In the 2005 Frontline film, Private Warriors—a documentary about outsourcing military services in Iraq—nonmilitary men from South and Southeast Asian countries are an undeniably ubiquitous presence (Gaviria and Smith Reference Gaviria and Martin2005). In one scene, a South Asian man in a “Pizza Hut Iraq” baseball cap serves pizza to soldiers in the food court of Camp Victory in Baghdad. Another scene takes place 40 miles north of Baghdad in Camp Anaconda, a vast base housing 28,000 soldiers and 8,000 contractors. Here, we see a Southeast Asian man pushing a laundry cart past countless aisles of washing machines and dryers. In several other scenes shot in Camp Anaconda, a South Asian man serves a cheeseburger to an African-American male soldier, and another South Asian man scoops ice cream for a young white male soldier. And finally, in another scene, yet another South Asian man is filmed moving in and out of individual portable latrines, cleaning each, while two white soldiers sit nearby. The filmmakers never explicitly discuss these South Asian men and the work that they do, but the film visually illustrates the significance of their presence in the kitchens, laundry rooms, and barracks of the military bases across Iraq.

The presence of migrant workers in service occupations suggests that the division of labor on twenty-first-century U.S. military bases has taken on a set of characteristics representing an underexplored axis in the global division of reproductive labor.Footnote ¹ As with other instances of this division of labor, we see the convergence of migrant labor serving as a structural stopgap and as a site for symbolic politics in the arena of social reproduction. In this case, the gendered symbolic politics of what is essentially a reliance on low-wage migrant labor serves to reinforce both the neoliberal privatization of the U.S. armed forces and neoconservative American foreign policy ambitions.

Dating back to the Revolutionary War, the U.S. military has always outsourced some degree of military services (Woods 2005, 3). Since the early 1990s, however, this outsourcing has intensified. The ongoing U.S. involvement in Iraq under Operation Iraqi Freedom has brought attention to the existence of the privatized military, the “corporate warriors” hired by contracting companies who work alongside military personnel (Singer Reference Singer2003). Since the September 2007 allegations of the disproportionate use of force by Blackwater personnel, this privatized dimension of current U.S. military engagement has been the subject of intensified public scrutiny. But in this article, the attention turns to another aspect of outsourcing in the U.S. military, one which has gone relatively unnoticed by scholars and by mainstream media.Footnote ² In addition to the privatization of security services, over the past decade the Department of Defense has also restructured the provision of so-called vital support services to the armed forces.Footnote ³

Reflecting more general economic trends toward restructuring and flexible production (Peterson Reference Peterson2003), the U.S. Army in 1985 formally created the Logistical Civil Augmentation Contract, or LOGCAP. This program institutionalized practices of outsourcing already increasingly in place following the Vietnam War. LOGCAP originally served as a means to plan in peacetime for “the use of civilian contractors to perform selected services in wartime and other contingencies to augment U.S. forces in support of Department of Defense missions” (Woods Reference Woods2004, 3). With civilian contracting far more centralized than ever before, LOGCAP served as the mechanism for establishing an umbrella contract for delivery of a vast range of support services. The first five-year LOGCAP contract was awarded in 1992 to Brown & Root Services Corporation (Briody Reference Briody2004, 185; Singer Reference Singer2003). In 2001, the Department of Defense awarded Brown and Root another LOGCAP contract, this time extended for 10 years. In Iraq, the now-named Kellogg Brown & Root Services (KBR) supports all of the U.S. and remaining coalition forces, relying primarily on hundreds of tiered subcontractors to perform a host of vital support services. These services cover the whole range of operations involved in the life cycle of a military base and of the individual soldiers on that base. Services include base construction and maintenance, delivery of fuel, transportation of cargo and personnel, generation of power, food service, laundry and field showers, latrines, and sewage and solid waste removal (Woods Reference Woods2004, 6).

The focus of this article is a particular aspect of the outsourcing of support services—namely, the staffing involved in the organization of social reproductive labor in the theater of war. I ask the following questions: Who does the laundry, who prepares the food, and who cleans the facilities on military bases? As illustrated in the aforementioned vignettes, evidence suggests that the vast majority of vital support service labor is outsourced to and performed by men migrating from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal, and Pakistan.Footnote ⁴ The majority of KBR staff in Iraq are noncitizens—out of 48,000 employees, 35,000 are neither Americans nor Iraqis. Beyond KBR, other estimates suggest that contractors in Iraq number 180,000, with only a small fraction working as security contractors. Here, again, most are not U.S. citizens.Footnote ⁵

The use of those the military refers to as third-country nationals, or TCNs, in Iraq represents a massive enhancing of decades-old migration pathways in place between Asian countries and the Middle East (Castles and Miller Reference Castles and Miller[1993] 2003, 159–60; Seccombe Reference Seccombe1985). For example, the Jordanian migrant recruitment agency, Morning Star for Recruitment and Manpower Supply, has for years brokered the placement of South and Southeast Asian migrants as low-skilled assembly workers and as maids for wealthy Jordanians. Since the U.S. involvement in Iraq began, the business of recruiting migrant laborers to work on American bases has been booming.Footnote ⁶

