“Be All that You Can Be.” “An Army of One.” These well-known slogans usually accompany pictures of a rugged white male dressed in fatigues carrying an automatic weapon. United States military recruitment advertisements regularly deploy such iconic masculine imagery. Or do they? Melissa T. Brown asserts that yes, this “conventional martial masculinity” remains a fixture of advertising efforts despite the All-Volunteer Force’s (AVF) inception in 1973 that increased women’s enlistment to 14.5% of all service members (p. 21). Analyzing how each military branch reflects changing cultural contexts in its recruitment advertising, Brown complicates our understanding of the most hegemonic of masculine images and, more broadly, constructions of masculinity itself.
Brown contributes to a growing body of work in gender studies, feminism, and political science on military service by examining the role that gender plays in recruiting for all four branches. The book’s central chapters focus, in turn, on the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Background on the culture of each branch and its approach to recruitment introduces each chapter, which in turn offer compelling and detailed analyses of advertising materials used during the AVF. To do so, Brown employs an “interpretive textual approach” to examine advertisements appearing between 1970 and 2007 in popular magazines and on television and Internet sites (pp.12-14). This methodology successfully aligns with tracking how visual images operate in the broader culture to shape gendered identities and constructions of masculinity.
Social constructivism and intersectionality act as the theoretical framework, one that focuses on the fluid, relational power dynamics between people, institutions, structures, and contexts to construct complex identities, informing Brown’s gender analysis (pp.18-23). This approach allows Brown to link the military as an institution to the broader political culture through advertisements viewed by people whose identities are formed partly in response to media images of masculinity and femininity. The book’s four main chapters, however, separate male and female recruitment into different sections. This organizational structure, though mirroring the sex segregation generally practiced in the services, works against this theoretical framework’s relational impulse. The dualistic categories of male and female prevent a full account of the complex dynamics involved in constructing masculinity. A bifurcation between the military as an institution and the broader culture also arises particularly in Chapter 3 “The Army” organized around each decade since the AVF, beginning with the 1970s. Second wave feminism and the backlash against it, for instance, should play integral explanatory roles in this chapter to explain how women became viable recruits in the 1970s, which marked a critical change in their relationship to military service. Critical engagement with the military and masculinity narrows the analytic scope to the degree that second wave feminism and femininity often become marginalized. Brown then shares a challenge encountered by gender studies and feminist scholars who, despite advances in intersectionality, methodologically struggle to keep sight of how specific institutions connect with broader cultural contexts and the fluid relationships between identity variables.
The complex interplay between masculinity and femininity emerges at points in the book where Brown brings together male and female military participation and representations in recruitment advertising. Chapter 7, for example, compares how the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force responded to recruiting a volunteer force after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, invasion of Afghanistan, and Iraq War to assess to what degree, if any, their strategies changed to include more women. Locating each branch in the same analytic space allows Brown to escape the conventional confines of sex-segregated analysis. Masculinity and femininity, as a result, intersect throughout. The chapter concludes that, “while in reality women in the services are performing combat-like roles, military recruiting helps to keep combat male in the public imagination” (p. 177). This integrated approach reflects how intersectionality enables gender studies and feminist scholars to capture fluid dynamics of gender power even when examining bastions of masculinity such as the military.
Interrogating how each military branch deploys male images in recruitment campaigns allows Brown to dissect the warrior as an icon of masculinity in the United States. The Marine – regardless of the AVF, recruitment in wartime, and increased number of women in the services – still exemplifies the “warrior masculinity” by portraying tough young men either in combat defending the nation or on ceremonial display (p. 178). The other three branches differ by degree in terms of how they measure up against this traditional standard of manliness. The Army relies on a “soldiering masculinity” that modifies traditional warrior traits with economic incentives for “regular guys” (p. 179) whereas the Navy embraces a non-economic appeal to high adventure that associates the recruit with a romantic past (p. 180). The “new world order masculinity” adopted by the Air Force diverges to the greatest extent by tempering aggression with compassion and technological might “used for benign dominance and humanitarian ends” (p. 180). This typology of military masculinity challenges cultural assumptions about males embedded in the warrior image and indicates growing attention to answering the “what is a man” question among gender studies and feminist scholars.
Focus on servicemen, who traditionally act as keepers of the nation-state and protectors of patriotism, enables Brown to explore “the nexus of citizenship and gender” (p. 28). Her book, as a result, contributes an important masculine dimension to the work on gendered citizenship that examines women and femininity such as Women and Citizenship edited by Marilyn Friedman (2005). Brown accounts for the economic factors impacting military recruitment in a changing political context where consumerism often trumps citizenship as the measure of value in political life, even in terms of serving the nation. Financial benefits and career advancement, particularly in Army and Navy recruiting materials, indicate how “new hegemonic forms of business masculinity” impact and even supersede those of military courage, strength, and sacrifice for the common good (p. 84). Such gendered analysis then speaks to broader concerns raised in political science about liberal democracy’s future given the ever-widening distance between citizens and political life that apparently extends to the iconography of military masculinity.
Brown’s concluding chapter shifts our gaze toward the frontiers of gendered citizenship. “Technologized masculinity” captures the clear trend of using advanced and information technology in recruitment advertising that regularly features “the use of military force as an exciting, bloodless video game” to appeal to male recruits (p. 181). Computer monitors, video consoles, and controllers distance servicemen (and sometimes servicewomen) from the lived reality of violent force exercised on people far across the globe. Drone warfare epitomizes the dehumanizing of military engagement. In a world where technology can replace people and economics often determines human value, the centrality of identity in gendered analyses of citizenship and the military such as Brown’s keep attention on the people who operate the machinery of war to bridge the gap between soldiers and the actual fighting.
Enlisting Masculinity offers a detailed examination of military recruitment advertising that goes beyond its immediate purview to widen and deepen the reader’s understanding of the military as an institution, masculinity, and citizenship. This book invites wide readership in the areas of feminism, citizenship studies, gender studies, militarism, and institutionalism.
