Abstract
Departing from the understanding that masculinity is both ubiquitous and resolute in the military, Aaron Belkin’s Bring Me Men offers a timely and necessary rejoinder. Challenging popular wisdom, Belkin suggests that masculinity in the American military has seldom existed as a fixed, exclusive category. Rather, military institutions have, in a variety of circumstances, incorporated the feminine and the queer into the practice of masculine identity.
In suggesting that military masculinity emerges through the fusion of binary identities, Belkin offers up a provocative thesis. The book’s enduring contribution will likely be the cases deployed to support this argument—as a catalogue of organizational depravity, this book is perhaps without equal. It analyzes systematic hazing of cadets in the nation’s military academies, the enduring and widespread occurrence of rape across military branches, the bizarre “crossing the line” equatorial ceremony practiced aboard US Navy ships, and the well-documented instances of torture and sadism carried out by US soldiers at prisons in Iraq. Belkin also emphasizes the contradictions bundled together in each of these cases. In instances of hazing and rites of passage, he argues that the many ways in which initiates are penetrated— literally and figuratively—empower the initiators and contribute to the reproduction of rank and hierarchy. The perpetrator in such rituals garners masculine status through dominance. In these initial passages, Belkin illustrates the ways in which masculinity and hierarchy are co-constitutive. Through these and other instances, Belkin illustrates the ways in which military masculinity emerges from the fusion of supposedly opposed binaries. Military masculinity does not merely oppose figurations of femininity or queerness but absorbs and uses them to perpetuate the masculine ideal.
These diverse cases are all explored in the book’s first half, the stronger and more intriguing portion of the text. The second half of the text explores US military involvement in the Philippines at the turn of the last century. Focusing on the categories of cleanliness and filth, Belkin attempts to illustrate the ways in which these contradictory categories are joined together in practice to form a component of masculinity. The strength of the book’s first section is its focus on how contradictory practices can conform to the same logic of masculinity. However, the contradiction in the “Filthy” chapter seems to be one of rhetoric and practice—while the military apparatus claimed to be a purveyor of cleanliness, in practice it was the opposite. This conclusion is less incisive than the first and contributes less to the book’s thesis. The book’s first half is largely devoted to investigating the contradictions of American military masculinity, and studying socialization in military academies is well suited to the task. However, the goal of the book’s second half is to bind these same contradictions to American imperialism. It is difficult for a reader to follow the necessary inference that a single case study, even if probative, succeeds in making that theoretical connection.
It is worthwhile to consider the text’s contribution to the literature as a whole. For his part, Belkin positions the text as divergent from traditional studies of masculinity generally and military masculinity more specifically. The degree to which Belkin’s contribution departs from extant literature is however debatable. Belkin’s method, elucidating the contradictions embodied in supposedly stable identities, has a long history in gender studies. The discipline of masculinity studies has often been sensitive to this tradition, making concerted efforts to reveal the fissures beneath the veneer of monolithic masculinity. Indeed, previous studies have undermined the mythical qualities of military masculinity through a variety of methodologies, illustrating the existing literature on masculinity is less uniform than Belkin’s review of the material suggests. 1 But this is by no means a disparagement of the text’s many contributions. Scholars of masculinity, gender studies, and the history of the American military will find the text engaging and the empirical work of profound interest and significance.