The problem of the queer protectors: (RE)articulating the rhetorical figure of the soldier in Military membership controversies

This dissertation examines processes of public deliberation over military membership policies and shifts in the regulatory exclusions of queer servicemembers. Specifically, it focuses on rhetorical deployments of the soldier as a rhetorical figure whose symbolic force (re)articulates militarism and gender as it invokes particular ideological discourses, myths, and tropes and investigates how these figurations circulated and animated certain gendered and militarized beliefs, values, norms, etc. with which publics might render judgment. The inclusion of a range of policy debates oriented this investigation toward strategic (re)articulations of the gendered relationships between militarism and the figure of the soldier within and across deliberations over four military membership controversies: Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal, women's exclusion from direct ground combat, the gender-based Selective Service registration requirement, and restrictions on transgender military service/members. This dissertation adopts a critical gender approach to analyze rhetorical practices and figures operating in controversies. It positions disagreement involving questions of fit or coherence between policy goals and populations as an iterative process of collective imagining that conditions how figures (of the soldier) appear and/or are (re)presented as they circulate among publics. Based on the analysis, this dissertation concludes that protector/protected logics, in particular, as well as other central nationalistic and patriarchal cultural myths that iv articulate the archetypal status and figure of the soldier, manifested militarized and gendered indices of power that created, expanded, and constrained queer soldiers' access to rhetorics of dis/incorporation as discursive publics attended to and deliberated their collective image(s). Strategic figurations of soldiers thus structured negotiations over and informed bases for judgments regarding the (de)regulation of particular military populations and what counts as legitimate conditions of vulnerability and forms of sacrifice relative to performances of the (queer) soldier-protector.

THE PROBLEM OF THE QUEER PROTECTORS: (RE)ARTICULATING THE RHETORICAL FIGURE OF THE SOLDIER IN MILITARY MEMBERSHIP CONTROVERSIES by Maurianna Shelbourn A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah August 2019 Copyright © Maurianna Shelbourn 2019 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Maurianna Shelbourn has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Michael K. Middleton , Chair 5/1/2019 Robin E. Jensen , Member 5/1/2019 Sean T. Lawson , Member 5/1/2019 Matthew L. Basso , Member 5/1/2019 Leonard C. Hawes , Member and by Danielle Endres the Department of and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. Date Approved Date Approved Date Approved Date Approved Date Approved , Chair Communication ABSTRACT This dissertation examines processes of public deliberation over military membership policies and shifts in the regulatory exclusions of queer servicemembers. Specifically, it focuses on rhetorical deployments of the soldier as a rhetorical figure whose symbolic force (re)articulates militarism and gender as it invokes particular ideological discourses, myths, and tropes and investigates how these figurations circulated and animated certain gendered and militarized beliefs, values, norms, etc. with which publics might render judgment. The inclusion of a range of policy debates oriented this investigation toward strategic (re)articulations of the gendered relationships between militarism and the figure of the soldier within and across deliberations over four military membership controversies: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, women’s exclusion from direct ground combat, the gender-based Selective Service registration requirement, and restrictions on transgender military service/members. This dissertation adopts a critical gender approach to analyze rhetorical practices and figures operating in controversies. It positions disagreement involving questions of fit or coherence between policy goals and populations as an iterative process of collective imagining that conditions how figures (of the soldier) appear and/or are (re)presented as they circulate among publics. Based on the analysis, this dissertation concludes that protector/protected logics, in particular, as well as other central nationalistic and patriarchal cultural myths that articulate the archetypal status and figure of the soldier, manifested militarized and gendered indices of power that created, expanded, and constrained queer soldiers’ access to rhetorics of dis/incorporation as discursive publics attended to and deliberated their collective image(s). Strategic figurations of soldiers thus structured negotiations over and informed bases for judgments regarding the (de)regulation of particular military populations and what counts as legitimate conditions of vulnerability and forms of sacrifice relative to performances of the (queer) soldier-protector. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................. vii Chapters ONE: “A FEW GOOD MEN”: MILITARISM, GENDER, AND THE RHETORICAL FIGURATION OF THE SOLDIER ................................................................................... 1 Militarism........................................................................................................................ 4 Militarizing Gender....................................................................................................... 15 Service Membership Shifts and Combat-ing Gender Anxieties ................................... 29 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 36 TWO: CRITIQUING CONTROVERSY: GENDER PERFORMATIVITY, STYLE, AND RHETORICS OF PUBLIC POLICY...................................................................... 39 A Rhetorical Perspective of Controversy ..................................................................... 40 Gender Performativity .................................................................................................. 43 Rhetorical Stylings and/of Gender (In)congruity ......................................................... 50 Rhetoric and Public Policy ........................................................................................... 57 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 66 THREE: “ASK NOT…”: INAUGURATING AN ERA OF OPEN SERVICE............... 67 Serving Up Protector/Protected Logics ........................................................................ 72 Picking Up the Soap: Eluding Position as Internal Threat ........................................... 82 “Thanks Obama”: The President and Lawmakers as Failed/Failing Protectors ........... 93 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 102 FOUR: COMBAT(ING) PROTECTION RACKETS AND DEFENDING COMBAT’S FRATERNAL/MATERNAL CONTRACT(IONS) ....................................................... 108 Les(bi)an/Female Soldiers’ Invisible War Against a Protection Racket .................... 113 Servicemembers and Combating (in) Blurred (Front)lines ........................................ 122 Dis/incorporating Vulnerabilities on Gendered Battlefields....................................... 133 Maternal Wounds: Incorporating Combat’s Harms on Female Bodies...................... 140 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 145 FIVE: FICKLE UNCLE SAM: SELECTIVELY (RE)DRAFTING (TRANS)GENDERED TERMS OF SERVICE ............................................................. 149 A Less Selective Service............................................................................................. 154 Military Policy Transitions ......................................................................................... 172 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 183 SIX: CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR RHETORICS FIGURING THE SOLDIER............................................................................................................... 187 Speaking for/about Protective and Defensive Configurations.................................... 191 Rhetorical Stylization and Homological (Trans)formations....................................... 198 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 202 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 204 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am incredibly lucky to have had so much support from numerous people leading up to and throughout this endeavor. Above all I must first thank my partner, Dr. Kaitlin Bundock, whose endless solidarity, confidence, and love was paramount for my completion of this dissertation. I cannot adequately articulate how grateful I am for the (literal) reams of drafts you read, in addition to the hours you spent listening to me talk through my ideas, offering me responsive encouragement, and taking on more of the pet care and household responsibilities even when your plate was full too. To say I could not have done this without you would be a profound understatement; for all you did over the entirety of this project, and for everything else, you have my deepest admiration and love. Second, Loretta Rowley on countless occasions proved to be an absolute accountabilibuddy extraordinaire, as well as a phenomenal friend and kindred spirit. I could always count on you to generously lend me an ear when I needed a sounding board to help navigate the myriad of puzzle pieces I was working to sort, decipher, and assemble. Thank you wholeheartedly for this and for the immeasurable emotional support you provided along the way. I owe my committee chair Dr. Michael Middleton special recognition for the incomparable amount of support he offered throughout the course of my dissertation. It’s difficult for me to imagine what completing this project might have been like had I not had the fortune of working with him as an advisor. I also want to thank the members of my committee, Drs. Leonard Hawes, Robin Jensen, Sean Lawson, and Matthew Basso, for graciously giving of their time to engage with my ideas while I was developing and writing this dissertation. Their constructive guidance and astute feedback helped to bring into focus the central arguments in this research. I am incredibly thankful for the valued friendships I forged with fellow graduate students in the department. In particular, Guy McHendry, Megan O’Byrne, Carlos Tarin, Ian Summers, and Nick Paliewicz provided welcome sources of respite, laughter, and replenishment. Additionally, I have tremendous regard for Dr. Frances Harris and credit a great deal of the resilience I maintained during this process to her sage counsel, as well as the insightful perspectives of other women from the graduate student group Frances facilitates on campus. Thank you also to all the folks at Jack’s who continually cheered me on. I am especially appreciative of Kate Atkinson, as well as Jojo Hymas, Kyler Downs, and Ryan Ball for the vital support they all supplied at pivotal moments. Without fail, Brooklyn Atkinson accommodated me and affirmed my need to prioritize writing; for that I am immensely grateful. Finally, thank you to my mother, Susan Goodrich, and my father, Rev. Dr. Jimmy Shelbourn, for everything you’ve each done that led me to and enabled this journey. Thank you to my sister, Abi Shelbourn, and to Kenny Hopkinson, Grant Campbell, and Kenton Schuster for all the phone calls, check-ins, and for your relentless love and friendship. Squishy kept me company during many late nights of reading and writing over the years. I felt her absence deeply over the last weeks of working on this dissertation. viii CHAPTER ONE “A FEW GOOD MEN”: MILITARISM, GENDER, AND THE RHETORICAL FIGURATION OF THE SOLDIER In March 2017, Fresh Air with Terry Gross aired an interview with “a purple heart warrior” (Gross & Miller, 2017) who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan and in 2009 was piloting a helicopter when it took fire from enemy combatants, which inflicted critical damage. In the first portion of the interview, Gross prompts Air National Guard Major Hegar through a recounting of the daring, Rambo-esque, leave-no-manbehind saga. Maj. Hegar was hit in the arm by a round that pierced the windshield of the HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter, yet still successfully piloted the craft and its crew to a hard landing before deplaning. As a small recon helicopter arrived to aid in the rescue, Maj. Hegar, despite having been shot in the arm, managed to return fire while standing on a skid of the recon helicopter and straddling the skid’s mount to the fuselage as the aircraft lifted off from the ground. Once in the air, Maj. Hegar continued to provide cover for the medical evacuation team and their patients still on the ground. In the end, the whole team, as well as the soldiers they were rescuing, made it out of the battle alive. Later in the interview, after returning from a station break, Gross notes that they have been joined in the recording studio by Maj. Hegar’s 3-month-old son, who had arrived 2 with Hegar’s husband and was passed off to Hegar so she could breastfeed him. Then, with baby on her lap, Hegar discussed her understanding of the roles of warrior and of mother as “completely compatible” (Gross & Miller, 2017, para. 100). I found this interview notable not only for its representational rarity—presenting an image of Hegar that recalls the cinematic spectacle of Stalone’s choreographed action stunts, right alongside an image of nurture as a breastfeeding mother—but also because it spoke to several key issues and/or points of contention surrounding recent controversies over military membership policies. The broadcast introduced listeners to Hegar the author of a memoir titled Shoot Like a Girl, and Hegar the litigant, as a member of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the Department of Defense for barring women from ground combat positions. Yet, Hegar explained that her support of and participation in efforts aimed at allowing women to (officially) serve in combat positions “wasn’t about women’s rights. It was about military effectiveness” (Gross & Miller, 2017, para. 73). Taken together, the interview constructed Hegar both in ways emblematic of, and in ways disruptive to, the more generalized (read as: traditionally masculine) figure of the soldier and the litany of discourses, images, tropes, myths, etc. that articulate notions of gender and the value of military endeavors via such figurations. In this way, Hegar’s interview serves as one exhibit that provokes my exploration into gendered relationships between militarism and the figure of the soldier in the shifting landscape of U.S. military membership policy, which forms the focus of this dissertation. Over the past decade, publics have frequently engaged in debates over membership policies directed at the regulation of female and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) service members in the U.S. military. Calls for the discontinuation 3 of these polices and their circulation via deliberative activity, which amplified certain rationales for determining whether, what, and/or how policy change should occur stand as a composite of rhetorical practices at work. Additionally, the materialization of these controversies and their ensuing character brought to the fore and actively engaged beliefs about and associations between gender and soldiering as they displayed attempts to disarticulate the spaces and endeavors of soldiering as appropriately (and at times solely) belonging within the purview of hypermasculinity. It is these dynamics that constitute the primary investigative purposes of this study. Specifically, this study aims to further account for and unravel processes of militarizing gender generally, while also providing greater discernment of the contingent qualities of militarized masculinity. Additionally, by examining various periods of engagement with controversies over military membership policy, this study seeks to contribute to an understanding of how rhetorical practices contribute to the evolution of a policy itself, as well as the deliberative techniques and technologies shaping its rhetorical character. As such, this study is guided by the following research question: In light of recent controversies over military membership policy, what (re)articulations of the gendered relationships between militarism and the figure of the soldier have occurred/are occurring? In this chapter, I develop the literature review and critical vocabulary that support my interests in and analysis of gendered discourses of militarism and military membership. I begin by devising a conceptualization of militarism as a critical problematic for rhetorical analysis. I next discuss dimensions of nationalism, (in)security, and citizenship and their influence on militarizing processes, particularly in terms of how 4 they inform the discursive matrix surrounding the figure of the soldier and endow its unique rhetorical force for (re)producing social conditions of militarism. Following this, I turn my attention to gender as a critical concept for analyzing processes of militarization. I develop a theoretical framework to understand how efforts directed at militarizing gender are key for militarism’s perpetuation and form a basis for considering the ideologically privileged position of militarized masculinity associated with the figure of the soldier. Finally, I address military membership practices and policies, which operate as sites of gender anxiety and as discursive spaces with the potential to disrupt institutionalized gender(ed) discourses and operate as sites of gender anxiety. Militarism Militarism is an ideology that describes a framework of ideas which have been variously characterized as the legitimacy or privilege given to things associated or aligned with military goals (Enloe, 2004, pp. 145-146); the adoption of values including “a belief in hierarchy, obedience, and the use of force” (Enloe, 2007, p. 4); the tendency to view militaristic actions (i.e., formalized warfare or other uses of force) as the most realistic way to ensure cultural preservation and/or national security (Ivie, 2006, p. 13); a heightened “propensity to use force [resulting in] the normalization of war” (Bacevich, 2013, p. 18); and a normalization of war that “erode[s] the boundaries between the military and daily life” (Butterworth & Moskal, 2009, p. 412). In this section, I develop a perspective on militarism as an ideology in order to construct a theoretical foundation for understanding the ways it participates in building connections between citizenship and soldiering and to establish a vocabulary for these connections germane to the figure of the 5 soldier. Ideologies wield a navigational capacity; they mold meanings around the beliefs, practices, and artifacts that compose a culture (Ott & Mack, 2010, pp. 124-125). In other words, finding evidence of a culture’s militarism entails examining its artifacts, the practices and conventions of everyday social interactions, and the beliefs, attitudes, and concepts whose values may be affirmed formally by governing institutions or as part of mundane, vernacular appeals in discourses related directly and indirectly to the military. Scholars characterize dominant U.S. culture as militarized in various ways, such as: presumptions embedded in rationales for the country’s recent War-on-Terror-related endeavors that war is both morally justifiable (Ivie, 2007, p. 151) and a reasonable preventative approach toward matters of foreign policy (Butterworth & Moskal, 2009, p. 412); the romanticization of soldiers and a view of “military power as the truest measure of national greatness” (Bacevich, 2013, p. 2); deferential tendencies within the judiciary for military officials’ argumentative appeals in the name of national security (Enloe, 2007, p. 5); “the scope, cost, and configuration of America’s present-day military establishment” whose presence across the globe elicits a comparable amount of attention from “the average American” as does “a cop on a city street corner” (Bacevich, 2013, p. 17); a resurgence in the popularity of G.I. Joe dolls following the Gulf War (Boose, 1993, p. 71) as well as the continued market stability for such uniformed dolls (Brown, 2012, p. 21); and even noodles shaped like familiar combat objects, designed in order to create consumer appeal for a can of soup (Enloe, 2000, p. 1). Presented with the preceding list, many individuals living in a militarized society might find many of the cultural practices and artifacts that reify militarism as rather 6 unremarkable, familiar observations of their social and political surroundings. But it is precisely this ubiquity, the degree to which militarism becomes normalized, that points to the force of its hegemonic allure. Hegemony is a useful concept to apply to investigations of militarism because it provides a way to think about militarization as processual, rather than a condition that is either present or absent. Though it is certainly possible for militaristic transformations within a culture to “happen suddenly,” such as in “response to a particular trauma,” militarizing processes often occur “at a slow, hard-to-spot creep” (Enloe, 2007, p. 4). Understood as “the process by which one ideology subverts other competing ideologies” in order to gain and maintain “cultural dominance” (Ott & Mack, 2010, p. 131), hegemony necessarily involves “the transformation of meanings and relationships” (Enloe, 1993, p. 100). In this respect, investigating militarizing processes that operate within dominant U.S. culture necessitates a focus on their rhetorical dimensions. This assertion—that rhetorical mechanisms are central to processes of militarization—is grounded in several key assumptions. First, communication is responsible for constructing symbolic systems through which we understand the world around us. As Ivie (2015) relayed, communication is “the dynamic on which culture depends for its continuity and transformation” (p. xii). As such, it functions as a “transaction that shapes meaning and delineates perspective” wherein “each transaction is a selective enactment of culture, thus adding to the cultural sum of sense making, patterns of interpretations, and ways of acting” (Ivie, 2015, p. xii). What is important to note in Ivie’s formulation is that a given instance of communication does not merely operate as a solitary message transmission, but as a fragment of a greater collective discourse. In this 7 way, communication fragments function rhetorically via the influence they have on those discursive formations to which they speak (McGee, 1990, p. 279). Boggs and Pollard (as cited in Butterworth & Moskal, 2009) identified that militarism operates discursively as “a rationality that deeply influences the structures and practices of the general society through storytelling, mythology, media images, political messages, academic discourses, and simple patriotic indoctrination” (p. 412). Thus, sustaining a governing militaristic ideology depends on the degree to which communicative acts are interpreted as reinforcing the tenets of its framework. From this perspective, the rhetorical facets of militarism/militarization as a hegemonic cultural force can be conceptualized as ongoing negotiations between discourses competing for cultural dominance. As Cynthia Enloe (2004) iterated “There is nothing automatic or inevitable about” militarizing processes (p. 220). Instead, communicative acts continually participate in a rhetorical “contest over which perspective will dominate the nation’s political imagination and prevail upon collective public opinion” (Ivie, 2007, pp. 115-116). In other words, there is a deliberative dimension to the rhetorics of militarization that operate by inducing popular support for bellicose activities. When militaristic discourses secure dominance, the public’s support for war is “a matter merely of submitting to war’s gravitational pull,” in a cultural milieu that encourages good citizens “to float downstream in the reassuring flow of public opinion and conventional wisdom” (Ivie, 2007, p. 1). It is this firmly established relationship between rhetoric and militarism that led Butterworth and Moskal (2009) to conclude that, American identity is constituted in and by a culture of militarism, wherein Americans are implicated in a structural relationship between government, the 8 military, and entertainment industries to the extent that it has become functionally impossible to live outside the rhetorical production of war. (p. 413) Representations of soldiers and the ideas and values they communicatively uphold feature prominently in the rhetorical production of militarism and war. As such, I next turn to consider the soldier as a rhetorical figure, and establish the ways it serves as one key site through which rhetorical processes of cultural militarization may be indexed. Nationalism, militarism, and the figure of the soldier Because I am ultimately interested in the roles figurations of the soldier play in the “rhetorical production of war,” it is necessary to address the pivotal interrelationship between nationalism and militarism for the production of American identity, especially how nationalism positions American citizenship in ways that create possibilities for militarism to gain an ideological foothold. Collective subjectivities, like national identity, are constituted by and through ideologies such as nationalism and militarism (Charland, 1987). Militarized discourses about national identity influence the ways in which national imaginaries are collectively conceived and enacted. As Benedict Anderson (1991) influentially argued, an individual’s sense of national belongingness functions as a measure of membership within an imagined community. To be a subject of a nation, then, is to be positioned as the product of a (rhetorical) process, which ascribes citizens as subjects within a constructed national imaginary. Provided that “the identity of a ‘people’ is the basis for the legitimacy of the state and its subsequent practices,” nationalism can thereby be conceived to function as “a construct of the state in pursuit of its legitimacy” (Campbell, 1998, p. 11). McGee’s (1975) postulation of a rhetorical function present in the collectivization of “the people” fostered further development in understanding how 9 national identity, as a construct, wields significant motivational force toward the production of individual and community activity (Howard & Prividera, 2008, p. 152). In addition to operating rhetorically as part of motivational appeals, nationalisms constitute themselves and their membership by delineating boundaries between self/us and Other/them. Mechanisms of militarization thus “depend[] upon national ideology to identify adversaries and establish its purposes and goals” (Howard & Prividera, 2006, p. 135). The rhetorical constitution of threats to a nation’s security, in turn, facilitates “militarization of and loyalty to the nation” (Howard & Prividera, 2008, p. 158). Discourses of (in)security and their role in militarizing processes form another pivotal node in the discursive matrix which surrounds figurations of the soldier. Specifically, insecurity is both a common justification for war and an endemic characteristic of American identification. As Oliver (2007) noted, “a sense of vulnerability quickly gives way to desire for war” (p. 8). In general terms, warfare is broadly conceived as resulting from or occurring in response to a named or perceived threat. Indeed, arguments grounded by national security claims frequently form officials’ justifications for engaging in military action (Coe, 2013). This naturalized association, positing war as the logical means for achieving securitization, is a presupposition central to militaristic ideology. Though conditions of (in)security are often presented as objective, knowable statuses, the constitution of states of (in)security, as David Campbell (1998) explained, is an “effect of interpretation” that always entails the selection of “one mode of representation over another” (pp. 2-4). Concerns over (in)security, as Robert Ivie (2006) illustrated, are a feature peculiar to American national identity. His argument that America operates as a “republic of fear” 10 (Ivie, 2006, p. 12) centers on democracy as a “principle constituent of political culture and a basic element of national identity” (Ivie & Giner, 2007, p. 58). Democracy, then, as defined and embedded within public discourses operates as a “term that articulates a national identity infused with a sense of insecurity” (Ivie, 2006, p. 45). Ivie (2006) traced democracy as a rhetorical token throughout the American discursive tradition where it is rendered as “something both dangerous and endangered” (p. 11). As Ivie explained, it is dangerous because true, radical democracy is conceptualized as chaos of the masses, which produces fear of the domestic Other; it is endangered because democracy is continually vulnerable to molestation from external adversaries, which manifests in fear of the foreign Other. The conflicting tensions in this paradox, Ivie contended, result in a rhetorical dynamic wherein “Americans must feel endangered in order to exist purposefully and meaningfully as a people” (2006, p. 11). Metaphorical invocations of evil—a feature frequently present in political cultures where insecurity is acutely entrenched—reify the boundaries and antagonisms between a nation and its constituted Other. In addition, this rhetorical strategy to “vilify the nation’s adversaries” is a primary mechanism through which perceived states of insecurity perpetuate and escalate (Ivie, 2007, p. 55). The capacity for adding momentum to militarizing processes that are inherent to, what Ivie (2007) terms, “rhetoric(s) of evil savagery” (p. 56) resides in its binary structure, which aids in the fabrication of a humanitarian disjuncture. Casting each side of a conflict in oppositional terms like good/evil “feed(s) into and off of the rhetoric of war” by promoting a “disavowal of ambiguities,” the recognition of which could chisel holes in the strictly drawn boundary constituting the ‘us’ from the ‘them’ (Oliver, 2007, p. 4). As Ivie (2007) characterizes it, 11 disjunctive strategies that forge camps of good and evil serve war propaganda devised to “desensitize the public to the human attributes of adversaries” (p. 5). However, the effects of rhetorics of evil savagery extend further than a public’s normalization of and acquiescence to state violence inflicted on others. As nationalist rhetoric reduces adversaries to abstract and uncomplicated evil/demonic/savage figures, so too does it caricature all parties to a conflict. As a result, the soldier-hero also becomes a figurative abstraction, cast in an ideologically recognizable, mythic role. Ivie (2007) elaborated, “To invoke the image of a demonic foe is to summon the corresponding and equally simplistic persona of an innocent victim or heroic savior” (p. 185). Through rhetorics of evil savagery, American troops become “elevated to divine warriors” (Ivie, 2007, p. 3). The articulation of soldiers with a warrior hero mythos helps sustain the forces of militarism by “paper[ing] over incongruities and contradictions” surrounding American national identity (Bacevich, 2013, p. 97). Myths inform and help reproduce dominant ideological systems, and are therefore a central mechanism through which nationality is constituted. Nationalist myths implicate the soldier because, as Slotkin (2001) maintained, “the mythology of the nationstate…vests this abstraction in the figurative flesh of representative heroes, embodying and exalting the character of ‘the People’” (p. 471). In this way, war becomes a ritualized securitization drama, a “master narrative” that provides a “source of meaning for peoples/nations” (Howard & Prividera, 2008, p. 158). The conceptualization of war as a habitual, sense-making drama thus implicates figurations of the soldier as key protagonists, engaged in the essential task of the nation: the preservation of itself. 12 Citizenship and the figure of the soldier The central role occupied by soldiers in defending the nation by combating threats against it is one factor that leads the figure of the soldier to be rendered as a symbolic representation of the nation. As such, and given the militarized conditions of national culture, Bacevich (2013) contended that soldiers “have come to signify who we are and what we stand for” (p. 1). In other words, the figure of the soldier possesses a metonymic function in relation to American identity. One way this manifests, as Achter (2010) explained, is through images of soldiers that “interpellate viewers as citizens and create the possibility for audiences to cultivate an emotional attachment to the nation-state” (p. 63). The discursive relationship between soldiering and citizenship, in part, helps explain the interpellative capacity soldier images have to position individuals as citizen-subjects. In addition, this relationship also helps reinforce soldiers’ function as metonym. Rationales underlying the symbolic force and status afforded the soldier can be traced through historical practices establishing a tradition of the citizen-soldier. Segal (1989) attributed the origins of “participation in armed conflict as part of the normative definition of citizenship” (p. 3) to cultural transformations during the American and French revolution, a time during which democratization of “the battlefield and Western society in general” (p. 9) were occurring simultaneously. In other words, throughout strata of military leadership, and in political leadership, the elites of society were losing their positional foothold. Krebs (2006) claimed it is “Western culture’s traditional intertwining of military service and citizenship” that makes it possible for sacrifice associated with performing military service to “sustain the claim to civic virtue and citizenship” (p. 4). In short, the soldier holds a particularly esteemed status, a privileged 13 position in the hierarchical construction of citizenship. Scholars have frequently engaged the question of how meaning is constructed for and around a notion of the “good citizen” (Biesecker, 2002; Chávez, 2010; Ivie, 2007; Stahl, 2009; I. M. Young, 2003) and within such discursive frameworks the soldier traditionally enjoys an articulation as “the best kind of citizen” (Brouwer, 2004, p. 419). In developing this argument, Krebs (2006) focused on how dominant discourses of citizenship implicate soldiering through their logics. He identifies two prevailing citizenship discourses—liberal and republican—and details how each constitutes citizenship, noting that within the context of a given historical moment the operation of both logics may be evident. In addition, liberal and republican discourses may exert similar influence, or alternatively, one may gain greater ideological dominance than the other. While a liberal discourse defines citizenship as something a person is (i.e., the holder of a status), a republican discourse defines citizenship as something a person does. Following this republican logic, a citizen is constituted in the performance of civic duty; the enactment of one’s public obligations exemplifies and embodies civic virtue. Through the republican formation, citizenship articulates with performance, which results in a politics of sacrifice emerging as a dominant frame. The primacy of sacrifice within this framework thereby positions the fulfillment of one’s civic obligation via military service, and injury or death in the course of that service in particular, as the highest demonstrable form of civic virtue (Krebs, 2006). Of course, as Bailey (2009) noted, there have always been “critical limits” on this founding notion of American nationalism that citizenship entails a “‘universal’ obligation” for military service; originally, “it applied only to those who were free, white, 14 and male” (p. 5). Furthermore, the American colonies collectively crafted over 200 statutory exemptions from service in their respective “common militias,” which Bailey pointed out primarily “benefited the economically successful and the socially wellpositioned” (2009, p. 6). Such inequities point to how relations of power structure figurations of the soldier via “representational features” of the citizen-soldier myth “designed primarily to reinforce the interests of patriarchy and [hegemonic] masculinity” (Jeffords, 1989, p. xi). Tickner (1992) traced the West’s militarized collision between patriarchy and citizenship back further to Greek city-states where recognition as a citizen of “manly virtue” was achieved through “heroic performance,” “sacrifice,” and/or “victory in battle” (pp. 37-38). The citizenries of Greek city-states were likewise comprised exclusively of men, as women and slaves were thought to taint the political realm. But, beyond consideration of women’s invisibility within the public, Tickner’s observation also serves as an example of the gendered dimensions within a sacrificial frame that condition both who performs sacrifice, and what is legible as sacrifice. Discursive remnants of these conditional boundaries continue to inform the meanings of citizenship and structure the forms by which certain modes of enacting citizenship are granted value. As Enloe (1993) observed, “Violent sacrifice under state discipline in the name of the nation…get[s] very close to what many Americans still today…understand to be the essential criterion for first-class citizenship” (p. 202). As such, she argues this “desired realm of citizenship” (1993, p. 202) is gendered to the extent that an individual’s capacity to access and/or occupy a “first-class” citizen-subject position is discursively confined and/or statutorily restricted. Likewise, when the legibility of any given mode of civic sacrificing depends on its articulation with military actions or agendas, “good 15 citizenship” is often both militarized and gendered. Militarizing Gender Previous scholarship argues that gender and militarism are inextricably intertwined and that militarizing gender is a key technique utilized to perpetuate cultural militarization. From these perspectives, gender functionally operates as a presuppositional component of militarizing processes and/or of militarism’s ideological maneuvers. Reviewing scholarship that traces out the intertwined ideological system that is constructed between gender and militarism provides additional groundwork in support of my efforts to examine the role of the figure of the soldier in these ideological discourses that implicate and give sense to gendered modes of citizenship. In particular, Cynthia Enloe (1993) argued theoretical explanations of militarization that ignore gender take for granted the immanent presence of a politics of gender that has traditionally and persistently resulted in men occupying the helm of powerful economic and state institutions. Specifically, she challenges capitalism and state-focused theories for “pay[ing] too little attention to cultural politics and to the mundane politics of military ‘manpower’” (1993, p. 47). Goldstein’s (2001) extensive investigation into the relationship between gender and war provides further support for theorizing how gender relations form a central component of militarizing processes. In light of the vast array of gender roles and norms throughout historical and cultural contexts, Goldstein located a unique “puzzle” in the connection between gender and war, endorsing its investigation due to the remarkably few appreciably diverse instances across time and space. By demonstrating that the sum of evidence across disciplines is 16 insufficient to prove an intrinsic male inclination towards war, Goldstein suggested that since “killing in war does not come naturally for either gender” (2001, p. 10), it’s the potentiality of war that prompts development of normative gender roles. In other words, societal anticipation of violent conflict produces the peculiar gender arrangement that appears systemic to warfare. MacKenzie (2015) concurred, maintaining that “the logic of war depends on the preservation of gendered stories and myths about ‘real’ men, ‘good’ women, and ‘normal’ social order” (p. 4). Further she offered that the “constant perpetuation and dissemination of such gendered ideals” could be conceived of as “a militarized-masculinity complex” (2015, p. 4). Militarized masculinity is a prominent concept used to name and characterize the forms of gender relations endemic to war and militarization. The scholarship in this area has developed a consistent thread of inquiry that explores whether and to what degree the militarization of masculinity is a necessary condition for militarism to gain dominance and/or achieve a hegemonic standing within a given cultural context. Enloe (1993) contended that social constructions of masculinity can “entrench and extend the grip of militarism” (p. 73). This potential resides in constructing “what it means to be a male” in such a way that it ideologically articulates with militarism, or “the values and beliefs that make military modes of thinking and behavior seem right and natural” (Enloe, 1993, p. 52). In other words, to render soldiering as the natural, or ‘go-to’ way to accomplish masculinity means the constructed nature of militarized masculinity “remains invisible” (Enloe, 1993, p. 56), and thereby reinforces a commonsense association between the two. Investigating the glue that binds masculinity to militarism then becomes critical for the task of demonstrating their (in)separability (Enloe, 2000, p. 273). That is, to reject the 17 inevitability of a militarized masculinity’s position as hegemonic entails identifying how, when, and to what extent these seemingly commonsense articulations are culturally and historically contingent. For Goldstein (2001), tracing connections between gender and war entails examining the “war system,” a term he used in reference to the scope of “interrelated ways that societies organize themselves to participate in potential and actual wars” (p. 3). As such, war, and war systems, fundamentally operate as key sites through which “meanings about gender are being produced, reproduced, and circulated back into society” (Cooke & Woollacott, 1993, p. ix). From these perspectives, gender’s relative rigidity within war is interpreted as a reflection and consequence of broader cultural logics responsible for ordering and constructing meanings within societies. Militarization processes are thus undergirded by rhetorical dimensions that allow for dominant logics of militarized masculinity to structure both: 1) how citizens understand their roles in the nation via patriarchal and nationalist discursive frameworks that shape the civic duties expected of differently positioned citizens, especially in relation to war; and 2) how the soldier, figured through gendered and nationalist myths, allows civilians to make sense of and evaluate the nation’s wartime/military actions. Patriarchal organizing logics in the constitution of national membership Patriarchy is conceptually useful because it provides a way to analyze organizing strategies within a particular social structure (Enloe, 2007, pp. 66-68). Patriarchy can be understood as “the structural and ideological system that perpetuates the privileging of 18 masculinity” (Enloe, 2004, p. 4). By privileging masculinity, patriarchal systems also consequently display a characteristic marginalization of femininity. Hence, assumptions constructed about gender binaries and the “natural” order of things often support patriarchal logics within a given culture, and thereby fuel a sense of legitimacy around such rationales. As previous scholarship attests, many attributes resulting from the patriarchal constitution of nations produce conditions favorable to militarism. Howard and Prividera (2006) submitted that, “Patriarchy and masculinity form the core structure and meanings around which nationalism and militarism are built” (p. 136). Gender constructions produced by and within patriarchal discourse unavoidably permeate the web of affiliations between nationalism and militarism. The influence of patriarchal logics molds objects of national identification and positions Americans across various spaces and strata of citizenship. A nation is indeed constituted in the delineation of boundaries between an “us” and a “them,” but also in the organizing of its “them” (i.e., it members). To expound, ideological systems like patriarchy are responsible for structuring a hierarchy of subjectpositions for citizens to inhabit. Drawing from an essay by Nakayama and Krizek (1995)—in which the authors name whiteness in order to investigate it as a strategic rhetoric that constructs a fictive social location—Prividera and Howard (2006) asserted that nationalism can be similarly understood as a strategic rhetoric. They explained, “Strategic rhetorics map and define the ideological spaces” through which a nation’s members must maneuver by establishing “group membership and rank according to their location relative to an elusive ‘ideological center,’” as designated at the intersection of privileged, hegemonic “cultural constructions,” which include “masculinity and 19 whiteness” (2006, p. 30). That is, the construction of the figurative center produces a system wherein those people whose bodies read as nearer facsimiles of the fictive center are conceived as ‘natural’ or ‘rightful’ occupiers of and contributors to the core, essential, and distinguished apparatuses of the nation. What results is a hegemonic normalization of this stratification of citizens’ prescribed roles within and duties to the nation. Nagel (1998) noted this system implicates female citizens through roles that are, “by design, support[ive]” and “reflect masculinist notions of femininity and women’s proper ‘place’” (p. 243). The particular way dominant ideology renders these feminized supporting roles reflects a patriarchal logic, which also facilitates and normalizes the designation of other duties to the nation as masculine and consequently, roles rightfully occupied by men. Here I address three strategic modes of patriarchal organizing that are centrally relevant to the rhetorical construction and perpetuation of soldiering as an exemplification of masculinity and as a duty expected of male citizens. They include the family, the patriot, and the protector. The family The family is frequently deployed as a rhetorical strategy for representing/figuring the nation (Enloe, 1993; Nagel, 1998). The tendency and success of “liken[ing] the nation to a family” demonstrates that publics are easily able to extrapolate those features presumed to be analogous between the two, namely, each are “male-headed [institutions] in which both men and women have ‘natural’ roles to play” (Nagel, 1998, p. 254). In other words, “the family” serves enthymematic and metonymic functions, by offering a way for “the people” to make (gendered) sense of their particular place within the nation 20 and how to ‘properly’ act as a citizen within that space. These kinds of conceptions take form in cultural representations. For example, Zeiger (1996) interpreted the ubiquitous World War II figures of the “Good Mother,” as well as the “pinup girl” to reflect “ideological constructions which served to frame U.S. military endeavors in a domestic or familial context—war for democracy as a family affair” (1996, pp. 27, 28-29). Zeiger’s work illustrates how the patriarchal “micro culture” (Nagel, 1998, p. 254) of the family inscribes upon war a mode for interpreting and classifying the actors and their relational dynamics within (inter)national belligerent dramas. The patriot In addition, the reach of a familial logic of sense making extends to fabricate gendered conceptions and divisions of what it means to be a patriot. With consideration of the far-from-subtle shared etymology between patriot and father, it is not difficult to imagine how the family trope functions to interpellate citizens toward differential realms of patriotism. Enloe (1993) observed that in wartime women must generally enter the arena of patriotism only “through the narrow doorways marked ‘mother’ and ‘wife’…Governments encourage women to imagine that being a loyal female member of a family is synonymous with being a patriot” (p. 175). Yet ostensibly, the expectation for and women’s fulfillment of mother/wife/girlfriend roles is not exclusively tied to war. That is, the familial trope constructs a feminine form of wartime patriotism that is passive, not calling for women to do anything extra. In contrast, Tickner (1992) attested that the dominant image of a patriot is “a man, often a soldier who defends his homeland, most especially his women and children from dangerous outsiders” (p. 3). A masculine 21 mode of patriotism, which positions men as soldiers, in turn affirms the articulation of a militarized masculinity. Additionally, this hegemonic figuration of a patriot as male gives form to a militarized, masculinized national citizen ideal. And, as Tickner’s description insinuates, the family trope—when mobilized to give sense to a patriarchal logic of organizing wartime duties of ‘the People’—does not neglect to provide a role for children. The protector/the protected Indeed, appeals for the protection of “womenandchildren [sic]” realize extensive use as justifications for military intervention (Enloe, 1993, p. 166). The act of protecting receives similar coding (via patriarchal nationalist discourse) as a naturally masculine/male activity, which in turn implicates those who require protection as feminine. Like the family trope, the myth of the protector and the protected relies on and echoes ideologically grounded presumptions that innate biological differences and capacities distinguish women from men. The ‘truth’ of biological sex, consequently gives rise to a gender order rationale, dictating which roles men and women can and ought to fulfill. As previously discussed, notions of (in)security rely on constructions of what constitutes a state of affairs as secure or insecure; these discourses are an effect of interpretation that takes shape with respect to the ideologies from which they emerge. Likewise, it follows that what is deemed necessary for processes of securitization or to achieve a state of security (i.e., defining and selecting the amalgamation of the required tools, actions, and bodies) is also contingent on ideological formations. With this in mind, 22 militarized, nationalist, and patriarchal ideologies all contribute to the emergence and formational features of the protector/protected myth’s discursive framework. Tickner (1992) argued that the “protector/protected myth” is a device that “contributes to the legitimation of a militarized version of citizenship” because of how the myth also articulates with patriarchal gender norms (p. 58). Indeed, as MacKenzie (2015) contended, the “gender norms that myths evoke” shape our conceptions of “binaries such as disorder/order and insecurity/security” and are therefore a central tool for constructing meanings about processes of securitization (p. 10). In this way, the protector/protector myth helps mold perceptions of gender relations and national security because “it conveys clear and consistent messages about natural order, the origins of society, legitimate behaviors, and ideal/heroic/or villainous identities” (MacKenzie, 2015, p. 11). As such, the myth is a recurrent feature of discourses that normalize and privilege militarized masculinity. Additionally, the protector/protected myth reinforces militarism’s ideological dominance because it functions as a device for militarizing national (in)security discourses. A militarization of national security is signaled in the development of a normalized relationship between the means of achieving security and military intervention. As Enloe (2007) explained, the protector/protected myth reinforces the “notion that there is an allegedly ‘natural’ relationship between the protected and the protector.