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

The military, which many still describe as a business which serves to “kill people and break things,” is perfectly consonant with this trait. By contrast, the presence of the feminine is dissonant with the military’s stated goal of “fighting and winning the nation’s wars,” despite women’s growing presence in the military. It is clear, then, that women’s presence has not affected the more monolithic notion of the military as the arbiter of American masculinity—a notion which is key to the analysis of language and gender in the military.