Like the African-American female calculators who broke into NASA in the middle of the last century, the number of women engaged in international politics far exceeds the image of the female elite that is usually seen, but under the clever cover of patriarchy, they are hidden and become part of the historical unconscious.
Stills from the movie "Hidden People". The film tells the story of three African-American women who used their mathematical abilities to send an American astronaut into space in the 1960s.
Where are the women in international politics? Why are they forgotten and how are they ignored? This is the question of Cynthia Enlo, an American feminist researcher, in "Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Feminism in International Politics." In this book, she traces and re-examines the international politics of women's lives across classes from a feminist perspective, breaking down the prejudice that power and gender are not related to international relations.
A classic of feminist international political theory, Enlo criticized traditional patriarchy and international politics dominated by elite men. In her view, only by focusing on the lives of women who have been covered up and marginalized can we more fully understand how different types of power shape and sustain the current international political system. At the same time, the feminist perspective also allows us to reset the boundaries between "international" and "political": even a disco can be a stage for international politics.
This article is excerpted from chapter 4, "Al Qaeda Women," "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Feminism in International Politics," and tells the story of the lives of women who play different roles inside and outside military bases. Among them were washers, military sisters-in-law, sex workers in discos, women and female officers who had enlisted in the army. In the international political arena, they are invisible, but they maintain the daily operation of each military base.
As the author points out in the article, "Obscure bases are as worthy of a gender analysis by feminists as they are suddenly revealed by scandals." International politics is not just about crises and scandals. International politics can be monotonous, with power shifting quietly and non-competitively. This tediousness is political. This monotony is gendered. ”
The original author | Cynthia Enlo
Excerpt from | Qingqingzi
Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Feminism in International Politics, by Cynthia Enlo, translated by Yang Meijiao, Shanghai People's Publishing House, June 2021.
Women inside and outside military bases
What about women inside and outside military bases? How did they get there? Who benefits? What does every woman think about living in or near the base?
Start with the base laundromat. She is likely a civilian employed directly by the base command or indirectly by a private defence contractor. She may have been from the same country as the owner of the uniforms and sheets she washed, the soldiers. Or she may be from a local community but have nationality from another country. She may even come from a distant country, a place where private contractors prefer to hire women. While working at the base's laundromat, she had her own ideas about operations carried out by the base's military personnel using lethal weapons, but was careful not to voice her political ideas. She may value the job because it allows her to provide for her children or send money to her parents at home. Or, she may find herself exploited at work, but feel that neither officials in the hierarchy of command nor contractors who are preoccupied with profits will listen to her. She knew that there were other women on the base — female soldiers, female pilots or female sailors; wives of male officers and soldiers; and women who had secretly come to the base for prostitution. But she doesn't think these women are her natural allies.
A military base is a complex microscopic world that depends on different women: (a) women who live on the base, (b) women who work at the base but come home at night, (c) women who live outside the walls but are inseparable from what happens inside the walls and what they do when the men and women in the military go out for entertainment, and (d) women who may live thousands of miles away from the base but connect with the men inside the base almost every day through the Internet. Paying attention to all these women will give people a better understanding of the international politics of military bases.
Today, the United States has more military bases beyond its borders than any other country. One of the reasons why people in many other countries think the United States qualifies as an "empire" is its global network of military bases. Moreover, norms "outside their own borders" ignore military bases on U.S.-controlled islands where residents do not have their own voting commissioners in Congress and do not have the right to vote in U.S. presidential elections. Others may call the islands colonies. Pull out a map or spin your globe to find Guam. The Pacific island of Guam is fast becoming one of the most militarized places on the planet, thanks to the concentration of U.S. troops there in the 21st century. But the fact that most mainlanders will have a hard time finding Guam on a map and rarely consider the men and women who live in Guam only highlights the gendered international political realities that most military bases have: their actions rely on specific patterns of interaction between men and women, and most are defined as "no-go zones" for civilian supervision.
In the late 20th century, the expansion of overseas military bases hit a new high. The Soviets had numerous bases in East Germany, Poland, and throughout the Baltic and Western Asia regions. France and Britain also had bases in their colonies and former colonies. The United States controlled many of the Pacific and Caribbean territories it colonized in the late 19th century, as well as territories seized from Japan at the end of World War II, especially Okinawa. At the same time, its Cold War with the Soviet Union became a reason for the U.S. military to expand its bases in Iceland, Western Europe, Central America, Turkey, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan, with the support of Congress.
Stills from the American drama "The True Colors". The story takes place at a U.S. military base in Italy.
Twenty-five years later, at the beginning of the 21st century, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and most of its bases in the Baltic Sea and Eastern Europe were closed. Today, however, the Russian military has reached an agreement with the Syrian government and some Soviet states to establish military bases on their territory. For example, the large Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Ukraine, and the Russian bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The French government has lost its imperial rule, but it still maintains military bases in several former African colonies, such as Gabon and Senegal, and has opened a new base in Mali. The British Empire had shrunk to a Victorian size, and the British government, which focused on reducing costs, had closed many overseas bases. The British military closed its training base in Belize in 2010, while its base in Germany will be completely closed in 2019.