Structurally, the vast supply of low-wage migrant labor is absolutely central to the calculations involved in the military outsourcing support services in the first place. In an interview with the producers of Private Warriors, Paul Cerjan, vice president of Kellogg Brown & Root Worldwide Military Affairs, defends the controversial high wages earned by KBR's truck drivers (who generally are U.S. citizens) by pointing out that the privatization of services actually saves taxpayer dollars precisely because of low-wage migrant labor. He baldly puts the matter as follows:

It is, of course, unusual to hear such an honest appraisal from official channels regarding the structural dependence of the United States on low-wage migrant labor. Cerjan freely and unapologetically admits that migrants working in reproductive arenas of food preparation, laundry, and cleaning services make a very low wage and so end up costing KBR and U.S. taxpayers far less.

Reflecting larger patterns of post-Fordist cost containment through flexible labor arrangements and outsourcing (Peterson Reference Peterson2003), exploitation of foreign labor is crucial to keeping reproductive labor costs low. Whereas the military estimates that a soldier costs about $100,000 a year in pay, benefits, and training, migrant workers earn only about $20 a day.Footnote ⁷ Labor practices that are commonly enforced in the United States do not apply, since migrant workers are the employees of any one of the hundreds of regional subcontractors. Therefore, far more labor can be extracted from each migrant worker. For example, the Saudi-based food services firm Tamimi contracts migrant workers to work in U.S. bases for two years at $1.25 an hour, and on average, migrant service workers work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week.Footnote ⁸ But the outsourcing of reproductive services represents more than a remarkable and, in light of these labor conditions, unsettling reorganization of the division of labor within the military. In this article, I suggest that this reorganized division of labor reinforces the devaluation and disavowal of social reproduction and, in the process, serves as a site of symbolic politics underwriting the gendered dimensions of the national identity of the American soldier. This symbolic politics appears to serve multiple ends. First, it helps to rationalize the privatization and outsourcing of reproductive labor. Second, it underwrites the imperial posture assumed by the United States in the context of neoconservative foreign policy.

Consider again the words of Paul Cerjan in the Frontline documentary. In defending the outsourcing of vital support services, he points out that this outsourcing serves, in part, as a means to reduce costs and, in part, as a way to enable the soldier to maintain a “proper attitude” as a “war fighter.” Cerjan laments that he “spent his entire career watching soldiers pull KP [kitchen police] in the kitchen.Footnote ⁹” He goes on to ask rhetorically, “Why do we have to do that with soldiers?” A soldier pulling KP—performing the feminized reproductive labor of preparing and cooking food and cleaning a kitchen—is for Cerjan unnecessary work that has the added disadvantage of detracting the soldier from his/her proper masculinized role as a war fighter.

This article explores the underlying gendered dimensions of this division of labor on U.S. military bases where, as we have seen, most reproductive labor is performed by men from poor Asian countries. Lying at the intersection of gender, race, class, and nationality, the structure of this organization of social reproductive labor builds off of a long tradition of gendered dynamics framing military service. I open the discussion with a survey of the evolution of this tradition in the organization of modern soldiering. Taking gender as a lens by which to unpack the naturalization of multiple intersecting hierarchies (Peterson Reference Peterson2003, 36), the discussion then explores how the outsourcing of social reproduction on military bases updates the tradition of armed masculinity. This is done by reinforcing the aggressive masculine production of the American soldier as a “war fighter”—regardless of the race, economic class, or even gender of that soldier.

The remainder of the discussion is dedicated to revealing the multiple ways that the displacement of reproductive labor, which remains coded as effeminate, onto poor, nonwhite, migrant men from South and Southeast Asian countries may well reinforce the aggressive masculine version of American soldiering. One key effect of the symbolic politics of off-loading this feminized work is that the resulting masculinist image of the military serves to rationalize the privatization of the armed forces. That is, the symbolic politics of this outsourcing is such that emphasizing the feminization of this labor serves to reinforce the neoliberal model of a leaner and more effective and efficient armed forces.

Outsourcing this labor enables a division of labor that symbolically reinforces the soldier's role as a masculinized “war fighter” with a second level of implications: supporting the corresponding and increasingly imperial posture that the United States has assumed in the world in this first decade of the twenty-first century. For example, the division of labor on the military base has become a site for positioning members of the U.S. military first as bearers of a superior masculinity vis-à-vis feminized migrant workers who are, significantly, non-Americans performing devalued feminine reproductive labor. In addition, it serves to mute significant race, class, gender, and regional differences among service members. Finally, this gendered symbolic politics appears to play a role in obscuring the disconnect that soldiers experience between their training for combat and the actual daily “nation-building” operations of occupying Iraq. As we will see, the link between the symbolic politics of the division of social reproductive labor and the ambitious and aggressive aspects of U.S. foreign policy echoes earlier colonizer–colonized relations in that domestic life and reproductive labor continue to be critical sites for demarcating lopsided positions of power in international relations.

