Sex, Citizenship, and U.S. Warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq

1. Sex, Citizenship, and U.S. Warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq

2. U.S. Military Today • Fighting two wars • All-volunteer force • Challenges of recruitment and retention • Homosexual discharges have fallen off since 2001 • Women are 15% of U.S. military troops • Who is allowed to serve?

3. GLBT Soldiers, Sexual Harassment, and Female Combatants Has the military changed to reflect increasing acceptance of women and GLBT individuals in the broader society, such that discriminatory military policies are anachronistic and ripe for change? Is it just a few senior officers and politicians like John McCain who stand in the way of more just and inclusive military? Or is the concept of a ‘just’ military, as some feminist critics argue, oxymoronic? Finally, does the military remain a crucial site for the installation of heterosexual male dominance in American society?

4. U.S. Military Inclusion and Civil Rights • Symbolic importance: military as “proving ground” of citizenship and national belonging • What is the relationship of the military to gender and sexuality? • And specifically, to gender and sexual violence? • How might our contemplation of these questions ramify the gender and sexual dimensions of U.S. citizenship?

5. Theorizing Citizenship

6. Citizenship as: • Formal legal status (citizens/aliens) • Belonging, recognition, and participation in the nation state • Social citizenship (TH Marshall) • Economic or cultural citizenship, consumer citizenship • Brenda Cossman, Sexual Citizens : The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging, 2007.

7. Citizenship as gendered, racialized and/or sexualized in nature (exclusionary) • Military as a proving ground for heterosexual masculine citizenship • Sexual minorities as “strangers” (Shane Phelan, 2001) • Men as “protectors”; women as “the protected” (Judith Hicks Stiehm, 1982)

8. Military service as civic obligation, demonstration of civic virtue • Military as a representative public institution in the United States

9. Citizenship as a technology of governance • Technologies of citizenship are “modes of constituting and regulating citizens: that is, strategies for governing the very subjects whose problems they seek to redress.” • Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower,1999, 2.

10. Sexual Citizenship

11. Heterosexual Citizenship • U.S. citizenship has long been constituted through the discourses of heteronormativity • Citizenship defined as: • rights or political participation exercised in public sphere • familialized, heterosexual sexuality relegated to the private sphere

12. “Sexual Strangers” Shane Phelan: sexual minorities are neither enemies nor friends – they may be neighbors, but they are ‘not like us.’ (Phelan, 29). This exclusion, this strangeness, this denial of full political citizenship, is “at the core of contemporary American understandings of common life.” (Phelan, 5)

13. Citizenship is now sexed differently: once private sphere of intimate life has been politicized demands for civic inclusion by gays and lesbians, women, and others has led to a revision and expansion of the meaning of citizenship issues once relegated to the private sphere are themselves the proper subject of political representation

14. Sexual citizenship is changing • [H]eterosexuality no longer acts as a preemptive bar to all forms of citizenship. Gay and lesbian subjects have begun to cross the borders of citizenship, unevenly acquiring some of its rights and responsibilities and performing some of its practices. They are in the process of becoming citizens, a complex and uneven process of crossing borders, reconstituting the terms and subjects of citizenship as well as the borders themselves. (Cossman, Sexual Citizens, 2007)

15. Debating Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

16. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell • “Don't ask, don't tell" passed by U.S. Congress in 1993. Under the law, GLBT members are allowed to serve unless they: -- Make a statement of their sexuality , publicly or even to family and friends (and are later turned in)-- Attempt to marry a person of the same sex-- Get caught engaging in a homosexual act Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell at http://hopesvoice.org/?p=1381

17. The DADT Digital Archive Peak discharges in 2001: 1273 Discharges in 2009: 429

18. You had to be there at the time. You had to hear from the troops…. from the academy superintendants who had to try to figure out how to accommodate this in very, very close barracks life… where you tell people who are going to be living with and sleeping in the same room with, you had to hear from the families who were concerned that this was going to affect our whole base life. There was a whole agenda coming in and it was not appropriate for that agenda to be presented to us. You should have heard from our chaplains who were having difficulty with this, so it wasn’t just a matter of a bunch of old generals. It was a difficult issue for us on one of the most fundamental issues of human behavior, sexuality [in] an organization that is designed for applying the force of the state. . . (Colin Powell in 2008)

19. The country has changed tremendously in fifteen years, and sure, review the policy. …but at the same time, I’m not sure we should do away with it. --Colin Powell in 2008

20. “The Time Has Come” • General David Petraeus, Commander of US Central Command, supports review of DADT • BUT, he states, eliminating DADT could negatively impact military function.