Occasionally, a shrinking empire simply hands over its old base to a new global power. Thus, in 2001, the Americans took over and expanded Camp Lemonnier, a former French military base in Djibouti, the Horn of Africa. Over the next decade, under the pretext of what Officials in Washington called the "war on terror," the Department of Defense established the Africa Command, a new military command structure based in Italy, to facilitate its operations in Kenya, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Ethiopia. One of its newly established bases is the drone base in Niger. Some of these U.S. bases in Africa are large, well-designed bases, while others are temporary. Each base relies on formal U.S. agreements with the host government, but some are politically weak; allowing U.S. forces to conduct operations on their soil that could jeopardize the government's legitimacy, even though the government has been on the fray.
Similarly, the Pentagon took over and expanded the former British Empire base in Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean territory, forcing local residents to leave their homes. In the Persian Gulf, U.S. forces have bases in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Maintaining friendly relations with these three absolute monarchies means that the U.S. authorities have expressed only lukewarm support for the "Arab Spring" sentiment and pro-democracy movements in these countries.
All of these bases have been or have been gendered continuously. Most bases have men and women in uniform. There are contractors: most of the small bases are male contractors, but there are also female contractors on large bases. The men and women assigned to each base – civilians and military – have links outside the base, and this connection has become more close due to the presence of the Internet, which affects the perception of that person (male or female) about his/her behavior on the base. Even those bases that are deliberately far from local towns stir up socio-cultural ripples and shape locals' gendered understanding of state, modernization, security, and citizenship.
That is, the operation and influence of each base is constructed by the ideas and behaviors of men and women and the specific relationships (intentional and unintentional) between different men and women. In the capital — Washington, Moscow, London, Paris — the commander of each base and his (almost always male) superiors have laid down rules aimed at reinforcing certain notions of masculinity and ideal femininity and managing a great deal of daily interaction between men and women.
Any base — whether of a foreign army or a local army — is militarized, not just because it has soldiers; since most decisions are judged on the basis of a basic criterion, it is militarized: to what extent the proposed rules or practices meet military priorities rather than environmental priorities, civilian democracy priorities, racial justice priorities, national development priorities and women's rights priorities. Every militarized ceremony, rule, and arrangement has the primary goal of the effective functioning of the country's military, including the benign functioning of equipment operated by soldiers, sailors and pilots.
Military bases do not need to be fully militarized. Any base is likely to be urged by the civil administration to achieve other non-military objectives. But it will require civilian officials — and civilians in polling stations — to resist militarized values, the attractiveness of jobs and wealth that militarization brings to the people. Many people are not exposed to these militarized temptations. As long as civilian officials and civilian voters are militarized, they see the military base's first priority as something in their own interest.
Therefore, every basic policy aimed at maintaining military bases needs to take feminism into account. This, in turn, requires an exploration of the gender intent of each policy and its resulting gender implications:
Housing policy
Curfew policy
Civilian Employment Policy
Business Policy
Prostitution policy
Sexually Transmitted Diseases Policy
Marriage policy
Sexual policy
Racial policy
This is only part of a military policy decision, in part to shape masculinity and femininity, as well as to orchestrate the interaction between men and women inside and outside military bases. And much more:
Environmental policy
Policing policy
Judicial policy
Sexual Assault Policy
Healthcare policy
Entertainment policy
Liquor policy
Ethics Policy
Childcare policy
Domestic Violence Policy
Priest policy
Divorce policy
The list would be long if it were made, because managing military bases requires managing a great deal of relationships about gender, race, hierarchy and ethnicity. Each of these military policies ensures that different groups of women should ideally be placed in the military. However, women inside and outside any military base cannot be considered in the same category. From the perspective of commanders and civilian officials, policies for the management of women must be adjusted to take into account their diversity. The categories of women associated with military bases are complex and superimposed: young, single, white, Asian, black, Latino (as categorized by the U.S. military), the elderly, people married to officers, people married to soldiers, single-parent families, parents, salaried, unpaid, officers, soldiers, civilians, paramedics, uniformed, on-base, off-base, respectable, undeserved. Some base policies are designed to ensure that different women do different jobs. Those policies are often effective.
However, gender policy at military bases is neither geographically nor historically fixed. As women moved between groups and perceptions of military service, masculinity, and subtle inter-state alliances changed, so did military officials (uniformed and civilian) the way they did things. While some women radically changed their understanding of themselves, their rights, their interests, and their political capacities, government officials and commanders redesigned or simply adapted their policies to accommodate the changes. Can the ex-wives of generals be dismissed by the military as easily as they were 30 years ago? Can the base commander continue to think that the women who work in the disco near the base will never be united with the country's middle-class feminists?
In this sense, no military base in gender politics is stable, not even those that have been fenced and fenced off for decades that seem to remain stubborn. An analysis of any military base anywhere in the world from a feminist point of view requires looking at it over time through the lens of gender, i.e., looking for persistent beliefs, looking for new meanings, looking for confusion.
Race and sex
The normality of maintaining local military bases is based on fine adjustments to the perceptions of men and women. If local men and foreign men, local women and foreign women do not fit in, the base may lose its normal pretense. It could be the target of nationalist resentment that could upend the structure of the international military alliance. In addition, when a base doesn't seem controversial, gender politics is at work to keep the wind and waves calm. That is, controversies sparked by sexual assault, water pollution discovery, and escalating noise can open the curtain on disguise and reveal often unseen gender dynamics. However, one does not have to wait until after the controversy erupts to explore these dynamics. When day-to-day affairs dominate, one can do a feminist gender analysis of the base. Feminists are always interested in normalcy.