THE GENDERED DIMENSIONS OF REPRODUCING SOLDIERS

There is, of course, nothing new about the fact that military service is a gendered arena. Feminists have noted that over the course of the Western tradition, gendered practices have always underwritten the theory and practice of military service. There is a long tradition of associating soldiering with masculinity, both in Western political thought and in the practice of armed forces (Enloe Reference Enloe1988; Snyder Reference Snyder1999). It is to this tradition that I turn next in order to tease out the gendered dimensions of the way in which reproductive labor in particular has historically been organized in the military.

The tradition of modern “armed masculinity” (Snyder Reference Snyder1999) can be traced back to Niccolò Machiavelli's celebration of the manly citizen soldier as the key figure in a republican polity. Reading The Prince alongside The Discourses of Livy, R. Claire Snyder explains that “the civic virtue of the citizen and the combatively masculine action of the soldier come together in a figure that exhibits both characteristics at once” (Snyder Reference Snyder1999, 25). Embodying republican civic virtue, citizen soldiers are motivated to act for the good of their community. They are characterized by their courage, patriotism, and selflessness, along with their willingness to take action (Snyder Reference Snyder1999, 23–24). For Machiavelli, these traits of civic virtue are interchangeable with masculinity. As Hannah Pitkin points out, Machiavelli repeatedly defines virtú against all that is effeminato (quoted in Snyder Reference Snyder1999, 24) and all that is either passive and meek on the one hand (Snyder Reference Snyder1999, 25), or wily, cunning, and unpredictable on the other (Brown Reference Brown1988, 89). This array of feminine traits stands in stark opposition to the qualities of the citizen soldier. Courage, patriotism, and so forth are realized through action that defies the passivity of Christian effeminacy and that subdues the fickle ways of feminine Fortuna. As Snyder highlights, by way of this opposition to all that is associated with femininity, the figure of the citizen soldier brings together “soldiering, masculinity, and citizenship” (Reference Snyder1999, 25).

The armed masculinity of Machiavelli's citizen soldier reverberated centuries later in the organization of the Revolutionary-era U.S. military, as did its symbolic feminine counterpart. But in this instance, femininity was linked less with passivity or cunning seductiveness than with domesticity and reproductive labor. Indeed, the attributes associated with soldiering alongside those associated with “republican motherhood” put the gendered dynamics of the division of labor into stark relief. The masculine citizen soldier was counterpoised against the middle-class ideal of the republican mother—the embodiment of feminine citizen virtue realized through the performance of reproductive labor.

The concept of republican motherhood has become common in feminist scholarship, but its origin lies in Linda Kerber's analysis of women's roles in the American Revolution. Republican motherhood derived, in part, from the role assigned to women to perform the social reproductive labor in support of members of the army. While often used to define the tasks of middle-class mothering of future citizen-soldier sons, for Kerber the concept of republican motherhood also serves to highlight the gendered division of labor in relation to the armed forces. She explains that “the American army offered political uses for traditional domestic skills… . Wives and children who had no means of support when their husbands and fathers were pressed into service followed after and cared for their own men, earning their subsistence by cooking and washing for troops in an era when the offices of the quartermaster and commissary were inadequately run” (Kerber Reference Kerber1980, 55). A sense of women's distinctive civic duty came to be associated with this social reproductive labor, as captured in the words of James Fenimore Cooper's character Elizabeth Flanagan, a “female sutler, washerwoman, and … petticoat doctor to the troops” in his novel The Spy. Emphasizing the civic significance of her work, she asks, “What would become of the States and liberty if the boys had never a [clean] shirt, or drop to comfort them?” (quoted in Kerber Reference Kerber1980, 56). The reproductive work performed by women during the Revolutionary War, alongside the cultural narratives that emerged on the subject, formed the basis for the attachment of civic importance to women's work in the gendered division of labor, at the same time clearly demarcating soldiering as masculine.

Women have always had a place in supporting members of the army, though they have not always been celebrated as the republican ideal. Cynthia Enloe notes that historically, female “camp followers” were often associated with promiscuity and disorderliness; however, their labor was absolutely essential, with women playing key roles as “soldiers' wives, cooks, provisioners, laundresses, and nurses” (1988, 3). In the twentieth century, as the armed forces modernized, reproductive work on the battlefield was undertaken less frequently by women than by soldiers themselves. In spite of this, however, Enloe is certainly right to point out that the paradoxical dynamic of misogyny toward, and simultaneous dependence on, “camp followers” has permeated the military's unspoken reliance on military wives to sustain soldiers (Enloe Reference Enloe1988, 4–6).

