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

To expand on Butler’s notions of gender performance and drag culture, in theory, one might argue that military women who must sometimes wear the masculinizing work uniforms of the military, such as flight suits or the camouflage “Battle Dress Uniform,” perform a type of drag culture. Key, though, is the fact that the uniforms may be gendering, but are not necessarily a deliberate misappropriation of gender attributes. Further, cursory observation shows that women often wear men’s clothing, or clothing styled after men’s fashions, with no threat to femininity, and perhaps even broadening notions of femininity. Still, the fact that a style can be identified as a masculine one, appropriated by women, genders the style and therefore the wearer.

In the military, then, it appears that a set of masculine practices, including willingness to fight, denigration of the feminine, homosocial enactment, rites of institution, and even style of dress, have interdiscursively created an accumulated masculinity. In other words, for men in the military, much of their masculine identity is established by virtue of their membership in what is a conspicuously masculine institution. In turn, the masculinity of institutional participation provides a cover for the feminine enactments required by the institution—most notably the close relational connections that the military both expects and fosters.

This notion, that an environment as masculine as the military requires feminine enactments, may seem odd, and it is arguably difficult to measure against definition. Whereas masculinity is defined by the traits outlined previously—willingness to fight, homosocial enactment, and renunciation of the feminine—“femininity” seems less frequently defined. Much gender theory operates on a “sense” of what the feminine is, based largely upon, referring back to Goffman, the activities associated with the female sex-class, namely, relational activities involving nurture and caretaking.

This sense, that close relational connections are a feminine trait, can be argued from the perspective that available descriptions of the “feminine” distill to the importance of connection.