Many Britons believe that their country in the 1980s had become "a friendly, unquestionable, geographically convenient but insignificant launch point for military power" for the United States. They feel that their country, once a global power, is no longer a sovereign state, but a land-based "aircraft carrier" of the U.S. Cold War armed forces. From 1948, when the U.S. Military re-deployed its military forces to post-war Britain to 1986, the U.S. Army established about 130 bases and facilities in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. They did so with the acquiescence of the British government, often in secret. Some of these facilities are just offices that are difficult for casual passers-by to notice. Others, like RAF Base in greenham Commons, Molesworth, Mill Hall and St. Locke, are mature communities with well-designed facilities, heavy weapons and a large workforce.
Most of Britain's larger bases were established by the United States during World War II. These were easier to rebuild during the Cold War because they had become a familiar part of British life in the early 1940s. But even during the Second World War, they could not be taken for granted. Policymakers must develop policies that are racialized and gendered so that the thousands of foreign soldiers who come in are both acceptable to local civilians and do not offend their own domestic voters. In Britain in the 1940s, this meant ensuring that men in Britain and the United States could work together as allies rather than love enemies.
During World War II, a highly controversial topic of policy debate among British and American officers was how to manage relations between African-American male soldiers and British white women. During the war, 130,000 Black American soldiers were stationed in Britain. Although they represented only a small fraction of all the U.S. troops stationed there, they became the focus of heated debate in country bars, in the media, in parliament and in war rooms. When the first soldiers arrived in 1942, the U.S. Army was a segregated institution. However, blacks have become a political force to be reckoned with in the United States; franklin D. Roosevelt's Democratic administration took office thanks to thousands of black voters in northern cities whose support shifted from Republican to Democratic.
British society in 1942 was overwhelmingly (though not all) white, imbued with a sense of imperial superiority before the Asians and Africans under their rule. The British Armed Forces participated in the First World War and in the Second World War, mobilizing troops in India, Africa and the West Indies. During the First World War, when British white male officials tried to wage that early war on the basis of race and gender, they considered it sexually; they had been trying to compensate for the so-called "great war" through a policy of prostitution. After 1920, in the early 1940s, when both the British and U.S. governments sat down to discuss how to ensure that the relationship between African-American men stationed in Britain and white British women strengthened joint operations, the male-dominated government prepared a set of racial rhetoric.
However, white British women have their own ideas. When they dated black American soldiers, they compared African-American men to British white men. British women often find the former more polite, better to get along with, and perhaps more "exotic". By 1943, some white British women had given birth to African-American children. Some choose to marry their black American boyfriends. Some male members of Winston Churchill's cabinet were alarmed, seeing it as a dangerous trend.
High-level discussions began in 1942. Three possible solutions were proposed at the all-white, all-male Cabinet meeting: (1) to prevent the U.S. government from sending any black male soldiers to Britain; (2) to confine African-American soldiers to certain coastal bases in Britain if impossible; or (3) to urge the U.S. armed forces to send more African-American female soldiers and Red Cross volunteers to Britain if all measures did not work, so that black male soldiers would not have to count only on white British women as female companions.
None of these proposals proved feasible. The Allied wars relied so much on the best use of human resources that more than 100,000 American troops could not enter Britain and had to hide in coastal towns. In addition, after the First World War, many white British people opposed black West Indies who had worked as maritime workers in the Port of Liverpool, a post-war experience that showed that coastal segregation did not prevent racial hostility. Finally, the U.S. government refused to send thousands of African-American women to Britain. Naacp leaders made it clear to the Roosevelt administration that they believed such a program did not respect black women: Black women volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army, not as sexual partners. In addition, some Britons consider the plan unwise; white British men may start dating black American women. In the end, only 800 African-American army women were sent to Britain, while others were not sent to Britain until 1945; they were members of the historical 6888th Central Zip Code Battalion.
Meanwhile, British and American officials were developing complex policies for racialized gender relations in wartime Britain, and other male allied officials were also developing policies that would allow the British government to recruit African-Caribbean and Indian women from the West Indies to join the British army without their deployment to break the entrenched apartheid of organizing work and social life in Washington, D.C.
In Britain, in order to discourage white British women from dating black soldiers, various forms such as official and unofficial warnings against local white women were taken. British women dating African Americans stationed at nearby bases were warned they were more likely to develop STDs. Women dating black soldiers were labeled "debauched" or even betrayed Britain. Whenever an African-American soldier violates discipline, the media is likely to specify his race. Local British newspapers say parents are irresponsible if they allow their daughters to play with black GIs.
In the early days of the war, British newspapers and MPs were widely suspicious that black American soldiers were more likely than white soldiers to be charged with sexual crimes such as rape, and if convicted, they would be sentenced to harsher sentences. By 1945, while blacks, the vast majority of whom were men, made up only 8 percent of U.S. troops stationed in Europe, they accounted for 21 percent of all convicted U.S. servicemen. The difference is even more striking when criminal convictions are broken down by category: Black soldiers make up 42 percent of sex offenders. 23 Nevertheless, in August 1942, the British Parliament passed the United States of America (Garrison) Act, which gave the United States authorities the right to try American soldiers who had committed crimes on British territory. It's a step toward allowing Americans to maintain their racial gender system, despite unusual circumstances in wartime.