Profound historical shifts in the allocation of reproductive work occurred in the early twentieth-century military. Reproductive tasks came to be folded into the armed forces as part of an overall reorganization of the logistical support needed to maintain a modernized and highly bureaucratic military (Keene Reference Keene2001, 39). During World War I, due to civilian labor shortages alongside relatively high civilian wages, the armed forces could no longer rely on civilians to perform these noncombatant tasks (2001, 51). Moreover, fighting overseas precluded significant reliance on unpaid nonmilitary resources, that is, wives and mothers, to support soldiers as they had when soldiers remained on American soil (2001, 51). As a result, and enabled by the 1917 establishment of the national draft, the armed forces and the army, in particular, significantly expanded its population of noncombatant troops.Footnote ¹⁰ This had implications not only for logistics support but for the organization of reproductive work as well.

Beginning with World War I, units of the armed forces increasingly became “self-sufficient societ[ies]” (Brotz and Wilson Reference Brotz and Everett1946, 374). In the early twentieth-century military, soldiers' duties in these self-contained societies were numerous, extending into social reproductive labor, or “housekeeping functions” (Reference Brotz and Everett1946, 374). This reorganization of the division of labor ultimately reinforced gendered orderings, with male soldiers uneasily assuming “feminine” reproductive tasks, which continued to be devalued. As described by sociologists in the 1940s, “to a former professional who is an enlisted man, policing the area, cleaning latrines, kitchen police, and care of the barracks is at first an imposition” (1946, 374). As evidence of its undesirability, KP, or kitchen police, has historically been assigned either by rotation, or as punishment for minor infractions.

It is not hard to imagine that in a military system that promulgated the image of the soldier as warrior, this extensive reliance on soldiers to perform, among other tasks, those associated with women in the gendered division of labor sat uneasily alongside soldiers' sense of their masculinity. The gendered politics of dependence and disavowal of social reproduction have, after all, proven to be tenacious historically. Writing of the huge pool of noncombatant soldiers in World War I, historian Jennifer Keene suggests that these soldiers struggled with the disconnect between the aggressive ideal of soldiering fostered by the armed forces culture and the actual work they did. She writes that “the contradiction between the belligerent posture the army enticed all recruits to embrace and what military service actually entailed for noncombatants precipitated an unforeseen crisis of identity for noncombatants in the wartime army” (2001, 36). For example, according to a War Department investigator at the time, soldiers complained that “their manpower was wanted but not their manhood” (2001, 40). What is key here is that this perceived disconnect on the part of conscripted soldiers existed because military service was associated with masculinity—and vice versa.

Due to the history of armed masculinity in the Western tradition, it is not surprising that this link has been long-standing. In spite of the integration of women into the modern military, the association of soldiering with masculinity continues to prevail (Faludi Reference Faludi1994; Herbert Reference Herbert1998; Snyder Reference Snyder2003).Footnote ¹¹ In fact, the combination of the privatization of the military during the last two decades alongside the posture assumed by the United States in foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration appears to have had the effect of invigorating the tradition of armed masculinity. To make sense of this aspect of the military requires unpacking the symbolic politics that produce and reinforce the narratives of hypermasculinity surrounding American soldiering today.

THE NEOLIBERAL AMERICAN EMPIRE

The twenty-first-century U.S. military looks quite different from its early twentieth-century progenitor. For one thing, it is a vastly smaller army made up of an all-volunteer force. Since the end of universal conscription in 1973, the U.S. armed forces have diminished from more than 3 million in 1970 to 1.4 million in 2002. A second and related difference is the increased flexibilization of the military and the attendant reliance on private channels to perform necessary services. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sums up the contemporary amalgam of public and private entities that comprise the armed forces as follows: “The U.S. military is more than its fighting forces. It is a broad complex of military, civilian, and contract personnel who equip, support, and sustain—in hundreds of thousands of ways every day—the men and women who put their lives on the line” (quoted in Woods Reference Woods2004, 1). A final difference is the role of the U.S. armed forces in the world today—a world in which the United States is increasingly viewed as, and increasingly considers itself to be, an imperial power. These conditions combined have profoundly altered the organization of social reproductive labor within the armed forces so that today, this organization is quite distinct from the model that prevailed for much of the twentieth century. At the same time, this organization has taken on new symbolic roles.

Before proceeding to explain this set of claims, a brief explanation of the United States as empire is in order. The United States as empire is a condition alternately hailed and condemned by commentators, but this disagreement should not detract from the remarkable consensus that “empire” has become an accurate way to describe America today.Footnote ¹² The events of September 11, 2001, ushered in an era of emboldened and militarized U.S. presence in global affairs. Having espoused a mostly isolationist approach to international relations in his first presidential bid, following 9/11 George W. Bush and his administration undertook a far more aggressive and ambitious approach to world affairs. While the United States has been the dominant world power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lopsided relationship of American power with regard to the rest of the world has emerged. In the 1990s, the United States maintained the Department of Defense's Unified Command Plan, a Cold War–era military organization of bases around the world. It did so without meaningful opposition from Russia, much less any other state. This residual Cold War–era global military structure, combined with post–Cold War military and economic preeminence and American activities undertaken under the aegis of the “global war on terror,” together helped position the United States as an imperial power.

