...This article explores the intimate historical and modern connection between manhood and nationhood: through the construction of patriotic manhood and exalted motherhood as icons of nationalist ideology; through the designation of gendered ‘places’ for men and women in national politics; through the domination of masculine interests and ideology in nationalist movements; through the interplay between masculine microcultures and nationalist ideology; through sexualized militarism including the construction of simultaneously over-sexed and under-sexed enemy’ men (rapists and wimps) and promiscuous ‘enemy’ women (sluts and whores). Three ‘puzzles’ are partially solved by exposing the connection between masculinity and nationalism: why are many men so desperate to defend masculine, monoracial, and heterosexual institutional preserves, such as military organizations and academies; why do men go to war; and the ‘gender gap’, that is, why do men and women appear to have very different goals and agendas for the ‘nation?’
......In her evocative book, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, Cynthia Enloe (1990, p. 45) observes that ‘nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope’. She argues that women are relegated to minor, often symbolic, roles in nationalist movements and conflicts, either as icons of nationhood, to be
elevated and defended, or as the booty or spoils of war, to be denigrated and disgraced. In either case, the real actors are men who are defending their freedom, their honour, their homeland and their women. Enloe’s insight about the connection between manhood and nationhood raises definitional questions about each: what do we mean by ‘masculinity,’ and
what do we mean by ‘nationalism?’
...
...These organizations embodied US and European male codes of honour (Nye 1993) which stressed a number of ‘manly virtues’ described by Mosse (1996) as ‘normative masculinity’, which included willpower, honour, courage, discipline, competitiveness, quiet strength, stoicism, sang-froid, persistence, adventurousness, independence, sexual virility tempered with restraint, and dignity, and which reflected masculine ideals as liberty, equality, and fraternity (Bederman 1995; Mosse 1996). Borrowing from Rosenberg’s (1980) analysis of ‘Sexuality, Class, and Role’, Rotundo (1987) divided these characteristics among three late nineteenth-century ‘ideals of manhood’ in the middle-class northern US: the ‘Masculine Achiever’ (competitiveness, independence, persistence), the ‘Christian Gentleman’ (willpower, restraint, discipline), and the ‘Masculine Primitive’ (strength, virility, courage).
Of course, the value of and adherence to these normative manly traits vary by time and place. While the writers cited above were describing late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century United States and Europe, there are other scholarly efforts to define masculinity in more universal terms. Gilmore’s research on cross-cultural conceptions of masculinity, Manhood in the Making (1990) shows that there is no universal standard of masculinity. None the less Gilmore argues that although there may be no “Universal Male”, we may perhaps speak of a “Ubiquitous Male” based on these criteria of performance: . . . to be a man . . . one must impregnate women, protect dependents [sic] from danger, and provision kith and kin . . . We might call this quasi-global personage something like “Man-the-Impregnator-Protector-Provider”
Such catalogues of masculine ideals as the historical and cross-cultural undertakings listed above are examples of what Robert Connell (1995, p. 68) calls ‘essentialist’ definitions of masculinity: ‘definitions [that] pick a feature that defines the core of the masculine’. The weakness of the essentialist approach is its arbitrariness and easy falsifiability. Connell (1995, pp. 68–71) catalogues three other definitional strategies besides essentialist: positivist, normative, semiotic. Positivist definitions of masculinity are descriptions of men in a particular place at a particular time: ethnographies of manhood. They are limited by a lack of generalizability, inevitable researcher bias, and tautology. Men are what men do, thus it is impossible for men to behave in feminine ways or for women to behave in masculine ways (Connell 1995, p. 69). Normative definitions of masculinity emphasize manly ideals, ‘blueprints’, or sex role stereotypes. They are limited by their cultural, historical and value assumptions, and by their emphasis on ideal types which exclude many men, that is, many (most) men do not behave according to a ‘John Wayne’ model of manhood (Connell 1995, p. 70). And finally, semiotic definitions of masculinity contrast masculine and feminine and deduce from the difference the meaning of masculinity (and femininity):
‘The phallus is mastersignifier, and femininity is symbolically designed by lack’...Nationalist politics is a major venue for ‘accomplishing’ masculinity (Connell 1987) for several reasons. First, as noted above, the national state is essentially a masculine institution. Feminist scholars point out its hierarchical authority structure, the male domination of decision-making positions, the male superordinate/female subordinate internal division of
labour, and the male legal regulation of female rights, labour and sexuality (Franzway, Court and Connell 1989; Grant and Tancred 1992; Connell 1995).