…that in any community some people are naturally the protectors while others are naturally the protected (p. 60). Enloe’s point here is not just that men are seen as protectors, while women are seen as the protected. Rather—outside of any particular gendered iteration of a protector/protected arrangement—the fidelity of the myth itself 23 creates a potential for the distortion of power relations. As she explained, “it is much easier to claim the authority to speak for others if one can claim to be The Protector; it is much easier to be silenced and to accept that silencing if one absorbs the self-identity of The Protected” (2007, p. 60). Indeed, Iris Marion Young (2003) asserted that the “logic of masculinist protection” extends analogously to position the nation-state as protector of its “subordinate” citizens (p. 6). With this in mind, the protector/protected myth can be understood to operate on individual and collective levels: both as a way for people to make sense of their position in relation to war and as a mechanism that encourages acquiescence from those positioned as the protected. Figuring the soldier in war discourse Nationalist discourse organizes gender in particular ways, resulting in “masculine cultural themes” like patriarch/head of household, patriot, and protector that “seem…thoroughly tied” to dominant conceptions of both national identity and what it means to be a man (Nagel, 1998, pp. 251-252). As Nagel (1998) argued, cultural norms of “masculinity in everyday life articulat[e] very well with the demands of nationalism, particularly [nationalism’s] militaristic side” (p. 252). A key vehicle for these articulations is through figurations of the soldier. This is especially the case given that the soldier operates as a nationalist archetype. Howard and Prividera (2006) explained, since archetypes are figurative representations of an idealized role (i.e., the fictive center), which stems from a specific ideological framework, “archetypes are reifications of ideologies” (p. 137). Thus, figurations of the soldier that capture and reflect dominant patriarchal notions of the 24 nation and masculine citizenship/civic duty have a distinct function as “central national symbols, repositories of mythical constructions of the past, and embodiments of the nation’s aspirations” (Krebs, 2006, p. 17). In light of their unique symbolic function and the aims cultural representations of soldier archetypes can be rhetorically deployed to achieve, it becomes contextually clear why, elsewhere, Prividera and Howard (2012) asserted “finding an archetypal model for an event or actor is often desirable for public consumption and sensemaking” (p. 55). This capacity for archetypes to serve as a means of sensemaking relies in part on their coherence and fidelity with central cultural myths (Howard & Prividera, 2015, p. 221). It is in this way that “processes of imagining” (Asen, 2002, p. 347) soldiers function within the broader field of war discourse. Higonnet (1993) noted that “what we call ‘war’ is a discourse that mobilizes actions and beliefs, veils events, constructs gender, and both permits and inhibits understanding” (p. 222). In other words, as Jeffords (1989) iterated, warfare functions as a “vehicle for the specification of social relations” that are “already implicit” within systems of power, thereby “provid[ing] a forum” for the “negotiation and articulation” of these identities (p. 182). Because the soldier is an embodiment of American identity and an expression of America’s place and purpose [in the world] it is a “crucial means by which civilian audiences are invited to make sense of war in the twenty-first century” (Achter, 2010, p. 63). Through the dominant discursive framework of militarized masculinity and patriarchal logics that differentiates civic roles and duties, figurations of the soldier relay a narrative about who “we” are and why “we’re” fighting. Patriarchal and masculinized myths articulated through soldiering/the soldier organize actors and actions in the terrain of warfare according to schemas like 25 good/bad, strong/weak, righteous/evil, etc., which thereby help to make sense of war and the justifications for it. War’s discursive structure positions the soldier in accordance with widely sanctioned myths of the national imaginary. Scholars address two myths that are most prominently deployed as a mechanism to make sense of men’s fulfillment of their civic duty through becoming soldiers: the band of brothers and the warrior hero. In using the phrase ‘becoming soldiers,’ I mean to draw attention to a distinctiveness in how I am conceptualizing these two myths from dimensions I discussed previously, namely, the band of brothers and the warrior hero myths are especially adept for figuring the combatinitiated soldier, or veteran, as having achieved some form of self-actualization. Indeed, scholars have noted the prominence of this militarized discourse positing war as makers of men within depictions of a veteran’s journey (Achter, 2010); military advertisements and/or recruiting materials (Bailey, 2009; Brown, 2012); political arguments for war (Hoganson, 1998); and wartime propaganda images (Jarvis, 2004). By “echo[ing] archaic male initiation rites,” Gibson (1994) argued that these types of mythic representations depict “war as a primary rite of passage,” which facilitates the vital “task of social reproduction by helping young men make the transition into full adulthood” (p. 41). The characteristic focus on the soldier’s journey analogizes his transformation with that of the nation and its aspirations, thereby figuring the soldier as evidence of America’s achievements and progress, which subsequently renders martial endeavors as righteous. 26 Band of brothers myth As one form of this self-actualizing discourse, the band of brothers myth presents war as a saga of male camaraderie, loyalty, and honor. MacKenzie (2015) asserted that the “bands of brothers” myth is “a consistent national narrative” that positions “the male combat unit…at the heart of American military identity” (p. 1). Additionally, the combat unit is a popular focal point for many recent war narratives, in which “the morality of war shifts from a reliance on a noble cause to making sure no one gets left behind in a hellish situation” (Stahl, 2009, p. 539). The myth’s underlying features inform constructions of the soldiering experience in several ways. First, it casts as transcendent the connections between men in war, as something “both primal and an essential element of an orderly, civilized society,” thereby militarizing male bonding in order to naturalize war as “honorable” and as “essential for social progress” (MacKenzie, 2015, pp. 3-4). As such, it furthermore “serves as a linchpin to social and cultural justifications for war” (MacKenzie, 2015, p. 4). For example, Slotkin (2001) argued that filmic representations of combat units can symbolically serve as “ideal[ized] projection[s]” (p. 479) of an American imaginary. In this way, band of brothers narratives operate by reifying key ideological tenets within dominant nationalist discourse, concurrently confirming a fundamental ethos to soldiering. A third way the myth plays out is as a trope to pin down the slipperiness of terms like unit cohesion. Indeed, as Segal (1989) claimed, “the masculine subcultural norms that currently pervade the American military and that anchor…male-bonding arguments are unquestionable” (p. 123). Even still, Segal also offered that it may be faulty to presume “the intractability of these norms” (1989, p. 123). However, within this 27 discursive terrain, the capacity of the band of brothers myth to sustain ideas “about ideal soldiers and ‘real’ warfare” (MacKenzie, 2015, p. 136) functions as an endorsement of militarized masculinity’s hegemony. The band of brothers myth concocts a romanticized rendering of war as the makers of men and “conveys messages of heroic commitment to fellow soldiers” (Klien, 2015, p. 373) through steadfast and, at times, intensely graphic narrative retellings of the familiar “leave no man behind” imperative. As such, it operates as a device that dissuades the populace from reservations about the “rightness” (Klien, 2015, p. 387) of the nation’s bellicose habits, while slipping rhetorical reinforcements of dominant modes of nationalism and masculinity into the narratives effectively peddled to the nation-at-large. Warrior hero myth A second way soldiering is figured as a transformative process is through the warrior hero myth, which A. M. Young and Kaurin (2015) noted occupies “an important narrative place in our [American] culture as a model for masculine virtue and ideal patriotic service” (p. 427). The warrior’s narrative is structurally typified as an odyssey, wherein our hero departs on a divine quest, is tried by “struggle[s] against monstrous foes” (Ivie & Giner, 2016, p. 200) and “returns home victorious by having either defeated the adversary or died honorably in the effort” (A. M. Young & Kaurin, 2015, p. 413). As A. M. Young and Kaurin explained, the sacred themes that ground the warrior hero myth operate to sanction a code of morality within/for a cultural imaginary. Correspondingly, as is “especially true of the United States,” according to Ivie and Giner (2016), “the ethos of the nation—its character, guiding beliefs, and moral sentiments—is invested in the 28 persona of the heroic soldier” (p. 200). Additionally because the warrior is characteristically and supremely masculine, there is a uniquely gendered dimension in the ways his acts of violence during battle get coded and interpreted as legitimate. Howard and Prividera (2006) noted that although several archetypal female figures who emerge from cultural discourses “may be permitted to kill” (e.g., the mistress, the scorned lover), they are cast as “ideologically questionable,” whereas if the warrior hero must kill it is out of some moral necessity (p. 137). Howard and Prividera’s observation is indicative of how the warrior hero myth operates through a gender-contingent sanctioning of violence that helps maintain perceptions about the right(eous)ness of soldiering violence carried out in the name of the nation. Boose (1993) asserted, “the sacrosanct story around which this nation’s understanding of itself has been built and then adumbrated into millions of mediated narratives is the story of American masculine heroism” (p. 78). Patriarchal, nationalist myths prescribe dominant cultural conceptions about what it means to be a man, as well as a male citizen of virtue, which figurations of the masculine soldier help to reify. Boose continued, “American militarist ideology has been built on top of a public investment in protecting” a particular “constructed image of the innocent American soldier,” who resides “at the center” of these narratives (1993, p. 78). The U.S. plainly appears to have a stake in maintaining the figure of the soldier in accordance with a militarized and hegemonic notion of masculinity. Indeed, Enloe (2000) identified the military’s “association with manliness” as “one of the chief pillars holding up [its] political legitimacy” (p. 226), while Hoganson (1998) noted, “the power of the militant manhood/political authority nexus” (p. 10). That is, figurations of the masculine soldier 29 uniquely contribute to militarism by structuring: 1) public perceptions of and civilians’ generally uncritical support for the nation’s military actions, and 2) a hegemonic form of masculinity that is likened to and may be proven or achieved through soldiering. Scholars point to the demand of meeting military “manpower” needs in preparation for and during wartime as one prominent rationale responsible for producing figurations of the soldier as unquestionably masculine—and devoutly patriotic (Tickner, 1992, p. 40). As Brown (2012) argued, “images of service members for public consumption…attempt to legitimate and normalize particular understandings of soldiering and related ideas about gender” (p. 185). In this way, masculinized figurations of the soldier complement patriarchal nationalist logics that perpetuate militarism’s ideological hegemony. Service Membership Shifts and Combat-ing Gender Anxieties In the previous two sections, I sought to conceptually unpack the interrelationships between militarism, nationalism, citizenship and ideas about gender. In particular, I considered how the figure of the soldier offers a focal point through which these ideas are defined, negotiated, and reproduced. And, I considered how the figure of the solider, as well as (gendered) ideologies of nationalism and militarism, are rhetorically deployed as well as their significance. Bringing together these ideological discourses that resonate and interact with each other provides a critical framework through which to understand public controversies that seek to challenge, renegotiate, or disrupt these ideologies. With all this in mind, I now turn to discuss rhetorical maneuvers undertaken to protect and (re)articulate figurations of the masculine soldier in the course of institutional 30 shifts in military membership and its attendant controversies. Shifts in gendered figurations of soldiers are a key site for analyzing hegemonic processes that (re)articulate masculinity and militarism. As Enloe (2004) noted, “although the most persuasive socialization strategies succeed because they manage to portray soldiering as a ‘naturally’ manly activity,” the political resources expended toward such cultural reproductions also work to “signal a degree of deliberateness in sustaining militarized notions of masculinity” (p. 109). By unraveling gender and militarism’s connective threads, we can begin to assess the mechanisms undergirding their contribution to militarizing and demilitarizing processes. The literature reviewed in the following section establishes a basis for this line of inquiry, ultimately demonstrating not only a history of deliberate investment in preserving soldiering as masculine, but also how figurations of the female/feminized soldier have been routinely cast as antithetical and thus threatening to hegemonic gender arrangements rendered necessary by the nation’s (in)security and exceptionalism. Militarized constructions of gender reinforce a culturally dominant and privileged status of soldiering as male and the military as a masculine institution, subsequently marginalizing the feminine and positioning female soldiers as second-class. With respect to such a discursive framework, scholars have noted the presence of a paradox between woman and soldier. Prividera and Howard (2012) explained this paradox in the following manner: “the dualism of ‘masculine/feminine,’ and ‘soldier/civilian’ are conflated into ‘masculine-soldier’/feminine-civilian’ [dualisms] and then collapsed into a new dualism ‘soldier/feminine’” (p. 57). This dualism, they argued, creates an “ideologically potent composite that makes the reality of female soldiers ideologically incomprehensible… 31 phenomena in the patriarchal system that governs military (and civilian) membership and action” (2012, p. 57). Herbert (1998) similarly argued that the disjuncture between feminine expression and good soldiering operates by “reinforc[ing] the belief that men are somehow uniquely suited to serving in the nation’s military” (p. 122). Yet over the course of the 20th and into the 21st centuries, women’s participation in and institutional indispensability to the U.S. military has steadily increased. Indeed, in spite of the feminine/soldier cultural paradox, Enloe (2007) revealed “policymakers…nonetheless will violate conventional tenets of masculine and feminine difference so that they can use women in new, ‘nontraditional’ ways for the sake of bolstering their war-waging efforts,” which results in, what she terms, “patriarchal confusion” (p. 81). Public awareness of ruptures to seemingly inviolable gender boundaries around soldiering leads to efforts to redress the cultural tensions provoked by such violations, often through purposeful management of figurations of the female soldier. Historically, the task of “limit[ing] public fears that the state was advocating changes in sexual, gender, race or class hierarchies” (Meyer, 1996, p. 8) has primarily entailed rhetorical maneuvers to strategically figure nonarchetypal soldiers so as to convey that their presence would not upset dominant military/masculinity discursive systems nor the larger social order. Early rhetorical image management of female U.S. soldiers deliberately aimed to depict them as feminine, virtuous (by way of being chaste), and respectable—that is, as enthusiastically upholding deep-seated gender prescriptions. In Meyer’s (1996) historical analysis of the creation of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II, she identified confusion between the seemingly discrete roles of “the male ‘protector’ and the female ‘protected’” as a root source of public anxieties over possible “consequences of 32 establishing a women’s army” (p. 3). Moreover, she explained that the WAC’s “potential upheaval in public understandings of exactly what constituted proper ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ was viewed by some as having serious consequences for the American family” (1996, p. 25). In later decades, especially those following the institutionalization of the all-volunteer force, the feminine respectability favored to figure WACs gave way to “a new form of guaranteed respectability” (Enloe, 1993, p. 220) recoded through the language of professionalism. By connoting their need to “be taken seriously” mediated representations of female soldiers as professionals serve as one mechanism to possibly shed, or at least weaken, reflexive renderings of female soldiers through morally suspicious gender epithets (Enloe, 1993, p. 220). Bailey (2009) observed a tendency by the 1980s in Army recruiting advertisements for female soldiers to “simply [appear] as one of the team, interchangeable with the men” (p. 210). However, women in such ads were rarely, if ever “associated with combat [or] shown wielding a gun” (Brown, 2012, p. 71). The composition of U.S. military membership is frequently discussed/framed as following an historical trajectory (especially since the turn of the 20th century) of gradual and increasing inclusion. In other words, over time racial and sexual minorities, as well as women, have gained entrance into the armed forces and had more military occupation specialties (MOSs) available to them. This narrative of progress conjures up and imagines the military as perpetually striving towards alignment with founding nationalist ideals about citizens’ “universal” obligation to military service that grounds the myth and figure of the citizen-soldier. Worth recalling, of course, is that U.S. military service obligations in practice have never been universal (even for White, straight males). 33 With respect to the shifting landscape of bodies composing the U.S. military, scholars identify a persistent anxiety over, and subsequent efforts aimed at, preserving spaces of conditional (read as: male only) occupation, spaces expressly reserved for those with elite warrior status. The warrior hero occupies the hierarchal top of military archetypes (Prividera & Howard, 2012, p. 55). The warrior identity is “a hypermasculinized version of the hero” (A. M. Young & Kaurin, 2015, p. 411). A national investment in the warrior has not only “been integral to the way Americans conceptualize, train, reward, promote and honor those that serve” (A. M. Young & Kaurin, 2015, p. 411), he also stands as the figure who most centrally captures the event of war and what it entails in the popular imagination (Gibson, 1994; Jeffords, 1989; Stahl, 2009). Thus, as a figure, the warrior’s “rhetorical authority… is sacrosanct” (Young & Kaurin, 2015, p. 415). The struggle to preserve boundaries delineating an elite, masculine warrior status plays out on a host of terrains. For example, Bailey (2009) discussed a controversy over Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki’s October 2000 announcement that the black berets worn by the elite Army Rangers regiment were to become standard issue for all soldiers. Critics of Shinseki’s order likened it to “warriornorming” and claimed the order “devalued warrior culture” (Bailey, 2009, p. 235). The conflict ultimately concluded, Bailey reported, with the Rangers switching to tan berets, symbolically distinguishing their status over those soldiers with the newly-standard-issue black berets. One site where anxieties have played out with considerable fervor over preserving some sliver of space for the elite masculine warrior is at the intersection of women and combat. Scholars locate the particular threat women pose as being grounded in the 34 premise that “masculinity…must be defined and defended against others within the system” (A. M. Young & Kaurin, 2015, p. 415) in order to effectively organize gender relations. Thus, women’s increasing presence and visibility in the military “provokes…concern about the meaning and uses of femininity,” which subsequently “makes the content and function of masculinity more problematic” (Enloe, 1993, p. 203). Manifestations of such ideological instability conjure the specter of feminization and engender processes of masculinization. Enloe (2007) explained feminization occurs by “imposing allegedly feminine characteristics” (p. 95) on something or someone. Because an association with ‘feminine’ attributes can be taken to signal diminished status, feminization gives rise to anxiety over privileged forms of masculinity. Masculinization, in turn, is often “fueled by…anxieties and fears of feminization” (Enloe, 2007, p. 51). For example, Hoganson (1998) attributed “jingoist clamor for war” (p. 8) during the early years of American empire to women’s forays into electoral politics as well as the “softness” of “middle- and upper- class white men who enjoyed the many comforts.…wrought by industrialization” (pp. 138-139). She explained: Fearing the future of the nation, jinjoes regarded war as an opportunity to.…return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.…jingoes argu[ed] that war would forge a new generation of manly, civic-minded veterans who would serve as the pillars of American democracy. (1998, pp. 10-11) Hoganson’s analysis demonstrates fears of feminization (in this instance, to the “manly” realm of politics) resulting in masculinization and militarization of the response to the perceived threat. Uncertainties in the definition and status of what it means to be a man correspondingly disturb the grounds for assessing whether and/or how masculinity is to 35 be demonstrated or proven. As such, issues like women in combat are rendered as intrusions into spaces designated as supremely masculine. Accomplishing masculinity “requires an audience” (A. M. Young & Kaurin, 2015, p. 415); that is, masculinity is performative. Gender’s saliency—its realness and naturalness—is produced through a “stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 2010, p. 419) that prescribe meaning in the culturally and historically discursive formations in which they operate. In other words, culturally constructed gender identity categories emerge and are sustained through iterative enactments of gender. Thus, “a performatively constructed masculinity,” in A. M. Young and Kaurin’s (2015) estimation, “is fragile, precarious, and requires constant proof to other men” (p. 416). Because successful masculine performances are constituted and confined through their relationship with female otherness, “reiterations of female otherness” in “male dominated arenas” act as insulation against a loss of masculine potency (Holland, 2006, p. 31). As such, “performing masculinity effectively requires a potency that is symbolized by the presence of the male body and by the absence of the female soldier” (Holland, 2006, p. 32). For example, Kimmel (2010) explained that prior to women’s admittance as cadets to the Citadel, “the absence of real women” provided “a constant symbolic other against which [male cadets would] measur[e] themselves,” and facilitated assurances of masculine accomplishment (p. 182). Yet, as Kimmel noted, women were of course already present at the Citadel as staff and faculty, leading him to conclude, “the threat posed by women is not posed simply by their presence but by their equality” (2010, p. 182). In other words, the presence of female bodies performing “as men” risks making the ground on which the stability of masculine accomplishment rests even shakier. 36 The performative qualities of masculinity contextualize the sources of anxiety over women in combat, as embedded in objections claiming that “women’s physical inferiority would dilute the military’s potency and that the inherent femininity associated with the female body is antithetical to the ‘warrior’ instincts of the masculine soldier” (Holland, 2006, p. 32). In short, such anxiety creates desire to re-entrench a stable foundation for binary gender norms and preserve spaces where the proof of inherent gender/sex difference is resonant. Scholars observe that challenges to patriarchal notions of innate gender difference and masculine superiority produce discursive strains about “male embattlement” (Cohn, 2000, p. 139), which find grounding in military controversies like women in combat “to shore up a version of masculinity under threat” (Brown, 2012, p. 40). In so far as combat has represented one of the last all-male bastions in the modern gender landscape, this too contributes to the intensity of anxieties at the intersection of masculinity and soldiering. Conclusion The primary objective guiding this chapter was to theoretically ground the relational connections between militarism, gender, and the figure of the soldier central to my study. To address this objective, I emphasized several principal ideas reflected in previous scholarship. First, nationalism and (national) (in)security discourses are implicated in processes of militarization to the extent they help promote and justify war, which in turn position soldiers as key actors in undertakings to secure the nation against threats. Next, a history of policies and practices connecting military service with obligations of citizenship uphold soldiering as the ultimate sacrifice to the nation. 37 Patriarchal logics organizing citizens’ wartime dispositions are evidenced in rhetorics (e.g., the family, the patriot, protector/protected) that construct and normalize gendered divisions in civic duties as they also further associations between men/masculinity and soldiering coded in the figure of the soldier. Additionally, mythic constructions of the band of brothers and the warrior hero demonstrate a cultural investment with turning boys into men as a militarized, yet sacred rite of passage that concurrently instills soldiers’ martial actions with a sense of valor and righteousness. Finally, instances of shifts in membership arrangements reveal an established pattern of hegemonic maneuvering to shore up militarized masculinity by neutralizing the object(s) of potential threat to the established militarized gender order. With these ideas in mind, my study focuses on how the soldier operates as a rhetorical figure whose symbolic force articulates militarism and gender as it invokes such discourses, myths, and tropes. In particular, I focus on rhetorical deployments of the solider as a rhetorical figure within controversies over and shifts in military membership policies. These moments of rhetorical negotiation of who or what constitutes the figure of solider highlight hegemonic processes in the production of gendered and militarized meanings and relationships that figure the soldier, spaces where those hegemonic processes can be strategically disrupted, and tactics by which hegemonic associations are reified. Ultimately in this dissertation I argue that the figure of the soldier serves as an apparatus for (re)articulations of gender and militarism because of the rhetorical work it does to (re)present certain conditions of vulnerability and forms of sacrifice as (un)intelligible. The figure of the soldier similarly supplies a heuristic by which publics 38 can differentially confer, contest, and (re)distribute value among varied conditions of vulnerability and forms of sacrifice. In the military membership controversies I analyzed, figurations of the solider thus structured negotiations over and informed bases for judgments regarding the (de)regulation of particular military populations and what counts as legitimate performances of soldiering. In the next chapter, I develop a critical framework to guide my methodological approach for investigating these ideological dynamics and the rhetorical practices and figures that drive them within four different controversies surrounding military membership policies. The following chapter thus contributes to my argument because it establishes my conceptualization of the figure of the soldier as an animating force within processes of public imagining. CHAPTER TWO CRITIQUING CONTROVERSY: GENDER PERFORMATIVITY, STYLE, AND RHETORICS OF PUBLIC POLICY In the previous chapter, I discussed several key features of tropes that play a central role in constructions of militarized masculinity, as exemplified within the figure of the soldier. These tropes (e.g., the patriot, band of brothers, protector, etc.) help to illustrate how discourses of nationalism, militarism, and patriarchy map onto figurations of the soldier to center the ideal soldier as a cardinal archetype within this interwoven ideological formation. Idealized images of soldiers and soldiering thus prominently contribute to public conceptualizations of and sense-making regarding war, its justifications, and the parties involved. In this way, the figure of the soldier operates rhetorically as a vehicle for the transmission of ideology. However, the peculiar relations between gender and war/militarism, which provide for the seemingly natural cultural associations between masculinity and soldiering, shift and change in particular moments and specific contexts. Thus, in this chapter I outline a critical approach geared at examining (re)articulations of the gendered relationship between militarism and the figure of the soldier. With this aim in mind, I first explain how situating my investigation within rhetorics of controversy allows for critical insight into the relations of power structuring the parameters of disagreement and forms 40 of engagement relative to a period of controversy, in this case over gender(ed) anxieties about military service. Next, I address gender performativity and its utility for conceptualizing how gender is (re)produced and functions as a regulatory logic. I utilize Butler’s identification of the substance of gender as repeated corporeal stylization to examine how processes of iteration both constrain and condition what possibilities exist for (re)articulations of gender in figurations of the soldier. I then discuss style as a tool for considering how elements cohere, or do not cohere, as it relates to the formation and stylization of sexed/gendered/sexual identities and highlight the role of homologies in providing senses of stylistic unity, as well as identifying underlying logics at work within assertions of military belongingness. Following this, I turn my attention to some specific methodological considerations that arise for examining public policy texts. I detail collective imagining as the process by which figures appear and/or are represented in public arenas before developing a rationale for how interrogating the circulatory activity of public discourse contributes to my analytical framework. A Rhetorical Perspective of Controversy In seeking to analyze (re)articulations of gender and militarism in figurations of the soldier, I first develop a critical framework that addresses how rhetoric contributes to and functions within public policy controversy. Goodnight (1991) proposed rhetoric and argumentation scholars begin to orient the notion of controversy as a critical problematic rather than viewing controversy as a necessary, or at least a productive/efficacious, means to an end. Specifically, Goodnight advocated for remedying what he observed as a dearth of theoretical inquiry and insights concerning “controversy’s cultural roles, social 41 constitution, intellectual significance, and communicative practices” (1991, p. 9n3). As such, theorizing the controversial entails positioning controversies as sites that “put at stake the implicit understandings of, and relationships between, communication and reason” (Goodnight, 1991, p. 6). Controversies over military membership policy serve as one such site to examine challenges to common sense practices and rationales. Since Goodnight’s call, explorations into the rhetorical dimensions of controversy have affirmed its role in the production of meaning and the opportunities it presents for the invention of new meaning (Asen, 2002; Phillips, 1999) as well as considered what a critical rhetorical interrogation of the controversial entails. For instance, Ono and Sloop (1999) suggested that there are critical analytical limitations when investigating commensurate controversies because the critic need not “take into account various logics and their power relations” (p. 528). They therefore encouraged critical attention to cases of incommensurability, in contrast to “cases of disagreement,” which they characterized as “differences in opinion, not differences in the relative power of logics and positions” (1999, pp. 528-529). While I take their point about finding issue with the analysis of a controversy whose conclusions are relegated to “illustrat[ing] how well [dominant logics] wor[k]” (1999, p. 529), I also want to forward a way of conceptualizing disagreement as a matter of invention (Greene, 1998a) from a field of iterative possibilities, which in turn can promote consideration of differential relations of power between activated logics and subjects. This perspective means viewing disagreement as a site where ideological struggle occurs over “establishing a common horizon to orient” (Goodnight, 1991, p. 12n3) the precise parameters of disagreement itself. These parameters, thereby, highlight what practiced forms and channels of argumentative engagement become intelligible, 42 decorous, appropriate, etc., thereby implicating the power relations structuring the conditions engendering a controversial engagement. If we take the moment of invention for a disagreement to mark the initiation of a controversy, the duration of a controversy can similarly be thought of as the period encompassing the invention, circulation, and regulated resolution of disagreement (Greene, 1998a, p. 28). To be clear, by describing a controversy’s duration in this way, I am not aiming to characterize the attainment of resolution as “an a priori good” (Greene & Hicks, 1998, p. 197), by which to measure a certain persuasive rhetorical achievement. Nor am I suggesting that controversy is best conceived as possessing a clean, linear temporality. Rather, I want to approach controversies as “temporally pluralistic” (Goodnight, 1991, p. 2), extending over time at varying speeds and intensities. For instance, as Goodnight (1991) held, “controversy elicits temporal displacements that tangle up memories of historical events…with contemporary policy decisions” (p. 2). The admonition to “support the troops” (and frequently therefore, war) as it informs policy debates might be considered one such case, in moments when and to the extent that it also conjures the specter of the embattled Vietnam veteran. Additionally, Stormer (2002) related the problem of “constraint in the performative production of gender” and the dissection of what possibilities exist to negotiate these constraints with the more general conception of how “memory constrains invention” (p. 277). As he explained, “Rhetorical invention is not about creation from whole cloth but about the sometimes predictable, sometimes novel reformulation of recognizable forms and substance” (2002, p. 277). Because gender disagreements (and how they may be invented, circulated, and regulated) are a central driving force of the controversies I analyze, in the next section, I unpack this 43 notion through a discussion of gender performativity and how it contributes to the way I am working to index the mechanisms that constrain and engender points of controversy about military membership policy. Gender Performativity For the purposes of this study, approaching gender through a performative lens equips me with conceptual tools for assessing the contingent dynamics of gender construction as they unfold through controversy. In this way, theorizing the performativity of gender provides several key insights for thinking about how processes of militarizing gender manifest via figurations of the soldier and are contextualized through military membership policy. Judith Butler’s conceptualization of gender performativity provides a rendering of gender as an iterative process where meaning continually unfolds as subjects act within codified structures of already gendered signs. As Butler (1993) postulated, the realness or ‘truth’ of gender is not materialized outside of, or prior to the constitution of a gendered subject in a given historical context and moment. Her project to demonstrate that gender is not “a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence, or fact” (Butler, 2010, p. 422) signaled a commitment towards unraveling assumptions of gender’s naturalness by revealing how gender arises as an effect of relations of power and the fixity of boundaries that reify categories over time. In this respect, gender is not approached as immutable; instead, because it is grounded by the “stylized repetition of acts” over time, the “possibilities of gender transformation” can be realized, as well as interrogated, in “the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (Butler, 2010, p. 419). In an effort to access these insights in my analysis of figurations of 44 the soldier, the following section provides further development of my working understanding of performativity as it relates to gender by first explicating how it is materially (re)produced before next discussing how gender functions as a regulatory logic that implicates related signifiers and practices of sex/sexuality, allowing for their mutual reinforcement. The material (re)production of gender A performative perspective provides a particular orientation for thinking about the materiality and substance of gender, as constituted by a process of corporeal stylization which reifies gender categorization and norms. As Butler (2010) explained recognizing gender as performative reconceives “the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body…as distinct from the process by which the body comes to bear cultural meanings” (p. 420). To clarify this idea, Haslanger (2006) posed a hypothetical in which landlords all have a mole on their left ear. However, while the presence of the mole might classify a person as a landlord, the mole itself does not constitute or fully determine what it means to be a landlord. Instead, as she pointed out, being a landlord is about embodying and performing in certain ways that continually reflect and reproduce one’s position as a property owner within a historically situated field of social and economic relations to others. Indeed, in light of Simone de Beauvior’s (1983/1989) seminal assertion that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (p. 267), Butler (2010) noted that to become a woman is “to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign…and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project” (p. 421). The body, in other words, through a 45 practiced process of embodiment materializes a set of possibilities—which are “both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention” (Butler, 2010, p. 421)—for constituting its corporeal style. Thus, when Butler stated we can think of gender “as a corporeal style” (2010, p. 421), she advanced a claim that this corporeal style is what lends gender the “appearance of substance” (2010, p. 419), the appearance of being a “natural configuration” (2010, p. 423). Commitments to the perceived substantive features of and distinctions between genders as naturally occurring, in part propels judgments about the proper place of men and women in relation to war, violations of which may provide fuel for controversy. By thinking the sexed body as “not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is” but rather the product of a regulatory norm that “qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (Butler, 1993, p. 2), a performative perspective reveals the enduring force of gender to be arbitrary and, as a result, thoroughly political. Indeed, as Denise Riley (1988) remarked, “there’s no becoming a subject without the generation, sooner or later, of a contesting politics of that subject” (p. 99). To approach gender as performative thus requires confronting the “inherent shakiness of the designation ‘women,’” and the implications of strategically deploying that designation or invoking its categorical authority (D. Riley, 1988, p. 98). Of primary concern, for instance, is how actions that reproduce women as a category risk further reifying the role of gender in sanctioning conditions of oppression and/or inequity. Such concerns led Wittig (1992) to argue for the necessity of distinguishing between ‘woman,’ as “an imaginary formation,” and ‘women,’ as the “product of a social relationship” (p. 15) and indicative of a class within which political struggle occurs to disrupt and 46 challenge the credibility of gender as a naturalized category whose logic organizes bodies into discrete sexes “which exist in binary relation to one another” (Butler, 2010, p. 423). Indeed, as Riley noted, negotiating this categorical tension and instability is precisely “the lot of feminism” (D. Riley, 1988, p. 98). Thus, although individual actions in part constitute “the life-world of gender relations” (Butler, 2010, p. 422) and regularly contribute to the reproduction of normative gender identities, in Butler’s (2010) determination “it doesn’t follow that oppression is a sole consequence of such acts” (p. 424). In other words, because “the relation between acts and conditions is neither unilateral nor unmediated,” challenges to current systems of oppression entail “transforming hegemonic social conditions rather than the individual acts that are spawned by those conditions” (Butler, 2010, pp. 424-425). As such, with regard to performative analysis Butler opined: …an explicitly feminist account…of gender as ritualized, public performance must be combined with an analysis of the political sanctions and taboos under which that performance may and may not occur within the public sphere free of punitive consequence. (2010, p. 430n9) Such a combined analytical focus is what provides visibility to how individual acts operate within and negotiate already ordained cultural codes and public norms. Matrices of gender logics and regulation Repeated, mundane enactments of gender function as the process by which gender’s socially established meanings and sanctioned forms of expression receive legitimation (Butler, 2010, p. 425). Put another way, the corporeal style of the body becomes intelligible as it is situated in those ideological categories that prescribe meaning and give order to a hierarchical system of social relations. It follows that bodies become 47 intelligible “only under some particular gaze” (D. Riley, 1988, p. 106). Holland (2006) characterized such effects of corporeal stylization to be “a product of both the forced articulations of normative gender assignments and the policing of gender boundaries” (p. 29). For example, one’s capacity to (appropriately, legibly) accomplish gender in a given context might entail having a body that can be read through a biological discursive regime as identifiably male or female, while engaging in practices and interactions that a binary gender formation permits—based on one’s sex category assignment. Extending this formulation of the interplay between sex/gender to sexuality in order to illustrate how gender and sexuality function to reinforce each other within a regime of binary gender logics, Herbert (1998) noted, There is a tendency to conflate gender with sexuality so that while normative patterns of gender (e.g., the exhibition by men of appropriate masculinity) lead to assumptions of heterosexuality, gender nonconformity (e.g., failure by men to exhibit masculinity appropriately or their exhibition of femininity) suggests homosexuality. (pp. 59-60) Herbert’s description of this arrangement of sex/gender/sexuality aligns with what Wittig (1992) termed the “heterosexual matrix:” the ideological system responsible for historically producing the boundaries of sex, gender, and sexuality and articulating them as a united gender formation. For Butler (1990/2006), this “‘unity’ of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality” (p. 43), a term Adrienne Rich (1980) deployed in her titular essay to name the force operative in hegemonically institutionalizing and maintaining heteropatriarchal dominance through apparatuses that function to restrict and/or exclude gender difference. Plentiful scholarship establishes the military as one quintessential location 48 repeatedly occupied with maintaining dominant sex/gender/sexuality logics and policing potential disruptions to their normative boundaries. Within extant literature, scholars have identified forms of sex/gender/sexuality discipline meted out to service members including: draft (in)eligibility criteria meant to identify and weed out male homosexuals based on physique (Canaday, 2009; Lehring, 2003); training drills and rituals designed to initiate cadets into, and reproduce a culture of masculinity derived from a disavowal and/or debasement of the feminine (Burke, 2004; Kimmel, 2010; Knight, 1990); dress codes to ensure clear and appropriate distinction between the bodies of male and female service members (Enloe, 2000; Herbert, 1998); and prior to the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), the threat of and engagement in lesbian baiting practices against female service members who were rendered suspicious via their successful accomplishments and/or their rejection of male sexual advances (Banner, 2012; Canaday, 2009; Crenshaw, 1997; Herbert, 1998). Collectively, these sites of inquiry demonstrate how gender logics can function via a regulatory apparatus to materially reproduce and reinscribe normative gender conditions. For the purposes of this study, I am more specifically interested in how figural representations of soldiers function to negotiate disruptions and/or threats to militarized masculinity’s normalization and rearticulate the militarization of sex/gender/sexuality logics. For example: by highlighting female soldiers’ additional role as mothers (Cohler, 2006; Prividera & Howard, 2006; Stachowitsch, 2013); or through the overrepresentation of and disproportionate attention paid to White female soldiers in popular media, whose corporeal legibility as more (and more appropriately) feminine serves as less of a threat to dominant gender systems (Brown, 2012, p. 184; see also Crenshaw, 1997; Prividera & 49 Howard, 2006; R. L. Riley, 2006). Taken together, these examples from the context of military membership policy reinforce how gender performativity can neither be deployed as a “theory of pure freedom nor as a theory of pure constraint” (Sloop, 2004, p. 8). Because while a given instance of gender disruption may “work subversively” it may also “work complicitly with dominant culture and representations” (Sloop, 2004, p. 8). For instance, in the context of sports, the prominent musculature that is characteristic of female bodybuilders may challenge norms of masculine strength and feminine weakness. But those same muscles may be coded through a discourse of feminine health and fitness as sexy (Shea, 2001), and thereby possibly attenuate the liberatory potential of such a break in gender normativity. Thus, as Butler (1993) insisted, “performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” (p. 95). This process is what makes the continual reenactment of gender norms and practices contingent on the ideological systems and chains of meaning available at a given historical moment. Put simply, performative iterations always entail constraint. But importantly, Butler explained that constraint should not be reductively conceived to function as a limiter on performative options. Rather, constraint becomes “the very condition of performativity,” in that, the precise conditions of constraint are “what enabl[e] a subject and constitut[e] the temporal condition” for their becoming (Butler, 1993, pp. 94-95). Thus, in recollection of Butler’s (2010) assertion that gender exists as “a stylized repetition of acts” (p. 422), I next turn to address my conceptualization of the rhetorical function of style and how it informs my theoretical/methodological approach towards analyzing configurations of a (gendered) soldier. 