This structural position of primacy is further bolstered by the foreign policy approach adopted by the Bush administration. The 2002 National Security Strategy explains this posture in no uncertain terms: “The U.S. will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world” (NSS 2002, George W. Bush, Introduction/preamble). Ann Norton has provided an astute excavation of the intellectual roots of the neoconservativism that has shaped U.S. foreign policy under Bush, noting the gendered dimensions of its “expansive internationalism” (2004, 187). She sums up the argument as follows: “America can not only be great among nations, with a power ‘unmatched since Rome,’ it can impose upon the world a Pax Americana… . The nation [can] shake off the effeminacy and apathy of containment and extend itself” (Norton Reference Norton2004, 190–91). In Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (2000), Robert Kagan and William Kristol give voice to the neoconservative drive to establish American greatness in the world, advocating a return to “a robust brand of internationalism” built upon “honor and greatness” (Reference Kagan, William, Robert and William2000, 23).

What we see in U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration is the putting into practice of this intellectual call for aggressively maintaining the United States as a preeminent global power. Underlying current ambitions lies the neoconservative thrust to purportedly spread the practices and values of American liberalism far and wide—even if this must be done at gunpoint. I will return to consider the gendered dimensions of neoconservative foreign policy later. First, though, we must explore the role of the privatized armed forces in this foreign policy climate.

The military plays a significant and unique role in this foreign policy vision. The expansion of a military presence is specifically mandated by the 2002 National Security Strategy:

On the basis of this directive and on the estimation that the United States has more than 700 military installations in nearly 40 countries around the world, Chalmers Johnson argues that in place of achieving political power through direct administration of foreign governments, the United States has instead established an “empire of military bases” (Reference Johnson2004, 6). Driven by a quest for national security in an era of nonstate threats, the United States as empire rests heavily on the capacities of the military to undertake this emboldened foreign policy strategy.

In advocating for a liberal American empire, historian Niall Ferguson (Reference Ferguson2004) worries that the American public is not up to the task—the American electorate would be unlikely to support an imperial undertaking. He is correct to note that the political impossibility of universal conscription certainly calls into question the viability of an empire modeled on earlier versions of colonialism that deployed colonial administrators across the globe. There are simply not enough American citizens willing to work as administrators of an American system of colonization.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, the relatively small numbers of the all-volunteer armed forces limits the possibility of a colonizing empire administered by the military. Reinstituting universal conscription remains utterly unrealistic in today's political climate. So it would seem that, desirable or not, a colonial-style empire, one organized along the lines of settlements created in foreign countries in order to reinforce a dominant country's management of the domestic and foreign policies of weaker countries, is not a viable option. This is why Jan Pieterse writes of what he calls “imperial understretch” (Reference Pieterse2004, 49).Footnote ¹⁴ And yet, while nonmilitary colonial-style settlement is not an option, and even military settlement is apparently questionable due to the relatively small size of the U.S. armed forces, the alarming expansion of U.S. military presence in countries around the world seems for the moment to have prevented a self-defeating “understretch” with regard to manpower.

This points to a central strategic paradox at the heart of today's Pax Americana but one that has been managed to date.Footnote ¹⁵ The only way that the United States can support an empire of military bases with a trimmed-down force comprised of all volunteers is by outsourcing services. The privatization of key components of the military in an era of neoliberal ideological dominance has turned out to be absolutely crucial for enabling a militarized imperial turn on the part of the United States. Thus, it is more accurate to term this a neoliberal empire of bases, one that relies heavily on nonstate, private entities to support all of the activities of the military—from security services to logistics and vital support services (Singer Reference Singer2003). In this neoliberal era, due in part to the all-volunteer army as well as to the availability of a low-cost and mobile global labor force of migrants, the U.S. armed forces have reverted back to a pre–World War I organization of both logistical support and the division of labor, outsourcing reproductive activities, among others, to nonsoldiers through privatized channels.

In the case of outsourcing reproductive labor, which is the focus of this discussion, it is of note that we are not witnessing a simultaneous reversion to a reliance on the unpaid labor of female camp followers. And so neither are we simply reverting to the dual cultural politics of republican motherhood and misogyny to prop up armed masculinity. But this is not to suggest that narratives of armed masculinity and the politics of dependence on, and disavowal of, social reproduction are waning. Quite the opposite. For example, even in an era of gender integration of the U.S. armed forces amounting to a 16% female presence in the military (GAO 2005), armed masculinity is alive and well. As scholars have noted, the presence of women in the military has instead led to a militarization of femininity and a corresponding masculinization of female service members (Herbert Reference Herbert1998).Footnote ¹⁶ The tenacity and capacity of armed masculinity to thrive in spite of the presence of women begs the question of how it is that armed masculinity is being produced today.