Many white Americans fear that if wartime Britain allowed sex between black men and white women, it would be more difficult to continue gender segregation in postwar America. However, the warnings of the government and the media have not yielded much success. A British wartime poll conducted in August 1943, The Popular Watch, showed that only one in seven Britons surveyed disapproved of blacks marrying whites; 25 percent of respondents told interviewees that they were more friendly to blacks in part because they saw African-American soldiers. However, until the end of the war, especially after the first babies were given birth to by white British women and black soldiers, it took considerable courage for a young white British woman to go to a local bar with a black soldier.
In these racialized wartime gender debates, U.S. military commanders are not passive. General Dwight Eisenhower, senior U.S. commander in Europe, accepted "black-and-white dating" because he believed the U.S.-Britain alliance could be undermined if white U.S. officers imposed their segregational discriminatory practices against blacks on the Britons. Other U.S. male officers, however, argued that the clashes between white and African-American soldiers in Bristol and Leicester were due to dissatisfaction with the actions of white male soldiers over the black army's "depletion" of the limited resources of local white women. Some U.S. officials are also staunchly opposed to "interracial" marriages and have used their power to prohibit men under their jurisdiction from marrying British women. By the end of world war II, at least sixty thousand British women had applied to American officials to immigrate to the United States because they were war brides. Women whose husbands are black are rarely accepted by the authorities. There appears to be some sort of "gentleman's pact" between middle-level white male officials in Britain and the United States, prohibiting black military personnel from marrying white British women. A black soldier who intended to marry would be transferred, his superiors would have a serious conversation with him, and an American officer or a British official in a relief business would be sent to dissuade the woman.
Who the male soldiers stationed at overseas bases will date and who they will marry remains a question on the minds of U.S. military strategists. Their concern stems mainly from distrust of the motives of local women. U.S. male soldiers who want to marry women from South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Germany are often dissuaded by commanders or military chaplains. Still, women who marry male U.S. soldiers and become wives of U.S. servicemen find that in addition to accepting the pressure of being military wives and following these rules, they must also cope with the attitudes of white U.S. citizens toward them, and that their fellow diaspora in the United States tend to be less welcoming to them. In both cases, all of the outsiders' reactions were based on the common assumption that the women must have met their military husbands while working in discotheques or massage parlors near U.S. bases overseas.
In other words, marriage has become an integral part of international security politics, primarily among military strategists — military and civilian, American, Canadian, British, Russian, Turkic, Japanese — who believe that only some kind of militarized marriage with women in specific jobs can ensure the smooth running of the country's military operations. Not taking marriage politics seriously – and the power exercised on behalf of marriage politics – can make it impossible to fully understand international politics. The international politics of taking military marriage seriously in turn requires genuine curiosity about the lives and minds of different women married to male soldiers.
The "problem" of the military sister-in-law
By the late 1960s, the U.S. military base in Effingham had become an integral part of social and economic life in nearby Long Crendon, a small British village in Essex. The expansion of the base in the 1950s brought about subtle but important changes in the lives of citizens. Americans began hiring local men and women and soon became one of the major employers in the region. As more American soldiers arrived, more wives and children also appeared. Along with these families came American consumption: "The plane to Effingham was filled with refrigerators, washing machines, pressure cookers and microwave ovens, sound equipment, vacuum cleaners, electronic accessories, and even Persian carpets. "Some appliances have made their way into the thriving local second-hand market. Because the U.S. Department of Defense equips the base with everything that makes soldiers feel as if they have never left home, married soldiers prefer to stay at the base, which is influenced by the ideology of American family life.
As U.S. overseas bases multiplied during the Cold War, this continued to serve as a template for base construction throughout the 1990s: suburbs with family homes where grass could be mowed, men were hired as soldiers, and civilian women became unpaid housewives. Betty Friedan, a feminist who has critiqued the trapping of white suburban women in the United States, could have seen the Pentagon's pattern of gendered neighborhoods immediately.
The Cold War and post-Cold War mentality of American military strategists is this: on foreign bases, to make a married soldier happy is to make his wife happy, and if it can't, it needs to be silently endured. For a century, military commanders in Britain and the United States have weighed the pros and cons of allowing soldiers to marry. This calculation can be confusing at times. On the one hand, they found that marriage raised the moral standards of the male military and reduced their alcoholism, debt, and st. agonistic diseases. On the other hand, in a militarized situation, marriage may weaken soldiers' loyalty, making them more slow to mobilize, while leaving soldiers to take responsibility for housing loans, health care, and family harmony. Today, there is still no conclusive jury on military marriage, not only in the United States, but also in other countries, where governments rely on married male soldiers to enforce national security and foreign policy and have the wives of these male soldiers follow the requirements of a "good military sister-in-law."
Stills from the first season of the American drama Homeland.
Despite the ambivalence of commanders, the increasing number of military sisters-in-law and children at military bases after World War II changed the nature of military bases. Military sisters-in-law are no longer as easily marginalized as they were centuries ago, and are seen as inferior "camp followers", relying on serving military operations and cooking and washing clothes for their husbands in exchange for meager rations. There are too many women like this. They are "honorable" women. Because the armed forces of Britain, Canada and the United States now have to recruit – and feed – large numbers of trained male volunteers without the need for compulsory military service, for the forces of these countries, the dissatisfaction of civilian wives with military life can lead to worrying manpower shortages. Disgruntled wives will urge their husbands not to re-register. In the 1960s, washing machines and electronic devices flowing into the U.S. Effingham base showed that the U.S. military was pleasing not only male soldiers, but also soldiers' wives.