50 Rhetorical Stylings and/of Gender (In)congruity Classical rhetoric understands style as one available means of persuasion, as a set of conventions that, when mastered by an orator, enhance the suasory impact of one’s speech (Vivian, 2002). From this perspective, style exists as a tool for rational, purposeful communication and the use of style becomes a matter of selecting through what form(s) to express the substance of one’s message or argument. However, Bradford Vivian (2002) proposed that “the category of style offers renewed explanatory force” (p. 228) when it is reconceived as “an analytic category for understanding a social reality” (p. 224). Approaching style in this way challenges classical rhetoric’s separation of form and substance by appointing style as “the manner in which the representative aesthetic forms” of a cultural milieu “constitute its defining and substantive features” (Vivian, 2002, p. 229). As such, style serves as a critical tool for examining “the interplay between collective discourse and cultural aesthetics” (Vivian, 2002, p. 226). Brummett (2008) defined style as a “technique” (p. 4) for “express[ing] values, structures, and assumptions” (p. 2) through aesthetic means—where aesthetics is understood to operate as “a systematic mode” for appreciating the sensory forms and qualities of lived experience (p. 17). This systematicity of the aesthetic mode signals how “the iteration of aesthetic forms” produces a restricted set of meanings for the “animat[ion] of contemporary social relations” (Vivian, 2002, pp. 228-229). For example, Brummett described normative gender formations articulated within a heterosexual matrix to work rhetorically through “cohesive clusters of style—movement, gesture, speech, vocabulary, decoration, and the like—that will be read as gay or straight and…such expectations and attributions work at some level often enough to be constantly used” (2008, p. xii). Below 51 I develop a framework for understanding style’s role “as an organizing feature of social and political relations” as well as “the ways in which [style] engenders, maintains, or reconfigures them” (Vivian, 2002, p. 225). The role of style in articulating identity is one aspect I draw on to inform my approach to examining the potential contestation and negotiation of the figure of the soldier’s gendered and militarized dynamics. On one level style functions “as a unifying center,” which “pull[s] together actions and objects defining…[an] identity” (Brummett, 2008, p. 40). As such, adopting style as a critical analytical tool draws my attention to the figural assemblage collectively imagined as identifying the archetypal soldier. On another level, style arranges the stuff of identity with social categories, making it the mode by which “having an identity…means being aligned with a social category” (Brummett, 2008, p. 96). With respect to these levels, style serves as a construct identifying those features that appear coterminous to a particular identity, and in addition, by drawing attention to the particular aesthetic attributes imagined to form a given identity, style points to the way such aesthetic indicators operate as a vehicle for making sense of a structure of social relations and the positions people occupy within it. Indeed, as Brummett (2008) remarked, “We know who we are and who they are because of the different aesthetics that mark our styles” (p. 46). In terms of military membership and the figure of the soldier, Prividera and Howard (2006) regard the warrior-hero archetype to form the “ideological center” and thereby serve as a stylistic rubric for assessing and categorizing “the performance and worth” of each and every service member based on how closely they appear to fit this archetypal ideal (p. 31). When considering controversies over military membership policy, the aesthetic elements that cohere in the 52 figure of the soldier are thus a locus of struggle and strategic negotiation on a terrain of stylistic constraint. Performatively, style functions as an arbiter of constraints by articulating a given action or object to a set of possible meanings presently available from existing structures of signification, as formed through past stylistic registers. For instance, Brummett (2008) presented for consideration the implausibility that someone—by simply asserting a meaning for gesturing in a particular manner or for wearing a particular accessory—could gain the unequivocal adherence from all others to their stated meaning. Such a gesture or accessory never functions as a completely freely floating sign because the structure of already intelligible stylistic modes is the condition through which the possibility of its meaning arises. This suggests the ways style “uses us as much as we use it” (Brummett, 2008, p. 3), because the senses of style we acquire contribute to and compel aesthetic iteration. Brummett held that having these senses of “coherence suggested by a style’s components” is a “powerfully motivating” force (2008, p. 36) because the repertoire of a style is what “allow[s] people to make claims about their identity” (2008, p. 92). With this in mind then, accomplishing the type of masculinity associated with soldiering can be understood to entail an attentiveness to and performance of the particular forms and patterns that give meaning to militarized masculinity’s respective repertoire. However, while self-stylization involves “the manipulation of meanings connected to the aesthetic dimension of public presentation” (Brummett, 2008, p. 17), style imposes boundaries on how free one is in their manipulation. Moreover, individuals are not entirely able to control or choose what stylistic repertoires are accessible to them—a property Butler (1990/2006) discussed as demonstrative of how style does not 53 operate in a politically neutral way (p. xix). For instance, Brummett (2008) noted that because “we know what styles mean what gender,” even purposeful performances of a “transgressive” or illegitimated gender identity are “necessarily in reference to the same [heteronormative] style code” (p. 94). Additionally, corporeal stylization “mark[s]” difference onto some bodies, which become “disproportionately subject to scrutiny and…sedimented meanings about the characteristics and qualities of their flesh” (Brouwer, 2004, p. 414). Brouwer (2004) illustrated this in his observation even as gay soldiers provided Congressional testimony portraying themselves to be “first and foremost a soldier” (p. 418) during the 1993 debate over DADT, other associations rendered specific to the gay male body, like disease, also permeated the discourse of the debate. With consideration to these dynamics of stylistic constraint, the analytic approach I am proposing situates the capacity “to stylize with rhetorical effect” (Brummett, 2008, p. 30) as contingent on how one draws from the repertoires of coherent senses of style in order to “reach the rhetorical horizon of intelligibility and communicability” (Stormer, 2002, p. 277). This approach bears in mind that “to aestheticize is to strategize” (Brummett, 2008, p. 17); it entails a continual fashioning or invention of something in the moment by “making use of the resources offered to one by different styles, which remain more permanent and ideal” (Brummett, 2008, p. 4). Throughout the contours of the controversies I analyze, this understanding of style points to the way available repertoires of gendered, raced, classed, and nationalized identities, in conjunction with the performative repertoire associated with soldiering, produce stylistically grounded constraints on what figurative manipulations can be used to what effect, as well as how 54 those manipulations are enacted and policed over the course of military membership controversies. Rationales of homological concordance Brummett (2008) pointed to the concept of homology to explain how various elements cohere to form a given style and provide its sense of unity. He specified it is the homology, the “formal pattern or structure,” that is shared “among the components of a style that creates the unity that holds a style together” (2008, p. 36). A homology’s precise structure, including what signified meanings aggregate to form a style’s repertoire is a function of ideology. As Brummett put it, “the gravity that pulls together [a given] style is its ideology that works homologically” (2008, p. 131). In other words, when presented with “a set of signs” a homology is what “tends to bring to the fore meanings of those signs that triangulate or cohere through the style that orders them” (Brummett 2008, p. 131). For stylistic enactments, then, ideology reveals itself based on “how and whether the meanings of signs cohere” (Brummett, 2008, p. 131) or alternatively exhibit stylistic incongruities as signs are strategically combined and their competing meanings struggled over. For instance, the meaning signified by blood on the battlefield is typically deemed ideologically coherent with militarized masculinity, but this coherence has not historically extended to blood on the battlefield when it signifies menstruation (McCracken, 2003). It is important to consider, however, that this sense of cohesion or apparent unity of a style is “engendered by (sometimes profound) disunity” (Vivian, 2002, p. 229). That a style conceals the heterogeneity and contradictions embedded within it is also 55 thoroughly ideological. Indeed, as Hall (1985) determined, the seeming “‘unity’ of a discourse” is understood as a result of the articulation between disparate elements (e.g., masculinity and soldiering) which “have no necessary ‘belongingness,’” but nevertheless under certain social conditions come to be linked (Hall, 1986, p. 53). As such, because the “expressive homology” which supplies the form of linkage is never a natural given, “the mechanisms which connect dissimilar features must be shown” (Hall 1980d, p. 325; as quoted in Slack, 1996, p. 115) in order to identify potential points of dis/rearticulation. In the case of the articulation between masculinity and soldiering, the homological form(s) expressive of their seeming coherence is where the tenets undergirding gendered and militaristic ideologies may be identified. It is via particular homological patterns that style becomes a vehicle for “expressing values and judgments about people and groups” (Brummett, 2008, p. 50). While the registration of ideology within the homological rationale tends to be unconscious, the judgments we make based on style often occur at the conscious level. As Brummett (2008) remarked, “One knows that this walk goes with this outfit even if one cannot say why” (p. 46). Crucially, style engenders such values and judgments because of its function as an instrument for speculation involving questions of fit, concordance, belonging, delineation, appropriateness, etc. Above I suggested how style works rhetorically to articulate an archetypal soldier aesthetic and thereby provides a means of evaluating questions of fit with that aesthetic. But for my investigation of military membership controversies, I am interested in this additional dimension of style involving assertions made regarding fitness. Because the controversies I analyze primarily center on whether to maintain or expand standards and practices of inclusion, I 56 want to direct my focus on how style implicates judgments made involving questions of fit between certain identity classifications (e.g., women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender personnel) and a specific contextual environment (e.g., combat, naval ships, showers, the military at large, etc.). Investigating the sources of homological linkage contained within evaluations of fit reflected in statements made by participants in the policy controversies entails looking beyond the literal content of the statements themselves. Indeed, Olson (2002) characterized the significance of homological analysis to be grounded in the recognition that “form plays at least as important a role in [a text’s] persuasiveness as its content” (p. 217) in the way it suggests and appeals to social values. In other words, the sense of the connection between and/or among texts, people, contexts, situations, etc. is achieved homologically, which in turn can “invoke or activate values and bring them to bear on decisions and choices” (Brummett, 2013, p. 63). By way of example, MacKenzie (2015) appeared to discover a homology at work when she commented on the commonly “visceral conviction that women ‘just do not belong’ in combat” and argued that rather than drawing on quantifiable reasons as justification, this conviction betrays a way of imagining “the nature of men and women” through “the types of identities and stereotypes associated with the band of brothers myth” (pp. 76-77, italics added). Homological connections may also be evidenced when being “big,…mean, and…kill[ing] lots of bad guys” restylizes the image of a gay service member to illustrate his appropriate fit for an (apparent) combat environment, as contextualized through the hypermasculine performance standard (C. Rich, Schutten, & Rogers, 2012, p. 277). As these examples begin to suggest, the forms of linkage between gender and militarism 57 shift with respect to the multiple ideas, interests, investments, and identities that also articulate the context at a specific moment. Thus, thinking about stylistic homologies cultivates analytical attention to both the specificity of sex/gender/sexuality stylization deployed in a given aesthetic rationale, as well as their articulated disposition and value as contextualized within public debate over military membership policies. Rhetoric and Public Policy My project centers on questions about the activation of gender logics and the form(s) of their connection to American militarism and its attendant discourses within the particular context of U.S. military membership policy. In a more general sense, this trajectory of inquiry entails exploring the rhetorical processes that allow a governing apparatus to “attach a population to a policy” (Greene, 1998b, p. 27). That is, recent shifts to military membership policies involving the open service of LGBT soldiers and the removal of the combat ban for female soldiers present an opportunity to interrogate the ways particular population segments were figured with relation to the particular policy changes and the rhetorical activity around them. In other words, my analysis serves as an exploration of how “rhetoric articulates policy purposes and populations and negotiates fits between them” (Asen, 2010, p. 129). As such, I utilize this section to briefly discuss key issues with respect to my approach to rhetoric as it operates in the realm of public policymaking before detailing the conceptual contributions of imagining and circulation for my analysis. In his discussion of what particular methodological implications arise for rhetorical analyses of public policy, Asen (2010) likened the temporal considerations 58 germane to a public policy text to the temporality characteristic of controversy. Specifically, he pointed to the diachronic and pluralistic temporal quality of rhetoric as it operates in public policy debates to be indicative of complications in distinctions between text and context. The analytical implication(s) for me in this complication of text and context is not quite a total “collapse” of “context into text” (McGee, 1990, p. 283; see also Greene 1998b, pp. 33-35) but instead suggests their identification “must be held in abeyance” because “what makes a text textual and a context contextual is unstable” (Stormer, 2004, p. 276). For instance, Asen (2010) offered one way to think about the instability of text and context when he observed “what may constitute text at one historical moment” in the discursive progression of a policy controversy “changes into context at another” and, moreover, that “aspects of policy debates may serve simultaneously as text and context” (p. 135). For Stormer (2004), the question of whether certain elements, objects, or things are textually operative becomes a matter of their articulation “within networks that privilege them as such, whereas in other networks what was a text becomes context” (p. 276). Thus, it is through considering the specificity of the arrangement of discursive fragments, bodies, institutions, practices, etc., that leads Greene (1998b) to conclude, “For the war room, manager’s office, and classroom, rhetorical forms exist to make populations ‘stand still long enough to analyze’ so as to make a series of deliberations” (p. 34). As such, to view rhetoric as a “technology of deliberation” is to approach the question of rhetorical effectivity from a logic of articulation; the particular cartography or distribution of articulated links between elements, fragments, practices, signs, etc. compels and conditions deliberative activity, the effect of which is the production of 59 judgment. As Grossberg stated, Articulation is the production of identity on top of differences, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices. Articulation links this practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics. And these links are themselves articulated into larger structures, etc. (Grossberg, 1992, as quoted in Slack, 1996) I situate this articulative function of rhetoric by drawing on Greene’s (1998b) recognition of “rhetorical practices…as a technology of deliberation [which] distribut[es] discourses, institutions, and populations onto a field of action” (p. 22). Rhetorical practices have this deliberative effect given their distributive capacity. For a governing apparatus whose purpose is to “formulate and solve” issues related to military membership policies (Greene, 2009, p. 54), the effectivity of its rhetorical practices turns on the techniques that allow certain populations, activities, situations, practices, and/or entities to appear as objects in need of intervention, regulation, and/or transformation (Greene, 1998a, 2009). That is, in the case of military membership controversies centered on questions of gender identity, rhetorical practices shape what questions get asked about what bodies. Imagining Because my analysis is directed most specifically at the articulated relations between gender and militarism to figure the soldier during deliberative processes resulting in policy decisions about a certain population’s fitness for the military and/or for a particular realm of soldiering, I employ the concept of imagining in my efforts to zero in on these dynamics. Asen (2002) posed the concept of imagining “as a tool that may inform critical investigations of the ways…people appear in public spheres” (p. 348). In particular, it grounds insight by emphasizing the multitude of forms through 60 which imagining occurs and the varied dynamics of imagining as it operates in the background versus through active engagement. For Asen, “processes of collective imagining” (2002, p. 357) depend neither on strictly visual nor linguistic forms of representation. As he submitted, “The polysemic character of ‘image’—which denotes a physical likeness, optical reflection, mental representation, figure of speech, and public perception—suggests the multimodality of imagining” (2002, p. 357). Adopting this notion of imagining’s multimodality informs my approach for assessing dynamics including representations of sex/gender/sexuality, the figure of the soldier, ideas about what soldiering entails and/or its physical/biological requirements, and the literal presence of bodies of current and former soldiers as they appear in and traverse a military membership controversy. Additionally, Asen (2002) distinguished between “active engagement” of collective imagining versus how it functions as a “background process” (p. 351). He explained that when operating in the background, “collective imagination constitutes a constellation of shared assumptions, values, perceptions, and beliefs for matters identified explicitly as topics of discussion” (2002, p. 351). Importantly, background processes of collective imagining function to “condition debates about the future of public programs” and policies (Asen, 2002, p. 351). In this way, we can align the background processes of collective imagining with mechanisms whereby traditionally dominant/prominent figurations of the solider serve to condition military membership debates as they articulate militarized masculinity with ideas about patriotism, the family, citizenship, warrior-heroes, protection and security, etc. Moreover, because Asen (2010) identified the rhetorical mode through which already-enacted policies operate as one of 61 “maintaining and enforcing meaning” (p. 129), existing military membership policy can also be considered to operate within imagining’s background processes. Alternately, Asen (2002) characterized collective imagining as active “in situations where advocates explicitly call upon their audiences to rethink relations to one another” (p. 351). Thus, for Asen policymaking, debates, and controversies represent instances of heightened engagement in collective imagining activity. As Asen explained, “Controversy engenders moments especially amenable to changes in imagining by unsettling background understandings and engaging imagining as an active force” (2002, p. 352). This increased level of engagement Asen attributed in part to the way “contestation accompanies controversy” (2002, p. 351). During such periods, participants in a public controversy actively attend to fellow interlocutors and attempt to solicit further public support. In this way, actively engaging figurations of the soldier within membership policy controversy represents moments of possibility for dis/rearticulations of gender and militarism as such discourses circulate in public fora. To develop my framework for approaching rhetorical engagement within a public controversy further, I next unpack a particular theoretical model of circulation with respect to deliberative rhetorical activity. This model of circulation serves to reorient my approach away from a model that centers rational, argumentative dialogue (Finnegan & Kang, 2004), while still facilitating consideration of multimodality and how the various modes for imagining respectively shape the ways people appear—concretely and/or imaginatively—in instances of public deliberation and controversy. 62 Circulating publics Warner (2002) introduced a theory of publics and counterpublics that redefines the notion of membership in a public, the public, even a public audience from typical delineations like citizenship, the geographical boundaries of cities or nations, or the concrete spatiotemporal binds of a specific event or “shared physical space” (p. 413). Instead, Warner directed attention at “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (2002, p. 413). In other words, a public’s existence, its make up, and character are a result of and dependent on the circulation of public discourses that address it as such. In his formulation, a public is “organized by nothing other than discourse itself” and “exists by virtue of being addressed” (2002, p. 413). However, the constitution of a public and its character, for Warner, is not just a matter of the semiotic or interpellative properties of public discourses. Rather, his stress on circulation as a central necessity for the formation and duration of a public facilitates recognition of circulation’s organizing and contextualizing capacities as indicative of its rhetorical functionality. Put another way, contextualizing a world becomes understood as a matter of circulatory activity and practices. Crucially, this casts public discourse and its circulation as “poetic world making” (Warner, 2002, p. 422). As such, circulation aids in my efforts to map the processes by which matters identified as up for discussion— matters being deliberated with respect to a proposed or planned change in military membership policy, for instance—receive contextualization within a certain historical conjuncture. That is, circulation is conceptually instrumental for indexing the emergence of a deliberative context by way of its articulations between people, discourses, values, agencies, texts, institutions, policies, etc. 63 Understanding public discourses and their circulation through their capacity for poetic world making highlights how the dispositions of and between rhetorical subjects exist as contingencies of circulatory activity. That is, rhetorical subjects “take on a set of characteristics and dispositions” (Greene, 2009, p. 51) because of and based on what, where, and how discourses addressed to a public circulate. As part of my effort to examine the contextual terrain that provides for the emergence of controversy over military membership policies, this directs my attention toward what texts, bodies, objects, figures, and participants circulate as part of the spatio-temporal articulation of a controversy, how they circulate (i.e., the forms and channels by which they circulate), and importantly, what things, elements, and forms fail to circulate and which “get stuck” (Topinka, 2016, p. 166). To unpack the contribution circulation makes, it is instructive to consider Warner’s (2002) argument regarding the dual imperatives of attention and circulation in the formation of a public and how their negotiation subsequently impacts the dispositions of its member-participants. As Warner argued, “some degree of attention” or “some kind of active uptake” of discourses addressed to a public is what predicates that public and its membership (p. 419). Additionally, because publics “must continually predicate renewed attention,” or “cease to exist,” a text only has and retains a public if it “continue[s] to circulate through time” (Warner, 2002, pp. 419, 421). This peculiarity in the character of public address puts the public life of a discourse in a perpetual quandary; its ability to have a public it’s addressing depends on its continued uptake and circulation, but its precise audience or membership cannot be definitively known or ensured in advance of member-participants’ acts of attention. The performative dimension of public address 64 resides in how discourse works to overcome this uncertainty. Discourse brings a public into being “partly by postulating and characterizing” the world inhabited by the public it is attempting to address, but it is also necessary for that particular public, which a discourse postulates and characterizes, to become a realized space for its continued circulation (Warner, 2005, p. 91). Discourse addressed to a public succeeds through this performative accomplishment when people imagine themselves and others as belonging to and participating in the particular public which the discourse they’ve encountered marks as its addressee. In this way, “a discourse does not address any public, but rather describes a public that belongs to a particular world and is marked by a certain disposition to action within it” (Atkinson, 2012, p. 676). Here, it is worth mentioning that I want to think about the disposition of rhetorical subjects/member-participants of a discourse public in terms of style. This is because disposition speaks both to the character of an individual as well as the position of that individual in relation to others. Similarly, style (or stylistic coherence) encompasses both those sets of aesthetic elements that, in their articulation, allow for the expression and interpretation of intelligible identities, as well as the homological formations that provide individuals with the capacity to judge appropriateness and fit of certain aesthetic elements or a particular (stylistic) form within the unity of a broader stylized context. As is the case with style, the circulatory activity of public discourse also occurs “in struggle with its own conditions” because it requires “preexisting forms and channels of circulation” (Warner, 2005, p. 106). Specifying the particular forms and channels of its circulation is what provides public discourse with the possibility to “circulate along a real path,” but it also “limit[s] the extension of that path” (Warner, 2005, p. 106). It is this 65 tension present in the nature of public address that led Warner (2005) to position circulation as “a problem of style” (p. 108). In other words, because discourse addressed to a public “need[s] to characterize the space of circulation…it is simultaneously” selecting participants based on the way it stylizes its circulatory space (Warner, 2005, p. 106). Warner (2002) located evidence of how public discourse makes use of style in its attempts to establish a circulatory path within “the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise en scéne, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon and so on” (p. 422). These techniques, by which public discourse attempts to create the dispositional character and arrangement of its memberparticipants as rhetorical subjects, draws my attention to how these techniques provide for the articulation of rhetorical subjects to various intelligible forms of identity/identification (e.g., soldier, citizen, sex/gender/sexuality) in the circulating discourses of the controversies I analyze. Circulation reveals why the forms and figures through which the rhetorical subject appears—that is, through which “concrete individuals come to understand themselves as subjects who communicate rhetorically”—matter because they are “produced and valued for the work [they] can and cannot accomplish” (Greene, 2009, p. 49). Since “the direction of our glance can constitute our social world,” the techniques for projecting a circulatory “space of encounter for discourse” (Warner, 2002, p. 420) serve as one avenue to investigate the process by which rhetoric distributes populations and discourses so that judgments might be made concerning public welfare (Greene, 1998b). 66 Conclusion In this chapter, my objective was to develop a critical framework to orient my analysis. I initially situated this analytical approach within rhetorics of controversy. In doing so I aimed to advance a perspective on disagreement understood through iterative processes that condition its invention and circulation. My purpose here was to provide an opening to critically examine how rhetorical practices of disagreement structure conditions for the future invention and circulation of disagreement. Given the centrality of disagreements relating to gender in the controversies I analyze, my discussion of gender performativity highlighted the regulatory logics that reify and constrain gender norms as well as the repeated stylization through which gender is (re)produced. By addressing the rhetorics of style, I aimed to outline dynamics operative in forging stylistic unities and fostering evaluations of aesthetic coherence as well as incongruity. These dynamics draw attention to rhetorical practices as they strategically function to contest and negotiate meaning on terrains of ideological struggle. The final section was directed at considerations of rhetorical mechanisms that contribute to the articulation of policy purposes and populations and serve as critical tools by which to investigate the function of deliberative and distributive practices as registers of ideology and in the (re)production of its conditions. In the following chapters I utilize these analytical tools as I investigate military membership controversies and identify and interpret (re)articulations of the gendered relationships between militarism and the figure of the soldier. CHAPTER THREE “ASK NOT…”: INAUGURATING AN ERA OF OPEN SERVICE The policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) arose in 1993 as a political compromise in light of intense resistance to and backlash against President Clinton’s stated agenda to remove the ban on homosexuality with respect to military service. During that time, many members of Congress as well as an overwhelming majority of senior military leaders expressed their vehement opposition over allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the U.S. armed forces. Much of the circulating media coverage characterized the unfolding controversy as being due to a fundamental split between, on the one hand, a new president who not only “lacked credibility as a military leader” (Lehring, 2003, p. 136) but was also “willing to undermine the military for the sake of lesbian and gay votes” (Meyers, 1994, p. 329) and on the other hand, top military officials and some leading members of Congress opposed to lifting the ban whose experience served to justify their position as knowledgeable authorities on military matters (Meyers, 1994). The agreement eventually reached between the Clinton Administration and the Pentagon continued to bar individuals from military service for homosexual conduct but not for homosexual orientation per se. Deeming sexual orientation to be “a personal and 68 private matter” Secretary of Defense Lee Aspin explained that the new policy would not regard orientation alone to be “a bar to service entry or continued service unless manifested by homosexual conduct” (Aspin, 1993, p. 1). However, the broad definition given to the term ‘homosexual conduct’ included not only engaging and/or “demonstrat[ing] a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts” but also “a statement by a servicemember that he or she is homosexual or bisexual”; the latter justified because it would create the “presumption that the servicemember is…or has a propensity or intent” to engage in such acts (Aspin, 1993, p. 2). The new policy’s colloquial moniker, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” reflects the presumptive power this rationale attached to servicemembers’ statements about their (nonhetero)sexual orientation. Servicemembers were not to be asked, nor required to disclose their sexual orientation, nor could servicemembers independently choose to reveal a (nonhetero)sexual orientation without the penalty of discharge. It is somewhat telling that the policy’s third mandate, “Don’t Pursue,”—dubbed as such because it forbade “commanders and investigating agencies” from “initiat[ing] inquiries or investigations solely to determine a members sexual orientation” (Aspin, 1993, p. 2)—ultimately faded from popular usage when referencing the policy, considering that, following a low point of 597 servicemembers discharged for homosexual conduct in 1994, this number rose steadily over the next 4 years, reaching 1149 by 1998 and remained above 1000 through 2001 (Lehring, 2003, p. 139). Although DADT(Don’t Pursue) barred investigations launched exclusively to suss out the (homo)sexuality of a particular servicemember, it still directed commanders to “initiate inquiries or investigations, as appropriate, when there [was] credible information that a 69 basis for discharge or disciplinary action exist[ed]” (Aspin, 1993, p. 2). Lehring (2003) argued that in effect, the new policy did little more than remove questions about sexuality from official enlistment forms; questions about servicemembers’ sexuality continued to be asked informally; chaplains and medical/psychiatric professionals continued to receive directives to report servicemembers for confidential disclosures; and military police raids on gay and lesbian bars near bases continued to be conducted (pp. 138-139). Despite the lackluster impacts of DADT on the circumstances of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) military service, the appetite in Washington to take up the issue again remained in what Neff and Edgell (2013) termed a “radioactive phase” for nearly a decade (p. 233). Following the election of President Obama in 2008, however, the sense that a window of viability had opened ramped up momentum and advocacy efforts for the policy’s repeal. In this chapter, my focus is on the controversy surrounding a repeal of DADT and the public deliberative activity that took place as a way to hash out the various matters of concern up for discussion and evaluation by participants. To this end, I employ Asen’s (2002) conceptualization of processes of collective imagining and his insights on their utility for underscoring dynamics that shape public inclusions and exclusions and the ways “included and excluded people appear in public spheres” (p. 348). Critical attentiveness to processes of collective imagining involves not simply a recognition of those instances in which individuals and/or groups encounter exclusion in a concrete, physical sense; it also importantly requires consideration of the ways that people who are physically excluded can nevertheless still appear in public deliberative activity. In this way, processes of collective imagining involve the representational dynamics of presence and absence. Thus, at moments when LGB servicemembers might be tangibly absent 70 from a given deliberative forum, they may still become present as included participants speak for/about them, thereby collectively constructing their imagined and imaged presence through a particular rendering. In this way, imagining “indicates a public process” (Asen, 2002, p. 349) that “enacts a politics of representation” (Asen, 2002, p. 347), which is “structured by a logic of abstraction” (Warner, 2002, p. 167). The political force behind such a logic “provides a privilege for unmarked identities” (Warner, 2002, p. 167) in the way that it forms a correlative relationship between the validity of a person’s public speech and their capacity to “transcend the given realities of their bod[y] and their status” (Warner, 2002, p. 165). In other words, the logic of abstraction that undergirds processes of publicity structures a dynamic wherein the particularities of a subject, their personhood, negatively correlates with the degree to which their words carry the force of public universalizability. Because “the ability to abstract oneself in public discussions has always been an unequally available resource” (Warner, 2002, p. 165), the act of speaking publicly “engender[s] disparate rhetorical effects” (Brouwer, 2004, p. 414) for differently (un)marked subjects. But furthermore, whether one is speaking publicly or is being publicly spoken for/about by others, the political ramifications of such moments of discursive engagement are implicated in processes of collective imagining whereby interlocutors engage intersubjectively in “imagining about people they regard as similar to and different from themselves” (Asen, 2002, pp. 349-350). That is, it implicates how able one is to be seen as a member of a/the general public, as no one in particular. Analyzing the figure of the soldier as a (contestable and contested) accomplishment of public processes of collective imagining alongside the (militarized) 71 gender dynamics that impact subjects’ access to and/or ability to strategically deploy rhetorics of dis/incorporation furthers my aim to theorize how rhetorical practices contribute to the evolution of a policy itself, as well as the deliberative techniques and technologies shaping its rhetorical character. Additionally, by investigating the deployment of protector/protected logics within the specific rhetorical practices implicated in processes of collective imagining that occurred during public deliberations over DADT repeal, my analysis endeavors to contribute to the theoretical interrogation of articulations of militarism and gender while also providing greater critical insight into how discursive formations of militarized masculinity condition what constraints and opportunities rhetors encounter when (re)figuring soldiers within public imaginaries. Because the controversy over DADT repeal puts at stake the coherence and fidelity of central nationalistic and patriarchal cultural myths that supply the figure of the soldier with its archetypal status, examining the dispositional application and negotiation of protector/protected logics reveals the militarized and gendered indices of power operating to constrain, create, and expand the availability of dis/incorporation strategies for LGB servicemembers as publics actively attend to and deliberate their collective image. Thus, I devise to probe whether, how, and to what effect certain mechanisms that homologically fashion the dispositional coherency between protector, protected, and threat afforded LGB servicemembers modicums of discursive flexibility within their operant boundaries of fidelity. With these aims in mind, I organize this chapter into three main sections. First, I detail the rhetorical dis/incorporation strategies by which LGB servicemembers attempted to abstract themselves into the generalized figure of the soldier-protector. Next, 72 I consider how advocates maneuvered the image of LGB servicemembers away from a perceived threat to the military and into a casualty of military policy. Finally, I discuss how the (re)articulation of the DADT policy as the actual threat positions LGB servicemembers as protector and protected simultaneously, while also positioning civilian political leaders as potentially failing/failed protectors for abandoning their obligations to the troops. In the next chapter, I devote specific attention to how female and/or lesbian servicemembers appeared within the DADT repeal controversy as I develop an argument for the ways lesbian servicemembers became more saliently marked for being women than for their (nonhetero)sexuality. Serving Up Protector/Protected Logics Many LGB troops with prominent visibility via their media circulation emphasized their status as protectors (as did the slew of assorted journalists, politicians, and other deliberation participants who spoke about them) by highlighting their soldiering credentials. Considering that protector figures traditionally personify a certain privileged form of heterosexual male masculinity, assuming a protector position might be deemed an unconvincing or out-of-place gender(ed) designation for subjects that deviate from this heteromasculine norm, especially under militarized circumstances. Yet, the well-engrained association between masculinity and soldiering, which likewise articulates protective practices with men/masculinity, appears to have offered a rhetorical space in which the link between soldiering and protection persisted even as it was articulated to more-(hegemonically)-subordinate gendered bodies and/or forms of identity. That is, this apparent tendential force between soldier and protector afforded 73 repeal advocates a strategic mechanism to potentially disincorporate, or abstract, the particularities of LGB troops’ sexuality (i.e., the assigned salience and meaning of sexuality as a marker of difference) with respect to how participants in the repeal controversy imagined LGB troops and the issue of their open service. Given the edicts of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy as executed curtailed LGB servicemembers’ capacity to be visible as soldiers and thereby circumscribed the means by which publics could imagine them as soldiers. To be clear, in debates over repealing DADT any question of whether LGB Americans had and were actively serving in the armed forces was widely treated as an already-resolved fact. Still, the looming threat of discharge limited how and to what extent active-duty LGB soldiers were able to speak as/for themselves in public forums. The underground network of active-duty LGB servicemembers that formed and grew to prominence as debate over repealing DADT escalated was originally named Citizens for Repeal precisely because of its founders’ concerns over “identifying too publicly as active duty military” (Fulton, 2013, p. 219). The group intended for its rebranding in July 2010 as OutServe to give the organization a “public face and identity” that emphasized its membership as “exclusively actively serving LGBT” (Fulton, 2013, pp. 220, 222). Nonetheless, prior to the implementation of DADT’s repeal, its membership largely remained secret and members were not altogether visible within public deliberations. Even cofounder and active-duty airman Josh Seefried, who routinely spoke publicly as a leading voice for the organization, employed the pseudonym “JD Smith” in his media appearances, and, during broadcast interviews, he was only shown in shadow or silhouette and heard through the use of voice-modulating devices. On one 74 level, such barriers to full visibility could have detrimentally impacted OutServe’s advocacy efforts. Were skeptics of repeal to superimpose on Seefried’s obscured image and distorted voice a stylized set of corporeal traits popularly legible as and articulated with an effeminate male homosexuality, for instance, this would likely temper how viably JD Smith could don the unrecognizable (read as: not recognizably any certain soldier in particular) visage of a decidedly masculine (hegemonically speaking) soldier-protector. However on another level, the maneuver toward the generic via Smith’s pseudonymous abstraction could instead invite audiences to imagine Smith through the very markers typifying this dominant soldier aesthetic. Indeed, OutServe’s rhetorical advocacy efforts largely displayed just such strategies of disincorporation. For instance, in OutServe’s initial public statement after rebranding the group contends that were a repeal of DADT implemented, it would “be business as usual” (OutServe, 2010, para. 3). As part of the rationale submitted to justify this expectation OutServe defines “sexual orientation [as] merely one facet of individual identity”—a facet they venture to constitute as situationally immaterial considering their assertion that “We are service members first” (OutServe, 2010, paras. 