What is the corresponding symbolic politics underwriting the “expansive internationalism” of neoconservative foreign policy administered by neoliberal armed forces? In what ways does the division of labor reinforce a demarcation between soldiers and those who labor to reproduce them? How in turn does this divide, which perpetuates the politics of dependence and disavowal of social reproduction, shape what it means to be a soldier in the neoliberal militarized American empire? In order to explore this aspect of the post-9/11 Pax Americana, I return to investigations of gender and the military. However, as we will see, gender as a category on its own is insufficient for unpacking the cultural work being done by the division of labor on military bases. Even when adjusted to incorporate dimensions of race and class, the division of labor in the neoliberal empire presents yet another factor, that of national citizenship status. When the vast majority of the people performing social reproductive labor on military bases are men emigrating from poor South Asian countries, what we have is an instance of what V. Spike Peterson terms the “corollary exploitation of all who are denigrated by association with the feminine” (Reference Peterson2003, 36).Footnote ¹⁷ This globalized organization of reproductive labor thus begs the question of what symbolic work is being done. That is, we must consider how the “armed masculinity” of American soldiers—men and women—is being recoded and, in turn, precisely what kind of narrative of soldiering may be emerging.

THE REPRODUCTION OF THE AMERICAN SOLDIER IN AN AGE OF EMPIRE

The face of the American empire looks very little like that of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European empires. The individuals on the front lines of empire are not readily reminiscent of the elite white European colonial administrators who were sent forth as the managers of earlier empires.Footnote ¹⁸ The daily operations of American empire are instead manned by servicemen and servicewomen of the all-volunteer military, housed in the many military outposts across the world.Footnote ¹⁹ However, while the population staffing the empire may look quite different today, the symbolic logic by which this population is signified as distinct and even superior is evocative of that of an earlier era. The set of symbolic politics that is the focus of this article is nested in the organization of “domestic life,” or reproductive labor, on military bases.

With assertions linking aggressive and ambitious foreign policy with “manliness,” the symbolic politics of the division of labor within the military arm of the current Pax Americana takes on a gendered valence similar to that of earlier European empires. As many scholars of European empires have noted, the organization of domestic colonial life was a key locus for the organization of the politics of inclusion and exclusion and the distribution and demarcation of power. For instance, Enloe has pointed out that “empires are built in allegedly ‘private’ places” (Reference Enloe2004, 270). Historian Ann Stoler further explains that management of the intimate spheres of life was crucial to the symbolic politics of modern European empires; she writes that “the very categories of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ were secured through forms of sexual control that defined the domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves” (Reference Stoler2002, 42). So, while there are great differences between the imperial adventure on the part of the United States and earlier empires, it should come as no surprise that with regard to the location of symbolic politics in the domestic sphere, there are striking parallels. The organization of the “domestic” arena of social reproduction in today's U.S. empire and the corresponding symbolic and political meanings echo the operations of the symbolic politics of demarcation in earlier European empires. In the case of American “empire,” the symbolic politics emanating from the reliance on low-wage migrant labor to perform reproductive tasks is constitutive of multiple narratives: On the one hand, it serves to underwrite the neoliberal privatization of today's all-volunteer military, and on the other, it serves to reinforce a neoconservative foreign policy.

With regard to legitimating a trimmed-down, privatized military, as Cerjan suggests, why not outsource social reproductive tasks that have nothing to do with the masculine role of the combat soldier? To continue to have these tasks performed “in-house” not only is inefficient as understood in economic terms but would also tend to effeminize members of the military, thus weakening their effectiveness on the battlefield. Moreover, the outsourcing of staffing of reproductive labor to poor men from South and Southeast Asia makes possible a smaller force, which in turn makes politically viable the U.S. kind of involvement overseas. Outsourcing security has the similar effect of keeping deployed active duty numbers relatively low (Singer Reference Singer2003). Finally, in the case of an all-volunteer army, this outsourcing and the corresponding symbolic politics of disavowal facilitate recruitment in an increasingly challenging climate. Military recruitment experts suspect that recruitment would be that much more difficult if the military were still associated with the labor of “pulling KP.” Michael P. Peters, Executive Vice-President of the Council on Foreign Relations, explains that “in order to make service more attractive, the military had to eliminate a lot of the less-glamorous aspects” of military service, including the “less-glamorous”—read feminized—tasks of cooking and cleaning (quoted in Pan Reference Pan2004).

It is also of significance, however, that this symbolic politics reinforces the aggressive U.S. foreign policy posture toward the world by way of underscoring the role of armed masculinity through the global division of reproductive labor. With regard to reinforcing neoconservative foreign policy, outsourcing plays multiple symbolic roles. It enables the U.S. armed forces to be figured, first, as made up of soldiers endowed with attributes of aggressive masculinity, and second, as an apparently homogenous middle-class entity. Third, it also serves to obfuscate the realities of daily operations undertaken on the part of soldiers on behalf of an occupying power. It is of note that the severely lopsided structural conditions shaping the experience of migrant workers reinforce all of these symbolic narratives regarding members of the American armed forces.