By 2010, 700,000 U.S. civilian women were married to active U.S. male servicemen. Some live on overseas bases. There are many people living on or near bases in the United States. By the early 21st century, the U.S. military had become the most married in the country's history: 58.7 percent of active-duty military personnel were married. The highest proportion of married personnel is in the Army and the lowest in the Navy. Of all heterosexual marriages in active U.S. military duty, 6.3 percent of men married female servicemen, while women married male soldiers accounted for 93.7 percent. After the end of the "don't ask, don't say" ban on openly gay and lesbian military personnel (2011), the Pentagon tried to adjust its tactics by responding to the demands of more civilian married couples in same-sex marriages for the same benefits as heterosexual spouses of military personnel.
Many military wives are satisfied with the special benefits offered by living at a military base: low housing costs, discounted shopping, health care, shared values, and for many African-American military wives, they are visibly less racist here than they are living outside of base. Many women who marry male American soldiers also see themselves as models of female patriotism with a spirit of sacrifice because they have to endure military rules, constant moving, de facto single-parent families, prolonged separation of spouses and wartime concerns about their husbands' safety. Some women who are sent with their husbands to large U.S. bases overseas — such as Britain, Germany, South Korea, and Japan — also play the role of informal U.S. ambassadors because they live abroad and want to embody what they see as america's best values through themselves. Their behavior is interpreted in a variety of different ways in host countries, which some locals appreciate, but to others it seems to be just a modernized feminized version of the old imperialism.
For military sisters-in-law who have gained a sense of political mission, a sense of community, a sense of security, and comfort in the life of the base, this comes at a cost: adhering to the military's gender settings for femininity, happy marriages, and hierarchical etiquette. The key to this is the official recognition that the civilian wife will combine her loyalty to her military husband with her uncritical loyalty to the government she serves: the enemy of the army is her enemy, and her husband's rank will determine the level of friendship between her own and her children. Living up to the honor of being a "good military sister-in-law" also means giving up her own professionalism, especially if she marries an officer and fully supports his promotion, the woman will need to engage in hours of unpaid volunteer service. The unpaid labor of the military sister-in-law has turned many bases into working "communities". This kind of feminine, wife-friendly volunteer work plays a more prominent role when women follow their husbands to overseas bases, as the chances of military sisters-in-law obtaining paid employment overseas and pursuing their careers are particularly slim.
From the early days of the Cold War to the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military base commanders and their civilian superiors counted on most women to believe that the satisfaction of being a gratuitous, loyal military sister-in-law outweighed the frustration.
So, in the 1980s, the wives and ex-wives of a group of male American military officers began organizing, politically experienced, to speak openly about what they saw as unfair to the Pentagon's gender-political marriage system, which surprised and resented the outside world. The women found supporters in Congress, particularly Rep. Patricia Schroeder, a Democrat from Denver. The sisters-in-law avoid talking about the foreign policy of the U.S. government, and they talk about spousal welfare and divorce rules.
Among the early activists were older women who met the criteria of "good military sister-in-law", many of whom worked pro bono work for up to 20 years at countless bases, which was considered a plus when their officer husbands were promoted. The women found that when their husbands filed for divorce in order to marry a younger woman, they not only lost their marriage, but also their housing, health insurance benefits and shop discounts. Pentagon officials argue that husbands filing for divorce do not have to calculate the benefits these women enjoy on the base when calculating divorce alimony. At first, according to Carolyn Becraft, a politically active military sister-in-law, the anger of divorced women focused on young women who were about to marry their officer husbands. But when they got together to analyze the situation and political messages, they realized that the new wife wasn't the problem, but the Pentagon official. The women concluded that the officials were more concerned with the economic security of male officers than with those of their civilian wives. The result of their lobbying was a Congressional order to change the benefits the Pentagon gave to military spouses and ex-spouses.
Soon after, in the history of gender-political marriage in the U.S. military, women who volunteered at bases in the U.S. and abroad began talking openly about domestic violence and about male soldier husbands beating their wives. While few of these women call themselves feminists, many are fully aware of the masochistic women's movement that is emerging in the United States. They learned that being abused is not something a woman should be ashamed of or suffer in silence. However, military bases are an environment that is difficult to change, and here this type of violence is often legitimized. 38 First, most of the base commanders — and their superiors in Washington — didn't want to hear about it. They have many other priorities to consider and address. They expected the sisters-in-law to cope. Second, there are these officials, who usually think that male soldiers only do that out of pressure, and that pressure is all there is to be a soldier. Third, publicizing domestic violence at the base tarnishes the base's reputation, which will hurt the base commander's next chances of promotion. Finally, and importantly, allowing domestic violence by soldiers to become a public incident can raise a persistently thorny issue: the culture of violence that breeds in the military. This is certainly not something that senior officials want to explore in the wider public sphere.
Trying to break the silence that masks violence against women has always been a challenge. It's harder to break the culture of gender silence at military bases. It is clear that women's silence is the backbone of U.S. national security.