11, 10). OutServe’s rhetoric of disincorporation buttressed their strategic efforts to abstract their members into the ubiquity of a universalizable figure of the soldier in part by conjuring the image of the protector alongside, and as a central tenet of soldiering. To illustrate, OutServe’s public statement quotes their overseas director, who is identified as “an enlisted service member deployed with an artillery unit in Baghdad,” and who says of the group’s membership, “We are here to fight and win wars, serve with integrity and honesty and protect the people fighting next to us. We are proud to sacrifice for the nation we love” 75 (OutServe, 2010, paras. 3, 7). By positioning OutServe’s members as those who “defend the nation now and [who] will keep defending it after repeal” (2010, para. 3), the overseas director furnishes an image of LGB troops as protectors, and as alreadyintegrated comrades of the band of brothers, more remarkable for their service, sacrifice, and heroism, perhaps, than anything else (i.e., anything having to do with their sexuality). LGB servicemembers who were recently out(ed) and/or discharged under DADT, and who were better positioned for less overtly veiled modes of visibility, similarly invoked the tenet of protection emblematic of soldiering in their public discourse to overturn the ban. For instance, in an op-ed for The Daily Beast, former Army officer and Iraq war veteran Anthony Woods stressed, “Until I was fired under DADT, the most important things on my mind were the safety and well-being of my soldiers and accomplishing the mission” (Woods, 2010, para. 11). Here, as Woods speaks through the discursive framework articulated by the band of brothers myth, he evokes the leave-noman-behind ethos symptomatic of this protective mindset. The driving force of this imperative relies, at least in part, on a presumption that positions all soldiers’ lives (i.e., their personhood) on an equal standing. That is, when all soldiers’ lives matter without exception, every member of the team is a (wo)man who deserves to not get left behind, regardless of “the given realities of their bodies and their status” (Warner, 2002, p. 165). Strategically invoking this presumption at the heart of the leave-no-(wo)man-behind imperative serves as a rhetoric of disincorporation in which—rather than publics imagining a given soldier/subject through their particularities—they could potentially cast a generic blanket over the soldier’s unique corporeal and/or other distinguishing markers. Thus, audiences may render Woods (or any other specific soldier/subject) 76 through the collectively imagined ubiquity of the figure of the soldier. A separate Daily Beast article covering Woods’ special election bid for California’s Tenth District—which if won, would have made him the first openly gay African American in Congress (though the democratic primary and later, the seat, ultimately went to then-Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi)—reveals the substance (and Bronze Star) behind the protector mindset Woods sought to emphasize. Specifically, the article provides details of Woods’ second tour of duty in Iraq during which he commanded a 64-person unit that was stationed in Tal Afar, a district that, “despite [the presence of] major violence in the region,” became “one of the first major success stories in the reconstruction effort” (Sarlin, 2009, para. 9). More crucially remarkable, however, is that upon conclusion of the deployment “Woods returned with all of the soldiers under his command alive…earn[ing] a Bronze Star for his efforts” (Sarlin, 2009, para. 9). Detailing these particular components of Woods’ credentials rhetorically sanctions his role as a soldier-protector and further, imagines him to be extremely capable and successful in his post as protector. Through these renditions of Woods’ mindset first and foremost as simply another (i.e., not any particular) brother-in-arms and of the resultant successful mission accomplishment—an achievement that ostensibly could not have occurred (from an antirepeal standpoint) were there a lack of cohesion in Woods’ unit— Woods becomes just another member of a generalized military unit, which (like the figure of the soldier) is itself another formational component of the nation’s collective imaginary and its dominant frame for making sense of the disposition(s) of members of the citizenry in relation to American militarism and the props that perpetuate it. Civilian journalists as well as political and other media figures whose rhetoric 77 either tilted or was overtly oriented towards repeal of DADT routinely made note of and often emphasized the medals and/or other decorations awarded to the LGB servicemember(s) featured as the subject(s) of their articles, interviews, and/or commentaries. In so doing, these participants in public deliberations endorsed the efficacy of such military decorations to function as a kind of metonymic short-hand for proof of the soldier’s honor, courage, and valor: the kinds of traits that signal a form of virtuous masculinity associated with the figure of the (soldier) protector (Young, 2003). In this way, remarks about awarded medals helped to engender imagined constructions of LGB soldiers’ acts of heroism, while potentially downgrading their sexuality (e.g., its role or impact) as a less remarkable matter of concern. This reveals how the incorporation of such medals (as decorations one might picture being pinned to a servicemember’s chest) may function as a tool for rhetorically abstracting the (figurative) universal soldier. In addition, it suggests that the discursive incorporation of such military medals operates as one feature carrying the political force of impersonal universalizability (just as traits like White, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc. do), and as such functions as a strategy that increases the validity of the subject’s public speech and/or public status (Warner, 2002, p. 166). Moreover, attention on medals by civilians and in appeals to civilians— insofar as they functioned to emphasize LGB troops alignment with the valor and virtue of America’s soldier-protectors—may also solicit public expressions of gratitude and praise from those seeking to prove their status as “good citizens” who support the troops, thereby potentially helping to shift popular opinion. For one especially emblematic (as well as gay) soldier-protector, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Victor Fehrenbach, this rhetorical maneuver of (re)directing attention 78 toward his awarded medals (and their bestowed heroism) surfaced in a particularly deliberate manner during his first appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show. Just over a month after the administrative discharge review board assigned to Fehrenbach’s case concluded in April 2009 with their recommendation for his honorable discharge, the 18year veteran of the U.S. Air Force and F-15 fighter pilot spoke publicly for the first time on her program. Maddow closes the interview by asking Fehrenbach if he would recount the circumstances that led him to be awarded the Air Medal for heroism. She explains that her intention to conclude by “ask[ing] about something that’s not related to [DADT]” is precisely because “I want people to remember you. And I want people to think about you when they think about this policy” (Maddow, 2009, para. 36). The move Maddow makes when justifying her final question solicits an interpretive frame for the circumstances surrounding Fehrenbach’s Air Medal as simply one remarkable story of one soldier-hero fighting to protect the American people. By prompting her audience to imagine Fehrenbach’s performance of the heroic protagonist in this narrative—as disassociated from DADT—Maddow attempts to strategically disincorporate Fehrenbach’s (homo)sexuality from his public image as soldier-protector. As Fehrenbach chronicles his account, he appears to tick several key boxes in order to stand as an exemplary protector figure. In terms of protecting America’s national security, he associates his actions with the Army’s successful takeover of Baghdad International Airport during the force’s initial advance on the city in April 2003. In terms of protecting his fellow soldiers, he describes how, from his vantage point in the skies over Baghdad, he spotted “an Iraqi ambush site of about…12 armored personnel carriers that were just less than a mile away from the Army advance” and successfully “took out” 79 the entire enemy position (Maddow, 2009, paras. 38, 40). In terms of his readiness to fight and risk himself for the sake of those he’s entrusted to protect (Young, 2003), he explains that, as the U.S. Army advance neared the ambush site, his wingman’s aircraft had a malfunction and left the wingman “unable to deliver his weapons” (Maddow, 2009, para. 38). Still within the brief span of several minutes, they managed, in Fehrenbach’s words, to employ all the weapons from my aircraft as well as I guided all the weapons from my wingman’s aircraft while we were under constant AAA [antiaircraft artillery] fire and…were fired upon approximately eight times by surface-to-air missiles. (Maddow, 2009, para. 39) The circulation of Fehrenbach’s story and the regularity with which he was invoked as an exemplar likely garnered an additional boost given that Fehrenbach was, as Maddow put it during another appearance on her show, “the highest ranking person in America who is facing getting fired under this policy” (Maddow, 2010c, para. 153). Other characterizations composing the articulated portrait of Fehrenbach further raise the possibility that, when presented as exhibit A, his image in particular also functioned as a way to rhetorically distance the collective perception of LGB servicemembers from notions of gay effeminacy. In profile summaries of Fehrenbach, journalists and repeal advocates aligned him with a (masculine) soldier-protector figure, not only by remarking on his “nine Air Medals, including one for Heroism” (DeMiglio, 2009, para. 2), but also his many overseas deployments “in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo” (Martin, 2010, para. 7), during which “he’[d] flown 88 combat missions including missions that were the longest combat sorties in the history of his squadron” (Maddow, 2010a, para. 187); not to mention “he’[d] logged more than 2000 flying hours, nearly 1500 fighter hours, 400 combat hours” (Maddow, 2009, para. 6). With respect to 80 such a record, it is perhaps unsurprising that allusions to the blockbusters, heroes, and stars of Hollywood occasionally peppered these characterizations. Indeed, to grasp Fehrenbach’s specific military occupation specialty, Weapons System Operator, one need simply “think Goose in Top Gun” (Hecht, 2009, para. 1). In a piece satirizing the top reasons to bar gays from the military, one blogger—in reference to fears that “military culture will become flamboyant to the point that it cannot function”—offered as her riposte Fehrenbach’s resemblance to Vin Diesel, who, in addition to playing Private Caparzo in Saving Private Ryan, had already become well known for his leading role in The Fast and the Furious franchise and could be counted as “one of the most masculine movie stars of all time” (Private Second, 2010a, para. 10). These conferrals of avowedly masculine credibility style an image of Fehrenbach incongruous with swishy, ostentatious displays of soldierly effeminacy imagined by DADT’s defenders. But neither is Fehrenbach a figure totally devoid of signifiers marking his (homo)sexual practices. Members of the public who attended to the circulating explanation(s) about what led to his investigation and recommended discharge—a decision that he continued to fight with support and legal representation from Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network (SLDN) throughout the period leading up to repeal and its implementation, furthering motivation for his ongoing media presence— would likely glean that in essence someone from the nearby city of Boise with whom Fehrenbach was intimately acquainted outed him. In a more detailed, though less frequently encountered version, this outing occurred “After a man accused Air Force Lt. Col Victor Fahrenbach [sic] of rape, the Air Medal winner was forced to come out to investigators to defend himself” (The Daily Beast, 2010, para. 4). And although he “was 81 soon cleared by police…his admission that he had engaged in [what he deemed consensual] gay sex was a violation of DADT” (The Daily Beast, 2010, para. 4). To some extent, the circulation of this part of Fehrenbach’s narrative risked conjuring the fear of unleashing predatory gay sexual appetites upon the military—an imagined specter repeal advocates had confronted in previous periods of controversy. However, based on a level of flexibility in the available gender logics and their capacity to (re)articulate the particular relational dynamics of the situation through alternate rubrics, other possibilities also emerge. As one participant characterized in a discussion held over the comment thread of a blog post about Fehrenbach on SLDN’s website, “the ‘trick’ which the Lt. Col. was banging refused to leave the situation alone…he pissed the TRICK off that bad” (Marshall, 2009b, 02:24pm, 03:34pm). Noting that Fehrenbach’s outing is “unfortunate” the commenter also reasons “but thats [sic] what you get for…not keeping your botty [sic] call in check” (Marshall, 2009a, 11:51pm). The gendered power relations embedded in this commenter’s interpretation suggest the potential for attention paid to Fehrenbach’s sexual escapades to be redirected by attributing a certain form of virile masculinity to him. Such an authorized status of masculine virility may retain (and for some perhaps enhance) the image of Fehrenbach as an American hero and legitimate embodiment of the soldier-protector figure. These protector/protected dynamics in turn position “the trick” through the figure of the jealous, malicious (wo)man scorned and tell a slightly divergent but familiar tale where improper deference to a man trying to protect his household heightens threats to his livelihood and where improper deference to/support of the troop(s) fighting to protect the nation produces weak spots in the figurative armor comprising national defense. And 82 Fehrenbach credibly encapsulates a quintessential rivet within that armor whose potential removal readily provokes anxieties over national (in)security given the continual drumbeat of reminders that Fehrenbach was “hand-picked to protect the airspace over Washington, D.C. after the Pentagon was attacked on September 11, 2001” (The Black Knight, 2009, para. 12; see also DeMiglio, 2009; Maddow, 2009). In this way, protector/protector logics, as operative parts of the discursive structure supplying the “difference[s] in the cultural/symbolic definitions of masculinity and femininity,” also shape “the difference[s] between self-abstraction and a body’s positivity” (Warner, 2002, p. 166). As such, instances of DADT repeal discourse invoking Fehrenbach as a soldier-protector exemplar demonstrate an opening for a legitimated gay soldier figure, even as the dimensions rendering that space appear quite narrow in form. This narrowness upholds notions of a particular way (that is, not markedly divergent from the dominant heteromasculine status quo) to enact national security/protection via soldiering. The figurations of other soldiers such as Woods or Seefried’s “JD Smith” that appeared in DADT repeal discourses similarly integrated various symbols and tropes (e.g., combat medals, band of brothers imagery) traditionally associated with the figure of the soldier. These devices thus availed strategic efforts aiming to disincorporate LGB servicemembers’ sexuality from their status and legitimacy as soldier-protectors. Picking Up the Soap: Eluding Position as Internal Threat Several argumentative opportunities cascade from rhetorical efforts to position LGB troops by figuring their service through the role of the protector. The first involves 83 the sheer capacity to fashion LGB servicemembers (and mold a form through which the public might imagine them) as appropriate(ly) soldiers from the outset of deliberative engagement(s). To be sure, some prominent voices of opposition to repeal (e.g., Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness) continued to advance the claim that LGB individuals—whether open about their sexuality or not—were unfit to serve among the ranks of the U.S. military. The underlying policy basis of this claim can be traced back to the Department of Defense’s (DoD) 1982 directive, which established discharge for homosexuality as a uniform policy across service branches on the official grounds that homosexuality was incompatible with military service. This conclusion was largely recodified in 1993 as part of the Fiscal Year 1994 National Defense Authorization Act through statutory language affirming, “The prohibition of homosexual conduct…continues to be necessary in the unique circumstances of military services” (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [DADT] Review, 2008, p. 75). For Donnelly and her largely selfrun (Nicholson, 2012) Center for Military Readiness, the incompatibility of LGB individuals with service in the armed forces remained established statute; the sum of President Clinton’s so-called compromise, aimed at providing an avenue for LGB citizens to serve as long as they did not make statements about their sexuality, was merely executive branch action removing the question about being a homosexual from induction forms used by military recruiters (DADT Review, 2008, pp. 75-76). On these grounds Donnelly testified in a 2008 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee that the problem with DADT—understood as an administrative policy—was that it (seemingly) forbade recruiters, military officials, etc. from determining a vital and 84 necessary criterion in evaluating a prospective recruit’s eligibility for the armed forces— a criterion rightly and justifiably “designed to encourage good order and discipline” (DADT Review, 2008, p. 75) constituted by one’s heterosexuality. As she analogized in her written testimony, It would be tantamount to a state law forbidding bartenders to check ID before serving younger customers who may not be of legal age. Such a law would force the proprietor of a bar to assume the risk that if an under-age customer drives and hurts someone on the way home, the proprietor of the bar will be held liable. In the same way, it makes no sense for the Department of Defense to forbid routine questions on induction forms that help to determine eligibility for military service. [DADT] forces the armed forces to assume the risk that persons who engage in homosexual conduct will be inducted or retained in the military. (DADT Review, 2008, pp. 77-78, italics in original) The rationale Donnelly mobilizes in her analogy links LGB servicemembers’ incompatibility and the threat they pose homologically to the imagined poor decisions and consequent actions of out-of-control, intoxicated youth and their subsequent threat to the safety and security not only of the establishment to which they managed admission, but also to the safety and security of unsuspecting citizens among the public at large. Similar rhetorical efforts to position LGB service and/or servicemembers as posing a threat to security rather than something or someone providing security proliferated widely throughout public deliberations in 1993. For instance, among the “pathologizing set of figurations” (Butler, 1997, p. 122) noted as part of this period of controversy were those “based on the epistemologies of sin, medicine, and personal defect” such as “the uncontrollable chicken hawk, the militant predator, and the diseased pervert” (Lehring, 2003, pp. 136, 134)—discourses which Brouwer (2004) argued served to “constitute homosexual bodies as excessive and dangerous” and as threatening the military with an “infective penetration” which risked “turn[ing] the military corps into a 85 military corpse” (Brouwer, 2004, p. 413). By feeding off of an image of LGB service as a threat to the troops, a danger the military needs to secure itself against, these figurations function(ed) to position LGB troops as antithetical to the model form of the soldierprotector. This incompatibility between LGB troops and the figure of the soldier-protector was notably exacerbated during 1993 due to the representation and circulation of voices in support of retaining a military ban on homosexuality being far more common (Meyer, 1994). For instance, in a sample of Congressional hearing testimony from current or former servicemembers Brouwer (2004) found 24 instances of witness testimony supporting a ban versus 10 instances criticizing the ban—of these 10 witnesses three were straight allies, five were gay men, and two were lesbian women (p. 413). In Lehring’s (2003) judgment, the policy outcome was “all but guaranteed” (p. 136) due to the dominance of deviant figurations in the deliberative imagery. That is, those largely absent or excluded from spaces where processes of collective imagining occur in public spheres may often become present through negative or disabling images concocted by others with the authority and/or capacity to speak for/about them (Asen, 2002). Recognition of their exclusion and the representational inequities that stem from it spurs counterpublics to take actions designed to surmount existing restrictions on their full and equal inclusion in wider publics. Upon gaining greater access to certain public forums and/or public channels of circulation, however, counterpublic agents regularly encounter hurdles constructed by these circulating images that shape their participation. One typical hurdle involves pressure to actively engage with and contest those unfavorable images already formed in the background of the collective imagination 86 (Asen, 2002). For LGB servicemembers, this created pressure to reframe the issue of open service away from those prevalently circulating discourses that cast them (and their perceived status as soldiers) as a threat through conjured images of deviance, contagion, etc. As such, arguments from LGB servicemembers seeking inclusion in the U.S. military, historically relied on strategies characteristic of a discourse of equal rights to contest their exclusion. To this end, in the period surrounding the 1993 debate, servicemembers challenging their discharges frequently presented arguments about sameness, suitability, and normalcy (Lehring, 2003, p. 150). The difficulty with highlighting issues such as fairness or equality to frame the controversy over homosexuality and military service is that it was mostly only good for “winning over the low-hanging fruit of liberal sentiment” (Frank, 2013, p. 162). In other words, it rested on a presumption that prioritized gay rights over the preservation of military readiness and effectiveness (Frank, 2013). In this deliberative configuration, “national security trumped fairness” (Frank, 2013, p. 163) with respect to those deviant depictions circulating during debates in 1993 illustrating the dangers posed to the military from (open) LGB service/members. In other words, it was an argument grounded on equality despite difference, one that for many opposed to open service was nonresponsive to the particular traits that marked LGB servicemembers’ difference, which were interpreted as constituting the ‘objective’ risks/conditions of the threat. But, during the course of the controversy over repealing the 1993 policy, deliberative attention turned away from nearly exclusive focus on potential harms caused by the presence of LGB servicemembers and the purportedly palpable and immutable threat they, by nature, ostensibly posed, and toward other possible harms to the military 87 presumably caused by military membership practices. The shift focused attention primarily on issues concerning the policy’s effectiveness (i.e., as gag order on open service) and on the justifiability of the consequences incurred whether LGB servicemembers remained closeted or they were out(ed). This revision within deliberative discourses permutated the popularly accepted threat interpretation. That is, it challenged not only whether something (e.g., LGB open service) might present a (potential) threat but also how to consider the veracity of it or any given factor regarded to pose a risk when weighed against other factors also ascribed as threatening. Figuring LGB servicemembers as protector(s) helped them elude being likened to the image of an enemy/threatening other given that emblems of protective masculinity emerge in relation to manifestations of an evil other. Imagining the presence of an outside aggressor or “bad man/men” is what enlists the protector or “good man” to take action and fight in defense of his family, his clan, his community, his home(land), etc. It is also what elicits subordinates (i.e., those positioned as vulnerable) to defer authority to the protector. Thereby, the virtuous masculinity associated with the figure of the protector “depends on its constitutive relation with evil others” (Young, 2003, p. 13). In this way, the rearticulation of LGB servicemembers through the figure of the protector also necessitated something still occupy the posture of the enemy/threat. One prevalently circulated candidate for the position of enemy/threat was the DADT policy itself. For example, a CNN article about the impacts of DADT opened by noting: “There’s a constant fear that hangs over some service members deployed to a war zone—and it's not necessarily the threat from insurgents or roadside bombs,” before quoting a Marine on deployment in Afghanistan about his “gut-wrenching” worry over 88 the risk of “being outed and kicked out” (Hornick, 2009, paras. 1-3). In an open letter to President Obama published on SLDN’s website as part of a series of posts dubbed “Stories from the Frontlines,” Lance Corporal Danny Hernandez, writing just 9 weeks after being informed of his discharge under DADT, makes explicit the position of the policy in relation to his position as protector, Upon earning the title of Marine, I took an oath and vowed to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” This enemy is a domestic one, and with your direction as Commander and Chief, this is a war in which we can be victorious. (Hernandez, 2010, para. 11) Naming the DADT policy and its enforcement as the true enemy threatening troops gave LGB members of the military corps greater leverage to expunge their imagined association with the feared specter of a military corpse. As a consequence they instead became (re)fashioned as the fallen soldiers, or, as Nathaniel Frank (2010) of the Palm Center touted in an op-ed for the Huffington Post, the “casualties of DADT” (para. 3). Former Air Force Major Michael Almy’s story captured prominent channels of circulation on several occasions to emerge as a particularly emblematic demonstration of DADT’s casualties. Initially, Almy’s combat experience provides the grounds authorizing his credibility to be positioned as a soldier-protector. Speaking at a press conference on Capital Hill, Almy recalls details of his final of four deployments to the Middle East during his 13-year career, for which he served as commanding officer to a unit of nearly 200 airmen. As he highlights, “my team came under daily mortar attacks as they were controlling the air space over Iraq. During this deployment, I was named one of the top officers in my career field for the entire Air Force” (Maddow, 2010b, paras. 176-177). Almy’s decorated-war-veteran status stands as testament toward acceptance of his position as an exemplary soldier-protector, battling for the safety of those under his 89 command while fighting against threats to the nation’s security. Shortly following this deployment however, Almy, as well as his unit, became casualties pursuant to the policy when Almy found himself under investigation for violating DADT after a tip to his commander resulted in a search of his email. As the Air Force pursued his discharge, Almy was relieved of his command duty and “replaced by a junior Captain who was less prepared for the job and far less respected by his troops” (Frank, 2010, para. 2). When asked about the impact on his unit by Rachel Maddow during an interview on her show Almy reported, “It had a tremendous impact after I was fired…it had a complete disruption to the unit, to the cohesion, to the mission. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion” (Maddow, 2010b, paras. 194-195). This, as the next key plotline in the standard narrative circulated of Almy, allowed prorepeal commentators like Maddow and Frank to forward Almy as refutational proof against, and in direct response to, claims made by those opposed to repeal, such as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), that the approximately 800 servicemembers discharged each year on average as a result of DADT was “not a significant loss from an overall DOD manpower perspective” (Maddow, 2010b, para. 171). In Frank’s (2010) mind, comments like Rep. Wilson’s “come as a damning, and misguided, slap in the face” to Almy and other recent servicemembers lost to DADT (para. 3). Almy likewise embraced his personification as evidence of the gravity of the losses wrought by DADT as he tells Maddow, “When they say that number is acceptable, that is me they’re talking about” (Maddow, 2010b, para. 191). In addition, Almy advances a mechanism by which to weigh the value of those troop losses due to DADT discharge. 90 We’ve recruited convicted felons and brought them into the military. We have brought in drug dealers, people who have made terrorist threats. And yet we continue to turn away qualified capable men and women who will only want to serve their country. (Maddow, 2010b, paras. 189-190) Almy’s (racialized) comparisons in reference to the loosening of eligibility standards is emblematic of a discursive thread within the repeal controversy jockeying to enhance the status of LGB servicemembers relative to some evoked form of lawless masculinity. Frank (2010) notes that in 2005 the “number of new recruits [the Army] granted moral waivers” rose almost 50%—a statistic he uses to emphasize that at the same time as “the military has been kicking out gays, it was letting in historic numbers of felons, substance abusers, and high school dropouts who remain in the force” (para. 5). This strategic contrast between LGB servicemembers and criminality is especially striking in repeal advocates’ frequent (re)circulation of Almy’s particular recollection that, “On my final day of active duty, I was given a police escort from the base as if I were a common criminal or threat to national security” (Maddow, 2010b, para. 179). Under a protector/protected logic, this strategy bestows Almy (as it would for other LGB servicemembers who occupy a protector role) with the legitimacy/authority of a protector figure precisely because that which is imagined as the bad actor or threat (e.g., criminality, policy requiring discharges) serves as a foil for the qualities embodied by the protector (e.g., as possessing virtue, integrity, honor, etc.). As one caller identifying himself as an infantryman in Vietnam, who aired during a broadcast of National Public Radio’s (NPR) Talk of the Nation, asserted: I would rather have them [gays] next to me than somebody who’s only there because a judge told them it was either the Marine Corps or jail…I’m for anybody…who is competent and wants to be in the Marine Corps. And if a gay, it means absolutely nothing because I used to serve with people who had all kinds of criminal records that I found a lot more repulsive than somebody who is gay. 91 (Conan, 2010, para. 24) The significance of this Marine Corps veteran’s comparison between ‘gays’ and ‘criminals’ on a scale of repulsion, a comparison in which ‘criminals’ are the ones to tip his scale, would not be lost on Campbell (1998) with respect to his observation that “an important impetus on an interpretation of danger” is the “capacity for a particular risk to be represented in terms of the characteristics reviled in the community said to be at risk” (p. 3). Here, the veteran-caller via his construction of a rhetorical foil with criminality disassociates LGB servicemembers from the threat posed by the encroachment of their (open) military service and instead portrays them as honorable patriots, exemplary soldier-citizens demonstrating their willingness to sign up and serve and sacrifice for the nation. LGB servicemembers imagined through the role of soldier-protector, and the dis/rearticulation of what’s constituting the threat, coupled with the dynamic of protector/enemy as foils for one another, became argumentatively advantageous in further weakening presumption for the status quo—a stance in opposition to repeal perhaps most prominently expressed by Senator John McCain and the assertion that “the policy has been working and I think it’s been working well” (Caron, 2009, para. 39). From this perspective, the policy works well under the rationale that the asking and telling it suppresses protects troops (as well as the institution’s desired gender hierarchy). The relational formation imagined here positions LGB servicemembers as the “enemy within” (Young, 2013, p. 8)–insofar as open service (i.e., asking and/or telling) constitutes dangerous dissident activity—and as such justifies the restrictions of their freedom/rights that the DADT policy inflicted. Yet, LGB servicemembers, by speaking 92 their soldier-protector status, contradicted the endorsement of policies aimed at containing the “distempered Other” (Ivie, 2006, p. 13) and therefore created potential for publics to suspect that such policies were neither justified nor working well. In a speech on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley a little over 1 month after publicly coming out on Rachel Maddow, Army Lieutanant Dan Choi illuminates this contradiction. I serve my country because I heard a leader say: “ASK NOT what your country can do for you… ASK what you can do for your country.” But when I step up to serve our country, to put my life on the line to protect my community, to protect my neighbors, to protect my family, to protect America, I am ordered… DON’T ASK. I am ordered… DON’T TELL. I serve with 65,000 selfless gay and lesbian Americans; we are ordered to deny who we are. We’re ordered to HIDE. But I am not hiding anymore…I am done ASKING. I am TELLING. I am gay. (Choi, 2009a, paras. 3-4, capitalization in original) Here (and in general early on as spokesperson for Knights Out), Choi positions himself in the role of protector by highlighting his patriotism and commitment to serve his country and protect its citizens. For Choi, it is not only his “leadership and Arabic language skills” that reveal his status as soldier-protector through a demonstrated record of having “save[d] lives” in the context of his military service (Knights Out, 2009, para. 4). Though this record is indeed addressed, as in one Knights Out press release quoting “a decorated straight officer who served with Choi in Iraq” who asserts that “Dan’s work was instrumental in establishing the reconciliatory efforts in South Baghdad during the ‘surge’” (Knights Out, 2009, para. 5). But furthermore, through his discursive emphasis on military values and the codes of honor guiding its members’ service, Choi portrays his act of telling as a performative embodiment upholding the honor, valor, and integrity constitutive of the soldier. Choi’s imbued legitimacy as soldier-protector—his service, 93 sacrifice, integrity, and honor—functions strategically as a foil to discredit the policy’s presumed authority (and the presumed authority of those who maintain and/or defend it). The viability of efforts to render LGB servicemembers’ legitimacy as soldierprotectors rested on the deployment of rhetorical techniques to contest and discredit historically authorized (re)presentations imagining them as posing an inadmissible risk and/or threat to the military. Accordingly, advocates circulated discourses supplanting the perceived risks of repeal with the greater harms already wrought by DADT and the continued threat it posed to (LGB) troops and military effectiveness. In addition, the mutually-reinforcing (re)figurations of LGB soldiers as protectors and the DADT policy as threat presented opportunities to question the legitimacy of those responsible for the policy’s continued survival and its enforcement (i.e., the President, policymakers) and to rhetorically position them as failed/failing protectors. “Thanks Obama”: The President and Lawmakers as Failed/Failing Protectors The figuration of LGB troops as protector also aided prorepeal arguments with respect to the regularity in which those troops simultaneously occupied a position in need of protection. While one commonly identified source of LGB servicemembers’ vulnerability in such argumentative strategies was the DADT policy itself, in others of a similar vein, the rhetoric of repeal advocates positioned the President and/or lawmakers in the role of protector and thereby the party/parties culpable for failing to provide that protection. For President Obama, attributions of his status as a failed/failing protector (of 94 LGB servicemembers) were largely grounded on his eschewal of providing protection by way of executive order. An “information campaign” waged by the Palm Center amplified this particular discursive thread and intensified the pressure prorepeal participants placed on Obama to resuscitate his standing as the “fierce advocate” for LGBT citizens that he claimed while on the campaign trail (Frank, 2013, p. 161; Nicholson, 2012, p. 77). In a May 2009 white paper, Palm Center researchers laid out a legal rationale to argue that Obama had the capacity per his presidential authority as Commander-in-Chief to suspend discharges under DADT by executive order (Belkin et al., 2009). This rationale began circulating within deliberative spaces and led Knights Out, not quite 2 months later, to deliver an open letter to the President signed by 77 members of Congress, calling on him to issue just such an executive order “as soon as possible,” lest “our LGBT service members and our country’s national security…continue to suffer” (The Black Knight, 2009, paras. 14, 8). Implicating Obama’s direct culpability, the letter highlights, “Since you took office…more than 250 gay and lesbian service members have been discharged under this law, which continues to undermine and demoralize the more than 65,000 gay and lesbian Americans currently serving on active duty” (The Black Knight, 2009, para. 7). Additionally, the letter called Obama’s attention to two of “the most recent examples of the failed [DADT] policy in action…exceptional servicemen who have dedicated their lives to defending our country and protecting the American people…and [who now] face impending discharge:” Lt. Dan Choi and Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach (The Black Knight, 2009, para. 10). Incidentally, Choi’s discharge became officially recommended just 8 days following this letter’s release. Allusions to Obama as the “Axe-man-in-Chief” are not uncommon and arise often 95 in various open letters to the President written by LGB servicemembers. For instance, U.S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal Danny Hernandez opens his letter to Obama this way, “Mr. President, if I could be serving my country right now—I would be. Instead, I was fired while you were my Commander and Chief” (Hernandez, 2010, para. 1). Similarly, in another open letter promoted as part of SLDN’s “Stories from the Frontlines” series, David Hall a former Air Force Staff Sergeant discharged because of DADT 8 years prior asserts, “Now is the time for you to show the leadership expected from our Commanderin-Chief.…stop discharging patriotic Americans. I did my part; now, sir, please do yours!” (D. Hall, 2010, paras. 1, 6). These and other circulating statements from LGB troops that address the President directly are especially striking because their appeals display the simultaneity with which they embrace a subjectivity as both protectors and as citizens struggling to be viewed as worthy recipients of (Obama’s) protection. But additionally—to the extent that these LGB servicemembers participating in public deliberations gain credibility for their presented stature as successful protectors, and to the extent that Obama appears as a failed/failing protector for opting out of any executive order option to halt discharges—a dispositional tension arises with the capacity to challenge Obama’s status in relation to the LGB soldier-protectors under his command. For instance, one servicemember from the SLDN series identified only as “A Soldier Returning to Baghdad” (2010) writes, “Mr. President, please keep your promise to me.…Our government called upon us to fight for our country.…we did not delay. We were sent world’s [sic] away to defend your freedoms. Mr. President, won’t you fight for mine?” (paras. 11-12). By contrasting their own enthusiastic willingness to fight for others with Obama’s seeming placidity, the anonymous soldier challenges Obama to 96 prove he possesses the character and wherewithal befitting a protector. Furthermore, as a U.S. civilian (and as President) Obama simultaneously occupies a position as a beneficiary of the kind of protection soldiers provide—a notion that former Army Staff Sergeant Anthony Moll makes unabashedly clear in his SLDNpromoted open letter when he reveals, “while serving as a handler in the military’s working dog program, I worked with the Secret Service in detecting explosives – working to protect you,” before concluding, “Don’t let another life be ruined by a failed policy that hurts our nation as well as our heroes. Mr. President, lift the ban” (Moll, 2010, paras. 8, 11-12). On one level, the expectation of reciprocity in protection from their Commander-in-Chief that Moll and others convey echoes the mantra of “leave no man behind,” a pivotal sentiment found within the band of brothers mythos. But also attention on LGB troops’ need of protection potentially redirects attention away from frequently voiced concerns of repeal opponents that construct straight male soldiers as those whose protection is paramount and imminently at risk. By implication, public discourse, as well as pressure on the president, gains greater potential to shift toward Obama’s protection of LGB troops instead of the maintenance of DADT to protect those troops imagined as the archetypal figure of the soldier. Additionally, at stake in (un)successful enactments of protection is its contingent relationship with the masculine status commonly afforded to protector figures. For instance, within a comment thread on SLDN’s website for the letter written by the anonymous soldier, one commenter argues there is one “very simple” solution to the soldier’s predicament, “His Commander-in-Chief, our President, must…learn about what real ‘spine’ is…And, if he wants to keep his own job…he must realize that voters respect 97 decisiveness, action, and courage more than passivity and failure to keep promises” (Bill, 2010, 1:27 p.m.). The commenter positions Obama as a failed/failing protector by implying that he lacks the necessary bravery or will to fight. To be sure, the commenter reasonably draws a distinction between the mechanisms to successfully execute the role of the protector for the anonymous soldier as compared to Obama. With respect to the tradition of civilian control of the military, even if Obama were to have served previously in the armed forces, as President he is tasked with fighting in other ways; still, demonstrating the willingness to fight for those in need of protection remains. As it would happen, one individual within the repeal controversy who emerges to a certain extent as Obama’s rhetorical foil is Dan Choi, who, by continually demonstrating his willingness to take risks and make sacrifices on behalf of those threatened and/or impacted by the policy, personifies his legitimate status as a protector of LGB troops. In an open letter Choi addressed to Obama as well as every member of Congress—which several news/blog sites electronically reproduced in full on May 11, 2009, the same day the Palm Center white paper was made available through their website—he writes, “As an infantry officer, I am not accustomed to begging. But I beg you today: Do not fire me” (Choi, 2009b, para. 10). Choi’s statement displays the simultaneity of his position as both a soldier charged with protecting others and as servicemember under President Obama’s command who needs his protection. However, Choi’s remarks cloud the clarity with which he fits any readily assigned status within relational formations constructed under normative militarized gender logics. Although Choi’s standing as an infantry officer invokes a masculine protector status for which the act of begging would widely be viewed as stylistically incompatible, he also readily and 98 without hesitation subordinates (and potentially emasculates) himself in the act of begging Obama to keep his soldier-protector post as an officer in the infantry. Moreover, in the same letter Choi reveals that as he continues to learn of the struggles other LGB troops and veterans have experienced and continue to face, it prompts him to remember my leadership training: soldiers cannot feel alone, especially in combat. Leaders must reach out. They can never diminish the fighting spirit of a soldier by tolerating discrimination and isolation. Leaders respect the honor of service. Respecting each soldier’s service is my personal promise. (Choi, 2009b, para. 6) Choi’s visibility and activism becomes central to what constitutes his protective actions. While recalling during an interview the hundreds of emails he has received from those expressing their gratitude and/or seeking support, Choi noted, “‘One said he wanted to commit suicide, but “Now I know there is someone else.” That’s the main reason why I cannot stay quiet’” (Caron, 2009, para. 19). Writing as a guest blogger on the Palm Center’s website, Becky Kanis, chair of Knights Out endorsed this characterization: by speaking out so publicly, [he] made others pay attention – in a way that is leading to the probable end of this dishonorable policy…Because Dan made a career-ending decision, he may have allowed many thousands of gay soldiers to keep serving. (Kanis, 2009, para. 9) Choi, both as a figure of military values and honor and because of his sacrifice for the sake of others, paints a picture in which the man who truly possesses a ‘spine’ is not in the White House, but rather chained to its fence in protest. Through direct action, Choi further frames Obama as a failed protector. Indeed, in his unscheduled remarks to a crowd gathered at Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. for a rally organized by the Human Rights Campaign around repealing DADT, Choi asserted, “You’ve been told that the White House has a plan…But we learned this week [from statements made by Congressman Barney Frank] that the president is still not fully 99 committed” (Eleveld, 2010, para. 8). Choi then urged participants to follow his lead on a march to the White House “to say ‘enough talk.’ … I am still standing, I am still fighting, I am still speaking out, I am still gay” (Eleveld, 2010, para. 8). Choi’s subsequent arrest on that day in March 2010, after he and former Army Captain Jim Pietrangelo—who received his discharge under DADT in 2004—handcuffed themselves to the fence in front of the White House, was the first of a series of civil disobedience protests Choi would conduct as part of GetEQUAL, a newly formed activist organization. Choi and other members of GetEQUAL would repeat this particular form of public demonstration several more times—a tactic that Nathaniel Frank of the Palm Center observed led to a shift in visual media coverage of the repeal controversy “from an impersonal rainbow or dog tag to the iconic image of a uniformed American chained to the White House fence” (Frank, 2013, p. 193) and that culminated with the November 15, 2010 arrest of 13 activists handcuffed to the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. However, their activism also regularly targeted Congressional lawmakers. Whereas much of the criticism repeal advocates and activists directed at President Obama centered on his failure to adequately fulfill his role as Protector-in-Chief, criticism and/or messages addressing Congressional representatives were more oriented at highlighting the contrast between the sacrifices LGB servicemembers made for their sense of obligation to their country and members of Congress’ failure to demonstrate or appropriately prioritize their consequent reciprocal obligation to those very (LGB) soldier-citizens willing to fight for and protect them, as well as every other American civilian. For instance, following comments made by House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO) at a media breakfast that he opposed repealing DADT 100 because doing so wouldn’t be “family friendly,” asking, “What do mommies and daddies say to their 7-year-old child?” (Garrison, 2010, paras. 3-4), GetEQUAL along with Show Me No Hate, a local Missouri grassroots organization, initiated a media campaign calling for Skelton to apologize. A week later, and in the absence of any forthcoming apology, members of both groups coordinated a protest in Missouri’s capital at Skelton’s district office. In addition to delivering a petition with over 3,500 signatures again demanding his apology activists read aloud a letter, which GetEQUAL subsequently published on their website, from one of Skelton’s constituents currently deployed in Baghdad who was facing a possible discharge under DADT. Despite his potential discharge the anonymous Army soldier tells Skelton that over the course of his 4 years of service, “I have become more patriotic than I knew possible” (United States Army (Specialist E4), 2010, para. 2). To substantiate his entreaty for his Congressman’s apology the deployed soldier professes, I am fighting for your safety and freedom, and for that of every mother, father, and child that you are shielding from my very existence. I come in from a long day out in the streets of Baghdad and see on television my Representative, my voice, refusing to acknowledge my very existence. Congressman, regardless of your personal views on the issue, we are serving now. To be disrespectful to us is not only intolerant, but ignorant.…as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, [you] must cease your public campaign to undermine the repeal efforts. I will continue fighting for your freedom, Congressman -- will you cease blocking mine? (United States Army (Specialist E4), 2010, paras. 4-5) The soldier emphasizes his standing as active-duty military while also submitting that Skelton’s personal views are inconsequential and subservient in relation to his implied obligation to support the troops. The support-the-troops discourse the soldier invokes functions strategically through a rhetoric of disincorporation affording the soldier the force of a “consubstantial entity” (Stahl, 2009, p. 549) that is the military writ large. 101 A similar rhetorical tactic invoking a support-the-troops discourse to situate the relative dispositions of civilian lawmakers and LGB servicemembers/veterans arose in another moment of direct action coordinated by GetEQUAL that targeted Virginia Senator and Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Jim Webb, a Democrat who had yet to back DADT repeal. The activists and former servicemembers donned their combat boots and paid a visit to Webb’s office to urge him to vote for repeal. The boots bore the signatures of servicemembers who had been discharged under DADT and also symbolically recalled the boots Webb wore every day on the campaign trail during his most recent Senate bid. Webb’s boots were an old pair belonging to his son, an activeduty member of the military who was deployed overseas at the time of Webb’s Senate campaign. For Webb, wearing the boots was meant as a tribute to his son and to “all the people sent into harm’s way” (Geidner, 2010, para. 2). The LGB veteran-activists placed their inscribed boots beside the encasement displaying the boots of Webb’s son. Of the action, one participant noted, “We think its important that, in the same way he wore those boots to support the troops, that he know what these boots represent” (Ali, 2010, para. 4). Speaking at the event, former U.S. Marine Corps Corporal Evelyn Thomas explained, I’m here today to tell Senator Webb that these combat boots I’ve worn in service to our country look just like his sons.…In the line of duty, there are not differences because we are all Americans and we are all putting our lives on the line in service to our country. Senator Webb, your service to this country is appreciated and honored. Next week, you have an opportunity to show me and my brothers and sisters that our service is equally appreciated and honored by you. (GetEQUAL, 2010, para. 4) In this act of civil protest, advocates symbolically invoked Webb’s obligation to supportthe-troops in his role as a U.S. Senator and father of an active duty-member of the band of brothers, as well as summoned military codes of honor and brotherhood under which 102 Webb himself served. Repeal advocates’ rhetorical maneuvers to (re)position the DADT policy as a threat constructed a scenario aiding the legitimacy of LGB servicemembers as soldierprotectors at the same time as it afforded space to situate them(selves) as vulnerable to the policy and in need of protection. Figuring LGB troops as soldier-protectors, in contrast to the civilians they protected helped activate the support-the-troops trope as one rubric for interpreting this scenario. In so doing, they articulated the act of removing the threat(s) posed by DADT (i.e., an executive order halting discharges and/or repeal itself) as the way for leaders to demonstrate their authority and civic patriotism. Conclusion On December 18, 2010 the Senate passed a stand-alone bill repealing DADT on a vote of 65 to 31, sending it to the President’s desk. In the Senate floor debate preceding the cloture vote senators spoke about LGB troops as soldiers first, in the sense that to put on “the uniform of the United States” (156 Cong. Rec. 22918, 2010) demonstrates their relational uniformity with the broader military corps. Stressing homogeneity over homosexuality, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin notes, “The men and women discharged under [DADT] are not asking to be treated as a special class. Just the opposite—they are asking to be treated like everyone else” (156 Cong. Rec. 22928, 2010). Additionally, Michigan Senator Carl Levin attributes a homogenizing force to the risks incurred in the line of duty when speaking about U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Eric Alva who was the first American wounded in Operation Iraqi Freedom and the war’s first Purple Heart recipient. Levin remarks, 103 The first casualty in the war in Iraq was a gay soldier. The mine…that took off his right leg didn’t give a darn whether he was gay or straight. We shouldn’t either. We cannot let these patriots down. Their suffering should end. It will end with the passage of this bill. (156 Cong. Rec. 22918, 2010) Just as Alva’s fellow brothers-in-arms—some of whom already knew he was gay when they rushed to his side, cutting away his clothes to assess his injuries and perform emergency first aid before evacuating him to a Kuwaiti hospital (DADT Review, 2008, p. 75)—refused to leave a fellow comrade behind, Levin’s statement reverberates a similar posture of resolute affirmation for and equal commitment to the lives of every soldier, regardless of the particularities of their personhood. By doing so, his statement propels/galvanizes a corollary contention that ‘we the people’ are, in effect, leaving noble, selfless soldiers behind, belying our own capacity to venerate the warrior ethos that America’s soldier-protectors faithfully display. The proper redressal, as Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) puts it, is to ensure that LGB citizens “no longer have to choose between [their] personhood and [their] patriotism” (157 Cong. Rec. 13942, 2011). Affirming this notion, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman submitted that the reason discharged LGB servicemembers are “lobbying, pleading with us to repeal [DADT]” is because “they want to go back and serve.…to put their lives on the line for our security and our freedoms” (156 Cong. Rec. 22923, 2010). In his determination, “to say no to them simply because of a private part of their person” equates to “a waste. These people simply want to serve their country” (156 Cong. Rec. 22923, 2010). These rationales rhetorically figure LGB troops as soldier-protectors by articulating their service through the leave no man behind imperative retained within the band of brothers myth, a move which concurrently rests on a presumption of sameness and thereby provides for the possibility of (homo)sexuality’s disincorporation. 104 Moreover, grounding these figurations in militarized forms of sacrifice (e.g., putting their lives/bodies on the (front)line) braved for the protection of others (e.g., civilians, the nation) brings into stark relief and in turn puts at stake the integrity of the reciprocity that protector/protected relations demand. That is, if DADT were to remain on the books, those being protected by LGB troops would not be displaying the appropriate gratitude and support for their protectors and the sacrifices they make. On September 20, 2011, the day DADT repeal was fully implement, Maine Senator Susan Collins expressed the pertinence of this reciprocity in a statement reaffirming that sexual orientation should not be a basis on which “our Nation” denies “the service of patriots who willingly answer the call to arms” because “if individuals are willing to put on the uniform of our country, to be deployed in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, to risk their lives for the benefit of their fellow citizens” the only thing we should be doing is “expressing our gratitude to them, not trying to exclude them from serving or expelling them from the military” (157 Cong. Rec. 13899, 2011). However, public commentary reflecting on the DADT’s repeal not only associated LGB troops with the vulnerabilities of traditional militarized battlefield/combat scenarios and their corresponding sacrifices. Speaking “directly to the gay men and women currently serving in our military” during his remarks at the signing ceremony for the DADT repeal bill on December 22, 2010, President Obama added to the portrait of LGB military sacrifice by acknowledging that historically, “your service has demanded a particular kind of sacrifice. You’ve…carr[ied] the added burden of secrecy and isolation…while…put[ting] your lives on the line for the freedoms and privileges of citizenship that are not fully granted to you” (Obama, 2010, para. 39). This rhetorical incorporation of the wounds that the DADT policy uniquely inflicted on LGB 105 servicemembers’ lives/bodies, including the perpetual confrontation of situations that put their integrity at stake, lends additional gravity to the representative costs inevitably paid/borne by LGB citizens-(soldiers) for attempting to fulfill their desire to protect America and its people. Additionally, highlighting this expanded version of the sacrifices endured by LGB soldiers engenders supplemental scenarios and manners in which to recognize their service for their country and fellow citizens as being grounded in a willingness to engage in combat against injustice(s) that continue to afflict the nation’s ability to live up to its idealized image of itself. Substantiating this alternate mode of recognition as he spoke at the signing ceremony Obama “express[ed] [his] gratitude to.…the patriots who…were forced to hang up their uniforms as a result of [DADT]—but who never stopped fighting for this country, and who rallied and who marched and fought for change” (Obama, 2010, para. 34). Their efforts to place “our feet as a nation on a path towards making this a more perfect union” (“Members of,” 2011, para. 55) notwithstanding, Obama’s tribute still retains elements of LGB servicemembers’ image as idealized soldiers, ever ready and willing to go into battle. Likewise, as Colorado Senator Mark Udall opined during a Senate press conference held in conjunction with DADT repeal’s official implementation, I think we would all agree the true heroes are the servicemembers who stepped into the public square after they had been rejected by their country and said, “We’re not going to let this injustice prevail. We want to serve our country.” And it took enormous courage. (“Members of,” 2011, para. 37) Appreciations such as these (re)cast LGB troops’ service as a fight to protect the ideals and values of the nation while also blurring distinctions between disparate battle lines. Also, by thanking members of the public “who stood with them in that fight” (Obama, 2010, para. 34) Obama conjointly articulates a civic disposition/ality for those who 106 support(ed)-the-troops in this manner. This conjuncture exposes a point of maneuver for the hegemonic maintenance of the public’s militarization. When coupled with the recharacterization of the battlefield on which LGB troops fought (and fight), civilian efforts to advance DADT repeal become performative instances constituting a militarized support of the troops. At a time when less than 0.5% of the population is currently serving in the military and less than 16% have served or have had a family member in the service since 9/11 (Schake & Mattis, 2016), public deliberative dramas over military membership policy like DADT have allowed for processes of collective imagining (about the military and the soldiers who constitute it) to make sense of the trajectory of the nation’s identity and project its future composition, priorities, and concerns. With respect to the controversy over repealing DADT, the blurring of various realms of fighting/struggle is a gambit in which images of soldiers’ combative activity in the sense of fighting injustice risk bleeding into traditionally imagined notions of combat waged by militaries and their soldiers. ****** In this chapter, I argued that efforts to rhetorically disincorporate the relevance of servicemembers’ (homo)sexuality promoted public imaginings of LGB troops through the universalized figure of the soldier-protector and advanced the notion that they (as well as their open service) were assets to the military rather than a liability. This strategy to render LGB troops’ remarkability via their status as soldier-protectors (thus relegating their sexuality to be of no consequence to their value as soldiers), in turn bolstered publics’ discursive activity attending to and heightening the salience of extant vulnerabilities—faced by LGB soldiers, their fellow brothers-in-arms, and the nation at 107 large—created by the ouster of LGB servicemembers (in accordance with the DADT policy). Additionally, I argued that as publics imagined the specific (and frequently extra) burdens DADT caused LGB troops to endure, they facilitated an avenue toward the greater intelligibility of LGB military service within a (militarized) politics of sacrifice that indicated a status for LGB soldiers as worthy of gratitude and admiration. The contentions in this chapter support the central argument of my dissertation by demonstrating that figurations of gay male soldiers as legitimated protectors who also bore added sacrifices and burdens prompted the introduction of a corollary obligation of supportive deference from those situated as the protected. CHAPTER FOUR COMBAT(ING) PROTECTION RACKETS AND DEFENDING COMBAT’S FRATERNAL/MATERNAL CONTRACT(IONS) In 2008, when the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee held the first congressional hearing on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) since the policy’s enactment approximately 15 years prior, LGBT servicemember organizations jockeyed for influence over the list of names forwarded to subcommittee staff for their consideration to fill each of the three witness slots allotted to the prorepeal side of the debate. One slot went to Eric Alva, the gay U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was the first American soldier wounded in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and whose advocacy for DADT repeal since coming out publicly in early 2007 had been almost exclusively conducted in partnership with the Human Rights Campaign. The other two witnesses ultimately chosen to testify included a member of Servicemember’s Legal Defense Network’s (SLDN) Military Advisory Council, retired Army Major General Vance Coleman, an African American flag officer who began his 30-year military career in the years before President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which set into motion efforts to terminate racial segregation within the armed forces. Retired Navy Captain Joan E. Darrah, a member of SLDN’s board of directors, filled the third slot. In the estimation of Servicemembers United founder and executive director Alex Nicholson (2012), “only one” of these final 109 two selections, Maj. General Coleman, “was solid,” deeming Capt. Darrah to be “a lessthan-optimal recommendation” to provide testimony for the hearing (p. 61). But neither Coleman nor Darrah represented the “most formidable witness we could have put forward as a community” (2012, p. 62), according to Nicholson, in part because each to varying degrees invoked a discourse of civil rights, paralleling racial integration and women’s expanding occupational role with that of LGBT open service. Nicholson’s (2012) additional dissatisfaction with Capt. Darrah’s testimony was because of the way it emphasized her relationship with her partner. She spoke of leaving a meeting at the Pentagon minutes before American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the very area of the building she had just been and explained how the experience forced her to confront a reality where, had she still been in that part of the building and been injured or killed, her partner of 11 years would not have been notified. Darrah “had not dared list” (DADT Review, 2008, p. 7) her partner’s name on any emergency contact information or other paperwork on file with the Navy out of fear that it could trigger an investigation under DADT. Because much of the pathos of Darrah’s story derived from this imagined scenario that could have left her partner in the dark, Nicholson reasoned, it had the potential to provoke repeal opponents’ anxieties that eliminating DADT might trigger a slippery slope towards the military’s extension of partner benefits to same-sex couples, or even nationally sanctioned same-sex marriage. As such, according to Nicholson, Darrah’s was “not the story that those we needed to convince at that time in the political arena needed to hear” (2012, p. 62). In his mind, the more essential and influential lines of argument would have been “addressing Marine Corps culture and concerns” (2012, p. 62) or the military’s desperate need for skilled linguists and the 110 significant financial investment and manpower the military was losing due to DADT discharges in this occupational specialty. What is most germane for considerations structuring this chapter with regard to Nicholson’s appraisal is the manner in which his assessment more broadly reflects divergences in how public advocates envisioned the probable range of argumentative utility that the circulation of accounts from gay versus lesbian soldiers held for countering antirepeal objections and/or appealing for DADT’s termination. One reason for this gendered discrepancy is because reluctance among publics to upend the status quo of military membership policy “overwhelming[ly]… centered on issues regarding the integration of openly gay male soldiers into combat units” (Banner, 2012, p. 91) and fears that such a move might disrupt unit cohesion, in turn hampering combat effectiveness. Since female servicemembers, regardless of sexual orientation, were not officially assigned to combat units during the period of deliberation over DADT’s repeal, nor were publics widely imagining them as regular participants in combat scenarios, the presence of lesbian soldiers was sparse when it came to issues involving unit cohesion and combat. Additionally, with the exception of a few rare occasions of discourse, 1 which bore minimal evidence of having broad public uptake and (re)circulation, the open service of lesbian soldiers as a potential cause of dis-ease to either male or straight female servicemembers or to unit cohesion, for instance, did not materialize as a notably relevant matter of concern. Incidentally, prior to and during the course of debates over DADT, a 1 One such instance came from Elaine Donnelly’s testimony to the House Armed Services Committee in 2008 regarding a message the Center for Military Readiness received from Cynthia Yost, a former medical corpsman in the Army. Donnelly relays Yost’s account of being “gang-assault[ed]” in 1974 while riding on the back of a truck by “a group of black lesbians” who “grop[ed]” and “rubb[ed]” at her body “through [her] fatigues” (DADT Review, 2008, p. 83). 111 few lesbian soldiers had already been or were granted the right through the courts to serve openly for the remainder of their military careers. For example, in September 2010, a federal district court judge ordered Air Force nurse Major Margaret Witt be reinstated, ruling that by discharging Witt in 2004 after learning of her romantic relationship with a woman, the military violated her right to due process and that the military did not meet its demonstrative burden to prove Witt’s presence in her unit hurt cohesion or effectiveness in any way (Gura, 2010). The dispositional disparities between gay and lesbian soldiers also mark their differential discursive designations within protector-threat-protected configurations. Craig Rich et al. (2012) argued that “the virtual absence of lesbians” in DADT repeal discourse is “because they are not seen as having the ability to penetrate” and therefore do not threaten “the ideological construct of the male soldier with direct feminization” (p. 279). Yet, as C. Rich et al. and others (Banner, 2012; Brouwer, 2004; Enloe, 1993) have indicated, despite being underrepresented in the discourse, lesbian servicemembers faced a disproportionally greater risk of discharge prior to and under DADT than gay men. C. Rich et al. (2012) speculated that lesbian soldiers’ increased probability of investigation and discharge was “perhaps due to the overall threat…lesbians pose to the genderexclusive heteromasculine definition of the soldier” (p. 279). Though they also maintained that the fact of lesbians’ discursive absence “supports our argument that the threat of open service is the inversion of the predator/prey relationship,” and while straight and lesbian soldiers pose ideological threats to the dominant soldier identity, “neither…threaten men with penetration” (2012, pp. 279-280). Accordingly, in the previous chapter, I discussed how the publicly embedded image of gay male 112 servicemembers as a contagion and/or a penetrative threat to their heterosexual male counterparts (as circulated within antirepeal scenarios wherein DADT helped protect straight male soldiers and preserve logics structuring homosocial bonding practices) became a crucial target for contestation by repeal advocates as they sought greater public support for removing the ban on open LGB service. However, advocates’ arguments that explicitly centered lesbian servicemembers and their unique experiences instead routinely rendered these very same generic heteromasculine soldiers as an unabated threat not only to lesbian soldiers but to straight female soldiers as well, precisely because of the dictates of DADT. In this chapter, I consider several argumentative discourses occurring in debates over DADT and women in combat and investigate their varied and contingent geographies articulating the character and magnitude of various threats to their reportedly susceptible populations, as well as examine the prioritization of certain forms of (non)intervention to securitize against the particular risk(s) of becoming vulnerable faced by some parties over and against others. In the first two sections, I consider deliberative activity foregrounding dynamics between the DADT and combat exclusion policies, respectively, and military women’s vulnerability to sexual harassment and/or predation. Discourses within each controversy worked to make visible and problematize the active role of each policy in the perpetuation of patriarchally normative expectations regarding men’s (sexual) entitlement (to women’s bodies) that undergirds the military’s institutionalized rape culture, positioning policy repeal as vital action to take in the ongoing battle against military sexual assault. While those challenging the DADT policy argued repeal would loosen the binds that could and did lead to servicewomen’s 113 entrapment under the guise of the whore/dyke dichotomy by retaliatory soldierprotectors, advocates of women’s full participation and equal status in combat rendered repeal of this policy as the ultimate defensive maneuver to disarm valorization of fraternal bonds that foment predation. In the final two sections, I more closely examine discourse from publics in favor of policy restrictions on women’s combative capacities that make arguments specific to those vulnerabilities the bodies of soldiers face on conventionally imagined combat battlegrounds. As I discuss, arguments against the presence of women in combat because of the unique threat they pose for the quintessentially masculine warrior class illustrate the conditions under which women would indeed threaten the fraternity and identity of the soldier with penetration. I conclude by contrasting this with the values placed on female soldiers and securing their bodily capacity for maternity. Les(bi)an/Female Soldiers’ Invisible War2 Against a Protection Racket Like many of the former or current gay male servicemembers featured in discourses circulated as part of public deliberative activity over the repeal of DADT, lesbian soldiers were also often portrayed as skilled, valuable members of the military whose contributions to the nation’s defense, advocates argued, were far more relevant than, and thus far outweighed, anything having to do with their sexuality. Within this argumentative strain, advocates similarly positioned the DADT policy, whether in relation to gay or lesbian soldiers, as a threat to their military service, livelihoods, 2 Ziering, A., & Barklow, T. K. (Producers), & Dick, K. (Director). (2012). The invisible war [Motion picture]. United States: Chain Camera Pictures. 114 mission effectiveness, and (by extrapolation) national security. But another strain emerged that presented DADT as a particular threat to lesbians (and other women) in the military, by emphasizing the gender dynamics structuring their unique vulnerability to attacks at the hands of their (straight) purported brothers-in-arms. On the one hand, the dispositional tenor of this strain of discourse within the repeal controversy saddled DADT with engendering conditions of insecurity for les(bi)an/female3 servicemembers, thereby introducing the possibility for public imaginings of a one-dimensional image of them as women in need of protection. However, other circulating discourses complicated such a simplified portrait, muddling the categorical demarcation of female soldiers among the class of the protected. This is because advocates’ discursive construction of the relational cartography of the plight of lesbian/female troops under DADT avoided presumptively positioning male soldiers as protectors of their les(bi)an/female counterparts, who would be (the) protected if not for DADT. Rather, this discourse conveyed the policy’s culpability for impeding lesbian/female soldiers from ultimately defending (Stiehm, 1982) themselves against an ever-present risk of heteromasculine predation. That is, it situated the true enemy/threat facing les(bi)an/female servicemembers through renditions of the figure of the soldier-as-penetrator/predator and in effect situated the DADT policy as operating in complicity with the logic of masculinist protection and the ways this logic “is laid bare in the sexual contract” (Pateman, 2008, p. 344), thereby denying les(bi)an/female soldiers adequate access to the appropriate weaponry to successfully combat the enemy threat, i.e., the threat posed by 3 My use of this notation is to align with my argument that the DADT policy, while explicitly punitive for nonheterosexual women, also spawned impacts that were punitive beyond those bounds and presented risks for servicewomen of any sexuality. 115 male soldiers. As such, alongside the image of the (universalized male/heteromasculine) soldier, collectively rendered through the figure of the protector, surfaced an image of the (universalized male/heteromasculine) soldier, collectively rendered, at best, through the figure of the penetrator or, at worst, through the figure of the predator. Advocates of DADT repeal delivered an image of the soldier-penetrator/predator as predicated on a form of heteromasculinity fashioned through notions of (sexual) entitlement and virility. For example, one profile featured as part of the DADT Story Project—an effort and website launched by then newly-elected New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in order to “introduce Americans to some of the brave men and women who have been harmed by this unjust policy” (Gillibrand, 2010, para. 3)— discussed the experiences of Captain Tanya Domi, a lesbian veteran who retired from the Army, noting that “throughout her term of service, [she] witnessed the systemic targeting of women.…[and] saw women accused and dismissed based on rumors, hearsay and appearance” (“Tanya Domi, former Captain,” n.d., para. 5). To further illustrate for attending publics the kinds of circumstantial evidence readily used to target women, the story specifies, “if a woman rebuffs a sexual advance, she can be accused of being a lesbian and investigated and prosecuted under [DADT]” (“Tanya Domi, former Captain,” n.d., para. 5). Journalist and Navy veteran Adam Weinstein (2010), writing for Mother Jones on the ordeals of lesbian cadets at West Point, presented a similar image of sexually entitled heteromasculine soldiers when explaining that within the “testosteronefueled adolescent atmosphere, male cadets can quickly assume that if you’re a woman and you’re not into them, you’re batting for the wrong team” (para. 10). Each of these examples convey female servicemembers as bound within a dichotomy, which 116 researchers/observers often point out demands they grapple with being labeled by fellow soldiers as either a whore or a dyke (Herbert, 1998; Meyer, 1996). Depictions of the nature of this dichotomy formed a basis for prorepeal arguments with respect to DADT’s specific impacts on les(bi)an/female soldiers, namely, that the policy’s explicit prohibition on overtly-linguistic means of “asking” or “telling,” regularly results in (formal or informal) determinations of a soldier’s les(bi)anism instead becoming contingent on her sexual availability to her surrounding male comrades. That is, as a woman in the military, you either are penetrated/appear available for penetration, or you risk the alternate conclusion. In this way, les(bi)an/female soldiers and their affiliated publics dramatically cast a scenario for servicewomen as perpetually under threat from advancing male troops, battling to somehow evade or outsmart these soldierpenetrators in their midst—and the tool (read as: penis or other penetrative object) each relied on to acquire evidence. One of the more prominent lesbian voices during the course of the repeal controversy to regularly speak about the difficulty of confronting these dynamics was former West Point cadet Katherine Miller. Miller garnered particular attention following her August 2010 appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show via live-stream video from the temporary barracks assigned to her upon formally submitting her letter of resignation to the academy (Maddow, 2010c). In one portion of the rationale Miller’s letter included to explain her reasons for resigning—which Maddow, along with a host of other media figures quoted during interviews with Miller—she discloses, “I have created a heterosexual dating history to recite to fellow cadets when they inquire. I have endured sexual harassment for fear of being accused as a lesbian by rejecting or reporting these 117 events” (Miller, 2010, § 5.c). Public discourses involving Miller—including a series of pieces she authored anonymously earlier that summer for Velvetpark, a website aimed at advancing discussions about the arts, subcultures, and activism of queer women, under the byline: Private Second Class Citizen—promptly began (re)circulating (and were somewhat further bolstered when Miller, along with three other LGB servicemembers, escorted Lady Gaga down the red carpet at MTV’s Video Music Awards that September). In one of the pieces Miller wrote as “Private Second” before resigning from West Point, she directly explores her own encounters with and negotiations of the whore/dyke dichotomy with respect to DADT. She begins by reproducing a text conversation with a male cadet who was also her friend. At one point in their exchange he informs her that she’s “a hot topic for debate” among some of the other male cadets, given that “almost every guy in the company has tried to hook up with [her]” (Private Second, 2010b, paras. 16, 6). Later in the piece, Miller lays out a typical interaction with one of the cadets who her friend identified, within their text conversation, as being among those raising questions about her sexuality. He would stop by my room with a Gatorade bottle to spit his dip juice into, talk about how much he benched pressed that day, and tell stories in an attempt to impress me with his testosterone-driven activities. Predictably, I was less than receptive. But according to him, my sexuality must have been the only reason I didn’t fall head over heels. And the fact that his busted ego could have gotten me thrown out…is a tad unfair. (Private Second, 2010b, paras. 19-20) The image Miller fashions of her unsolicited, would-be suitor conceivably resonates with les(bi)an and straight women alike as the epitome of a certain familiar, irreverent form of heteromasculinity embracing notions of sexual virility and patriarchal entitlement. Additionally, based on the jest in her tone when ascribing her sexuality as the “only 118 reason” for her disinterest, Miller infers that comporting this form of heteromasculinity no longer (if ever) causes many straight women to swoon either. By doing so, Miller, on one level, conceives of a demoted cultural status for this masculinity relative to other masculinities. But also, on another level, by articulating a “less than receptive” posture for both les(bi)ans and heterosexual women in relation to the (sexual) advances of the cadet-cum-creeper-personified, Miller’s insinuation calls on publics to recognize that the latent consequences of a soldier-penatrator’s “busted ego” pose a threat to all female servicemembers irrespective of their sexuality. Indeed, women participating in public deliberations over DADT to advocate for its repeal, whether straight or les(bi)an, routinely made this point throughout the controversy. Speaking at the press conference held for the launch of a national speaking tour organized by Servicemember’s United dubbed the Voices of Honor Tour, Genevieve Chase, a straight Army Staff Sergeant who served in Afghanistan, detailed instances when rejected advances predictably lead ego-bruised soldiers to accuse a female servicemember of lesbianism, noting that “the accusation itself is enough to warrant an investigation and it is all too often true, that troops are guilty until proven innocent” (Chase, 2009, para. 6). In Chase’s depiction, the most significant factor in female servicemembers’ susceptability to the risks of being accused, investigated, and even discharged under the policy is not identifying personally as a les(bi)an. Rather, it is in how successful (or simply lucky) they are in negotiating their interactions with male soldiers as women. As Chase concludes, “DADT is used as a tool levied against women and I could easily have been one of those women” (Chase, 2009, para. 6). To be sure, one central image of masculinity associated with the archetypal soldier within the national 119 imaginary commonly derives from and stylistically reflects that of the figure of the protector. However, through its reification the masculinity of the soldier can also become less chivalrous and protective and more domineering, aggressive, and even predatory. In Judith Hicks Stiehm’s (1982) exploration of the “tendency for a protector to become a predator” and the nature of the link articulating the protector’s relationship to the protected, she turns to the notion of “the classic protection racket,” in which, as she describes, “an individual offers protection from an ambiguous foe (in fact, himself) for a price” (p. 373). This price, of course, is to adopt the prescribed posture of the protected: as a subordinate who “concedes critical distance from decision-making autonomy” (Young, 2003, p. 4); as a grateful admirer of “his willingness to face the dangers of the world for her sake,” making it “only fitting that she should minister to his needs and obey his dictates” (Young, 2003, p. 5); and as a “‘good’ woman” who does not challenge her protector’s “judgment about what is necessary for her protection, and remains loyal to him” (Young, 2003, p. 14). However, as Young (2003) interjects, a person subjected to the feminized position of the protected who “refuses such protection by claiming the right to run [their] own life” may “discover that they are most in danger from” their would-be protector (p. 14). Public deliberative discourse(s) focusing on the ways DADT uniquely impacts les(bi)an/female troops figure the masculine visage/demeanor espoused by the protector as contingent on the protected’s (e.g., female servicemembers’) acquiescence to the racket. For instance, in an interview with The Guardian, Rhonda Davis, a Navy veteran discharged under DADT, maintained she found it to be the case sometimes that men don’t like women having authority and advancing through the ranks. And they really don’t like it when a pretty girl turns 120 them down.…It’s easy for them to claim that any woman [emphasis added] who ticks them off is a lesbian. (Cahalane, 2010, para. 6) Like Davis, other les(bi)an/female soldiers publicly advocating for repeal spoke critically into this logic of masculinist protection structuring gender relations by underscoring their fellow soldiers’ use of predatory aggression to (re)assert a masculine status, were they or other female troops to reject the posture of the protected or fail to appropriately perform through it. In so doing, these circulating voices of les(bi)an/female servicemembers accentuated an image of protective masculinity as concomitant with acts of domination and predation. For example, U.S. Air Force veteran Major Debra K. Hedding (2010) in a letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Times provided her assessment of the policy’s impacts on women and argued its repeal would mean that, female military members won’t be accused of being lesbian for refusing to ‘put out.…’ I was serving before [DADT], and things went from bad to worse when they pushed that on us.…Female service members were sexually harassed and attacked in record numbers, as if to ‘prove’ male heterosexuality. This straight female veteran will be celebrating when this reign of terror is over. (paras. 1, 4-5) The DADT policy, in Davis and Hedding’s depictions, operates in service of a protection racket that makes female soldiers vulnerable to heteromasculine retribution via the threat of or actual accusations of lesbianism, while simultaneously denying them adequate weaponry (e.g., ability to file a report) to defend themselves in the face of such attacks. Former Army Sergeant Tracey Cooper-Harris’s open letter to President Obama, published as part of SLDN’s Stories from the Frontlines series, provides perhaps the starkest account illustrating the latent capacity for protector/protected configurations to become coterminous with those of predator/prey. Recollecting an early experience during her time in the military, she discloses how the protection of her military career 121 concurrently involved her predation. In Cooper-Harris’s case, the protection racket set by men with whom she served entailed their assurance of the secret that she was a lesbian; the price was the availability of her body for sexual favors. Because, as Cooper-Harris (2010) explains, she “had seen friends discharged under DADT who were in similar situations.…while their perpetrators were given a slap on the wrist” (para. 7), she had no evidence to believe “the military’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy on sexual harassment” (para. 6) would provide her any recourse since it seemed to not “apply to those forced in the closet under DADT” (para. 6). Thus, as she rationalized, “I had a choice: report these men for ‘sexual harassment/cohesion [sic]’ and end my military career or submit to their demands” (Cooper-Harris, 2010, para. 5). Just as the classic racketeer—should someone decline his protective services—calls upon some muscle for backup and consequently “teach[es] a lesson to others who might wish to go their own way” (Young, 2003, p. 14), les(bi)an/female causalities under the muscle of DADT served as a cautionary tale with the force to dissuade other female soldiers from also becoming combatants. Les(bi)an soldier-participants in the controversy over DADT repeal, along with their allied straight female counterparts, rhetorically incorporated their status as women in order to exhibit the policy’s harmful impacts particular to female soldiers. This rhetorical strategy contrasted with the rhetorics of disincorporation relied on by advocates speaking about/as gay male servicemembers, which sought to abstract gay male soldiers from their sexuality as proof of their consonance with the average, garden variety American soldier—and the ubiquitous patterns stylizing his un(re)marked masculinity. Alternatively, rhetorical incorporations reflected in les(bi)an/female soldiers’ appeals for DADT’s demise explicitly marked their gender and (real/perceived) sexuality and 122 directly linked those markers to the conditions shaping their (mis)treatment at the hands (and egos) of ubiquitous heteromasculine soldiers. In so doing, these appeals from les(bi)an/female soldiers bore greater potential to animate the edicts emblematic of soldiering masculinity within public deliberative spaces and offer them up for scrutiny. That is, rhetorical incorporations of sex/gender/sexuality within prorepeal arguments centering the unique impacts of DADT for military women, imparted a particular rendering of protective masculinity further disarticulated from notions of honorability, righteousness, etc., commonly associated with the dominant, archetypal figure of the soldier-protector by rearticulating it through models of penetration and/or predation. Specific deliberative attention on les(bi)an/female soldiers within DADT repeal debates signaled a venture to collectively interrogate public valorization and/or endorsement of the hegemonic status of this version of militarized masculinity (including the protective logics forming its basis, the practices that embody it, and the relative expectations it imposes on others), which so often appears inherent to soldiering. However, as deliberative attentions shifted away from DADT repeal, discourses over women in combat further illuminate the stakes publics held in the relational foundations of protector-protected structures/logics, and their reliance on the figure of the (masculinist) protector as defined through contradiction with his (feminine and/or feminized) dependents. Servicemembers and Combating (in) Blurred (Front)lines Forty-six days before the Department of Defense (DoD) directive that would come to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” officially took effect on February 24, 123 1994, Defense Secretary Les Aspin issued a memorandum establishing new policy regarding positions assigned to female military personnel. The prior November, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1994, Congress included language repealing all remaining prohibitions on the capacities in which women could serve on aircrafts for combat missions and on combatant-classified surface marine vessels (Kamarck, 2016). Thus, while this congressional action opened many combat jobs to female servicemembers, Aspin’s January 13, 1994 Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule memo reiterated women’s mandated “exclu[sion] from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground” (Aspin, 1994, para. 4). Direct ground combat, as defined by the memo, entails, “engaging an enemy on the ground…while being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact with the hostile force’s personnel” (Aspin, 1994, para. 5). The memo also further specified that topographically, this form of engagement “takes place well forward on the battlefield while locating and closing with the enemy to defeat them” (Aspin, 1994, para. 5). Key to the policy change instituted by Aspin’s memo was the removal of the so-called “risk rule,” a metric first introduced by the DoD in 1988 that—remaining consistent with entrenched logics of masculinist protection—became the standard rationale warranting women’s exclusion from particular unit assignments and/or missions on the basis of whether “the risks of exposure to direct combat, hostile fire, or capture were equal to or greater than the risks in the combat units they supported” (Kamarck, 2016, p. 4). Although in an official sense the “risk rule” was long-obsolete as controversy over eliminating the direct ground combat exclusion policy mounted, discourses from this more contemporary debate continued to reflect concerns regarding 124 the degrees of risk entailed by variously imagined conditions of (in)security particular to scenarios of combat. On November 27, 2012, roughly 14 months after official implementation of DADT repeal, the nonprofit Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) filed a lawsuit jointly with the American Civil Liberties Union against the Defense Department and its then-Secretary Leon Panetta on behalf of four female servicemembers. The basis of the plaintiff’s complaint directly challenged the constitutionality of the existing DoD policy established by the 1994 Aspin memo. Lead plaintiff in the case was Maj. Mary Hegar, the Air Force helicopter pilot who, 4 years later, would speak with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross and once again recount the battle in which, after being shot in the arm, she piloted her damaged helicopter to a crash landing and then gave cover to her team by returning fire on enemy forces while hanging from a second helicopter during liftoff. Each of Hegar’s three fellow plaintiffs had likewise served in Afghanistan. Army Staff Sergeant Jennifer Hunt also served a tour in Iraq and like Hegar was a Purple Heart recipient. Marine Captain Zoe Bedell and Marine First Lieutenant Colleen Ferrell both served as part of Female Engagement Teams (FETs), a program in which the Corps attached teams of women to direct ground combat infantry units for the primary purpose of “engaging with Afghan civilians, particularly Afghan women” (Hegar v. Panetta, 2012, p. 3). Like Hegar, both Hunt and Ferrell “experienced ground combat” (Service Women’s Action Network [SWAN], 2012b, para. 2) during their deployments, while Bedell, in her capacity as “Officer-in-Charge of the FET program,” (Hegar v. Panetta, 2012, p. 7) led female troops who “regularly encountered ground combat,” (Hegar v. Panetta, 2012, p. 7). Together, the plaintiffs’ proximity to and experiences of direct ground combat during 125 their deployments work to illustrate a central premise of the lawsuit, that “the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan lack any clear boundaries or front lines,” and “as a result, servicewomen across the Armed Forces, including the Plaintiffs, have risked their lives and continue to risk their lives serving in combat” (Hegar v. Panetta, 2012, p. 1). The lawsuit predicates this argument for elimination of the combat exclusion policy on battlefield scenarios in which soldiers risk(ed) commensurate susceptibility to harm regardless of gender-based occupational classifications, meant to protect female servicemembers from face to face confrontations on the ground with (a) hostile force(s). Across the controversy’s broader deliberative context, however, several prevalent points of contention featured rationales characterized instead by assertions of dissimilarity between male and female soldiers’ vulnerabilities. In a nod to some of these blurred (front)lines, as well as the various purported (in)equities they engendered, Foreign Policy associate editor Joshua Keating remarked, “While female soldiers…increasingly brave the same dangers as their male counterparts, they still face a unique set of risks from their own fellow soldiers” (Keating, 2012, para. 14). Indeed, one central contention between those supporting and those opposing women in combat concerned what implications the removal of combat exclusions would have on the institution’s sexual assault epidemic. Proponents of opening all combat positions to women argued that doing so was tactically imperative for gaining ground in the battle against rampant sexual harassment and assault across the miltiary. For example, at the press conference held to announce the Hegar v. Panetta lawsuit, SWAN Executive Director and former Marine officer Anu Bhagwati criticized the military for “propagat[ing] a policy that tells troops that women 126 are incapable of being physically and mentally fit for combat,” while concurrently holding the “expect[ation] that service women will be treated well by their peers,” contending that this ambivalence was the reason “Combat Exclusion directly contributes to a culture that condones harassment and mistreatment of service women” (SWAN, 2012a, para. 8). On January 24, 2013, not quite 2 months after SWAN filed its suit, Secretary Panetta and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey issued a joint memorandum that immediately rescinded the 1994 Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule and initiated a process for opening all military positions to women by an implementation deadline of January 1, 2016. In remarks during the press conference held for the memo’s signing, Gen. Dempesy arrived at a diagnosis similar to Bhagwati’s. Responding to a reporter’s question about how their action would strengthen the military and/or infantry forces, Dempsey in part observed, Secondly, we’ve had this issue with sexual harassment, sexual assault. I believe it’s because we’ve had separate classes of military personnel at some level…when you have one part of the population that is designated as warriors and another part that is designated as something else, I think that disparity begins to establish a psychology that in some cases led to that environment. (C-SPAN, 2013a, 35:19) Dempsy’s widely (re)circulated statement reverberates with Stiehm’s (1982) longavowed recognition of the “always asymmetric” relationship between classes of the protector and protected that ranges “from benevolent to malevolent,” as a result of systems and policies in which “one has access to force and one does not” (p. 374). Furthermore, in postulating that dissolving designations between those counted as warriors and those counted as less-than-warriors among military personnel might help alleviate issues with sexual harassment and/or assault, the Joint Chiefs Chairman’s assessment also tacitly endorses the rationale Stiehm advanced when she proposed that a 127 possible remedy for the inequities stemming from logics of masculinist protection lay in the figure of the defender. According to Stiehm (1982), “a defender has full and equal access to the means of destruction/protection…[and] is expected to be ready to share in all risks and roles society deems necessary for its safety” (p. 374). She argued that “in a nation of defenders the roles of the protector and the protected”—and thereby the harms wrought by structural investments in these roles—“cease to exist” (1982, p. 374). Proponents of women in combat regularly advanced an image of female soldiers through discursive logics giving shape to this figure of the defender within public deliberative imaginaries as they articulated the nature of the connection between military sexual assault and the Combat Exclusion Rule. For example, in an op-ed published by the Houston Chronicle, Mary Hegar (2013) maintained, “Any expert will tell you sexual assault is more about power and asserting your dominance over someone you view as weak.