That service members are not performing reproductive labor can function on the symbolic level of underscoring a figuration of American soldiers as endowed with armed masculinity. These are precisely the kinds of soldiers that KBR Vice President Cerjan advocates as necessary—necessary, that is, for the task of enforcing neoconservative imperial ambitions that reverberate around the globe. This gendered dimension is, of course, nothing new in the cultural politics of empire. In his trenchant work on the subject, Ashis Nandy explains that colonialism “produced a cultural consensus in which political and socio-economic dominance symbolized the dominance of men and masculinity over women and femininity” (Reference Nandy[1983] 1988, 4). Edward Said echoes this in his analysis of the gendered dimensions of orientalism as an epistemological project. As illustrated in Gustav Flaubert's nineteenth-century writings about Kuchuk Hanem, an Egyptian dancer with whom he had an affair, orientalism was undergirded by a particular form of sexual politics. Said explains:

The gendered symbolic politics of U.S. empire takes multiple forms. For example, the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib that was brought to light certainly was produced by and in turn constituted a complex terrain of symbolic sexual politics (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2005; Tétreault Reference Tétreault2006). Building off of contemporary feminist applications of postcolonial scholarship to the analysis of American involvement in Iraq, I suggest that the organization of social reproductive labor on military bases may well present an additional dimension of gendered symbolic politics.

As suggested by Cerjan, to have service members “pulling KP,” doing laundry, cleaning the latrines, and so forth is to disarm them—they are directed away from the attitude that would be proper for an aggressive enforcer of the expansive internationalism. The deployment of the politics of disavowal and the displacement of effeminate reproductive labor onto others reinforce the aggressive nature of armed masculinity required of such a bold and ambitious undertaking as securing American's position of preeminent power in the globe and legitimates the privatization of the armed forces. This is not a task for the unmanly. Soldiers are reminded of this on a regular basis, several times a day, in fact. The people who serve them pizza, ice cream, and hamburgers, the people who do their laundry, and the people who clean the latrines they use are not soldiers. Of course, for the most part, they are not women either. Here, we see the symbolic politics of gender overlaid with an imperial posture toward the world. In this case, the aggressive undertaking on the part of the United States is emboldened by its masculine qualities—which in turn are emboldened by the emasculation of the rest of the world. This emasculation is reinforced in the staffing of devalued and disavowed reproductive labor activities on the American military base, with poor men of color migrating from South and Southeast Asia making up the vast majority of these workers. The division of labor on the base also serves as a daily invocation of the orientalism of colonial projects, and the corresponding pattern of relative strength on the part of the United States in relation to the rest of the world. It is this kind of gendered symbolic politics that serves to reinforce the neoconservative foreign policy message that the United States is in a unique, but tenuous, position of preeminence. As such, it is endowed with a set of global responsibilities and so must not shirk “the cause of American leadership” as the neoconservative group, Project for the New American Century has put the matter (PNAC 1997). This is a manly undertaking if there ever was one—in fact, it reverberates with Machiavellian civic virtue in the sense that the rest of the world figures as feminine, unequal, and in need of being directed.

In addition to demarcating gendered boundaries of who is American and who is not, this symbolic politics generates a homogenizing effect by underscoring the commonality of American nationality among an otherwise disparate and potentially conflict-laden group of service members. These sets of symbolic politics have a particular significance due to the nature of U.S. military service today. Endowing an all-volunteer force with the task of reinforcing America's preeminent power in global affairs entails a significant degree of symbolic politics—particularly since the actual daily tasks involved in occupation detract from the combative behavior associated with armed masculinity. The symbolic politics of social reproductive labor downplays this disconnect to avoid a crisis of identity by redirecting soldiers toward their role as masculine enforcers of Pax Americana.

Consider the demographics of the enlisted population that comprise the armed forces today. With regard to geography, most active duty service members are from the southern and western parts of the United States. More specifically, most are from rural communities (GAO 2005).Footnote ²⁰ Most service members hail from the lower middle class, with median household incomes ranging from $30,000 to $59,999. As the bipartisan National Priorities Project explains, “neighborhoods with low- to middle-median household incomes are over-represented” (NPP). Most have completed high school, but far fewer have attended college (GAO 2005). The makeup of the armed forces is racially and ethnically diverse, though only 16% of the force is made up of women service members.Footnote ²¹ Significantly, the members of the armed forces—the face of the U.S. empire—are not members of the elite. They are just barely, if even, members of the middle class. Instead, they are oftentimes individuals who find themselves on the downside of the globalized labor market of the United States. With the reorganization of global production and the attendant demise of urban and rural manufacturing, jobs for those without college degrees are fewer, are less secure, and are generally poorly remunerated. In a postindustrial economy, joining the military is one of the few available means of economic mobility left.