Despite the obstacles, women working with military sisters-in-law succeeded in getting members of the Armed Forces of Congress, particularly women in Congress, to pressure the Ministry of Defence to acknowledge the fact that domestic violence was perpetrated by male soldiers. Plus, as activists will find out, a decade later, when they try to get senior officers to admit that they were complicit in incidents of sexual violence by male soldiers against female soldiers, the military still stubbornly prioritizes the value of male soldiers and wants women to remain silent.
Today, thousands of women married to male soldiers live on numerous U.S. Department of Defense bases at home and abroad. The largest bases include Camp Pendleton, California, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, McHold, Louisburg, Washington, Fort Hood, Texas, Naval Air Station virginia, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Fort Carson, Colorado. The gender characteristics of these bases are the same as those of the United States in South Korea, Turkey, Japan, Guam, Djibouti and Germany. The long wars waged by the Government in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought disasters, and women living as military sisters-in-law in or around these domestic bases often find it difficult to remain silent, since in Iraq and Afghanistan bases were not built to provide shelter for military spouses and children. Many of these women participate in the Wives' Association, but their activities are often structured by the cautionary influence of the wives of senior military officers and the expectations of the base commanders;
In the current political era, U.S. military wives living at or around domestic bases, despite these pressures, continue to speak out publicly, including some women whose husbands have fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, physically and mentally devastated. These civilian women have become the face of many domestic military bases, demanding that base commanders be transparent, treat women well, give women resources and be honest in their handling of matters. These women shattered expectations of silence in the military sister-in-law, not only more clearly indicating the actual costs of the two wars, but also exposing their injustice by passing these costs on to civilian family members of the military.
After 9/11, during President Bush's administration, a new concept was developed at U.S. bases overseas— the lily pad. "Water Lily Base" refers to overseas bases with little influence that still requires a formal agreement with the local host government, but has less "coverage" of social and cultural impact. No suburban homes, no lawns, no bowling leagues, no golf courses, no discos outside the gates, no wives.
For many locals living around U.S. overseas bases, they seem to like this change in the "water lily base" model. The burden of the social and cultural impact of the base will be reduced. There is no unorthodox entertainment area outside the "Water Lily Base" that attracts male soldiers after work. There will also be fewer American armored vehicles galloping through the busy streets of civilian towns. But the Pentagon's motivation seems to be less sensitivity to local issues than to escape the feminine dimension of the Big Cold War-era bases. At the same time, the "water lily base" is unlikely to be the main target of local anti-base protests. For the thousands of women who are married to American soldiers, one consequence of the Pentagon's "water lily base" strategy is that more husbands will be sent farther from home for longer. In fact, military sisters-in-law who have already endured the single mother model will have to bear more.
Political weaknesses discourage sisters-in-law who try to change sexist policies in the lives of military bases, in part because of the polarization of the roles of women in military bases, some as military sisters-in-law, civilian base workers, military personnel, and others as prostitutes around military bases. The male military elite treats these four categories of women differently, and they usually have the same distinctions about themselves. Women soldiers who launched the Twenty-First Century Campaign to make sexual assault a national problem can learn a lot by resorting to active military sisters-in-law and military prostitutes to obtain analysis and strategic advice.
The safety of female soldiers
Any military base — whether domestic or overseas — is a place to cultivate and reward some form of masculinity, belittle or punish other forms. Instructors are often the primary shapers and enforcers of ideal militarized masculinity — that is, a way of expressing one's masculinity, which makes military life, especially combat life, whether real or imaginary, the primary criterion for judging one's behavior and attitude. This particular approach usually prioritizes resilience, skill in fighting, assumptions about enemies, gay maleity, repression of one's own emotions, and discipline (being disciplined and asking others to do so). In addition to instructors, many different characters at the base also played their part in shaping and encouraging certain militarized male attitudes and behaviors: priests, psychiatrists, commanders, mid-level officers, and even wives. Actors outside the base also glorify some forms of masculinity while mocking others: fathers, legislators, media commentators, entertainers.
Nor is the form of privilege that militarizes masculinity a single one. The forms of training and reward for militarized masculinity vary from country to country, with militarized masculinity in some countries being developed to serve international peacekeeping, some to accomplish humanitarian missions, and others to enhance combat capabilities. We now know that these differences and commonalities need to be investigated, for example, the different male traits that are privileged and glorified in the armed forces of Ireland, Japan, Nigeria, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Korea, Brazil, Israel, Bangladesh, Fiji and Canada. Each of these militarized male norms is applied in specific domestic and foreign operations.
Whether in Texas or Bahrain, a military woman has a personal stake in documenting and understanding which masculine model is the most popular on her base. Knowing this will make her life meaningful and safe, and not knowing this will jeopardize her career and personal safety.
Military women are in fact always in the minority, sometimes a very small minority, of all uniformed personnel at national military bases. With the end of the Cold War and many governments gradually ending the recruitment of men into the military (what Americans call "conscription"), national defense strategists and their legislative partners had to find ways to increase the number of women recruited to government forces without compromising the military's precious image as a place where men could prove their manhood. In 2013, the highest proportion of women in the military was in Ukraine, Latvia, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Israel, South Africa and the United States. Understanding every army — the one with the highest proportion of women and the one with the lowest proportion (such as Russia, Japan, China, and Turkey) — requires studying not only how women in uniform show pride, patriotism, and camaraderie, but also how they are sexually harassed and assaulted.