Second, the culture of nationalism is constructed to emphasize and resonate with masculine cultural themes. Terms like honour, patriotism, cowardice, bravery and duty are hard to distinguish as either nationalistic or masculinist, since they seem so thoroughly tied both to the nation and to manliness. My point here is that the ‘microculture’ of masculinity in everyday life articulates very well with the demands of nationalism, particularly its militaristic side. When, over the years I have asked my undergraduate students to write down on a piece of paper their answer to the question: ‘What is the worst name you can be called?’ the gender difference in their responses is striking. The vast majority of women respond: ‘slut’ (or its equivalent, with ‘bitch’ a rather distant second); the vaster majority of men respond: ‘wimp’ or ‘coward’ or ‘pussy’. Only cowards shirk the call to duty; real men are not cowards.
Patriotism is a siren call that few men can resist, particularly in the midst of a political ‘crisis;’ and if they do, they risk the disdain or worse of their communities and families, sometimes including their mothers. Counter to the common stereotype of mothers attempting to hold back their sons as they march off to war, Boulding (1977, p. 167) reports that many mothers of conscientious objectors during World War II opposed their sons’ pacifism.11 The disdain of men for pacifists is considerably greater, as Karlen (1971) recounts in Sexuality and Homosexuality: ‘In 1968 pacifists set up coffee houses to spread their word near military bases. A Special Force NCO said to a Newsweek reporter, “We aren’t fighting and dying so these goddam pansies can sit around drinking coffee” ’ (p. 508). Fear of accusations of cowardice is not the only magnet that pulls men towards patriotism, nationalism, or militarism. There is also the masculine allure of adventure. Men’s accountings of their enlistment in wars often describe their anticipation and excitement, their sense of embarking on a great adventure, their desire not to be ‘left behind’ or ‘left out’ of the grand quest that the war represents.
Finally, women occupy a distinct, symbolic role in nationalist culture, discourse and collective action, a role that reflects a masculinist definition of femininity and of women’s proper place in the nation. Yuval-Davis and
Anthias (1989) have identified five ways in which women have tended to participate in ethnic, national, and state processes and practices: (a) as biological producers of members of ethnic collectivities; (b) as reproducers of the [normative] boundaries of ethnic/national groups [by enacting proper feminine behaviour]; (c) as participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture; (d) as signifiers of ethnic/national differences; and (e) as participants in national, economic, political and military struggles (pp. 7–8)
......Concerns about the sexual purity and activities of women is not the only way that sexuality arises as an issue in masculinity and nationalism. Enloe (1990, p. 56) argues, ‘when a nationalist movement becomes militarized . . . male privilege in the community usually becomes more entrenched’. She is referring to the highly masculine nature of things military. The military, it turns out, is also highly sexual. I am referring here to several (masculine hetero)sexualized aspects of military institutions and activities.
First, there is the sexualized nature of warfare. Hartsock (1983, 1984) argues that all forms of political power, including military power, have an erotic component; she points particularly to a masculine eroticism embedded in notions of military strength and valour. Classical history is replete with references linking strength and valour on the battlefield with masculine sexual virility, hence Julius Caesar’s (1951) admonition to men to avoid sexual intercourse before a battle (or in more modern times before that social equivalent of war, sport) so as not to sap their strength. Mosse (1985, p. 34) discusses debates in Germany about masturbation and homosexuality as sexual practices that endangered national military
strength, and describes war as an ‘invitation to manliness’.