21. Opposition to Repeal "This successful policy has been in effect for over 15 years, and it is well understood and predominantly supported by our military at all levels. We have the best-trained, best-equipped, and most professional force in the history of our country, and the men and women in uniform are performing heroically in two wars. At a time when our Armed Forces are fighting and sacrificing on the battlefield, now is not the time to abandon the policy.“ Sen. John McCain, March 2010

22. "Now is the time to write your elected officials and chain of command ... If those of us who are in favor of retaining the current policy do not speak up, there is no chance to retain the current policy.“ • Lt. General Benjamin Mixon, head of U.S. Army Pacific in a letter published in Stars and Stripes

23. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/26/marine-corps-general-jame_n_515564.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/26/marine-corps-general-jame_n_515564.html • "I would not ask our Marines to live with someone who is homosexual if we can possibly avoid it. And to me that means we have to build BEQs (bachelor enlisted quarters) and have single rooms.“ • Gen. James Conway, Commandant of the Marine Corps

24. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/18/john-sheehan-retired-us-g_n_504992.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/18/john-sheehan-retired-us-g_n_504992.html • Retired U.S. general John Sheehan: • Dutch troops failed to defend against the 1995 genocide in the Bosnian war because the army was weakened by the inclusion of openly gay soldiers.

25. “Transgenders in the military” • “HIV positivity” • “Inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community” • “Forcible sodomy” and “exotic forms of sexual expression” • Lesbian gang assaults • Elaine Donnelly, President of the Center for Military Readiness, in testimony before House Subcommittee in July 2008

26. Arguments against Repeal • Heterosexuals . . . will be required to live in forced cohabitation with professed (not discreet) homosexuals, on all military bases and ships at sea, on a 24/7 basis.  • Such a policy would impose new, unneeded burdens of sexual tension on men and women serving in high-pressure working conditions, far from home, that are unlike any occupation in the civilian world. • The ensuing sexual tension will hurt discipline and morale. • We are talking about human sexuality and the normal, human desire for personal privacy and modesty in sexual matters. • Center for Military Readiness

27. "Prejudice is wrong, but feelings about sexuality are different.“ - Donnelly • “I think that it is a different issue [from race]… I think sexuality, and sexual preferences, in the confines of barracks life is a different issue.” -Powell in 2008

28. Women, Sexual Violence, and the ‘Double Jeopardy’ of Service in Iraq and Afghanistan Sheila Jeffreys, “Double jeopardy: Women, the US military and the war in Iraq,” Women's Studies International Forum30:1(2007), 16-25

29. The military's privileged position makes it ... a fundamental site for the construction of gender, that is, the defining of the boundaries of behavior--indeed, of life possibilities for people we call men and women. Francine D'Amico and Laurie Weinstein, Gender Camouflage (1999)

30. Feminists Theorize the Military • Military as a site for the preservation of heterosexual masculinity • Protector/protected distinction • Sexual dimensions of military culture • Are such claims still relevant given current composition of the U.S. Armed Forces?

31. Feminist critique Liberal, rights-based arguments in favor of military inclusion Opposing view: Military is fundamentally masculinist and misogynistic “The military is characterised by an inflated and coercive masculinity.” (Jeffreys, 2007)

32. Women in combat • In the early 1990s, Congress lifted ban on women flying combat aircraft and serving on combat ships • Women may not be: • assigned to ground combat units. • allowed to serve in the infantry or as special operations commandos. • But women are serving in support units as truck drivers, gunners, medics, military police, helicopter pilots and more.