In the United States, the proportion of women in active-duty military personnel rose from 2 percent during the Vietnam War in the 1970s to 14.5 percent when troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011. The service with the highest proportion of women in active service is the Air Force (which relies mainly on female soldiers), which accounts for 19 per cent. The department with the lowest percentage (and the one most resistant to women joining the military) was the Marine Corps, at 6.8 percent.
For female soldiers belonging to different social classes, ethnic groups or racial groups, the gender politics of any military can be very different. African-American women stand out among women in the current U.S. military: While African-American women make up only 12 percent of the nation's female population, in 2011 they made up 17.2 percent of active-duty officers and 29.6 percent of active-duty soldiers. Looking further at the differences between the military branches in particular, it was surprising to note that in the same year, 39.1 percent of women among active-duty soldiers were African-American women. That is more than three times the proportion of women in the country's civilian population.
In contrast, Hispanic women, who make up about 15 percent of the U.S. population, seem more likely to choose other departments when volunteering for the military. The proportion of Hispanic women among all active-duty women has steadily increased since 1990, the result of deliberate recruitment by the Pentagon, which reached the highest percentage among Marine Corps soldiers: 19.6 percent. In 2011, Asian and Pacific Islander American women made up only 4 percent of the U.S. female population, but they made up 20 percent of the total number of Navy soldiers.
As a result of 30 years of lobbying by women in the U.S. military, especially female officers such as Naval pilot Rosemary Mariner, who have worked with women members of the House and Senate, the Department of Defense has gradually (often reluctantly) opened up more and more military positions to women. 44 American civilian feminists are often ambivalent about investing limited resources in challenging sexism within the military because they prioritize anti-war movements, fearing that promoting female soldiers to "first-class citizens" would deepen the roots of already powerful militarism deeper in their countries' cultural soil. Still, one obstacle to women's military training and deployment has been removed since 1990; the most recent change was when the Pentagon lifted the ban on women's combat roles in 2013. The U.S. military did not take the lead. The armies of the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are ahead of the United States in ending the sexist ban on female soldiers in the work of ending the Pentagon's classification (changing minds and then reclassifying) as "fighting", and it remains to be seen how the open combat role for women will be practiced in the United States. The formal rules for changing any system are only the beginning of its gender transition, and there is no guarantee in itself that it will significantly reduce the patriarchal overtones of institutional culture.
While organized barriers to gender discrimination have been lowered, there has been a reported surge in sexual assaults by male servicemen in the United States against female and male servicemen. Some feminist analysts have loudly questioned whether the increase in reports of violence against women in the U.S. military is due in part to the increase in the percentage of female soldiers and their gradual promotion to the most masculine occupations in the military. As in many other areas of society, some men express their dissatisfaction with women's continued advancement in this field by calling women "invaders", because until then, these high-level fields had been firmly in the hands of men. Other feminists warn that the surge in sexual assault reports should be treated differently from the actual incidence. In the past, they said, many female soldiers had silently endured rape and attempted rape, believing that it was unsafe and useless to tell the story of sexual assault for the authorities to record. Paying close attention to silence in any area of international politics is a crucial investigative strategy.
Combating violence against women has been a central issue for women advocates since the 1970s, and even those cautious feminist peace activists working for women's military equality are unambiguous when such incidents occur in the military. It's not just a matter of militarizing careers or promotions. So by 2013, a nationwide campaign organized by women activists brought together women military personnel, civilian feminists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and women working in Congress to challenge the Department of Defense and the entire chain of command. At the same time, they focus on military academies and specific military bases (e.g., Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas). They forced the Veterans Administration to broaden its self-perception considerably, a large federal agency that in the past generations of administrators thought they were only serving male veterans. In response to the growing number of female veterans in the middle of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women veterans were seen as post-sexual assault victims, and health professionals at the Department of Veterans Affairs scrambled to develop a new medical concept. They eventually decided to call it "military trauma." The Department of Veterans Affairs has subsequently established specialized clinics throughout the country to provide care specifically for female veterans who have suffered "military trauma" (groups of post-traumatic stress disorder). According to these medical professionals, the "military trauma" was caused by the rape of a fellow male soldier.
As political activity for sexual violence within the U.S. military intensified, the Department of Defense was forced to release a report reporting both the incidence of sexual assault and the findings of those that assessed the actual incidence of sexual assault. It is estimated that reported sexual assault is just the tip of the iceberg, with 19,000 military personnel sexually assaulted by their U.S. military colleagues in fiscal year 2011 alone (October 1, 2010 to September 30, 2011). In fiscal 2012, that number jumped to 26,000. Most of these U.S. military personnel said they had been violated by male servicemen, usually by their superiors. In this era, men accounted for 85 per cent of the total number of active duty. Although women make up only 15 percent of U.S. active-duty military personnel, the proportion of assaulted far exceeds that. As a result, women in the military are more likely than men to be targeted for military violence. Most women and men who have been sexually assaulted do not report such incidents. Male victims told reporters that it was women who stood up to tell the story of rape that gave them the courage to overcome this stigma and tell their stories publicly.