A second way that military institutions and actions are sexualized centres on the depiction of the ‘enemy’ in conflicts. Accounts of many wars and nationalist conflicts include portrayals of enemy men either as sexual demons, bent on raping nationalist women, or as sexual eunuchs, incapable of manly virility. Bederman’s (1995) analysis of Theodore Roosevelt’s nationalist discourse provides examples of both. In African Game Trails, Roosevelt adopts a colonialist’s superior, indulgent attitude towards African men, whom he describes as ‘strong, patient, good-humored . . . with something childlike about them that makes one really fond of them . . . Of course, like all savages and most children, they have their limits’ (Bederman 1995, p. 210). Roosevelt’s assessment of Native Americans was less patronizingly benevolent, since Indians represented a military threat to the white man whom he saw as not taking part in a war against a civilized foe; he was fighting in a contest where women and children suffered the fate of the strong men . . . His sweetheart or wife had been carried off, ravished, and was at the moment the slave and concubine of some dirty and brutal Indian warrior (Bederman 1995, p. 181).
Mosse (1985) describes portrayals of women on the battlefield as victims of sexual aggression or exploitation along the lines depicted above. He notes, however, that ‘women haunted soldiers’ dreams and fantasies’ (p. 127) in other roles as well, either as ‘objects of sexual desire or as pure, self-sacrificing Madonnas, in other words, the field prostitute or the battlefield nurse’ (p. 128). Enemy women are more uniformly characterized as sexually promiscuous and available: sluts, whores, or legitimate targets of rape. The accounts of virtually all wars contain references to and discussions of the rape, sexual enslavement, or sexual exploitation of women by not only individual or small groups of men, but by army high commands and as part of state-run national policies (see Brownmiller 1975; Enloe 1990, 1993; Sturdevan t and Stoltzfus
1992). As Theweleit (1987) summarizes: ‘Woman is an infinite untrod-den territory of desire which at every stage of historical deterritorialization, men in search of material for utopias have inundated with their desires’ (p. 294).
A third sexualized aspect of militarized conflict is the use of the masculine imagery of rape, penetration and sexual conquest to depict military weaponry and offensives. A commonly reported phrase alleged to have been written on US missiles targeted on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War was, ‘Bend over, Saddam’ (Cohn 1993, p. 236). There is a tendency in national defence discourse to personify and sexually characterize the actions of states and armies. Cohn (1993, p. 236) reports that one ‘wellknown academic security adviser was quoted as saying that “under Jimmy Carter the United States is spreading its legs for the Soviet Union” ’. She reports similar sexualized depictions by a US defence analyst of former West German politicians who were concerned about popular opposition to the deployment of nuclear Euromissiles in the 1980s: ‘Those Krauts are a bunch of limp-dicked wimps’ (Cohn 1993, p. 236). Such sexualized military discourse is very much from a heterosexual standpoint, as is clear when we consider the imagery of rape during the 1991 Gulf War: attacks that needed to be defended or retaliated against were cast as heterosexual rapes of women (‘the rape of Kuwait’); attacks that were offensive against the Iraqi enemy were phrased as homosexual rapes of men (‘bend over, Saddam’) (see also
Cohn 1987; 1990)
......What does this exploration of masculinity and nationalism tell us? For one thing, understanding the extensive nature of the link between nationalism, patriotism, militarism, imperialism and masculinity helps to make sense of some puzzling items in the news. It has always seemed a mystery to me why the men in military and para-military institutions – men concerned with manly demeanour and strength of character –often seemed so agitated and afraid of the entry, first of blacks, then (still) of women, and now of homosexuals into military institutions and organizations. This unseemly, sometimes hysterical resistance to a diversity that clearly exists outside military boundaries makes more sense when it is understood that these men are not only defending tradition but are defending a particular racial, gendered and sexual conception of self: a white, male, heterosexual notion of masculine identity loaded with all the burdens and privileges that go along with hegemonic masculinity. Understanding that their reactions reflect not only a defence of male privilege, but also a defence of male culture and identity, makes clearer that there are fundamental issues at stake here for men who are committed to these masculinist and nationalist institutions and lifeways
...itan ena sxetika ektenes digest, perissotero san eye-candy
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