Combat as a moving target: masculinities, the heroic soldier myth, and normative martial violence
Combat as a moving target: masculinities, the heroic soldier myth, and normative martial violence
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作为移动目标的战斗：男子气概、英雄士兵神话和规范的军事暴力
DOI：
10.1080/23337486.2017.1302556
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Joanna Tidy
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
K. Millar;Joanna Tidy
摘要本文对男性气概、军队和战争的批判性学术中“战斗”的概念和使用提出了质疑。首先，我们追溯了战斗是如何在传统的战争研究学术中作为一个经验范畴出现的，描述了一种表面上不言而喻的物理实践。然后，我们研究女权主义和性别方法--相比之下--是如何将“战斗”揭示为对军事暴力的规范想象。这种对暴力的想象是通过英雄战士神话构建男性理想和军事力量正常化的关键。然而，我们认为，尽管有这种批判性的冲动，但许多女权主义和性别分析显示出概念上的“滑落”：在男子汉气概理论中，战斗仍然经常被视为一个“常识”的经验范畴--一个“是”的东西。这种将性别想象视为经验论的做法引入了一套规范性投资，这些投资限制了英雄士兵神话及其所从事的政治工作被解构的程度。因此，虽然我们知道男子气概是如何与“战斗”相关的，但我们缺乏对男子气概如何构成战斗的必然理解，以及由此产生的想象力如何维持军事权威和更广泛的社会对战争的接受。我们认为，解开这些动态并填补这一漏洞，是阐明有意义的“关键”性别和军事研究的关键。
ABSTRACT This article problematizes the conceptualization and use of ‘combat’ within critical scholarship on masculinities, militaries, and war. We trace, firstly, how combat appears as an empirical category within traditional war studies scholarship, describing an ostensibly self-evident physical practice. We then examine how feminist and gender approaches – in contrast – reveal ‘combat’ as a normative imagination of martial violence. This imagination of violence is key to the constitution of the masculine ideal, and normalization of military force, through the heroic soldier myth. We argue, however, that despite this critical impulse, much of feminist and gender analysis exhibits conceptual ‘slippage’: combat is still often treated as a ‘common-sense’ empirical category – a thing that ‘is’ – in masculinities theorizing. This treatment of gendered-imaginary-as-empirics imports a set of normative investments that limit the extent to which the heroic soldier myth, and the political work that it undertakes, can be deconstructed. As a consequence, whilst we know how masculinities are constituted in relation to ‘combat’, we lack the corollary understanding of how masculinities constitute combat, and how the resulting imagination sustains military authority and the broader social acceptance of war. We argue that unpacking these dynamics and addressing this lacuna is key to the articulation of a meaningfully ‘critical’ gender and military studies.