Leo Braudy is the Bing Professor of English and University Professor
at the University of Southern California.
Braudy stresses the historical and cultural components of masculinity
in relation to war and notes how these change over the centuries in relation to such factors
as the social structure of society, the nature of political power, the available modes of
technology, and the idea of the state.
He argues that an important shift in the relationship of war and
gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a retribalizing of the entire male
community and a return to the warrior sensibility and the gender polarization on which it
depends. Today military personnel are citizens of a nation rather than subjects of a ruler
and are recruited and inspired by the idea of the nation or the state to which they owe a
sacred allegiance. In turn, national identities emerge out of myths, traditions, and
beliefs. They are also created by identifying what the nation is explicitly not - for
instance, highlighting differences of race, gender, ethnicity, or cultural norms that
readily transforms into an "us versus them" view so useful in warfare.
In the twenty-first century, Braudy notes that these easy polarities
are breaking down and asks, "Does the female or the homosexual soldier undermine the
traditional military need to see the enemy as feminine? It is a question that has
preoccupied democratic armies in the past in the shape of the Jew, the African American, or
any other group that had previously been seen as marginal or subordinate to the so-called
real men of mainstream society."
Braudy concludes that all polarities can be remapped as
masculine/feminine, especially the "us versus them" of warfare. When such polarities
collide, they may cause entrenched aspects of the old war gender system to break
down.
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