Women in the garrison recounted their experiences of sexual assault at night when they went to the toilet, when they slept in their barracks, and when they met with superior officers in their offices, either on record or without record. Later, debates began around the long-cherished philosophy of U.S. military officers that the military's hierarchy itself — not civilian criminal justice authorities — was best placed to investigate, prosecute, try, and punish its own personnel. In reality, however, the Chain of Command has erected another, less conspicuous barrier around the isolated military base. Many female survivors of rape see it as a double barrier that jeopardizes their safety.
Former Army Sergeant Rebekah Havrilla told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2013 that she was raped by her male superiors while being sent to Afghanistan in 2007. She did not report him: "I don't report anything because I don't have confidence in my chain of command. However, Sergeant Havelila discussed the matter with the army chaplain at his base. He replied, "Rape is God's will. "He asked her to go to church.
Former U.S. Army Sergeant Rebecca Havelila, image from The New York Times.
Two related issues are often not discussed in the debate on how to effectively prevent and prosecute sexual violence within the U.S. military. First, what is the causal link ( if any ) between sexual violence perpetrated by men within the military and sexual violence perpetrated by male U.S. military personnel against civilian women living around military bases in the United States and abroad? Second, how do different men in the military understand the masculine perception that women are the property of male domination, and they are said to be affirming their masculinity while maintaining male superiority in certain institutions.
The two questions are related: answering one of them will help answer the other. The failure to raise – and fail to answer – these two related feminist questions means that male politics has been militarized. It also means that women in U.S. military presences are not united with women in other countries where women are abused because U.S. soldiers are stationed abroad. In most cases, sexual violence within the military is seen as a mere domestic problem. In fact, this is a change in international politics.
Sex scandals and international gender politics
For at least the past two centuries, the sexual relationship between male soldiers and women – one that other men have tried to control – has been a thread running through international politics. These sexual relationships include dating, dating, marriage, buying sex, and compulsive sex. The lines between these five different relationships are often blurred, but in other cases they are highly valued. Curiously, mainstream investigators in international politics rarely explore this multifaceted topic, making headlines only when it explodes into a "scandal." However, mere topics that are seen as scandals rarely change traditional understandings of what is "international" and what is "political."
Military bases and prostitutes are considered interrelated and are a "natural" pair, so they are not worthy of political investigation. In fact, military bases have adopted deliberate policies to maintain this so-called fit: policies that shape men's sexual orientation, ensure readiness, regulate business practices, create economic opportunities for women, influence military sisters-in-law, socialize female soldiers, and design policing, recreation, and public health systems. Shockingly, these policies have been successfully obscured in most bases, particularly in the United States.
In the 20th century, the governments of France, Japan, the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, and Canada all attempted to sexually control women through military and civilian initiatives, maintaining the legitimacy of the military while ensuring the morale and health of male soldiers. The Imperial Japanese Army forced Women from Korea/Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia to perform sexual services in their military "comfort stations", allegedly to raise the morale of male soldiers, perhaps the most famous system of forced prostitution in World War II.
At the same time, it was this "World War II" system that gave rise to the concept of "sexual slavery", a concept proposed by Korean feminists in the 1990s. They believed that such militarized forced prostitution should be considered a war crime, and they succeeded. Shortly thereafter, the concept of "sexual slavery" was crucial for transnational feminists working to expose specific types of sexual military abuse that formed part of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. That is to say, women who are forced to become "wives" of warriors and subjected to constant sexual assault are not their wives or prostitutes, they are victims of "sexual slavery". These same feminist political and legal activists continue to advocate for governments to recognize "sexual slavery" internationally as an indictable and punishable war crime. It was their conceptualization and persuasion that made "sexual slavery" explicitly listed as one of the war crimes indictable by the newly established International War Crimes Court in The Hague.
However, the infamous imperial Japanese "comfort women" system was certainly not the only prostitution system in World War II and the system that established its post-war political occupation. But it is only now, 60 years after the end of the war, which americans still call the "war of justice," that we begin to understand the work of American officials in making prostitution and prostitutes serve the war and postwar occupation. Acknowledging that prostitution policies also existed among U.S. officials during World War II should not dilute the condemnation of the Imperial Japanese Army's "comfort women" system. Rather, it should promote a sensitive, feminist, transnational, comparative investigation of the politics of sex in any war.
During World War II, U.S. officials attempted to establish a system of racialized military prostitution, including the establishment of brothels for African-American male soldiers around U.S. military bases in postwar Germany, postwar South Korea, and postwar Japan, separate from those designated for white male soldiers— the famous Hotel Street in wartime Hawaii. Similarly, the feminist historian Mary Louise Roberts found evidence that after the invasion of Normandy, France, American male soldiers and their superiors made everyone think that France was a selfish and abusive country, and subsequently established a segregated brothel. One of the most devastating political consequences was that many post-war French women were insecure because of their gender, and they were exactly what American men called "liberating." That is to say, Washington officially believes that the era of US military occupation in the mid-to-late 1940s was an era of liberation and democratization, and in fact, the era of active development of racial prostitution policies in the United States.
The end of World War II did not mark the end of prostitution in the U.S. military. Feminist activists and researchers in South Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines have been telling us how prostitution continued to be racialized in the U.S. military during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the post-9/11 global war on terror. Many male military commanders have always firmly believed that the military-tolerated, organized prostitution is protecting "decent" women. Takazato Suzuyo and his companions who founded the feminist group Okinawa Women's Anti-Military Violence have spent years documenting violence by U.S. military personnel against civilian women and girls in an attempt to break this self-serving military myth.
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