Sister Citizen Soldier: Toward a Feminist Ideal of Military Professionalism

• In Event: Gendered Public Policy and Attitudes

Abstract

Over the past three decades, joint insider-outsider advocacy efforts, by feminists in the US military and their civilian allies, have eliminated many of the formal barriers to equal service for cisgender women. Scholars and servicewomen generally agree that the most significant remaining obstacles are the sexist ideologies and misogynistic practices endemic in military organizational cultures, and that policy changes alone cannot reform culture. How, then, can these cultural problems be resolved? And more broadly, how can minoritized activists reform the internal cultures of state institutions? The literature to date has painted a bleak picture in this case: feminists in the military, being few in number, physically isolated, and ideologically compromised by their complicity in militarization, lack any real capacity to effect cultural change from within. Such change must instead be instituted from the top down, something military leadership has proven unwilling or unable to do. Some scholars argue that only external actors can craft appropriate cultural reforms, while others point out that external pressure often provokes internal backlash, resulting in a hardening of the problematic cultural tendencies reformers hope to change.

In this paper, I argue that the literature has misjudged the content of contemporary military feminism and the capabilities of military feminists, who have already begun a radical transformation of their organizational cultures. Using discourse analysis of in-depth interviews and publicly-accessible online ‎‎conversations, I identify three components of a process through which military feminists are crafting an ‎‎inclusive, anti-sexist ideal of military professionalism based upon ethics of care and civic virtue: First, feminist servicewomen ‎‎typologize incidents of misogyny, creating categories of behavior. Second, they invoke a ‎‎collective identity of military womanhood and frame these types of misogynistic behavior as ‎‎attacks against servicewomen as a class. Third, they articulate counternorms that define the parameters and features of their ideal. Most importantly, proponents do not frame this ideal and the counternorms that ‎shape it as novel or aspirational, but as authentic, preexisting, and normative. In so doing, they portray military misogyny as deviant despite its ubiquity. While I do not attempt a causal argument in this paper, I offer evidence suggesting that feminist counternorms are already influencing both culture and policy through pathways that blur the insider-outsider distinction and the boundaries—both societal and intrapersonal—between soldier and citizen. I close by considering the implications of my findings for theories of feminist politics, public discourse, institutional change, and the study of culture in political science.

Author

• Layla Picard, University of Virginia