Schooling Bodies for War: An Ethnography of the Making of Military Men

• In Event: Against Inclusion: Resisting School Militarization in the Name of Gender Justice

Abstract

“I love men with guns,” top-level NSA agent Ms. Day announced. “I mean, there’s just something about a man with a gun.” Ms. Day’s declaration reverberated through the auditorium of Milton High School, a public school with its own specialized Homeland Security program aimed at training its poor and working class youth of color for low-level, low-wage work in the national security industry. Throughout her talk, Ms. Day celebrated the ideal heteronormative masculinized soldier and called upon Milton students to perform such glorified masculinities as “military grunts” and national security workers willing to “stand in front of the threat” and “save lives.”

Through an ethnographic investigation of Milton during the 2012-2013 school year, I attend to the scale of everyday life to craft an embodied understanding of school militarization in the context of the global war on terror. In “constructing knowledge that theorizes from bodies” and privileging the “material ways in which bodies are constituted, experienced, and represented,” I offer a mediation on the production and regulation of gender and its embodiment in the name of national security (Moss & Dyck, 2003, p. 60). This analysis, thus, explores the making of national security gender norms through school bodies.

Through an ethnographic exploration of Milton, this paper focuses on two main findings: First, I sketch how the Homeland Security program encouraged Milton boys--most of whom were Black--to perform hypersexual, virile, and aggressive masculinities. These masculinities map onto dominant, racist tropes of the Black male body as inherently violent and hypersexual. While the police pursue Black men and boys, the military re-valorizes these de-valorized racialized masculinities, inciting men of color to enlist. I examine how Milton enacted these contradictory social processes through which Black boys came to constitute both national security threats and national security solutions.

Second, I explore how female-identified students seeking their inclusion in school space also performed these militarized masculinities. I investigate how girls participated in the same glorified culture of violence as the boys in order to gain access to the glorified military culture and resist markings as “thirsty” or “ratchet.” Drawing from everyday life at the school, I examine how girls negotiated the sexualization, erasure, and demonization of their bodies by Milton boys by performing these militarized masculinities. The girls’ presence and strategic performances carved out spaces for their inclusion in a deeply hetero-patriarchal national security culture, a process the contributed to and intensified the masculinist culture of violence celebrated at the school.

These corporeal tactics demand new scalar narratives: Critical education scholars must shift their scale of analysis from coarser scales (global, national, neighborhood, school) to the finer scale of the body to examine the “processes relationships, and experiences otherwise obscured” (Mountz, 2004, p. 325). Milton’s story illustrates the imperative for critical education scholars to shift their scale of analysis to the body in order to analyze how the gender norms imposed by the global war on terror reconfigure public schools and how public schools actively contribute to this (re)making of militarized masculinities.

Author

• Nicole Nguyen, University of Illinois at Chicago