…Accept women into your culture as equals and violence against them decreases” (paras. 10-11). Similarly, in a Washington Post op-ed, University of Virginia School of Law Professor and founder of the Molly Pitcher Project Anne Coughlin along with Colonel Ellen Haring—who happened to be a plaintiff in a separate lawsuit (Baldwin v. Panetta) challenging combat exclusion—castigate the military for an institutional climate that “treat[s] female comrades as second-class soldiers” (Coughlin & Haring, 2013, para. 3). They insist, “Until women are fully accepted in the military’s warrior culture, their minority status will put them at greater risk of being abused” (Coughlin & Haring, 2013, para. 3). In these appeals, advocates situated the extent of female soldier’s (in)security over threats/risks of sexual domination/predation as contingent on their full and equal 128 exposure to the threats/risks of “real” combat battlegrounds. Moreover, continued (re)circulation of this argumentative rationale promoting the figure of the female soldierdefender also furnished a platform for publics to impugn masculinist protective logics and their seeming incontrovertible force to articulate and enshrine conditions of (in)security. Deliberative participants expressing concerns about or outright opposition to women in combat, however, conversely imagined the nature of “real” combat battlegrounds and the soldier-warriors who occupy them as precisely the reason why assigning women to direct ground combat units would instead expose them to a greater risk of sexual abuse. In one instance, an article published in the San Antonio Express the day following Panetta and Dempsey’s announcement quotes Army Specalist Cody Nusbaum, who grounds his reservations on the impression that “when guys get overseas and they’ve been away from women awhile, they get weird” before surmising “I feel like it’s going to get a lot of people hurt” (Christenson, 2013, paras. 14-15). The article’s author appears to certify the junior noncommissioned officer’s authority to speak on matters regarding “women who are posted in austere environments surrounded by men,” by identifying him as “an infantryman shot 11 times in Kandahar” (Christenson, 2013, para. 13). Then, as a second to Nusbaum’s professed doubts, the author provides the perspective of former Army Specalist Kasey Hunter—“one of only four women in an aviation unit near Baghdad”—who characterizes her apprehension by explaining, “I like to call it the perfect storm, when you have men who have been separated from spouses, they’re hyped on testosterone and aggression” (Christenson, 2013, paras. 5, 16). On the surface one might understandably discount these and similar objections as merely banal 129 derivatives of predictable and/or routine arguments predicating opposition to female soldiers becoming infantry(wo)men on conventional presumptions about the innate biological origins dictating who men are and in what ways they express their inherent masculine natures. However, these specific gendered presumptions, when cited as justification for anxieties about female soldiers’ risk of sexual assault, form a logic that gives credence to an articulation of infantrymen’s (presumed) innate masculine sexual urges and their preordained predation of female soldiers. Marine Captain Lauren Serrano exemplifies such a rationale in her essay arguing “Why Women Do Not Belong in the U.S. Infantry,” which appeared in an issue of the Marine Corps Gazette after being awarded first place in the 2013 Maj. Gen. Harold W. Chase Prize Essay Contest. One “very practical reason” for keeping women out of direct ground combat that Serrano raises is because infantrymen tend to be in their “late teens or early twenties,” and as she indicates “at that age, men are raging with hormones and are easily distracted by women and sex” (Serrano, 2014, p. 38). In light of this, Serrano determines, As the pinnacle fighting elements of the Marine Corps it is in the best interest of the infantry units to mitigate the opportunities for sexual assault/harassment. If women are part of infantry units, it will be a matter of when, not if, more sexual assault cases will happen. (Serrano, 2014, p. 40) And, as she attests, “few things are more disruptive” to a unit than cases of sexual assault and harassment because for every case reported “several Marines have to dedicate important man-hours [emphasis added] to resolving the issue,” which incurs an “opportunity cost for the Marines involved,” in that it “subsequently tak[es] time away from training, readiness, and unit morale” (Serrano, 2014, pp. 39-40). For Serrano, an increase in cases would weaken assurances that “Marine Corps infantry units are as 130 strong as possible to fight our Nation’s battles” (Serrano, 2014, p. 40). Given what battles Serrano grants national priority, it is somewhat telling that the only tangible harms concerning sexual assault/harassment she discusses specifically result from reports of sexual abuse rather than the instances themselves. Also telling is the commonplace Serrano imparts to summarize her defense of combat exclusion in the final paragraph: “Marine Corps infantry is not broken, so let’s not ‘fix’ it” (Serrano, 2014, p. 40), which—regarding the essays argumentative treatment of the issue of sexual assault/harassment—becomes homologically iterative of another commonplace inferred by her reasoning: ‘infantrymen will be infantrymen.’ Indeed, earlier in the essay Serrano imparts the necessity of preserving “the infantry brotherhood” from women and their inevitable disruptions to “the infantry’s identity, motivational tactics, and camaraderie” (Serrano, 2014, p. 38). While acknowledging the infantry might not be “the most polite environment,” she maintains that because it is “the one place where young men are able to focus solely on being a warrior without the distraction of women or political correctness,” which therefore permits them to “fart, burp, tell raunchy jokes, walk around naked, swap sex stories, wrestle, and simply be young men together;” this infantry atmosphere is precisely what promotes the formation of an “invaluable” bond essential for encouraging men in combat environments to keep fighting (Serrano, 2014, pp. 38-39). In relation to her characterization of the infantry, Serrano’s argument not only subscribes to the notion of innately gendered traits, it also endorses these expressions of masculinity as necessary to how the military’s “pinnacle fighting elements” ensure the (in)security of others. A hegemonic struggle waged by deliberating publics over the logics of 131 masculinist protection and the (feminist) logics of defense becomes apparent as Serrano’s argument (and others resembling it) (re)circulate among and discursively interact with rebuttals advanced by proponents of women in combat. In this way, while those aligned with Serrano’s stance consent to the proposition that infantrymen will (and must) be infantrymen, given the risks and demands imposed on tip-of-the-spear soldier-protectors, proponents of women in combat refute this notion, instead suggesting that in the case of this protracted form of masculine protection, protectors will be predators. For instance, one direct response to Serrano came from Army officer and sociologist Jessica Scott, who also happens to be a best-selling author of military-themed romance novels (and whose tweet about taking birth control to prevent a pregnancy from prematurely terminating her tour of duty while jointly-deployed overseas with her husband—to admonish Rush Limbaugh for calling women on birth control sluts—led Esquire to name her as one of their 2012 people of the year). On the subject of sexual assault/harassment, Scott (2014) points out that in Serrano’s adamance “that infantry Marines cannot be trusted to incorporate women into their teams without turning into marauding rapists” she instead demonstrates the opposite is true, that in fact “there ‘is’ something broken in the Marine Corps and its broken across all of our forces” (Scott, 2014, para. 37). Scott counters that her “vehement issue with” Serrano’s “insistence that the brotherhood as she painted it is worthy of preserving” is because championing these particular expressions of masculinity “is EXACTLY why we have a problem with sexual assault in the military” (Scott, 2014, paras. 16, 18). Such rebuttals from proponents of full combat integration problematize the glorification of a version of soldiering masculinity informed by logics of (un)protective, penetrative predation, in their efforts to challenge its public endorsement. Indeed, as 132 Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Tammy Duckworth, a former helicopter pilot and then-newly-elected Congresswoman (D-IL), retorted in an interview broadcasted in the days following Panetta and Dempsey’s joint memorandum, “to say that we can’t allow women to serve in a full range of jobs because they may become victims is really disgusting to me. Because the problem is in…fixing the predator problem” (Martin, 2013, para. 34). By mobilizing logics of defense those supportive of opening direct ground combat to women rebuked what others took to be a suitable level of slippage between masculine protection and predation, thereby situating the policy change as a primary means to inoculate Corporal Jekyll against morphing into Corporal Hyde. Accordingly, objections forwarded by champions of combat exclusion over this prospective departure from an appropriately masculine soldiering identity disclose anxieties surrounding the ideological threat such a collectively imagined figure of the female soldier-defender poses to edifices of male privilege that substantiate the logics of this masculinist racket. Within these circulating discourses publics not only debated whether women should be in direct ground combat and/or in which types of scenarios female servicemembers would be at greater risk of sexual assault/harassment. Their deliberations also became absorbed in processes that collectively imagine what constitutes (il)legitimate violence (or perhaps at minimum, what constitutes forms of unavoidable and/or understandable violence). For some, the nature of (the) infantry/men and their effectiveness in war inevitably entailed certain unpleasant externalities, from which those not of the warrior class should be protected. While for others, women’s capacity to take up arms as coequals alongside their combat brethren situated a mechanism for the defense of their own corporeal (in)security as contingent on becoming fully anointed 133 defenders/protectors of the corpus publicus. Dis/incorporating Vulnerabilities on Gendered Battlefields Debates over rescinding the combat exclusion rule unfolded through rhetorics figuring the (fe/male) soldier-defender and imbued this posture with the capacity to transpose the stature of female servicemembers from likely objects of prey, assailable by infantrymen’s penetrative weaponry. Such a transposition, advocates argued, depended on the establishment of a homogenous corps, uniformly sharing in the tasks deemed necessary for the nation’s defense (i.e., mutually disposed to wield the complete array of weaponry and participate in the full range of offensive maneuvers), while equally subject to the same risks/vulnerabilities germane to any particular field of battle. However, across public deliberative spaces, as opponents of combat integration collectively imagined distinct scenarios of direct ground combat and their attendant harsh realities, they held that the given nature of these combat(ive) contexts preordained fe/male soldiers’ asymmetrical susceptibility to and consequences of certain forms of corporeal vulnerability. Arguments constructed against the scenario of mixed-gender direct ground combat missions commonly acknowledged male bodies as vulnerable due to the especially harsh environments encountered during such missions. To be sure, the avowed severity of such a backdrop similarly arose with respect to female soldiers’ risks in direct ground combat assignments and to the specific vulnerabilities uniquely articulated with their bodies. However, emphasis on the brutal realities of this spartan setting likewise provided the fodder for opponents to substantiate how gender-integrated scenarios of 134 combat gave male soldiers a newly-added burden of precarity particular to the things they carried on combat missions. This appended vulnerability, thrust inequitably upon infantrymen, as this argument alleged, was because the incorporation of female soldiers onto the battlefields of direct ground combat would, in turn, uniquely afford them (i.e., infantrywomen) with an extra weapon in their arsenal of destruction: the gaze, which, when equipped had the means to render their male battle buddies pregnable. As such, deliberative discourse(s) of corporeal vulnerability distinctly pertaining to combat integration at the tip-of-the-spear, figured the anticipated entrance of female soldierwarriors as a penetrative, predatory threat to the infantry and the fraternal contract (Pateman, 1989) forming the basis of its exclusivity. Those arguing against gender integration of the infantry and special forces rhetorically centered the body’s saliency within lived experiences of extended combat operations, and structured such zones of direct combat as the exclusive domain of hardened male soldiers by recounting the ruthless conditions these warriors must tolerate “outside the wire” to execute their missions. Retired Army Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, in an editorial written for CNN, stresses that scenarios of direct ground combat often entail “prolonged operations that can last for months,” during which the unit may “typically [have] no access to a base of operations or facilities,” meaning that throughout such missions “the physical toll is constant and wearing” (Boykin, 2013, para. 7). To further instantiate this “abysmal and base” setting he cautioned, “There is routinely no privacy or ability to maintain personal hygiene for extended periods. Soldiers and Marines have to relieve themselves within sight of others” (Boykin, 2013, para. 8). However, his characterization of the everyday realities during extended combat 135 engagement(s), is not, in and of itself, the crux of his contention that direct ground combat should be an exclusively male zone, nor does he question whether female soldiers are/could be capable of enduring these hardships. Instead he reasons that, in light of the already unmerciful elements combat warriors must withstand, incorporating women would be a “tremendous burden” on commanders and their efforts to “maintain focus on defeating the enemy in battle,” while operating “in an environment that combines lifethreatening danger with underlying sexual tensions” (Boykin, 2013, para. 9). Here, Boykin rhetorically grounds the impropriety and unnecessary complications imagined to arise with full combat integration by endowing (the presence of) female bodies with the power to inflame (hetero)sexual tensions. In the perilous context of direct ground combat, fanning such (hetero)sexual tensions become so imposing as to ostensibly risk rendering members in the unit impotent to perform satisfactorily in battles that could rise up at a moment’s notice, leaving troops more exposed when targeted by enemy forces discharging their weapons. In a similar vein, Ryan Smith, a former Marine Corps infantryman who participated in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, painted a vivid picture illustrating how the introduction of (hetero)sexual tensions within extended ground combat scenarios foments heightened corporeal precarity for male troops. His rhetoric figures the combat warrior within a framework of vulnerability and imagines female soldier-warriors as agential threats to the masculine bodies of combat soldiers due to their capacity to enfeeble the(se) tough guys/guise guarding against a penetrating sense of defenselessness. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Smith (2013) argued that the general public does not adequately grasp the abhorrent situations grunts brave in their particular line of duty and 136 subsequently recounted his own experience as an infantryman during the Iraq invasion to testify to the nature of combat and to establish a perspective through which to make sense of his demarcation of which bodies cohere among the realities of that environment. Smith (2013) recounts being crammed for hours on end with other Marines in the back of assault vehicles headed to Baghdad, which, given the convoy’s travel orders, at times kept them captive, without the ability to exit the vehicles for over 48 hours. Not only were the men, therefore, “forced to urinate in bottles inches from our comrades,” additionally, as Smith explains, because the unsanitary conditions led many of the Marines to develop dysentery, it meant that at whatever point “an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE [Meal, Ready-toEat] bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade's face” (2013, para. 6). In addition, chemical suits worn almost continually caused the Marines to develop sores over their bodies to the extent that, by the time Smith’s unit reached Baghdad, the suits “were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood” (2013, para. 8). After being instructed to strip and throw the suits in a burn pit, Smith and the members of his unit “stood there…naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn” before getting their first shower “in well over a month” from a pressure hose (2013, para. 9). Whereas the strength of the “brotherhood” that exists between male troops allows them to stomach these pressures, as Smith attests, introducing women to such scenarios would “irreparably” shatter this camaraderie and significantly harm a unit’s combat effectiveness. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex. Despite the professionalism of the Marines, it would be distracting and 137 potentially traumatizing to be forced to be naked in front of the opposite sex, particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene. (2013, paras. 11-12) Within this scenario, Smith suggests that men’s effective combat performance relies on an exclusively fraternal setting to sufficiently fortify their mechanisms for coping in such environments and portrays women’s infiltration of this fraternal citadel as particularly jeopardizing because it threatens toughened masculine warriors—especially while they inhabit foul, wasted, wounded bodies—with exposure to the female gaze. His professed concern over exposing infantrymen to such vulnerability, to warrant a continued prohibition on female soldiers permeating the Corps’ elite combat units, accordingly exposes anxieties over the possibility of “a reversal in the predator/prey relationship” (C. Rich et al., 2012, p. 277). Furthermore, while publics deliberating women’s (un)belongingness within the infantry frequently gravitated toward rhetorics of incorporation that utilized the particularities of women’s bodies to ground their objections (and cast the corporeality of the male soldiers as the abstract universal), both Smith and Boykin opt to incorporate men’s bodily excretions to underscore the particular and exclusionary circumstances of direct ground combat life. The work of scholars who have linked corporeal vulnerability with the incorporation of wounds or other symbols of the body’s defilement sheds constructive light on the particular rhetorical incorporations reflected in Boykin’s and Smith’s arguments. Initially, Kristeva (1982) posited that a body is abject when what defiles the body becomes visible. She argued abjection places tension on ego-identification with “the self’s clean and proper body” (1982, p. 72). The body’s control of “excrement and its equivalents” (1982, p. 72) marks the self’s identification with the social world, while 138 defiling substances, themselves, represent a risk of identity loss. Grosz (1994) considered how perceptions regarding one’s control over bodily flows, as well as certain forms of corporeal excretions themselves, articulate the sexed body to demarcate and accentuate female otherness. Thus, whereas “women’s corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage” (1994, p. 203), public discourses disincorporate men’s bodies from abjection; their corporeal subjectivity is not leaky. In this way, rendering the particularities of abject flows visible reduces a body’s access to the privileges of corporeal abstraction. Drawing from Kristeva and Grosz, Jarvis (2004), for example, discussed dynamics related to the corporeal subjectivity of soldiers in her analysis of popular WWII-era representations of soldiers. She attributed the “cultural prohibitions against showing men’s bodily fluids” as one reason why popular WWII-era representations depicting wounded soldier bodies were rare in the early years of U.S. troop deployment because it was thought to “undermin[e] the notion of the impenetrable male body” (2004, p. 89) and create a negative image of the war effort. Regarding the differential value(s) assigned to fe/male bloodshed, McCracken (2003) detected perceptions of an “incompatibility between women’s blood and heroic bloodshed” (p. 627). She termed this the “amenorrhea of war” in reference to anxieties surrounding the absence or suppression of women’s blood imagined necessary “in the valorization of the productive values of men’s bloodshed” and “the construction of masculine military heroism” (2003, p. 627). With respect to Boykin and Smith’s incorporation of infantrymen’s abject bodies and flowing excretions, they, in one sense belie, and thereby signal potential rupture(s) within, a stock imagery relaying the warrior-hero’s imperviousness to the perils he braves. Yet, in another sense, they connote the exceptionality of those abject bodies, 139 cordoning them off by particularizing the circumstances surrounding their abjection in order to reinscribe it through valor. Indeed, as Brayton (2007) similarly observed regarding strategic incorporations of the abject in certain cases, “the espousal of an object identity ironically works to restore the cultural importance of the white male subject” (p. 60). Following Brayton, I suggest that the recourse to the abject in Smith and Boykin’s arguments represents a maneuver operating within a broader struggle over how publics collectively imagine the universal(izable) soldier-warrior archetype and (t)his version of masculinity as the standard-bearer figuring the hegemonic militarized (masculine) ideal. Other circulating discourse also manifested publics’ participatory activity in this process of contestation. For instance, a writer for Jezebel, a general interest website targeted at women, included Smith’s editorial at the top of a list of “The most batshit crazy reactions to women in combat” (Halper, 2012, para. 1), while others writing for conservative media outlets identified Smith’s argument as a “must-read” (Duff, 2013, para. 8) and as an example of an article that “include[s] a wealth of common sense” (Center for Military Readiness, 2013a, para. 4). Likewise, a writer for the online news magazine Slate labels General Boykin’s reasons for opposing women in combat “cringeworthy” (Saletan, 2013). Though one commenter on the article retorts that “it would be humiliating to shat and piss in front of women” and accuses William Saletan, the article’s author, of having “no common sense” (joetheragman, 2013). While it remains unvoiced whether being forced to shit, piss, or even bleed in front of men would be similarly humiliating for female soldiers or would impart a corresponding level of vulnerability on them, other identified aspects of female physiology become particularities for women and their fitness for direct combat’s 140 abrasive habitat. Maternal Wounds: Incorporating Combat’s Harms on Female Bodies Recent circulating discourses arguing against women in combat jobs less routinely issue doubts about women’s categorical (in)capacity to meet the basic physical standards required of combat troops, instead appending presumptions of female physical inferiority to questions about what long term effects sustained combat might uniquely have on the female body, and by extension, her role in the national civic body. For instance, Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Jesse Jane Duff explained, the effects on women’s bodies from extended time in combat are not well researched and could be severely detrimental (Duff, 2013). These discourses meaningfully incorporate the bodies of female soldiers at their point of entry into cartographies of U.S. combat engagements, rendering women’s bodies as particularities within these spaces. In the instance I examine in detail below, these moments of rhetorical incorporation render combat as uniquely hazardous to women’s ability to build a career within the military and/or . Marine Corps Captain Katie Petronio wrote about her experience during two combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively, as testament to why Marine infantry positions should not be opened to women. While the editorial Petronio (2012) authored originally appeared in The Marine Corps Gazette, she and her arguments (re)circulated across various news and blog sites. Petronio subsequently gave interviews on CNN and Fox News about her public stance on women in infantry units; Serrano also happened to cite Petronio as part of her award-winning article featured in the Gazette the 141 following year. In the editorial, Petronio (2012) centered her argument on the issue of longevity; specifically she asked, “Can women endure the physical and physiological rigors of sustained combat operations, and are we willing to accept the attrition and medical issues that go along with integration?” (2012, p. 30). She grounded her concerns with references to her time in the military and to her own experiences while deployed. Looking back to when she was “a young lieutenant,” Petronio characterized herself as “fit[ing] the mold of a female who would have had a shot at completing [the infantry officer training course]” given that in college she was “a star ice hockey player” in college, and who “at 5 feet 3 inches…was squatting 200…and benching 145” by the end of her senior year” (2012, p. 30). But despite completing training courses at the top of her class and ranking well above average on the Marine physical-fitness test, Petronio also noted that body deteriorated significantly during deployment, and at a rate that was “noticeably faster than that of male Marines” (2012, p. 31). She explained that her repeated participation in combat and general proximity to combat zones required that she wear her “full combat load” for extensive periods of time. Petronio did acknowledge that her experiences may not be representative of all military women who have experienced combat. However, because she notes her high physical achievement some might see her as an example of an especially fit female Marine. Petronio (2012) located her problematic experiences while serving in combat not in her capability of achieving immediate mission success, but rather in the long-term impact it had on her health. She noted that the severity of her physical deterioration was in spite of the lower physical and emotional demands placed on her female body versus 142 those placed on infantrymen. Again highlighting her initial fitness, Petronio claimed, “At the beginning of my tour in Helmand Province, I was physically capable of conducting combat operations for weeks at a time, remaining in my gear for days if necessary and averaging 16-hour days of engineering operations” (2012, p. 30). Yet, after developing restless leg syndrome, which was compounded by compressions to the spine that caused neuropathy, Petronio reported that her leg muscles began to atrophy. In addition, after losing 17 pounds over a 7-month deployment, Petronio disclosed that she “was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome,” and in her case, a diagnosis “which personally resulted in infertility” (2012, p. 31). Explaining that polycystic ovaries do not run in her family Petronio attributed its appearance to “the chemical and physical changes endured during deployment” (2012, p. 31). Although, Petronio claims she succeeded at her missions and gained respect from her “infantry brethren,” her key argument is that, were the Marine Corps to fully integrate women into the infantry, “we as an institution are going to experience a colossal increase in crippling and career-ending medical conditions for females” (2012, p. 31). Petronio’s stance counters public arguments made in support of women’s full inclusion in combat, which are often based on claims that opportunities for military career advancement are more available to those with extensive combat experience than to those without. Her rhetoric incorporates the fertility and the shielded status of the normalized female body to discursively position women’s equal opportunity for promotion through the ranks as achievable, but at the cost of these markers of femaleness. Petronio’s infertility aligns with the crippling of the female body, but would not on its face be considered a career-ending medical condition. In this way, her disclosure 143 implies the value of fertility in constituting the functional female body. The risk of infertility for female combat soldiers was evidently key to journalists and bloggers who gave coverage to Petronio’s editorial; it was a frequent focus of the side-effects of her combat experience (CNN, 2012; Fox News, 2012; McCormack, 2013; Weaver, 2012). Incongruously, Petronio was actually 5 months pregnant in July 2012, during the peak of initial media coverage about her editorial. In an article written several months later that exposed her pregnancy, Petronio explained to the reporter that she received months of fertility treatment, which helped her conceive (Weaver, 2012). That her postcombat infertility was represented initially as a seemingly permanent status—through the absence of information about her conception—is significant. It suggests both the saliency of fertility issues to the bodies of women in combat and points to a public perception that risks of infertility are a significant reason to limit the types of combat roles available to women. Through this context, her article is a warning against risking other women’s bodies from succumbing to the same consequences. Opinion articles written by combat-experienced service members and veterans highlight a discursive separation between the wounded bodies of men and women’s wounded bodies in relation to combat service. A blog post about women in combat written by Marine Corps Infantry Sergeant James Robert Webb reflects nostalgically about combat’s physical toll on the body. Webb is the son of former Navy Secretary and U.S. Senator from Virginia Jim Webb; it was his combat boots that Sen. Webb wore on the campaign trail and which later formed the symbolic cornerstone of a direct action event orchestrated by GetEQUAL during the controversy over DADT’s repeal. Sgt. Webb writes, “To this day I still wake up every morning, and have a nice 'walk down 144 memory lane'. When I look in the mirror I see the scars on my body left by a reconstructive surgery on my shoulder” (Webb, 2013, “It Can Physically Break,” para. 1). His main claim in this section of the post is that combat is physically detrimental, even to those men deemed the strongest. Despite the toll extended combat took on his body, Webb notes, “I will never be as proud as I was about serving as a Grunt [infantryman] in the Marine Corps” (2013, “It Can Physically Break,” para. 1). The corporeal traces of combat—his battle scars—are represented as sources of pride, artifacts incorporated within a particular form of embodied masculinity closely associated with the military. In contrast to Webb’s sentiment, Katie Petronio’s (2012) reflection of her years of service suggests that her gendered status has been reduced, “Five years later, I am physically not the woman I once was and my views have greatly changed on the possibility of women having successful long careers while serving in the infantry” (p. 30). Petronio’s injuries mark her body with particularities, which she interprets to diminish her capacity to fully embody womanhood. Servicemembers’ wounds may serve as corporeal markers of their sacrifice(s) for the nation and by extension as expressions of civic virtue. Indeed, for Webb, such traces incorporate congruously as part of an articulation of the valor and virtues of military service/sacrifice. However, Petronio disarticulates her wounds, her physical deterioration from that which gives sense to and evidences a soldier’s sacrifice as bestowing civic virtue. 145 Conclusion I have contended that arguments against the permanent inclusion of women in ground combat roles employ strategies of rhetorical incorporation to position female troops as inappropriate occupants of combat zones. The risks to women’s bodies, and in particular the fertility of women’s bodies, incorporated within discourses addressing vulnerabilities stemming from the harsh environments of ground combat signals a gendered disjuncture in the signification and value placed on injuries suffered while in the line of duty. Opponents to female service members’ unrestricted role in combat strategically incorporate gendered bodies to argue that these changes to military policy threaten not only female troops’ capacity to maintain their womanhood but also threaten male warfighters’ sense of invulnerability, thereby purportedly threatening their combat effectiveness and military effectiveness overall. Although the rhetorical incorporation of men’s leaking and puss oozing bodies within fields of battle argumentatively demonstrates the crippling risk masculine bodies face in combat, infantrymen testifying to these combat vulnerabilities and their remaining corporeal traces also rebrand them around notions of exceptionality, honor and valor. As such, this disjuncture (re)inscribes the wounds, abjection, vulnerabilities of male soldiers as heroic sacrifice, while distancing the bodies of female soldiers from this frame. Moreover, the relationship rhetorically established between the longevity of a woman’s participation in combat and the potential harms inflicted on her fertile body bears resemblance to other occupational spheres. Given female service members’ presumed necessary presence in FETs attached to combat units and broad public acquiescence to the idea that the United States is currently fighting a different kind of war 146 (i.e., no front line), it is not women’s exposure to combat that remains debatable, but rather the longevity of their exposure to combat. The idea of career-length service in a combat occupation aligns with the potential deterioration of the female body, which includes her reproductive health, as evidence against opening this occupational path to women. Britt (2001) identified this tension between women’s prolonged focus on their desired career path and risks to their potential fertility within mainstream discourse that stigmatizes professional women for delaying childbirth. In her discussion, Britt pointed to arguments aligning women’s choices to forgo or delay child rearing in favor of a career “as one of the causes of the ‘dangerous’ decline in Western birthrates” (2001, p. 101). Nationalized rhetoric that positions the importance of women’s reproductive labor over other forms highlights the importance of fertility to public discourses of womanhood, suggesting that “good” female citizens, including those serving in the military, retain this capacity. Incidentally, another public controversy spotlighting female soldiers and expressions of motherhood began to percolate in the month prior to the initial publication and circulation of Petronio’s article. The controversy stemmed from a photo posted by photographer Crystal Scott to her website featuring an image of two servicewomen breastfeeding while in uniform. Scott, who also founded a support network called Mom2Mom “for service-connected mothers at Fairchild Air Force Base” (Weinstein, 2012, para. 1), took the photos in advance of National Breastfeeding Awareness Month and were intended to be used on base as “part of a campaign to empower service members to breast-feed” (Kelly, 2012, para. 1). As Facebook users circulated the photo and garnered its increasing notoriety, allegations of various improprieties of the photo 147 arose. One former Marine, whose comment aired during a radio program’s discussion of the controversy, and who indicated she breastfed while in the service, took issue not with the right of female soldiers to breastfeed while working but because “This photo…will bleed [emphasis added] into combat situations and this is the exact reason many women are kept from serving on the front lines” (Martin, 2012, para. 42). However, as Scott reported during an interview on NBC’s Today, “A lot of people are saying it’s a disgrace to the uniform. They’re comparing it to urinating and defecating [while in uniform]” (Sitt, 2012, para. 3). In her analysis of the controversial photograph, McFarlane (2015) contended that the image “complicates representations not only of gender, but also of patriotism and national identity” (p. 205). Indeed, as I examine further in the next chapter, the disuniformity of the meanings and values publics inscribe on the bodies of soldiers—injuries, fluids, and all—reflects part of the fabric of ongoing ambivalences toward how women performatively fulfill their duty and sacrifice to the nation. ****** In this chapter, I argued that les(bi)an/female soldiers making a case against DADT incorporated their status as women in order to center their particular vulnerability to lesbian baiting and other forms of sexual harassment and/or assault that the policy exacerbated. Discourses constructing an image of this form of vulnerability also presented a critique of the normalization of a militarized masculinity expressed through notions of sexual virility and entitlement. I also argued that despite publics’ diverging stances on the policy itself, they were widely unified in rendering female servicemembers’ sexual vulnerability as a prominent issue within deliberations over the (un)justifiability of the policy excluding women from military jobs that explicitly 148 involved direct ground combat. Finally, I argued that argumentative efforts to defend the ground combat exclusion policy deployed rhetorical strategies of incorporation that marked infantrymen’s bodies as abject and female soldiers’ bodies through a discourse of (maternal) inadequacy in order to particularlize the (gendered) vulnerabilities, burdens and/or sacrifices specific to serving in direct ground combat. The arguments in this chapter contribute to the central argument of my dissertation by revealing the ways that female servicemembers’ particular (and greater) vulnerabilities to/within combat(ive) environments and the(ir) corporeal sacrifices derived from exposure to these risks were not imagined in quite the same fashion as more conventionally intelligible forms of military sacrifices that often evoke publics’ expressions of appreciation for such sacrificial service. CHAPTER FIVE FICKLE UNCLE SAM: SELECTIVELY (RE)DRAFTING (TRANS)GENDERED TERMS OF SERVICE Disparities between a normative ideal about who bears the responsibility to fight in the name of the nation’s security during wartime compared with the distribution of that burden and its attendant sacrifices across eligible populations has long been a source of controversy for the United States. During the colonial period, state-level militias organized U.S. military forces under the principle that universal service (including conscription) was an obligation of the citizenry. However, state-crafted exemptions made the obligation of conscription less than equitable. For example, a 1647 Massachusetts law exempted various government officials, members of the clergy, and students and faculty of Harvard, medical professionals, schoolmasters, captains of large ships, and fishermen employed year-round (Segal, 1989). Connecticut enacted similar exemptions during the Revolutionary War for some officials, the clergy, and members of Yale but also permitted men to get out of their conscription obligation for a fee of 5 pounds (Zinn, 2003). Such inequities not only resulted in poor citizens bearing a large portion of the fighting (Zinn, 2003), in some instances they also led to riots (Segal, 1989). Conscription inequities, as well as protests about their (un)fairness, is a recurrent theme when the United States is tasked with mobilizing for war (Geva, 2011; Keith, 2001; Moskos & 150 Butler; 1996; Segal, 1989). The Civil War marked the establishment of the first federalized system(s) of conscription. But, because the Confederacy exempted slave owners from draft liability and wealthy northerners could commute their obligation to serve in the Union Army for a fee of $300, neither army instituted substantial strides toward greater egalitarianism. In particular, Segal (1989) noted that objections to the North’s commutation provision on the basis that “poor mens’ blood was going to be spilled for rich mens’ interests” contributed to riots in several states, including one riot in New York City lasting 4 days during which “roughly a thousand people were killed” (p. 26). Despite the intensity of opposition to the North’s conscription policy, the Union army was composed of 98% volunteers, while only 2% of Union soldiers were federal draftees (Segal, 1989). America did not institute another draft until its entry into World War I. While this iteration of a national conscription policy eliminated substitutions and commutation fees, the Selective Service System also established a schema for classifying a range of statuses, which permitted some potential draftees to garner an exemption from military service (Segal, 1989). Indeed, rather than a more universal conscription system, as Geva (2011) remarked, the bureaucratic framework established by the Selective Service to legitimize some draft deferrals over others “drew from existing social inequities and often exacerbated them further” (p. 599). In particular, “gendered assumptions regarding men’s breadwinning obligations to their financial dependents” were part of a broader calculus that allotted exemptions to men recognized as fulfilling other necessary and “legitimate civilian obligations” (e.g., some forms of industrial, agricultural, and aviation labor) “that equaled the citizen-soldier obligation” (Geva, 2011, p. 599). A man’s ability to gain draft 151 exemption for reasons of dependency obligations relied on discourses that identified what legitimate breadwinning was, and what it was not. Guidance crafted at the federal level concerning what qualified as a justifiable reason to warrant an exemption, which “began with the assumption that men would be exempted, not for marriage, but for dependency” (Keith, 2001, p. 1344), required interpretation by county-level exemption boards. For instance, these local draft boards, whose members “remained susceptible to the hidden prejudices of racism and its complex intersection with class and gender” (Geva, 2011, p. 606), were then tasked with determining whether husbands were the only source of income to support their wives, and further whether the $30 per month payment given to soldiers would improve living conditions for the household. The former added to the case for deferment; the latter detracted from it. Further, federal guidance on the various circumstances qualifying for dependency