Masculinity, War and Violence

Ann-Dorte Christensen, Palle Rasmussen, Ann-Dorte Christensen, Palle Rasmussen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315406404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Addressing the relationship between masculinity, war, and violence, this book covers these themes broadly and across different disciplines. These analyses are located at different levels: public policies at the macro level; resistance and independence movements at the meso level; and masculine subjectivities, processes of mobilization, and radicalization at the micro level.

The ten contributions encompass four recurring themes: violent masculinities and how contemporary societies and regimes cope with traditional violent rituals and extreme violence against women; popular written and visual fiction about war and masculine rationalities; gender relations in social movements of rebellion and national transformation; and masculinity in civil society under conditions of war and post-war. Taking into account different geographical contexts, the book emphasizes the relationship between the local and the global as well as the importance of understanding gender and masculinity in their intersectional interrelations with religion, race, ethnicity, class, and locality. This book was originally published as a special issue of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies.

War, violence and masculinities: introduction and perspectives

Ann-Dorte Christensen^a and Palle Rasmussen^b

^aDepartment of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark; ^bDepartment of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

The evolution and social constitution of masculinities are intimately linked to violence and to warfare as an organised field of violent practices. The present issues of NORMA explore the mutual influences between violence, war and masculinities, the forms these have taken in different social and cultural contexts and the implications for masculinity research. The issues cover a range of historical and current topics, cases and analytical approaches. The contributions fall into the following four themes: violent masculine rituals and how contemporary societies cope with extreme violence against women; popular written and visual fiction about war and masculine rationalities; gender relations in social movements of rebellions and national transformation and finally masculinity in civil society under conditions of war. In this introductory article we present the four themes and contextualise and summarise the contributions. In conclusion we discuss perspectives and challenges for the study of violence, war and masculinities.

The social constitution and historical development of masculinity are closely linked to violent practices in human relations and to the ‘civilising’ regulation of such practices. Warfare constitutes an important arena for organised violence and as a type of practice almost exclusively undertaken by men it has contributed significantly to the shaping of masculinities embodied with the soldier as the main representation. This means that warfare and military institutions have been important in the making of masculinities and in many contexts militarised masculinity has been a crucial element in hegemonic forms of masculinity (Barrett, 2001; Hutchings, 2008; Kronsell, 2012; Morgan, 1994; Tallberg et al., 2008; Woodward & Jenkings, 2011).

At the same time war and military are basically characterised by gendered constructions which have been closely linked to nationalist military myths. These are based on essentialist conceptualisations of on the one hand men as aggressive and violent fighting for the sake of women and children and on the other hand women as peaceful anti-violent mothers (Encloe, 1980; Yuval-Davis, 1997). Even if these traditional constructions have been challenged in recent decades they are still alive and often emerging new forms, for instance in arguments for Western military intervention (Messerschmidt, 2010) as well as in the situation of women going into the army and returning from military service (Alexiyevich, 1988).

These special issues address the relationship between masculinity, war and violence. The contributions cover the theme broadly and discuss gendered violence, military and war in practice and in popular culture, resistance to war and the impact of war in civil society. In this introductory article we contextualise and summarise the contributions and discuss their significance for masculinity studies.

The interrelations between war, violence and masculinity may be studied at different levels. At the macro-level we find phenomena such as public policies, debates and ideologies on war and terrorism, which may directly or indirectly reflect gendered discourses and specific notions of masculinity. Macro-level issues also include perceptions of national identity and questions of (re)making nations and national borders. Important elements at the meso-level are military organizations, peace and resistance and independence movements as well as collective narratives and memories of war, violence and resistance. At this level we also find the media and their narratives and images of violence and war. The micro-level includes masculine subjectivities, processes of mobilization and radicalization as well as masculine positions and stereotypes such as warriors, heroes, victims, veterans and war criminals.

It is important to emphasise that while this distinction between levels is a practical way of structuring investigation and analysis, social reality generally involves phenomena and processes that cut across the levels. For instance national liberation movements arise out of social structures and conflicts at the macro-level, they involve processes of cognition and identity at the micro-level as well as formation of organisations at the meso-level and they lead to – or do not lead to – new social and political structures at the macro-level.