33. Iraq and Afghanistan • In Iraq and Afghanistan, US troops waging war against guerrilla insurgency • Enemy tactics include improvised explosive devices, mortar attacks, suicide bombs and rocket-propelled grenades • Unpredictable nature of attacks blurs distinction between front-line and rear areas

34. Combat exclusion results in “the institutionalization of a two-class system that legitimizes the glass ceiling and furthers the chasm between the female-noncombatant and the male-warrior.” • Howard and Prividera, 2008 Army Spc. Monica Brown, a medic from the 782nd Brigade Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division

35. Tactical uses of gender and sexual violence • Military academies • Prisons, Interrogation Facilities (Abu Ghraib) • DADT • Sexual harrassment, violence, intimidation on the basis of gender and sexual orientation are rampant in the military • Problems for women reporting sexual assault • Problems for gay men and lesbians

36. Military Women in “Double Jeopardy” • Enemy attack + gendered violence from fellow U.S. soldiers • Violence is physical and discursive

37. Sex, Violence, and Torture • Abu Ghraib: Iraqi male prisoners were tortured by being turned into women. • One prisoner reported being threatened with rape by a U.S. soldier: • “He drew a picture of a woman on my back and made me stand in a shameful position holding my buttocks.” (Langton, 2004).

38. According to Lynndie England, ‘Iraqi prisoners [at Abu Ghraib] crawled over broken glass wearing only sanitary towels.’ (Crerar, 2004, cited in Jeffreys). • Similarly, Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were humiliated with the uncleanliness of women in the same time period: • An Australian prisoner, Mamdouh Habib reported that a prostitute was told to stand over him and menstruate on him.

39. The “Double Whammy” of Sexual and Military Trauma • I wasn't carrying the knife for the enemy, I was carrying it for the guys on my own side. • -Army specialist Mickiela Montoya I was less scared of the mortar rounds that came in every day than I was of the men who shared my food. I never would drink late in the day, even though it was so hot, because the Port-a-Johns were so far away it was dangerous. So I'd go for 16 hours in 140-degree heat and not drink. I just ate Skittles to keep my mouth from being too dry. I collapsed from dehydration so often I have IV track lines from all the times they had to re-hydrate me.

40. SMA at BOSS ConferenceAugust 27, 2008 • "The crime of sexual assault is fundamentally against our warrior ethos." • Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, deputy chief of staff of the Army for personnel, G-1.

41. Scapegoating female troops Large presence of women in the military is being blamed by some for the sexually violent behavior of male soldiers. The fact that there are so many women and that a woman was in charge of the military prison at Abu Ghraib, has been used as evidence for the idea that women harm morale and order. In the case of Abu Ghraib it was the presence of women in the military police that encouraged the ‘obscene misbehaviour that the photos reveal.’

42. Should women pursue equal opportunity in the military? • “To begin to un-gender the military, we have to recognize that we must also examine and undo other social hierarchies that intertwine with, support, and maintain the current gender divisions" • D'Amico & Weinstein, 1999 • Economically disadvantaged women and women of color are disproportionately recruited and subsequently placed in low paying support positions in the military. • John W. Howard, and Laura C. Prividera, “The Fallen Woman Archetype” (2008)

43. Has the Time Come?

44. Hypermasculinity and Military Effectiveness Is it possible to create an effective military . . . without masculinity? A military without masculinity may be unrecognizable and may not be capable of aggressive warfare . . . If aggressive masculinity is the necessary foundation of the military rather than being an unfortunate hangover of patriarchy, then women cannot be equal in this institution. Jeffreys, 2007

45. "It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy that forces men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.“ • Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

46. Pitfalls of Sexual Inclusion • Disciplinary and normalizing nature of inclusion (Berlant) • Normalization is a strategy for inclusion in the prevailing social norms and institutions of family, gender, work, and nation. • neutralizes the significance of sexual difference and sexual identity • “render[s] sexual difference a minor, superficial aspect of a self who in every other way reproduces the ideal of a national citizen.” (Steven Seidman, 1997, 324).