deferment and draft boards interpretation of them disproportionally denied exemptions for African American households both because of higher instances of poverty and greater likelihoods that African American women worked (Geva, 2011). Furthermore, while Black men were disproportionately more likely to be drafted, they also served mostly in supply or labor positions, whereas poor White men were more likely to see combat (Keith, 2001). Keith (2001) noted that Black leaders viewed the denial of combat positions to Black soldiers as detrimental to arguments mobilizing military service for citizenship rights and that Southern Whites too believed that they had been disadvantaged. Such incongruities in the application of the draft, as well as the extent of its correspondence with or divergence from the composition of draftees assigned to combat, continued to be raised as a matter of concern throughout subsequent periods of 152 active conscription in the 20th century (Bailey, 2009; Jarvis, 2010; Moskos & Butler, 1996). The Second World War marked the first instance where some women faced the possibility of becoming draftees. The widespread circulation of a December 19, 1944 syndicated column by Walter Lippmann, which alerted publics to a dire shortage of nurses in the military that left America’s wounded soldiers without timely or sufficient care, and in which he also insinuated that “too many civilian nurses were shirking their patriotic duty by refusing to enlist” (Kalisch & Scobey, 1983, p. 229) sparked public outcry and momentum for drafting nurses. As Kalisch and Scobey (1983) document, by February 2 the next year “73% of the American public approved a draft of registered nurses” (p. 229). Subsequent investigative hearings revealed multiple “mismanagement” of and “inconsistencies” with enlisting and assigning military nursing personnel, rather than a shortage of nurses willing to serve (Kalisch & Scobey, 1983, pp. 229-230). Despite these findings quieting fervor over American nurses not fulfilling their patriotic duty, draft legislation moved forward and the House passed the measure 347 to 42 on March 7, 1945 (Kalisch & Scobey, 1983). Remarkably, as Kalisch and Scobey indicated, “Not a single representative suggested the bill be defeated because of the impropriety of drafting women or…the danger to the American home or the integrity of the family; even nurses married after March 15, 1945, were eligible” (1983, p. 230). However, the conclusion of the European theater of the war, which allowed for a shift in personnel resources to the Pacific, began to erode public commitment to the need for a nurses draft and ultimately led to withdrawal of the legislation (Kalisch & Scobey, 1983). The potential for women’s conscription remained largely dormant until 1980 153 when President Carter asked Congress to revive Selective Service registration from its brief hiatus and to concurrently extend the requirement to women. With little Congressional support for women’s incorporation, the draft’s reinstatement occurred absent Carter’s additional request. A year later the Supreme Court issued a judgment in Rostker v. Goldberg, which as of now remains current precedent. In the ruling against medical student Robert Goldberg, who claimed that the Military Selective Service Act unconstitutionally discriminated against men (Associated Press, 2013), the Court reasoned that because “the purpose of registration was to prepare for a draft of combat troops” and “since women are excluded from combat” Congress did not violate the constitution by exempting women from the registration requirement (Kamarck, 2015, “Background,” para. 4). In this chapter, I explore flashpoints of public deliberative attention over two issues of military manpower policy, the draft and transgender military service, each of which gained traction following debates leading up to the decision to open ground combat positions to female soldiers. For each controversy, I seek to examine the rhetorical contours of its circulating discourses at the conjuncture of previous changes to military membership policy, an embedded civic-military relational divide, and the politics of identity and civic rights. Additionally, because a more stable consensus with respect to the governance of each issue (potentially) has yet to find its terminus, my analysis serves as a canvassing of the discursive landscape(s) conditioning unrealized possibilities for future dis/rearticulations. With this in mind, in the next section I turn to deliberative discourses involving women’s continued exemption from Selective Service registration. Connecting this 154 controversy with the women in combat debate, I review the parallels advocates forged between each issue as they articulated the harms as well as causes emanating from logics of masculinist protection. I then attend to the paternalistic lamentations over an increasing irreverence for the band of brothers and masculine warrior hero as mythos directing the nation’s moral compass. In the final section pertaining to the draft, I give consideration to discourse from men’s rights activists and account for how it articulates gender equity regarding draft registration and combat conscription, with a particular emphasis on implications connected to status/privilege and responsibility/duty. Following this, I pivot to an analysis of the controversy surrounding transgender military service. Using the 2018 Department of Defense (DoD) report detailing the policy recommendations introduced under Secretary Mattis as a central focus, I further investigate how gender and gender identity articulate with discourses of fairness and the conditions engendering it. A Less Selective Service In recent periods when publics were more emphatically debating the issue of opening all combat occupation specialties to female servicemembers, versus any proposition expressly involving a definite change to the Selective Service per se, both advocates and opponents of women in combat posited a discernable relationship between the elimination of the combat exclusion rule and its possible implications for draft registration requirements under the status quo. For instance, in contrasting op-eds published by U.S. News & World Report roughly 3 weeks after Panetta set in motion the 3-year process for opening direct ground combat positions to women, Service Women’s 155 Action Network’s (SWAN) legal director Rachel Natelson took women’s registration with the Selective Service to be “a necessary corollary to the integration of women into combat units” (Natelson, 2013, para. 2), while Center for Military Readiness (CMR) President Elaine Donnelly advised that the Pentagon’s recent action made a successful judicial challenge to Rostker an almost foregone conclusion—a move she warned would “divide…instead of rall[y] Americans” at some anticipated future “time of true emergency” (Donnelly, 2013, para. 4). In a later post to CMR’s website, Donnelly further cautioned that igniting this “legal time-bomb” would lend “new meaning to the phrase ‘war on women’” and entreated Congress to act before the courts could “impose Selective Service obligations on unsuspecting civilian women” (Center for Military Readiness, 2013b, para. 5). Advocates however countered concerns like those raised by Donnelly, which presented the specter of female draftees as a reason for curtailing women’s increasing involvement in combat roles, by (re)articulating the draft issue as another instantiation of faulty and damaging logics of masculinist protection. In so doing, they represented women’s incorporation into the Selective Service system as action that would further alleviate a range of problematic consequences wrought by a history of institutionalized military policies and practices that sanctioned gender disparities under the guise of safeguarding women. For example, while recounting how the Molly Pitcher Project spawned under the dual aims of rescinding the combat exclusion policy and providing a pathway for including women in Selective Service registration requirements, University of Virginia Law School Professor Anne Coughlin stressed that “these two forms of sex discrimination in the military are deeply connected” (McNeill, 2011, para. 29) in the way 156 each establishes forms of exclusion rationalized as “special protections for women” (McNeill, 2011, para. 43). In practice, however, Coughlin stipulated these ostensibly justifiable protections ultimately prove “injurious to women because they fence us out of the very places where power is exercised,” thus revealing women’s “alleged pedestal” to be “a cage” (McNeill, 2011, para. 43). Her comments underscore and seek to castigate how a propensity to fall back on chivalric intent as a means of rationalizing policies and standards granting women with special status obstructs the recognition that what is actually special about women’s (feminized) status is the subordination of their autonomy in processes of decision-making. Speaking as a panelist at a February 2013 symposium on women in combat hosted by the University of Virginia School of Law and SWAN, among other organizations, Maj. Mary Hegar similarly took to task the rhetorical hand wringing of some deliberative participants over springing the draft on women, depicting it as emblematic of the type of mindset responsible for perpetuating women’s diminished status and misvaluing their capabilities and contributions. Replying to an audience question about implications of combat integration for the draft, Hegar framed her answer by initially disclosing an incident with a close friend who was no longer on speaking terms with her because of her involvement as a plaintiff in the eponymous lawsuit filed against Panetta to challenge the combat exclusion policy: “So what he said to me was if what you’re doing ends up resulting in my daughter being drafted, I’ll never forgive you” (C-SPAN, 2013b, 48:49). With this experience at the forefront of symposium attendees’ minds, she implored them to recalibrate the issue’s point of entry away from a perspective of whether you can picture “your cute little 5year-old daughter who is playing with dolls…in a war zone,” and instead to start by 157 considering in “what world do you want your daughter to grow up” (C-SPAN, 2013b, 49:10, 49:19). Hegar then explicated that under present circumstances, as daughters grow up they continue to be “put into a group of women and children, first,” inescapably defined through dependency because it is “a group that’s always going to be included with children” (C-SPAN, 2013b, 49:25, 50:06). When referencing this symposium panel in her op-ed several days later, Natelson (2013) relayed that the contrast Hegar drew between one world in which women and girls are “infantilized as passive objects of chivalry” (para. 4) and “one where they’re empowered to achieve their potential as genuinely equal citizens” (para. 4) asks publics to reckon with the ways “draft registration implicates the overall standing of women both within the military and in society at large” (para. 3). Offering her own appraisal, Natelson then remarked on how the prevalent “culture of widespread violence against women” belies “the conventional wisdom that women can and should rely on men for protection,” which led her to reason that “if women can’t rely on the availability of state protection against violence, it makes little sense to exclude them from civic obligations on the pretext of shielding them from harm” (Natelson, 2013, para. 5). Her diagnosis called into question the efficacy of (patriarchal) institutional structures that deputize men for the governance of women’s security and thereby enshrine the masculine status this responsibility imbues. In December 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced his directive to discontinue all exceptions with regard to the occupations and positions open to female servicemembers. His decision aligned with the submitted recommendations of all military branch secretaries and chiefs of the military services with the exception of Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Dunford’s recommendation, which included a request to maintain “a 158 partial exception in some areas such as infantry, machine gunner, fire support reconnaissance and others” (U.S. Department of Defense, 2015, para. 21). Defending his decree Carter remarked, “we are a joint force, and I have made a decision which applies to the entire force” (U.S. Department of Defense, 2015, para. 21). Carter’s order also propelled supporters of women in combat to adjust their sights on the draft, and “remov[ing] a final barrier to full citizenship” (Haring & Germano, 2016, para. 12) for women currently excluded from registering. In the process of developing their rhetorical support for the draft, advocates continued to advance their arguments through promotion and (re)circulation of a discursive logic that established the disposition of the citizen-defender within public deliberative imaginaries. In so doing, they extended their criticisms of ingrained associations articulating soldiering with manhood and protective masculinity as a way to breach “the concept of a masculinized citizenship obligation” (Bailey, 2009, p. 32). In an opinion piece for the military-focused online news media outlet Task & Purpose, contributor Col. Ellen Haring (2016), who also was a coplaintiff in Baldwin v. Panetta— the combat exclusion lawsuit originating out of efforts from the Molly Pitcher Project— protested that “all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are not, and should never be the sole purview of men” (para. 4). While to some degree Haring’s argument espouses a liberal conception of citizenship as a status held and a bundle of rights conferred on holders of that status—to wit, the article’s title begins with the imperative, “Give [emphasis added] women all the rights of citizenship” (2016)—it also decidedly activates a republican discourse of citizenship, discussed in Chapter One, as performatively constituted through the enactment of civic duties. In alignment with this 159 orientation, Haring then asserts, “As citizens of this country, women are just as vested in the security and defense of their homes and should be equally responsible for shouldering the burden of their own security” (2016, para. 4). Haring both nods to conventional notions of home (and women’s responsibilities fashioned within this sphere) as she simultaneously projects these onto the homeland, blurring the boundaries articulating private and public commitments, as she advocates for discarding entrenched (gendered) distinctions in the fulfillment of particular duties, including bearing the “ultimate sacrifice of death in combat” (Haring & Germano, 2016, para. 12) as the highest form of civic virtue. Paternal lamentations Those pushing back against women’s Selective Service registration likewise subscribed to a discourse linking draftees with the prospect of making the ultimate sacrifice, by depicting the intent behind and utility of conscription as tied directly to the periodic need “to fill combat specialties because men are dying on the front lines in such high numbers” (Lamothe, 2016, para. 13). This particular premise forwarded by oppositional voices also drew from a republican discourse of citizenship, albeit one that reserved the responsibility of martial sacrifice as a masculine citizen(ship) obligation. As such, it provided a basis for publics to diverge over the ensuing appeals from advocates that this burden should operate in a gender blind way. Opponents’ efforts to situate women and the draft as fundamentally at odds with one another exhibited a two-tiered rhetorical strategy, which on one level marked the particularity of the draft and/for combat as distinct from general military recruitment for service personnel positions. A 160 blog post from Donnelly’s CMR website encapsulates such a distinction with the terse assertion, “The purpose of conscription is not to induct people for desk jobs or playing in the band; it is to rapidly find and train ‘combat replacements’ for casualties fallen in battle” (Center for Military Readiness, 2016, para. 10). To a certain extent this remark also implicitly encompasses the second tier, which involved imagining female soldiers as the exception(al) and construing them as not representative of the general pool of America’s young women from which future female draftees might be selected and obligated to fight. Doing so enabled opponents to strategically narrow their rhetoric toward a conventional(ized) rendering of the female half of the citizenry—those who were not as readily deemed protectors or defenders because they were not already soldiers and were therefore (easier to figure as) the protected, given their status both as women and civilians. To this end, with respect to the female soldier’s strategic extraction as a figure of relevance for deliberating about women and the Selective Service, rhetoric objecting to women’s draft registration took the form of a jeremiad that addressed a projected public who remained uneasy with forcing what advocates trumpeted as a more fair and equitable conscription system indiscriminately onto the nation’s purportedly fairer sex. Retired Army Colonel James McDonough, writing as a guest columnist for seasoned military journalist Thomas Ricks’ “Best Defense” blog housed by Foreign Policy, supplied a particularly elegiac representation of this jeremiad in which he instructs the people to “heed the [ghostly] voices of the infantry” heard “from…countless bloodied American battlefields,” who, “though proud of their [emphasis added] heritage and sacrifice…wonder how such duty will elevate American womanhood” (McDonough, 161 2016, para. 1). As he forges this discursive distinction between American womanhood and the figure of the female soldier, McDonough (2010) imparts the words of the “ghostly voices call[ing] out to American women” (para. 1) in this time of urgency with the wisdom they earned through their sacrifice: “Listen,” they say, “this is not about promotions, nor equality, nor pride in individual ability to compete physically with men. This is not a gentleman’s club whose barriers you are crashing, nor a prize to be won. Infantry warfare means closing with and destroying the enemy, with all the suffering and hardship that is entailed on both sides of that conjunction.” (para. 2) Politicians contributing to public deliberations about expanding draft registration similarly articulated distinctions between American womanhood, women’s military service, and conscription into combat. For instance, House Armed Services Committee member Austin Scott (R-GA) noted, “You’re not talking about whether or not a lady can serve, you are talking about whether or not a mother has to go to war during a time of a draft” (Siripurapu, 2017, para. 3). In a similar vein, then-Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) caveated women’s “invaluable role in war,” adding that, “My daughter was a damn good Navy diver,” before proceeding to lament the genuine concern at hand, that the “natural conclusion” of rescinding the combat exclusion rule “opens young women up to the draft” (Carter, 2016, paras. 4-5). Accordingly, Zinke flags this as “a very important issue that touches the heart of American family” and, therefore, demands the public’s attention and scrutiny (Carter, 2016, para. 5). Such characterizations summon the dual figures of the patriarch and the patriot, conflating them at the point where masculinist protection intersects with martial citizen/ship obligations. Correspondingly, McDonough (2016) implicates an ongoing disintegration of citizens’ adherence to the fulfillment of patriarchal, patriotic duties for contributing to the looming potential of female draftees as 162 he gives voice to questions that the apparitional infantrymen have for the women of today: “Why…are you drawn to this? Why does American society wish you to do this? Are there not enough men who will fight?” (para. 6). Within the rhetorical structure of this jeremiad, these inquiries posed by enshrined citizen-soldier-heroes become indicative of the path from which the nation has strayed and the compacts which require restoration, namely those instituting the sacrosanct relations between protector and protected, as instantiated under the auspices of a Selective Service system that manifests men’s civic obligation to martial service/sacrifice. A bill introduced by Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and cosponsored by Zinke, titled The Draft America’s Daughters Act of 2016, brought this jeremiad, and the stakes it articulates over patriarchal and/or patriotic citizenship, to bear within the congressional arena. An editorialist for The Atlantic remarked that the bill amounted to petitioning the public to recognize that women’s expanding role in the armed forces “represented a sort of breakdown of the chivalric code in society” (Clairmont, 2016, para. 4). As Hunter (2010) indicated in an opinion piece for the Marine Corps Times, the bill’s title was indeed “intended to be provocative,” though he quickly assured his readers that “as an artillery officer in the Marine Corps and Zinke as a Navy SEAL commander…we are well-aware of what such a change could mean” (para. 10). Elaborating on the grim state of affairs projected in the title of his bill, Hunter cautioned that this mounting prospect, which threatened young women across the nation with the plight of being called up in a time of war to the frontlines of combat and “tasked with finding and destroying the enemy, sometimes in quarters so close that fighting is reduced to the use of hands, knives, and even helmets, is surely unsettling and should not be taken lightly” (Hunter, 2016, 163 para. 11). In a similarly somber depiction to relay the true gravity of the scenario Americans were at the precipice of encountering, McDonough (2016) spoke to the perspective of the fallen by noting, In truth, [the infantrymen] regret that the gender they have been raised to cherish and protect will now share in the horror—not only those who have eagerly pursued the “opportunity”, [sic] but very likely those as well who would have preferred to avoid it. And they wonder how our society will look back upon this decision when the casualty lists again extend many pages and we note therein that the genders are equally represented. (para. 6) Within such lamentations, however, is also the inference that this fate could still be otherwise. For instance, while the intentionally provocative title of Hunter and Zinke’s bill operates in the articulation of an “immanent demise” in the nation’s moral creeds, the bill also provides an indication of “the possibility to return to a more virtuous past, and therefore a better future” (Wolfe, 2008, p. 11) as contained within its acronymous form: DAD(Act). That is, the DAD(Act) positions patriotic duty as paternal(istic) duty, enabling dads, as well as others capacitated as governmental decision-makers, an opportunity to performatively fulfill their paternal civic obligation through their governance over how best to protect particular citizen-subjects and from what threats they need protection. Indeed as Hunter suggested shortly after introducing the bill, “it is quite possible that I vote against my own legislation, as might others in Congress with military experience” (Hunter, 2016, para. 12). Ultimately, Hunter did precisely that, and “exhorted his colleagues to consider the unacceptable reality…and vote down the measure,” explaining to his fellow Armed Services Committee members that “he could stomach the notion of his son being conscripted to go off to fight and die, but not his daughters” (Clairmont, 2016, para. 12). In contrast, mothers participating in public 164 deliberations over the draft often spoke about how “the specter of a draft has weighed heavily on the minds of mothers with sons” for decades, and pressed the question, “If not your daughters, then why my sons?” (Smiley, 2017, para. 22). Beyond the worry over their sons being drafted and going off to war, this line of argument also problematized a contextual disparity between “boys having no choice about joining a war” while support “for women’s choice regarding their bodies and lives” gained ground (Smiley, 2017, para. 14). Masculinist rights and the draft Another public discourse circulating among debates contesting women’s exclusion from draft registration also took issue with gender disparity in Selective Service requirements by emphasizing the toll the current system unfairly levied on men exclusively. At the forefront of this particular discourse was the National Coalition for Men (NCFM), an organization situated within the men’s rights movement more broadly. While the issue of Selective Service inequality was part of the organization’s platform from its founding in 1976 (Lesmeister v. Romo, 2013), the current trajectory of NCFM’s advocacy efforts regarding the draft launched in earnest on April 4, 2013 with the filing of a complaint in U.S. District Court, charging that the male-only registration requirement of the Selective Service “violate[d] the rights of both men and women to equal treatment under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments” (National Coalition for Men [NCFM], 2013, para. 5). Two years later, following the lawsuit’s hearing with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, NCFM board member Fred Sottile—who has also been noted as “a leading member for the National Coalition for Issues Reform” (Schaper, 165 2017, para. 21), an organization identified as an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (n.d.)—spoke with a reporter from the Washington Post outside the courtroom and identified that “the harm to men,” claimed by NCFM’s suit, comes from “tak[ing] all the combat stress” incurred by a draft, which is “not equally distributed among the genders” (Fuentes, 2015, para. 24). Sottile went on to elaborate, “When you are 17 and a man you realize you are signing up for something that could be very disastrous in your life” because in the “blink of an eye…all of a sudden, you are going to go to combat,” whereas “women…live a life where this is never an eventuality” (Fuentes, 2015, paras. 24-25). Jumping off of one draftee and Army veteran’s remark that since women are not subject to the draft it “gives them a false sense of superiority,” Sottile further interjected that as “the protected class…[women’s] national commitment is not a great as a man’s” (Fuentes, 2015, para. 27). In one sense, the rhetoric of NCFM members and/or supporters espouse a discursive standpoint akin to feminist-oriented military groups, their members, and other backers who advocate for women’s rightful place and equal status both in combat and in the Selective Service system. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that their general stance on the draft in addition to their progressing litigious action spark ire from those publics lamenting the changes in military membership policies that seemingly pose a threat to the nationalistic ideological framework sanctioning a traditional structure of gender roles grounded in a protector/protected relationality. Following the most recent ruling over NCFM’s lawsuit, in which a judge for the U.S. District Court of Southern Texas found current Selective Service requirements to be unconstitutional, some objectors to the groups’ continued legal proceedings took to 166 NCFM’s website to express their discontent with the organization and its members within the comment threads of various NCFM press releases and issue statements related to the draft and/or their court case. For example, one visitor to the Issues page about military conscription commented “it remains a mans [sic] duty to defend his people and nation, when called to,” before suggesting “If you don’t like it then why don’t you give birth to a pair twins? …or do you only want equability when it benefits you?” (Ed Kopp, 2019, 12:24 p.m.). Leaving the testicle-based derision aside, a comment(er) identified as NCFM responded, “We are approving your comment to show our readers how some people fail to understand our Constitution and…our pursuit of justice and equality” (NCFM, 2019, February 25, 12:44 p.m.). In another post, “Will” berated, “Because of you idiots, my daughter is one step closer to having to register for the draft,” professing the draft “was set up unfairly” on purpose “because men were the ones that bore the most burden during war. My life before my daughters. It’s what most dads do. Obviously not any of you at the NCFM” (Will, 2019, 7:03 p.m.). Offering an alternative interpretation of what the dads of NCFM value, an NCFM reply countered with, “I’m not real happy about my grandsons having to register either. Are you saying daughters and grand daughters are more important than our sons and grandsons? Just curious” (NCFM, 2019, February 25, 1:25 p.m.). In these and similar responses, NCFM frames its platform as a simple and straightforward undertaking for men and women to both have equal standing and treatment under the law, including the same expectation of responsibility and liability to bear the burdens and obligations of citizenship—a position NCFM characterizes as “not complicated” (NCFM, 2019, February 24, 2:50 p.m.). Be that as it may, NCFM’s 167 discourse is abundantly laden with rhetorical ambivalences. For instance, while the move by the Defense Department to open direct ground combat positions to women was the crux of persuading the court that their case was ripe for adjudication (Fuentes, 2015), NCFM and its supporters at times selectively distance, and at others connect, the draft and/or draft registration with the impacts of combat. In conjunction, their rhetoric also selectively assigns and deducts weight to the salience of differences between men and women, as well as the salience of differences among men and among women. As such, NCFM-affiliated rhetoric regarding which differences do or do not come to matter, in what contexts, and for what reasons variably shape gendered articulations with and among combat, the draft, and citizenship. Exemplifying these contextual nuances, NCFM, in a comment back to “Joe,” who posted, “Men with wives, daughters, or granddaughters are cringing. I feel you should be ashamed to push this” (Joe, 2019, 11:31 a.m.), in part, underscored that “registration in no way means one will end up in a foxhole. Nor are all men suited for combat. Men and women are needed in many support roles and never get close to a war zone” (NCFM, 2019, February 24, 2:50 p.m.), and later in the subthread of responses to Joe noted, “We, NCFM.…are only concerned that our federal government extend equal opportunity and responsibility to all of us” (NCFM, 2019, February 24, 3:44 p.m.). Elsewhere however, NCFM’s characterization regarding the potential for gender equity in the draft and/for combat took on a different frame. In one instance, a comment posted by “Isla Ferguson” discloses “personally identify[ing] as a feminist” as well as “believ[ing] that all genders should be required to sign up for” Selective Service because this would be consistent with “the argument ‘well, equal rights, equal responsibility!’” (Isla Ferguson, 2019, 1:25 168 p.m.). Yet, Isla also relays concerns about whether women’s equal rights will correspond to women’s equal treatment, considering how “the military is an extremely hostile place for women” (Isla Ferguson, 2019, 1:25 p.m.). With respect to this thinking, while also signaling being “really, genuinely interested in a discussion,” Isla asks the forum, “If women were required to register, what would your suggestions be for making the military a safer and more welcoming place for women?” (Isla Ferguson, 2019, 1:25 p.m.). NCFM replied by contending, “in westernized societies women have as many if not more rights and protections than do men without any corresponding responsibility” and, in relation to the military specifically, asked Isla to consider that given the way things are now, “they [men] die and suffer catastrophic injuries far more often than do women in the military. Military deaths and injuries are hardly equitable don’t you agree?” (NCFM, 2019, March 13, 11:12 a.m.). Various comments supportive of and/or backing NCFM and its efforts also revealed paradoxical assertions over the equity of a draft obligation and combat sacrifice(s). In one instance, a post from “HQR3” regarding NCFM’s recent court victory, expressed wariness over “be[ing] so celebratory just yet” and cautioned that unless women were drafted into combat specifically, many of “the noncombatant positions…will be filled with women, ‘freeing’ male soldiers to become cannon fodder” (HQR3, 2019, 5:42 a.m.). But “HQR3” then grants that since “one doesn’t want to compromise the efficiency of the military by integrating physically less able women into the infantry,” women instead might “ably serve in sex-segregated units with a different albeit similar function” (HQR3, 2019, 5:42 a.m.). To illustrate one such possibility, HQR3 suggests, “The men’s units could be the forward ones that take territory and 169 directly confront the enemy; the women’s units, in larger numbers, could be used to hold the gains, the occupiers,” before caveating that although his lack of military expertise may mean this particular idea “doesn’t make practical sense…I do know that if drafting women doesn’t include combat, it will turn out worse for men. That wouldn’t be equality” (HQR3, 2019, 5:42 a.m.). Whether HQR3 assumes equal bodily risks and/or harms between combat scenarios designed with the expressed intent of gaining enemy ground and combat scenarios that arise when troops are holding previously won ground is unclear. But, HQR3’s premise marking as salient men’s (presumed superior) capabilities compared to women, displays a degree of ambivalence regarding the bright-line between compromised efficiency and cannon fodder as it signifies fairness and equality. Additionally, in light of self-identifying as “no military expert” (HQR3, 2019, 5:42 a.m.), HQR3’s preoccupation with the unfairness of men dying on the frontlines absent the equal opportunity for women to become fodder for the cannons—in the hypothetical scenario of an active war draft—also relays a seeming dismissiveness towards conditions of equity surrounding actual combat deaths of members of the military. In a reply to HQR3’s post, a commenter going by “ken,” despite first affirming HQR3 for being “spot on with your comment,” then adds, “However, the Selective Service Scheme is only a list, and it is the burdens and restrictions that are the issue” (ken, 2019, 7:15 p.m.). Redirecting attention away from (in)equalities meted out on the battlefields of combat and toward methods of resolving the unfair burdens and restrictions that correspond with an unequal registration requirement in particular, ken then caustically remarks, The answer maybe to leave it as it is and remove the female right to vote, that of course will also remove the obligation (burden) to serve on juries, the other 170 marker for full citizenship. Somehow, I don’t think women will accept that, like they accepted the privilege of been exempted from the SSS. (ken, 2019, 7:15 p.m.) For ken, the significance of draft registration equity (as well as the justifiability of men’s indignation absent it) does not rely on how the draft articulates with combat and in turn an exigency caused by an imbalance of outcome on the scale of corporeal sacrifice (whether hypothetical or actual), but instead on the draft’s articulation with citizenship in order to emphasize and justify men’s aggrievement over imbalances in the more quotidian burden(s) of adhering to the law. The post also broaches one additional feature in the discourse circulating among NCFM’s public supporters: an overwhelming assuredness of women’s outright aversion to being required to register for the draft. For example, thinking back to when they registered and recalling “how angry I was at the injustice of it” one commenter on the Washington Post article covering NCFM’s Ninth Circuit hearing then proposed the draft’s ongoing inequity as a fitting illustration of “feminist hypocrisy through and through” noting that, “they would have a bit more credibility if they would fight for equality even when it doesn’t suit” them (Lance Smith, 2015, 4:33 p.m.). Another comment posted on the article, predicts it is “highly doubtful” that “women’s groups” would invest in a “fight for equal opportunity” when it comes to the draft since “this is not one of the ‘fun’ or lucrative things they want ‘equality’ in” (selfthinker, 2015, 6:06 a.m.). Concurring with these other posters, “HowieG1” first lambasts “feminist and women’s rights groups” for “scream[ing] about Patriarchy and male oppression” and “then…demand[ing] women be allowed into combat,” but then notes how when it comes to Selective Service discrimination, “you hear not a peep about them being equal in 171 requirement to sign up for the draft. That’s Feminism 101. Give us the benefits, free stuff and special privileges, but no responsibilities” (HowieG1, 2015, 5:12 p.m.). While many of these contributors leave little indication of their extent or level of affiliation with the country’s all-volunteer force, on the whole, the weight and emphasis they place on the requirement of registering for the draft as an exceedingly cumbersome burden, particularly with respect to the implication from HowieG1 that fighting in combat fits in with a package of benefits, free stuff and special privileges, whereas the draft does not, gives reason to speculate about their civilian disposition. As such, by way of conferring to the draft registration requirement a degree of clout and gravity more readily articulated in collective imaginaries with military combat service/sacrifice, these kinds of comments might be read as a means of adopting elements from a militarized masculine aesthetic in the projection of their masculine status and its differentiation from a presupposed encroaching rise in the status of women. Then again, the more mundane but very real bureaucratic stipulations that correspond to young men’s Selective Service obligation—requirements that “women don’t…have hanging over them” (Fuentes, 2015, para. 19)—led others to remark that the system should be abolished all together given, as Scott Beauchamp, a former infantryman who served two tours in Iraq, argued in a piece for Task & Purpose that the one thing the Selective Service system “does do well…is to punish young men who don’t register” (Beauchamp, 2016, para. 7), a consequence disproportionately borne more often by those who lack money, power, and status. Deliberative publics invested in debating women’s draft registration routinely constructed appeals by calling on discourses of citizenship. In so doing, participants articulated relationships between a liberal discourse of citizenship based on rights and 172 status, and a republican discourse of citizenship based on the enactment of civic duties/obligations. A republican logic ordains a politics of sacrifice that hierarchically confers civil status/benefits correlated with the particular level of responsibility or burden shouldered. On the other hand, a liberal logic confers civil status/benefits based on the already-inherent qualities or attributes of particular bodies and/or populations. These debates over Selective Service registrations reveal points of tension created by the civilmilitary divide as well as gendered notions of who should (or who does) take on a greater sacrificial burden and/or responsibility with respect to the rights and duties of citizenship. The contradictions and/or clash between these liberal and republican discourses sets the stage for insinuations of ‘special rights’ in the presence of disparities in performative obligations. Military Policy Transitions Whether a draft registration requirement were to remain or be abolished, the prospect that NCFM’s lawsuit might result in establishing a truly genderless standard, as one contributor wrote for LGBTQ Nation, that would also go a long way to “make life easier for trans men” (Bollinger, 2018), especially when it comes to negotiating bureaucratic hurdles found in the branches of the military. While registering with the Selective Service is not required of trans men, those who at some point legally correct their gender markers on identification documents must also then initiate a sometimes several months-long process to obtain a letter from the Selective Service verifying their registration exemption in order to be able to access any governmental benefits that depend on registration (Bollinger, 2018). Failure to supply paperwork certifying such an 173 exemption bars trans men with updated legal documents from seeking benefits such as financial aid or federal employment throughout the course of their adult lives (Selective Service System [SSS], n.d.a). Conversely, because the Selective Service currently requires trans women to register, a yet-unrealized circumstance that might extend draft registration to the country’s entire population of women would ultimately mark the incorporation of cis women into a process already compulsory for trans women upon turning eighteen (SSS, n.d.b). Whether or not a principally administrative Selective Service requirement were expanded to nontrans women at some future point in time, precisely what an active draft could entail for how policies and procedures of (non)conscription might be levied on trans populations and/or people of any given gender identity remains decidedly enigmatic due to the recent contestation over and state of volatility in the service of trans personnel in the all-volunteer force. Earlier I charted the path wherein termination of the combat exclusion policy, in light of the standing precedent established by Rostker, compelled a condition of precarity regarding the constitutionality of current Selective Service enrollment delineations and thereby catalyzed momentum for a direct challenge to the draft policy, setting the ensuing controversy in motion. In a similar vein, abolishing the lingering gender(ed) constraints on particular combat occupation specialties likewise impacted the viability of rationales for allowing openly transgender soldiers to serve in the military. Belkin (2016) argued that removing combat exclusions was a key contributing factor in the rapid pace of policy change regarding transgender servicemembers during Secretary Carter’s tenure at the Defense Department for three primary reasons. First, it took “off the table” concerns voiced about overburdening the military with negotiating the complications they feared 174 might arise if, for instance, a servicemember in the infantry, who entered the military under the male designation assigned to them at birth, should decide to undergo gender transition while continuing to serve in the same occupational specialty (Belkin, 2016, p. 10). Second, it helped to validate the premise “that job standards should differ by occupational specialty, not by gender,” signaling that anyone—including transgender servicemembers—“who meets the standards associated with a particular job should be allowed to do that job” (Belkin, 2016, pp. 10-11). Third, Belkin argued, it expelled “some of the air out of anti-transgender concerns about mixed genitalia in living quarters” by underscoring the notion that “military personnel in combat are going to have to make practical accommodations of privacy whether or not transgender people are present” (Belkin, 2016, p. 11). While these suggest the ways in which deliberations leading up to the decision to lift restrictions on women in combat, as well as the act itself, worked to shift the calculus related to considerations of gender in relation to military performance capabilities, an abrupt shift occurred related to policy changes affecting military membership of transgender personnel following the arrival of Defense Secretary Mattis in 2017. In February 2018 the DoD, under Mattis’ watch, laid out new policy recommendations to govern the service roles of transgender military personnel. The proposed changes outlined in the published report repeatedly stressed a departmental approach to the question of trans military service that prioritized the sacrosanct standards of military accession and retention to preserve their credibility as a uniform metric for the equal appraisal of servicemembers and (potential) recruits. This emphasis marked a divergence from as well as a rebuke of the Carter policy for its origination out of “the 175 assumption that transgender persons are qualified for military service” which led to changes aimed at “accommodat[ing] transgender persons” by specially affording them with “adjusted or relaxed” standards in order to “remove the obstacles to such service” (U.S. Department of Defense [DoD], 2018, pp. 14, 19). Pointedly, on the issue of accession and retention criteria, the analysis developed in the Mattis-directed 2018 report claims to “make[] no assumptions but instead applies the relevant standards applicable to everyone to determine the extent to which transgender persons are qualified for military duty” (DoD, 2018, p. 19). By using established accession and retention guidelines as the starting point for considering whether certain standards preclude or restrict transgender people from serving in the armed forces, the report ultimately develops a rationale that attempts to circumvent “transgender status alone” as the basis for its proposed limitations on military membership and instead grounds its recommendations on the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which the report frames as “a mental health condition that can require substantial medical treatment” (DoD, 2018, p. 20). Contained within this device to superimpose a medical condition onto being transgender is a possible strategic maneuver to buttress the policy against accusations of bias or discrimination. To be fair, the report is deliberate in noting with reference to the American Psychological Association that neither identifying as transgender nor diagnoses of gender dysphoria are mutually exclusive or exhaustive with the other (e.g., people may suffer from gender dysphoria for reasons unrelated to a transgender or other genderqueer identification, just as the experiences/expressions tied to identifying as transgender or genderqueer need not be indicative of dysphoria). Nevertheless, because of the report’s reliance on this medicalized rationale to make broad-sweeping determinations based on a 176 clinical diagnosis, many argued that the introduced policy changes still in effect amounted to a de facto ban on trans people serving openly in the military. For instance, an analysis of the DoD’s report by the Palm Center finds fault with the Department’s recursive strategy to base restrictions on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and argues that the report inaccurately “contends that service members with gender dysphoria who need to transition gender are, by definition, medically unfit” by conflating language of “clinically significant distress or impairment,” which is included in the gender dysphoria diagnosis as a mechanism for people to obtain insurance-covered treatment, with a level of distress or impairment that would functionally impede people’s ability to adequately perform the duties and tasks of their jobs, daily living, and/or military service (Arthur et al., 2018, pp. 16-17). Yet, the newly-fashioned policy recommendations in the DoD’s report indeed contain this contention/premise in its delineation of the particular (and limited) circumstances under which transgender individuals could be(come) in/eligible for military service. Specific to standards of accession, the Mattis policy includes the following provisions: 1) “Transgender persons without a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria, who are otherwise qualified for service, may serve, like all other service members, in their biological [sic] sex;” 2) “Persons with a history of gender dysphoria may access into the Armed Forces” only if they submit evidence demonstrating “36 consecutive months of stability (i.e., absence of gender dysphoria)” over the time period directly prior to their application date; “they have not transitioned to the opposite gender; and they are willing and able to adhere to all standards associated with their [sex assigned at birth];” and lastly, 3) “Transgender persons who require or have undergone gender 177 transition are disqualified” from entering the military (DoD, 2018, pp. 4-5). With respect to the policy’s one exception for someone with a history of gender dysphoria to access into the military, the report explains that the 36-month stability requirement remedies the special standard introduced under the Carter policy of an “18-month stability period for gender dysphoria,” which “by contrast, has no analog with respect to any other mental condition listed” across DoD standards (DoD, 2018, p. 42). Regarding physical health accession standards, the report similarly situates its rationale for denying admission to transgender people who have already transitioned with recourse once again to the assurance of uniformity and equal opportunity in applying standards to those seeking to join a branch of the service. For example, the report explains that before the Carter policy proposals, the Department historically “barred from accessing into the military anyone who had undergone chest or genital surgery” (DoD, 2018, p. 28). This, in addition to a standard disqualifying “persons with conditions requiring medications such as anti-depressants and hormone treatment…unless a waiver was granted” had “long applied uniformly to all persons, regardless of transgender status,” claims the report, before going on to criticize the Carter policy for “deviat[ing] from these uniform standards by exempting, under certain conditions, treatments associated with gender transition” (DoD, 2018, p. 28). As evidence of the Carter policy’s attempts to grant transgender applicants special consideration not afforded to others, the report notes that under the previous proposal, transgender people would be considered eligible for military service while taking hormones or 18 months following gender confirmation surgeries (barring no complications), while cis gender people undergoing similar treatments would be considered ineligible without a waiver. 