unpaid labor, and this institutional arrangement is “sustained by various ideologies and representations of gender, such as discourses of feminine nurturance and masculine detachment and autonomy” (7). This perceived femininity of nurturance and relationship figures heavily in my assertion that the military’s institutional masculinity provides masculine camouflage for feminine enactments.

Consistent with Thorne’s observation that women do the work of caring in the world of unpaid labor, for example, the domestic sphere, researchers (Coltrane; Hochschild) have shown that conditions for more equal division of domestic labor are being achieved in some American families, indicating changes in gender distribution of household labor. However, even in such families, the researchers found that most food preparation, clothes care, and cleaning up were still done by women. Given these findings, we may label such tasks as being assigned to the sex-class of women. Interestingly, in the American military, such tasks as housekeeping and grooming are important elements of the institution. Basic military training places great emphasis on dust-free cleanliness and picture-perfect tidiness—priorities which carry over to daily life on active duty. Military “old-timers” will recall that trainees or young enlisted members were often assigned to Kitchen Patrol or “KP Duty” which often entailed cracking dozens of eggs, peeling dozens of potatoes, or cleaning dirty dishes. Yet, the presumption of masculinity in the military environment validates such housekeeping, grooming, and food preparation duties, which may otherwise, by their connection to housework, be considered womanly.

The importance of the military as a social construct of American masculinity cannot be underestimated. Various gender theorists and philosophers have delineated combativeness, or at least the willingness to fight, as a key component of masculine construction.