To understand the interaction between elements at different levels, a historical perspective is also important. Structures, institutions, networks and identities are established and changed through complex historical processes, where new developments occur within a range of possibilities determined by previous developments (Archer, 1995; Hobsbawm, 1998). For instance, the radicalisation of boxing champion Mohammed Ali took place in a complex field including elements like the predominantly white tradition of the sport, the economic interests and public attention linked to it, the growing opposition to American involvement in Vietnam and the emergence of black Muslim radicalism. But these elements did not determine Ali’s radicalisation; there were other possible outcomes.

This introductory presentation is structured around the four themes of (a) violent masculinities and how contemporary societies and regimes cope with traditional violent rituals and extreme violence against women; (b) popular written and visual fiction about war and masculine rationalities; (c) gender relations in social movements of rebellions and national transformation and (d) masculinity in civil society under conditions of war. Finally, the significance and further perspectives and challenges for the study of masculinity, war and violence are discussed.

Violent masculinities

Acts of physical violence have been, and in some contexts still are, integral to masculine dominance in society. But in contemporary societies violence is generally regulated and restricted by public authorities and legislation and most communities also try informally to limit violence. As a consequence, the significance of violence for men’s power today rests on the potential of violence, realised through unspoken threats or through symbolic acts.

This is analysed in the article ‘Violent potentials: Exploring the intersection of violence and masculinity among the Bugkalot’ by Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen and Thomas Friis Søgaard. They draw on a case study of a community that may seem not so modern, the Philippine people known as the Bugkalot, where headhunting was practiced as an initiation ritual among men until the late 1970s. It should be noted that the role of violence in such male initiation rituals is well known from other contexts, for instance among street gangs (Vigil, 1996). Today, the headhunting practice has ceased among the Bugkalot, but cultural performances drawing on the headhunting tradition still exist, for instance in certain forms of aggressive male dance. Mikkelsen and Søgaard emphasise the ambiguity of masculinity among the Bugkalot; the community is traditionally characterised by a high degree of equality and men generally take care to be respectful in social relations. Earlier, men who had performed beheading did not brag about this and their status in the community did not seem to change. In the accounts of older Bugkalot men the beheading was presented not as revenge not as showing off to other men or to women but rather as a personal fulfilment, which could occur without disrupting the civil norms of everyday life. However, the violence was still present and constitutive for masculinity, not as explicit dominance but as the potential of using violence. The performances of contemporary young Bugkalot men express the same potentiality in the attempt to construct masculinity.

Mikkelsen and Søgaard argue that this construction of masculinity, where the potentiality of violence exists alongside everyday social relations characterized by equality and mutual respect, is actually widespread in modern societies. This is not least the case among western middle-class men, living in a culture where violence is generally condemned but where traditional notions of masculinity continue to be very much present, for instance in the popular media. In this ambiguous situation the potentiality of violence may still be an important element in the construction of masculine identity, even though this element is not unfolded in the public arena.

The necessity of public regulation and intervention against male violence towards women continues to be demonstrated. In recent years, sexual violence, rape and murder against women in India have sparked worldwide attention and provoked a strong national political reaction. But as to the role of men and masculinity, the measures taken are still ambiguous. This is discussed in Shannon Phillip’s article ‘Making Men and Masculinity Visible – A macro level enquiry into conceptualizations of gender and violence in Indian policies’. The analysis is motivated not least by the crucial silence about gendered violence and women’s sexualities which has followed some of the tragic incidents. Even if the dominant political response to the violence has been initiatives to empower women and improve the judicial and legal procedures, the results have been very limited because rape and male violence against women have not been included in the political processes of policy formation. The article is based on a discourse analysis of two key government policy documents shaping gender policy in India and shows that masculinities have passed as the unmarked gender and been invisible as a part of the gender politics of India. One of the reasons is that knowledge about gender stems from a deeply embedded masculinity discourse based on an economic logic and a hierarchy of knowledge which means that the Indian policy processes are framed by compartmentalised idea where masculinities remain invisible in gender politics. ‘Gender’ is marked as women’s issues. The main message is that making the role of men and masculinities visible in politics as well as in public debates and discourses is a crucial step towards dealing with men’s violence against women. In fact this message can be generalised beyond the issue of sexual violence; in many contexts men’s power is partly based on or upheld by its norms and practices not being seen as male but as generally human. Confronting this is precisely one of the aims of masculinity studies.