178 This discourse of special treatment/allowances given to transgender troops reverberates within and among deliberating publics. For example, commenting on a Military Times article about whether, in light of ongoing legal developments, a January 2018 deadline set under the Carter policy to begin the enlistment of transgender troops would take effect, “Raymond Bouchard” remarked, “Folks with 6 fingers, too short, too tall, overweight, underweight, missing an eye, club-foot can’t serve and the list goes on” (Raymond Bouchard, 2018, 2:27 p.m.), implying no special or compelling reason to differentiate such characteristics from being transgender. In a more recent article on the same website regarding a vote in the House of Representatives on a nonbinding resolution to oppose a ban on transgender military service, “Michael P. Clifford” contributed to the comment thread, noting, “Serving in the armed forces is not a right, it is a privilege. Many individuals are rejected for pre-existing conditions, i.e. flat feet, obesity, schizophrenia, and other mental conditions” (Michael P. Clifford, 2019, 7:07 p.m.). By contrasting the notion of universally held rights from the privilege(s) of—as well as derived through—military service, this comment(er) also strips transgender identity from its political relevance as a historically consequential category. In so doing, discourse such as this functions instrumentally as a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand offering to save/recover collective patriotic face by through the disincorporation of identifiers of being transgender as unremarkable in its distinction from an innumerable throng of attributes found among the civilian populace, that—were it not for said attribute—they too might have opted for and enjoyed the privilege of being in the military. While the framing of military service as a privilege versus a right, on one level 179 connotes a sense that obtaining a soldier status requires being good enough or right for such a privilege; on another level it also names precisely what is put at stake in these points of contention over transgender service for those at the center or periphery of this struggle. As “Michael Cullinan” asserts in a Military Times comment, “The Ts [sic] have the opportunity to serve in the military…under the same objective standard that is uniformly applied to everyone, but they don’t want that. They want the military to change for them,” further determining that it ultimately comes down to a decision about “whether they want to serve in the military or have their precious gender identities affirmed and validated…the military hasn’t got the time and resources to make sure that you feel safe and supported” (Michael Cullinan, 2018, 5:12 a.m.). Rather than expressing a sentiment that echoes the commonly accepted imperative for supporting the troops, this comment(er) instead implies that such esteem is not deserved by nor owed to those who want or try to avoid playing by the same rules as everyone else, thereby figuring transgender troops as the outlaw(s). Additionally, while the issue of the military granting waivers to enlist “felons, substance abusers, and high school dropouts” (Frank, 2010, para. 5)—which advocates raised during debates over DADT repeal as a rhetorical foil for LGB servicemembers who abided by the dictates of the policy but nonetheless became the subject of investigation and discharged—a corollary rhetoric has yet to widely circulate in deliberations over the military’s transgender membership policy. Despite this particular distinction, supporters of inclusive trans service policies work to attach the Mattis policy back to DADT, deliberately calling it an attempt by the DoD to “reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell” for transgender troops” (Palm Center, 2019). One basis for advocates’ articulated connection resides in the policy’s proposed rules 180 governing the retention of servicemembers who receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria after joining the armed forces. The policy recommended by the report provides for the retention of servicemembers under the conditions, “they are willing and able to adhere to all standards associated with their [sex assigned at birth]…do[] not require gender transition, and…[are] not otherwise non-deployable for more than 12 months” or a possibly a shorter time frame, as dictated within certain branch-specific standards for (non)deployability (DoD, 2018, p. 42). While the new Mattis policy did extend an exemption to servicemembers who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria over the time period that the Carter policy remained in effect, the new policy drastically altered the conditions under which transgender people could serve moving forward. Within this portion of the DoD’s justification for its proposed policy changes, the deployability standard adds a layer to the discursive medicalization of transgender identify via its articulation with gender dysphoria alongside a supplemental premise that the extent of treatment could often preclude trans servicemembers from adhering to the military standards concerning a soldier’s (non)deployability while undergoing gender transition. That is, by relying on a medicalization of transgender identity, the DoD justifies the exclusion of trans servicemembers on the assumption that ‘their condition’ requires intensive treatment. By centering standards of (non)deployability as a reason to deny servicemembers access to gender confirming procedures, the report imagines a soldier’s deployability as central to their purpose and honor while simultaneously impeding public associations of trans troops with this image, in part due to a perception of special status. As commenter “Stefanie Rueffler” remarks, “all those coming in who want to be trans, they would be on a non deployable profile throughout the entire process, 181 so they are getting paid to serve their own mental illness” (Stefanie Rueffler, 2017, 7:38 a.m.) rather, as she seems to presume, than serving the nation and its citizens. However, the other reason forwarded within the DoD report to defend why trans servicemembers should not be allowed to serve while or after transitioning, which rests on compliance with sex standards, relays an overarching message regarding adherence to binary male-female designations as a fundamental logic informing military as well as social organizing more broadly. In addition to discussing the merit of upholding customary sex-based expectations regarding privacy, the report also develops a rationale to substantiate how “The variability and fluidity of gender-transition undermine the legitimate purposes that justify different biologically-based male-female standards” (DoD, 2018, p. 31). That is, given a range of treatment approaches as well as an undefined continuum for the scope of treatment—particularly with respect to the Carter policy, which did “not require a transgender person to undergo any biological transition in order to be treated in all respects in accordance with the person’s preferred gender” (DoD, 2018, p. 36)—were the military to retain gender transitioning or transitioned servicemembers it could pose a threat to the bedrock of “unit cohesion and good order and discipline” (DoD, 2018, p. 36) While concerns about such outcomes are familiar in military membership debates, in this case the risk to the solidity of this bedrock, as the report explains, is because the stability of its foundation expressly depends on the fidelity of (biologically-grounded) sex/gender difference as the cornerstone for maintaining separate standards to govern male and female soldiers as well as simultaneously protecting the perceived fairness of these separate standards from further (or perhaps total) erosion. 182 To this point, the DoD report offers several scenarios illustrating how transgender servicemembers presenting as their confirmed gender could introduce perceived or actual unfair (even unsafe) circumstances into military environments. For instance the report claims that if the military gives trans servicewomen permission to conform with “female uniform and grooming standards, it creates unfairness for other males who would also like to be exempted from male uniform and grooming standards as a means of expressing their own sense of identity” (DoD, 2018, p. 31). Additionally, cis male soldiers “held to male standards” would be “unfairly discriminate[d] against” if the military were to “allow biological males [sic] who identify as female to be held to female standards, especially where the transgender female retains many of the biological characteristics and capabilities of a male” (DoD, 2018, p. 36), while cis female soldiers “would be possibly disadvantaged” if they were “required to compete against such transgender females in training and athletic competition” (DoD, 2018, p. 36) because trans servicewomen allowed to “compet[e] as females will likely score higher on the female test than on the male test and possibly compromise safety” (DoD, 2018, p. 31). Within these examples, the DoD report figures trans women serving in the military as outlaws and instigators of unfairness—given that, not only would cis men be afforded as many ‘options’ as trans women, but another layer in the brass ceiling would be imposed on cis women, whose safety during training could also be at greater risk. However, with regard to trans servicemen, this section of the report situates them as potential victims of bodily harm caused by unfair matchups, noting only, that “importantly, in physically violent training and competition, such as boxing and combatives, pitting biological females [sic] against biological males [sic] who identify as female, and vice versa, could present a serious 183 safety risk” (DoD, 2018, p. 36). Throughout this explanation, the report reveals its reliance on conventionally gendered logics of the protector/protected, while also highlighting the notion of avoiding/removing barriers to (cis) women’s job opportunities. The issues encompassed within the DoD report raised as purportedly relevant to transgender military service connect broadly to a discourse of special rights. By articulating trans service through this discourse the report situated transgender recruits and/or servicemembers as beneficiaries, under the Carter policy, of special consideration that did not extend to other citizens. In this way, the DoD’s rationale also called upon and animated tensions between liberal and republican discourses of citizenship that play out in military membership controversies. When articulated within a republican logic stressing a politics of sacrifice, publics commonly vest servicemembers with a status of civic virtue. However, through the discourse of special rights the DoD’s rationale for tightening restrictions governing transgender military service potentially hinders the intelligibility of this typical link between service and virtue. Conclusion As debates carry on regarding who must register with the Selective Service, as well as the manner in which transgender people may enlist and serve in the military, the ever-present history of controversies over military membership policy continues to condition its deliberative parameters and the prospects for strategic extensions and/or rearticulations of the issues and subjects within its frame. With respect to these traces, Navy Lieutenant Commander Blake Dremann, testifying in February 2019 before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee at the first- 184 ever hearing to solicit testimony from active-duty transgender servicemembers, remarked in his opening statement, I’ve been told three times that something other than my capability to do the job was the reason I wasn’t worthy of an opportunity: first, for my gender assigned at birth, second for my sexual orientation prior to transition, and third for my gender identity. (Transgender Service Policy, 2019, 2:12:53) Later in the hearing, when ranking member Trent Kelly (R-MS) asked the five activeduty trans servicemembers on the panel about the impact their transition had on their deployability, Army Captain Jennifer Peace answered that over the span of 3 years her “total non-deployability time” was about 4 1/2 months, 2 of which she took from personal leave (Transgender Service Policy, 2019, 2:54:41). She then followed this up by offering a comparison, “It’s important to remember that a single pregnancy from a female averages around sixteen months of non-deployability and that can occur multiple times throughout twenty years of, or more, of honorable service” (Transgender Service Policy, 2019, 2:54:51). A New York Times article published after the hearing offered a similar comparative moment in its profile of Army Captain Alivia Stehlik, another active-duty soldier who testified during the House hearing, noting that in 2018 she actively sought out and was granted the opportunity to deploy with an infantry brigade to Afghanistan as a replacement for “the unit’s regular physical therapist [who] became pregnant” (Philipps, 2019, para. 33). Despite this capacity to suggest trans servicemembers’ potential comparative advantage by militarizing a disposition of (in)fertility, other aspects of the hearing worked against rendering a collective image of trans troops in alignment with the universal figure of the soldier. In particular, the soldiers testifying were unable to appear in military uniform, a factor Cpt. Peace noted, calling it “unfortunate” that people could 185 not “see us testifying with our rank and our accolades and speaking from a position of authority in the uniforms that we wear everyday” and remarking that this was additionally regrettable given that “we’re here in civilian clothes testifying on our own, while the Department of Defense speaking on authority to kick out 15,000 transgender servicemembers is appearing in those uniforms” (Transgender Service Policy, 2019, 2:27:32). While images of each of the five servicemembers in military uniform circulate in media, as it would happen, at least four recent articles about the transgender service policy published on the Military Times website included as the feature photo an image of the five active-duty soldiers each in civilian garb and lined up in panel formation to testify at the House hearing. ****** In this chapter, I argued that advocates of women in combat extended their criticism of masculinist protective logics to situate the draft as the final bastion of military membership policy upholding paternalistic norms extolling the virtues of masculine military sacrifice for the protection of “womenandchildren,” which relegate women to a position of vulnerability throughout the course of their lives. Those wishing to retain the patriotic duty of draft registration as paternal(istic) duty marked women in the military as particularities due to their soldier status in order to rhetorically center an image of the typical (i.e., civilian) American woman’s vulnerability to fighting in combat should she be expected to register for the draft. I also argued that across masculinist discourses epitomized by NCFM, expressions of an ambivalent posture regarding the magnitude of burden/sacrifice entailed by the draft registration requirement, when compared to fighting in military combat, evinced a tension between and efforts to 186 negotiate civilian men’s (masculine) status and/or civic virtue relative to that of female soldiers. Finally, I argued that rationales constructed to justify greater restrictions on transgender military service relied on rhetorics of dis/incorporation that both figured being transgender as unremarkable from a variety of other characteristics that precluded some people from serving in the military, while at the same marked being transgender under a medical(ized) discourse via the diagnostic label of gender dysphoria. The arguments in this chapter support the central argument of my dissertation by attending to various (gendered) contingencies surrounding the intelligibility and valuation of certain vulnerable bodies and performances of sacrifice, which illuminate sites of continued ideological struggle over points at which gender and militarism articulate. CHAPTER SIX CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR RHETORICS FIGURING THE SOLDIER In July 2017, 4 months after the release of her memoir Shoot Like a Girl, Mary Jennings Hegar declared her candidacy for the House of Representatives in the 31st district of Texas, which is located along the Interstate-35 corridor north of Austin and includes the cities of Temple as well as Killeen, home to the U.S. Army base Fort Hood. Accusing the seven-term Republican incumbent John Carter of “doing nothing to defend the citizens of this district,” Hegar announced her run by presenting herself as “someone willing to stand up to bullying and intimidation to protect our freedom and our place on the world stage” (Leggitt, 2017, para. 9). Hegar won a May 2018 primary runoff to become the Democratic candidate, but in the end lost to Rep. Carter by 2.9% in the general election (Texas Office of the Secretary of State, 2018). However, that Carter’s victory was far narrower than in previous years—winning by margins of 32 and 22 percentage points in 2014 and 2016, respectively (Dexheimer, 2018, para. 7)—many attributed, in part, to Hegar’s June 2018 viral campaign ad, which “racked up 4.7 million views of YouTube and Facebook combined” (Tobias, 2018, para. 2) just 8 days after its release and boosted Hegar’s campaign donations to the tune of $750,000 in its first 10 days (Livingston, 2018, para. 1). 188 The highly produced 3-minute and 28-second spot, aptly titled “Doors” (Hegar, 2018) begins with a shot of the front door to a house. As the door opens the camera leads viewers through its corridors into a dining room and rests on Hegar and her family sitting down for a meal, while Hegar’s voice-over announces, “This is a story about doors, a lot of ‘em. And that’s me, MJ Hegar, an Air Force combat veteran and a mom” (Hegar, 2018, 0:06). The camera centers in on a metal door resting against the wall atop a piece of furniture. This door is from Hegar’s Pave Hawk helicopter, which Hegar, still in voiceover, notes is “all that’s left of the aircraft I was flying that day” (Hegar, 2018, 0:18). She details the story of her helicopter crash in Afghanistan to stock video footage of a helicopter taking off from a grassy field as the ad’s soundtrack, an instrumental version of The Rolling Stone’s 1969 song, “Gimme Shelter,” continues to play, becoming for a few moments reminiscent of similar scenes reverberating in the popular imaginary that pair archival footage of Vietnam with the same tune. Flashing back in time, Hegar then narrates a brief montage of her military career and her pursuit to become a pilot, which, she remarks, meant “opening, pushing, sometimes kicking through every door that was in my way” (Hegar, 2018, 1:02). After her helicopter crash, however, “the door closed,” not directly because the injuries she sustained meant she could no longer fly, but because “I was barred from my next career choice because I was a woman” (Hegar, 2018, 1:53) So, she explains, instead, “I came home…got married and started my family” (Hegar, 2018, 2:00) It is in this moment, just over 2 minutes into the ad, Hegar first directly addresses the camera and delivers the line: “Wait, barred because I was a woman? That’s ridiculous” (Hegar, 2018, 2:06). The camera flash pans to the interior of a courthouse as the voiceover continues, “So I sued 189 the Pentagon” (Hegar, 2018, 2:10). Her corresponding efforts to lobby Congress, in which “door after door was slammed in my face” (Hegar, 2018, 2:19) serve as the device the ad uses to single out one particular slammed door, that of Hegar’s Congressional representative and now opponent, Rep. John Carter. After, figuring the incumbent representing Texas’ 31st Congressional District as part of a “system that cares more about campaign donors and political parties than protecting our country” (Hegar, 2018, 3:08), Hegar begins the final line in voiceover: “Congressman Carter hasn’t had a tough race his entire career. So…” (Hegar, 2018, 3:14) then turning again to face the camera declares, “we’ll show him tough—then we’ll show him the door” (Hegar, 2018, 3:19). The trajectory of Hegar’s particular flashpoints of heightened publicity is emblematic of several themes that appear throughout my analysis and offer a point from which to launch considerations of a few implications of the rhetorics surrounding military membership policy. For this project, my underlying aim was to interrogate rhetorics operating at the intersection of gender and militarism. To do so, I situated my study through a conceptualization of the figure of the solider as one vehicle implicated within “aestheticethical” (Greene, 1998a, p. 28) processes of public sense-making. In deploying this construct to examine controversies stemming from recent challenges and revisions to military membership policies, I sought to uncover how figurations of the soldier circulating within regimens of public deliberation animated the (gendered and militarized) beliefs, values, norms, etc. with which publics might render judgment. The inclusion of a range of policy debates oriented my investigation toward strategic (re)articulations of the gendered relationships between militarism and the figure of the 190 soldier within and across deliberations over four military membership policy controversies I analyzed. Chapter Three considered public debate over the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT). I evaluated how current and former gay servicemembers as well as their advocates employed a rhetorical strategy of disincorporation as they strove to decouple soldiers’ (homo)sexuality as relevant to their job performance or ability to successfully execute missions among the(ir) band(s) of brothers. This strategic abstraction of sexuality operated in concert with a protector/protected logic to render the image of gay servicemembers as the universal(ized) figure of the soldier-protector. In conjunction with these rhetorical efforts, advocates for DADT’s repeal performed a maneuver to supplant the collective image of gay troops as a penetrative threat to the military and its members, which circulated extensively during debates preceding DADT’s establishment in 1993. Their advocacy isolated the policy itself as the true threat to the military, the troops, and the nation’s security. In a third move, advocates situated lawmakers and President Obama as failing/failed protectors with respect to LGB troops discharged under DADT, as well as the country itself for their delays in enacting the policy’s repeal. In Chapter Four, I extended my examination of the DADT policy with a focus on discourses circulated by and about les(bi)an/female soldiers that presented an image of the unique impacts of the policy on servicewomen. In particular, I argued that les(bi)an/female soldiers and their advocates collectively rendered an image of the soldier-penetrator/predator that stood in contrast to dominant soldier-protector imagery. Following this, I turned my attention to deliberations over women in direct ground combat and discussed how advocates framed the combat exclusion rule as instantiating 191 perceptions of female troops’ inferiority that left them vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault. I also considered how opponents of women in ground combat imagined combat as a distinct zone with differential consequences on gendered bodies in ways that sought to (re)affirm the essential nature of the bond of brothers to the soldier-warrior and (re)align female soldiers with figurations of maternity. In Chapter Five, I first addressed how advocates of women in combat refocused attention on women’s exclusion from draft registration as a final barrier to full citizenship through their extension of discourse problematizing masculinist protection. Next, I explored patriarchal anxieties over the prospect of women’s draft registration and considered how some of these discourses rhetorically operated through the form of a jeremiad, calling for a restoration of moral codes that dictated more chivalrous gendered standards and the masculinist discourse that problematized such configurations. Finally, I examined the rationales surrounding the Department of Defense constructed justification that reinstated greater restrictions over transgender servicemembers. In this chapter, I discuss my initial conclusions resulting from these interrelated analyses. Speaking for/about Protective and Defensive Configurations In Chapter One, as I traced theoretical connections between gender and militarism with nationalism and citizenship and patriarchy, I discussed Ivie’s (2006) contention that the American discursive tradition infuses the nation’s democracy with an essence of impending peril and thereby constitutes itself as a “republic of fear” (p. 12). This provided a basis for establishing how such nationalistic discourses of (in)security operate in the identification and constitution of not only foreign but also domestic Others through 192 rhetorical practices that interpret certain conditions, actions, and subjects as rising to a level of enough menace so as to justify the mobilization of particular containment apparatuses. In my aim to conceptualize the figure of the soldier, I extended this foundation within my discussion of the protector/protected myth and its role in systems that inform and engender processes of (de/re)securitization, including the means (e.g., technologies, programs, bodies) by which they occur. Specifically, I theorized the figure of the soldier through the lens of the protector/protected myth, as a logic that operates as one mode of patriarchal organizing to structure hierarchies of citizenship. I found this advantageous because it propelled analytical connections that position the soldier as a nationalist archetype and established the soldier as a figurative (re)presentation and mode of reification for ideology (e.g., patriarchy, militarism, etc.) (Howard & Prividera, 2006). This served as an anchor for my endeavors to extrapolate and interrogate gendered (re)articulations between militarism and the figure of the soldier by situating how the circulation of discourses that imagine (the) soldier(s) may operate to reify, disrupt, and/or transform certain ideological formations, depending on their dispositional coherence and fidelity with the protector/protected myth and its (allegedly) commonsense relational parameters. Two parameters especially germane to figurations of the soldier within my analysis, and for the (re)articuations I address in this implication, include: 1) protector/protected arrangements and the (de)legitimization of subjects’ authority to speak for/about others; and 2) figurations of the soldier-protector as a site of possibility for multiple dimensions of protected/protector relationality to exist simultaneously. I utilized this theoretical foundation in Chapter Three when I examined DADT 193 repeal advocates’ attempt to center the image of LGB servicemembers as soldiers first and foremost in ways that, with remarkable consistency, reinforced those qualities constituted within the universal soldier ideal (e.g., heroism, sacrifice, honor, a felt duty to serve and protect the nation, etc.). In so doing, I argued such efforts to leave un(re)marked LGB soldiers’ (homo)sexuality functioned as a strategy of rhetorical disincorporation—as I described in instances such as Woods indicating that his primary focus while on a deployment with heavy fighting in the region was the safety of his soldiers and bringing them back alive or Fehrenbach taking out an entire enemy position who were awaiting advancing U.S. troops and/or being as macho-looking as Vin Diesel. These and many of the other examples I relied on to support my arguments about such strategic, rhetorical disincorporations involved publicly circulating images of gay soldiers recently or likely soon-to-be discharged under DADT. However, my analysis of OutServe—the underground network established for active-duty LGBT servicemembers—and the media appearances of its then-shrouded cofounder, Josh Seefried, additionally accented the way semantic expressions of active-duty LGB troops, speaking as/for themselves through figurations of the universal(ized) soldier-protector, conjoined with a performance of their enacted disaffection via the corporeal enunciation of their speech-act. By looking at Dan Choi’s speech at the UC-Berkeley campus, and his poignant punctuation of the relational antinomy formed through the figural conjunction of Choi as soldier-protector and Choi in his prior submission to (homo-)silencing, this chapter unearthed additional factors to nuance the interplay between mobilizations of (masculinist) logics of protection and mobilizations of speaking for/about others. This 194 was particularly evident when I highlighted Choi’s performance of a citational turn(ing) of the idiom, “Ask not…,” from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. Choi, denoting his service in protection of the nation, turns the idiom into the policy’s governing imperative, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and turns it again, in the denouement (i.e., “I am done ASKING. I am TELLING. I am gay” [Choi, 2009a, para. 4]). In this defection, Choi thereby set the conditions for his anointment as protector of, and speaker for, other active-duty soldiers still serving in silence. In Chapter Four, I then continued to build upon the components of this conceptual framework as I examined the dimensions of silencing les(bi)an/female troops articulated under the DADT policy. In particular, I contended that les(bi)an/female soldiers advocating for DADT’s repeal underscored how the policy exacerbated their entrapment under the whore/dyke dichotomy by operating as a mechanism of dissuasion from outwardly rebuffing or rejecting the advances of prurient male colleagues, based on the risk that doing so could, and regularly did, result in accusations that would lead to disciplinary action under the policy. By connecting this dilemma with the “classic protection racket” (Stiehm, 1982, p. 373), in which a protector-turned-predator forces their ‘protection’ onto another, who must then pay the price of their subordination, my analysis explored how advocates discursively positioned the DADT policy for a ruling on its complicity in ripening conditions for such a racket to exist. In this way, discourses of les(bi)an/female soldiers revealed at least a double silencing under both DADT as well as a (masculinist) protection racket commanded by their fellow soldier-penetrator/predators, though as my account of Tracey Cooper-Harris’ open letter to President Obama revealed, protector/protected asymmetries that result in silencing can cultivate future additional 195 silencings. With respect to these dynamics, my analysis demonstrates the rhetorical significance that subjects’ differentially situated capacities in/and maneuvers to claim the authority to speak for/about others has for interrogations of (masculinist) protective logics and the ways they shape and/or situate protector/protected relationality, as well as what critical possibilities and complications exist for processes that reconfigure these relations of power. It specifically calls for further dissection of the opportunities and consequences entailed when marginalized people or groups stake such claims authorizing their legitimacy to speak for or (re)present others on a posture articulated to their status as (a) soldier-protector(s). That is, how might we consider and/or judge maneuvers that facilitate widening the gaps in the doors that block or restrict some from (full) participation when such efforts rely on figurations grounded in militarized and/or masculinist protective logics? The opportunities created when one doorway widens can shape the gaps in others doorways and the direction their hinges turn. Thus, my analysis foregrounds figurative (re)presentations (of the soldier), with respect to the relational and ideological features configuring claims that stake authority toward a becoming-protector, as a site warranting further critical interrogation. One possibility for conducting such inquiry might be to focus on the expansion of critical theoretical insights regarding the disposition of the defender with respect to conditions of (in)security and logics of (masculinist) protection. In my analysis of protector/protected logics and their deployment in controversy over women in combat(ive) military spaces, I developed considerations of the concept and role of the fraternal social contract (Pateman, 1989) as a mechanism by which the class of men 196 coheres, thereby securing their privileged status and access to “exclusionary networks” (C. Rich et al., 2012, p. 278), in which patriarchally-grounded bonds coalesce as a way of thinking about the vulnerabilities articulated to/by male troops in these arenas. As I discussed in Chapter Four, male combat troops voiced vulnerabilities arising not just from the precarious situations they regularly confronted as infantrymen, but also (the prospect of) arising from becoming subject(ed) to/by the female gaze once their bodies were besieged by fresh tokens of battle entailed by the punishing conditions of combat. Given that the fraternal contract finds its origin in “the sexual contract that justifies (is said to justify) the government of women by men in both public and private life” (Pateman, 2008, pg. 344), it sharpens discernment of expressions of such masculine insecurities tied to extant “struggle[s] over who gets to control ‘the gaze’ in the military” (Lehring, 2003, p. 130). Thus, my analysis prompts further conceptualization of the interactive dynamics between matrices of sex/gender/sexuality and the fraternal/sexual contract to better enrich continued explorations of the ways that modes of patriarchal organizing (i.e., the protector/protected myth, the patriot, the family and its patriarch) configure spaces of civic/societal, institutional/organizational, and domestic/familial life, as well as their attendant (in)securities and/or points of (re)articulation. By way of illustration, as I argued in Chapter Five, Rep. Hunter’s strategically named bill, the Draft America’s Daughters Act (DAD[Act]), which Congress debated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2017, was intended as a call for dads to fulfill their paternal and patriotic duty to protect their daughters by voicing their outrage over female draft registration and, accordingly, to ensure the bill’s defeat. Regardless of the impacts of such a connoted directive, the DAD(Act) was ultimately 197 removed from the NDAA during the process of reconciling both chambers’ version of the bill. In its place however, the 2017 NDAA established a 3-year commission for the purposes of (1) conduct[ing] a review of the military selective service process…and (2) consider[ing] methods to increase participation in military, national, and public service in order to address national security and other public service needs of the Nation. (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, 2016, § 551(a)) The commission’s preliminary report released January 2019 indicates their consideration of a range of recommendations for their final report, due in the spring of 2020, including not only possibly opening up the selective service registration requirement to include women, but also other methods to broaden and “implement universal service,” whether as an established norm or requirement (National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, 2019, p. 2). Granted when Judith Hicks Stiehm (1982) proposed, as an alternative to the asymmetries accompanying protector/protected relations, the figure of the defender as one in which the “disabilities which attend [the] dependency” of the protected could give way to “equality and reciprocity” (p. 374), she was expressly considering the context of the women’s role/place in the military. However, in my analysis in Chapter Four, I embarked on an application of this defender figure as productively instrumental not only for military contexts but also for how it addresses dimensions related to sexual (in)securities and equal access to modes and means of defense. As such, this dynamism suggests the potential for use of the defender figure as a critical interrogative and interventionist tool. 198 Rhetorical Stylization and Homological (Trans)formations The methodological approach I developed for this dissertation incorporated assumptions provided by theorizations of the rhetoric of style and its utility for attending to and facilitating insight into the operation of rhetorical techniques that resist and precipitate change within dynamic networks. Because my analysis sought to cultivate understanding of a range of shifts in military membership policy that implicated sex, gender, and sexual identities in a variety of ways, style offered a generative scaffold from which to access my texts and sculpt my critical claims. Specifically, as I discussed in Chapter Two, adopting style as an analytic category with “explanatory force” and a critical tool to interrogate the “interplay between collective discourse and cultural aesthetics” (Vivian, 2002, pp. 228, 226) entails recognizing style’s effectivity as a rhetorical technique (Greene, 1998a). Style, as a rhetorical technique, shapes and (re)animates political and social relations. It operates as a site of possibility for the (re)configuration of meanings and the relational formations they engender because it acts as a device through which to “express values, structures, and assumptions” (Brummett, 2008, p. 2) and thereby organize collective perceptions and assign patterns of shared meaning across (dis)similar experiences. Importantly, this framework of the rhetoric of style was beneficial for adding greater critical dexterity to my approach for interrogating the hegemonic figure of the soldier as a performative accomplishment and site through which to analyze the ways deliberative discourses of/on military membership policies circulated in an attempt to reify, contest, and (re)articulate “policy purposes and populations and negotiate[] fits between them” (Asen, 2010, p. 129). That is, style’s performativity, with respect to 199 questions of fit or coherence between policy goals and populations, directs critical attention toward how deliberative processes directed at publics party to those deliberations become a matter of negotiating or strategizing invention out of the stylistic repertoires that constrain the possibilities for that invention in terms of “reach[ing] the rhetorical horizon of intelligibility and communicability” (Stormer, 2002, p. 277). It is in this vein that I discussed homology as a productive instrument with which to locate and unpack the nature of constraining ideological forces and identifying possibilities for in(ter)vention. One area of my analysis in which such homological considerations became particularly applicable is articulations justifying the policy that disqualifies many transgender individuals from military service. But before directly addressing the deliberative discourses surrounding transgender military service examined in my analysis and discussing the resulting implication, I want to first develop some preliminary remarks from which to build upon. In Chapter Three, I addressed the history of DADT’s emergence as well as scholarly accounts of the formation of that discursive milieu as part of my argument that one advantage repeal advocates gleaned in their efforts to articulate LGB troops with the universal(ized) figure of the soldier-protector was a strengthened capacity to elude being fixed by public perception as categorically unfit to be effective soldiers and/or unequivocally incompatible with military service. As I noted, this perception of incompatibility rested on a history of rhetorical techniques that constructed homosexuality and LGB service through “a pathologizing set of figurations” (Butler, 1997, p. 122), which helped to make the threat posed by LGB servicemembers, particularly gay men, a matter of commonsense; that is, for many, gay soldiers would of 200 course endanger mission effectiveness because their presence would destroy the (apparently) fragile organizational and cultural cocktail found in military contexts that facilitated male bonding, which (obviously) formed the crux of unit cohesion (not to mention the crux of the band of brothers myth). As such, the matter-of-factness on which this argument relied became a generative source of scholarly critique, which frequently attended to what such justifications revealed about the ideological nature and mechanisms of masculine homosocial bonding (Britton & Williams, 1995; Bulmer, 2013; C. Rich et al., 2012). For instance, Butler (1997) observed that the logics formulated within the policy itself emphatically endorsed the idea that the presence of openly gay men in the military would “threaten[] to bring into explicitness and, hence, destroy the homosociality by which the class of men coheres” (p. 121). However, as I noted in my analysis, by the time public discursive energy formed around deliberating DADT repeal, the matter-of-factness of this was seemingly less matter-of-fact and more open to debate. With this in mind, I want to return to the insights thinking homologically can generate with respect to the policy now governing trans soldiers and their military service. In Chapter Five, I investigated how the Department of Defense (DoD) report outlined its rationale to justify the roll-out of a policy with greater restrictions on the conditions under which transgender people qualify to serve in the military. I contended that the DoD primarily relied on a strategy that mobilized discourses from psychology and medicine to stress the issue of a received diagnosis of gender dysphoria in its appraisal of and comparison with other ‘conditions,’ which articulated gender dysphoria as well as its range of probable treatments forecasted by the report within the class of 201 other apparently obvious and straightforward standards disqualifying people from joining or remaining in the military. As a separate justification the DoD additionally appealed to the matter-of-factness of the necessity to maintain clear and separate sex-based standards for training and performance evaluation based on the presumption that transgender troops serving openly in their confirmed gender would self-evidently malign the fidelity of those standards. Within this part of the analysis, I also discussed how the DoD report situates the agency’s concerns over sullying the integrity of the military’s sex-based standards as a central threat posed by an unrestrictive transgender service policy for unit cohesion and identified that the key basis on which the report presents the reality of this threat is the perceptions of (un)fairness that would begin to fester among the rank and file. Yet, separate sex-based standards have long been a source of rancor for men in the military held to that higher standard (Cohn, 2000); and servicewomen frequently issue calls for a true equalization of the standards to eliminate this gripe. Such contradictions might serve as one site for more thorough investigation. Critical inquiry into ideological forces unifying the ‘truth’ that combat units’ cohesion and effectiveness would be threatened by gay soldiers in their midst, particularly those attending to the male gaze and anxiety over its reversal, connected this dynamic with objections to LGB service raised about privacy, and in particular, the shower scene. While initially an issue voiced to demonstrate the self-evidence of homosexuality and military service as incompatible, later on reference to this scene gained currency among publics in support of overturning DADT, by (re)presenting a contradiction between highly trained and lethal combat warriors being afraid of a gay man next to them in the shower. While this counterpoint relied on a logic of contrast 202 between hegemonic militarized masculinity and a subordinated gay masculinity, it also registers rhetorical effect towards the redistribution of strategies negotiating the fit between policies and populations. Conclusion In this concluding chapter, I drew from my analysis of four controversies regarding military membership policy to propose implications that illuminate the relationships between militarism, gender, and the figure of the soldier. I have argued that the figure of the soldier operates as a site for understanding connections between gender and war, militarism and nationalism, and patriarchy and citizenship. When my analysis of the different controversies are considered together, it becomes evident how the figure of the soldier, circulating within public deliberative discourse, strongly reflects back on citizens’ own negotiations to reinforce, challenge, and/or reconfigure their role as citizens. This view foregrounds the figure of the soldier’s articulative rhetorical force for sense making and struggle, in particular to center formations of sex/gender/sexuality as the national ideal. Whether figurations of the soldier arise at points of controversy over still-ongoing military membership policy, they continue to have bearing in and critical implications for the issues raised here. For instance, the national prominence of several recent and ongoing political campaigns articulates the soldier to this particular civic setting as it continues to invoke the soldier’s (re)articulation with past memories of war and performance of soldiering. Certainly, calling upon one’s military service to demonstrate one’s fitness for public office is not a new phenomenon. Still, veterans’ groups 203 organizing around the goal of locating and grooming recent veterans to get them elected to office, in addition to growing numbers of candidates impacted by the policies in this dissertation, provide potentially rich opportunities for further research. One accompanying feature within much of my analysis and the conclusions I drew was the protector/protected relationalities, which proved to be a dynamic and malleable concept. In particular, in addition to what I have examined, it is also important in the future to return to and consider components that I was not able to appropriately account for in my analysis chapters. There is at least one significant dimension with respect to various formations of protector, protected, penetrator, predator, prey, defender relationalities as they related to figures of the soldier within the deliberations of the policies I included here which is international in scope. That is, publics’ circulating discourses within these time periods also imagined soldiers within land occupied overseas as valuable and/or indispensible to war/(in)security efforts (e.g., gay linguists, female engagement teams). 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