In spite of various identifications among service members along the lines of race, class, and gender, the contrast with third-country nationals on the base serves to smooth over the edges of these differences, along with their potential for political disunity. This social operation of homogenizing a “we” by way of contrast with “them” permeates all imperial projects. Writing of the function of racism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, historian Stoler explains that “colonial racism was more than an aspect of how people classified each other, how they fixed and naturalized the differences between We and They. It was also how people identified the affinities they shared, how they defined themselves in contexts in which discrepant interests, ethnic and class differences, might otherwise weaken consensus” (2002, 24–25). In the U.S. involvement in Iraq, the contrast with the “enemy” can perform similar work. However, in light of the elusive and ever-changing nature of this enemy, the existence on military bases of a class of non-American low-wage laborers performing devalued feminized reproductive labor serves as a meaningful site for the daily reproduction of military service members as having in common their status as American citizens. This is particularly important symbolic work due to the disparate racial and ethnic makeup of the armed forces, as well as the differences between rural and urban recruits. Potential contestations between service members, as well as between enlisted service members and officers, are attenuated by way of a symbolic politics that serves to reinforce what all members of the military have in common—they are Americans enjoying the semblance of a middle-class lifestyle, food courts and all.Footnote ²² This lifestyle is made possible due to the low-wage labor of non-American migrant men of color.

Again, it is of note that the military services are for the most part comprised of nonelite enforcers of empire. But on the imperial bases in theaters of war, with a low-wage class of migrant laborers performing the vast majority of the reproductive labor previously performed in their families (most likely by women—wives, mothers), these nonelite “imperial grunts” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan2005) are positioned as elites vis-à-vis service workers. Moreover, due to structural shifts in the U.S. labor market, ironically the migrant food-service workers, in particular the burger flippers at Burger King, the cashiers at Pizza Hut Iraq, and even the barristas at Green Beans Coffee, are performing the kinds of low-skilled service jobs that their enlisted customers would most likely have back in the United States were they not serving in the armed forces.

The symbolic politics of low-wage migrants performing feminized labor serves yet another purpose. In the daily operations of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, there is the potential for a similar kind of crisis of identity found by historian Keene to have existed in World War I. In that case, noncombat soldiers socialized to be aggressive warriors struggled with the mundane and decidedly nonaggressive nature of their daily tasks. Similarly, today in Iraq, as the initial war has dragged into a far longer and far more complex operation of nation building, soldiers have come up against the disconnect between their training as combat soldiers and their daily reality. In a recent documentary film on the daily life of a battalion in Iraq, Sergeant Toby Nunn expresses this frustration in an interview. Commenting on his actions vis-à-vis Iraqi police officers he believes to be working with insurgent forces, he explains that “[t]he warrior in you is telling you to go over there and whack every single one of them, engage them, let them know that you know that they're the enemy. But then, you know, the leader and politician in you is saying this is not gonna help the cause, this is not gonna win their hearts and minds” (Scranton Reference Scranton2008). The theater of war of the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been marked by a divided and contradictory set of tasks, with moments of combat required in the midst of what is by and large an operation of nation building. This requires soldiers to tack between the masculinized role of combat soldiers and more often something else, something akin to what is often viewed as a feminized role of nation builder.Footnote ²³ It seems likely that the symbolic politics of disavowal of the feminized reproductive labor on bases across Iraq would help to smooth over the potentially jagged edges of this gendered identity crisis.

This “othering” operation vis-à-vis TCNs along the lines of gendered politics and of the politics of national citizenship is further reinforced by the dreadful conditions shaping the lives, choices, and work of migrant workers. As previously mentioned, as a structural stopgap, TCNs are hired because they are willing to work for comparatively far lower wages than American citizens. Salaries range from $65 to $112 a week.Footnote ²⁴ Anecdotal evidence suggests that their working conditions fall far below U.S. labor standards. These appalling working conditions further reinforce the devaluation of the reproductive labor that these workers perform. Working long days throughout the week, TCNs are housed in comparatively poor conditions and are given inadequate food.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, these employees lose their freedom of movement, with recruitment agencies and local employers often confiscating their passports upon arrival.Footnote ²⁶ Identification practices on military bases include badges for all workers with their names, the names of their employers, their designated jobs, and their nationalities, one more means of marking them as distinct from U.S. service members.Footnote ²⁷ These poor labor conditions serve to further reinforce the powerless position that migrant workers find themselves in, in contrast to the relatively powerful position of the service members of the U.S. armed forces.

This article has illustrated how the posture of U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration has a long tradition of symbolic politics to invoke in producing a culture that reinforces the lopsided vision of the world at the core of Pax Americana. Gendered symbolic narratives surrounding the military have been particularly salient due to the central role that the military plays in U.S. foreign policy at the outset of the twenty-first century. The modern military has always been formed by way of gendered politics, and so it should come as no surprise that a version of this symbolic politics has surfaced in the contemporary empire of bases. In addition, in today's stripped-down, neoliberal military, outsourcing is a central factor. The corresponding reliance on low-wage migrant workers to perform reproductive labor serves a structural purpose as well as a symbolic purpose. The multiple effects of this symbolic politics of disavowal ultimately support a key narrative. That is to say, the globalized division of labor on military bases helps to figure the soldiers of a neoliberal, all-volunteer force as enforcers of the muscular ambitions of a foreign policy that asserts that the United States is endowed with the global responsibilities of greatness.