Combat, Cohesion and Gender

女人能当步兵吗？战斗是人类活动中最极端的形式之一，在整个人类历史中，它几乎完全是男性的领域。然而，随着武装部队的专业化和最近在阿富汗行动的压力，妇女参加军队和行动已日益被接受，甚至正常化。加拿大和丹麦现在允许女性进入步兵部队，尽管英国和美国仍然禁止女性进入步兵部队，但英国和美国的女性士兵越来越多地在前线作战。这项研究解决了妇女日益积极参与战争这一重要且可能具有历史意义的问题。尽管身体上的差异并非无关紧要，但女性被排除在步兵之外通常是合理的，因为它可能会影响男性士兵之间的凝聚力。女性威胁着男性部队的战斗表现。为了审查妇女是否可以成为步兵成员，并查明可能促进或限制这种参与的文化和体制条件，本研究采用了历史和比较的观点。它调查了这样一个论点，即20世纪大规模征召军队的士兵缺乏训练，在战斗中普遍表现不佳。从第一次世界大战到越南战争，凝聚力主要是通过呼吁外来的社会价值观来鼓励的（通常不是很成功）；男子气概、种族或民族主义。应征入伍的士兵被他们的社会相似性联系在一起，就像战友一样；他们曾经。在这些团体中几乎没有女性的位置。相比之下，具有讽刺意味的是，21世纪职业军队的凝聚力基础可能更有效，也更没有人情味。职业军队现在优先考虑训练。他们通过反复灌输训练士兵们一起执行的训练来产生凝聚力和高水平的集体表现。凝聚力现在似乎主要基于实践能力而不是社会标准；技能而非社会同质性现在被认为是最重要的。这似乎产生了重要的社会学影响。至关重要的是，鉴于这种专业化，妇女在前线与步兵一起作战，在某些情况下，她们自己也担任步兵的角色，这是可以接受的。战斗士兵如何团结起来，在战斗中履行自己的角色，已经发生了根本性的转变，允许曾经被排除在前线的个人成为这些高度凝聚力群体的成员。通过对加拿大、丹麦、德国、法国、英国和美国军队的纪录片、实地调查和访谈研究，本研究旨在探索妇女参与步兵的可能性和局限性。这样看来，职业军队或许反映了更广泛的社会变化。20世纪的社会，尤其是前半世纪，在民族和种族上都是同质的，性别、民族和阶级等级都有明确的定义，而今天全球化社会的特点是，随着传统界限的侵蚀，混合性日益增强。在公民社会中，也有可能声称，新的团结形式正在出现，而不是基于人们是什么——无论他们是男人、女人、黑人、白人、同性恋还是异性恋——而是基于他们做什么；在职业、消费、休闲活动、生活方式和行动主义方面。在阿富汗南部作战的步兵的凝聚力可能是一种专业化、本地化和基于实践的团结的军事版本，这种团结越来越多地定义了今天人们的生活。本研究旨在通过对社会实践中一种虽小但却极具戏剧性的形式——战斗的考察，来探索社会存在的这些深刻变化。

Can women be infantry soldiers? Combat is one of the most extreme forms of human activities and throughout human history it has been almost exclusively a masculine domain. However, with the professionalization of the armed forces and the recent pressures of operations in Afghanistan, female participation in the army and on operations has been increasingly accepted and even normalised. Canada and Denmark now allow women in the infantry and, while the UK and US still maintain their bans on females in the infantry, female British and American soldiers have increasingly served on the front line in combat situations. This research addresses this important and potentially historic issue of the increasingly active participation of women in war.Although the physical differences are not irrelevant, women's exclusion from the infantry has typically been justified by reference to its presumed effects on cohesion among the male soldiers. Females threaten the combat performance of male troops. In order to examine whether women can be members of the infantry and to identify the cultural and institutional conditions which might facilitate or limit this participation, this research adopts a historic and comparative perspective. It investigates the thesis that soldiers in mass conscript armies of the twentieth century were poorly trained and generally performed badly in combat. From the First World War to Vietnam, cohesion was encouraged primarily (and often not very successfully) through appeals to extraneous social values; masculinity, ethnicity or nationalism. Conscript soldiers were bound together by their social likeness, as comrades; as brothers-in-arms. There was little room for women in these groups.By contrast, the basis of cohesion in the professional armies of the twenty-first century may ironically be both more effective and more impersonal. Professional armies now prioritise training. They engender cohesion and high levels of collective performance through the inculcation of drills which soldiers are trained to execute together. Cohesion seems now to be based primarily on practical competence not social criteria; skill not social homogeneity is now regarded as paramount. This seems to be having important sociological consequences. Crucially, in the light of this professionalization, it is becoming acceptable for women to operate with infantry soldiers on the front line and, in some cases, to perform as infantry soldiers themselves. There has been a fundamental shift in the way in how combat soldiers unite themselves and perform their roles in battle, allowing individuals who were once excluded from the front-line to become members of these highly cohesive groups. Through documentary, fieldwork and interview research with the armies of Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, the UK and the US, this research seeks to explore the possibilities and limits of women's participation in the infantry.In this way, the professional army perhaps reflects wider social changes. While societies in the twentieth century, especially in its first half, were ethnically and racially homogenous with clearly defined gender, ethnic and class hierarchies, globalised society today is characterised by increasing hybridity as tradionally boundaries erode. In civilian society, too, it might be possible to claim that new forms of solidarity are emerging based not on what people are - whether they are men, women, black, white, gay or straight - but on what they do; in terms of careers, consumption, leisure activity, lifestyle and activism. The cohesion of infantry soldier fighting in southern Afghanistan may be a military version of the kind of specialised, localised and practice-based solidarity which is increasingly defining the lives of people today. Through the investigation of one small but dramatic form of social practice, combat, this research aims to explore these profound changes in social existence.