War, masculine rationalities and popular narratives

War is institutionalised, regulated violence undertaken by nations or by organised groups within or across nations. In the famous words of Carl von Clausewitz (1997), war is the continuation of policy by other means; it is a way of pursuing the interest of the nations and the organised groups in conflict with other interests. While states regulate and limit the use of violence among citizens, they also monopolise violence for certain purposes, not least the conduct of war. The military, with its personnel, organisation and technologies, is an instrument established for this purpose. Violence in war thus serves higher purposes like the realisation of national geopolitical claims, protection of society against aggression or overthrowing of despotic regimes. But it also mobilises the aggressive and destructive drives of warriors, and this is not easily controlled by the discipline of the military organisation. The result has often been violence far beyond the official purposes of warfare.

War has historically almost exclusively been undertaken by men, and still is. Because of this, both military violence and the principles of military organisation and discipline are strongly linked to masculinity. In many historical and contemporary contexts militarised masculinities have achieved or strongly contributed to political dominance. There are obvious historical examples like Fascist Italy, but militarised masculinities are also in the United States for political influence. For instance, being a war hero has been a strong asset for persons seeking nomination for president (Ducat, 2004; Messerschmidt, 2010)

Because the military profession has been almost exclusively male, military thought on the qualities demanded of soldiers has conceptualised these qualities as masculine. The history of military though from the earliest Chinese and European writings on warfare offers many examples of this (Van Creveld, 2005). Military theorists have often focused on two types of masculine qualities necessary for soldiers. One type is a calculating and informed rationality, making the soldier able to assess a situation and choose appropriate actions. The other is the physical and mental ability to endure and fight in direct confrontation with violent opponents. An example of the focus on calculating military masculinity is Antoine Jomini, a French soldier writing early in the nineteenth century whose writings on military strategy were widely read and used in the following decades, also outside Europe (see for instance Readon, 2012). Jomini was one of the first to place strategy at the core of military theory. He envisioned warfare as armed forces moving against each other in the two-dimensional space of landscape resources or obstructions such as rivers, roads, mountains and fortified positions, and he developed concepts and principles for an army to use this theatre of operations in the most rational and efficient way. For Jomini soldiers with stamina and discipline were important, but the outcome of battle was decided by rational strategic decisions. A contrasting example of focus on masculine qualities to be mobilized in direct battle is Ardant du Picq, a French officer writing in the 1860s. To him the key to military victory was not strategic principles but the ability of the individual soldier to endure and perform under the intense and violent conditions of battle as well as the mutual solidarity among men who knew and trusted each other from training together and acting together in the battlefield.

Different types of masculine military rationalities are also taken up in the two articles that analyse and discuss how war and military masculinities are presented in popular written and visual fiction.

In the article ‘Sounds of the Cold War: Gendered Submarine Narratives’ Irina Novikova investigates the complex forms of masculinity portrayed in American and Soviet novels and films about submarines during the Cold War. In contrast to the visible, violent and bloody dramas of the Second World War, the Cold War was a period of little open war but massive accumulation of destructive resources and constant fear of mutual destruction. Submarines gradually came to play a special role in this balance of terror because they could carry nuclear missiles close to enemy borders without immediately being detected. This sparked popular imagination, and especially American, but also Soviet novels and films took up the theme. Novikova analyses how the masculinity of submariners is constructed in these narratives, focusing on the intersection of two dimensions. The first dimension concerns differences in masculinity between traditional warriors and modern submariners. Traditionally, war narratives in popular culture have emphasised masculinity as unfolding of bodily strength and aggressive determination, shown in sceneries of violent destruction. But submarine warfare and the need to keep the war cold call for different forms of masculinity, where level-headed warriors practice restraint and patience in handling their advanced technology below the surface of the sea. The violent sceneries and blasts of battles are replaced by the underwater silence where the opposing sides listen for the sounds of the others. Submarine narratives thus integrated in the warrior identity some qualities traditionally perceived as feminine.

The second dimension of the analysis concerns differences between Western and Soviet constructions of submarine warfare and masculinity. In American novels and films submarine action during the cold war is often linked to visions of catastrophic escalation of the hide-and-seek undersea games, while this perspective is mostly absent in the Soviet narratives. The traumatic experience of the Second World War on Soviet soil is seen as the main reason that the entertainment industry avoided this perspective. There are also important East–West differences in the portrayal of submarine masculinity. The American narratives emphasise the fragility of the submarine environment but also its character of a home with everyday life and domestic activities for the men. This is another element of feminine qualities integrated in the warrior identity. In the Soviet accounts the feminine qualities are not present in the submarine environment, but are represented by the wives an...