What is more masculine than war?
One is hard pressed to find an answer. War has often, historically, cross-culturally, and transnationally, served as a conduit for the expression of a robust manhood. The history of western culture, particularly, is filled with representations of masculinity as a pretext for war. Teddy Roosevelt, advocate of the “Strenuous Life” and American President, formed a group of Rough Riders and charged San Juan Hill (supposedly) to display to his country his highest manhood. Or, one need only think of the recurring use of or reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V in both rousing national sentiment or readying boys for war: “gentlemen in England now-a-bed/ Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here / And hold their manhoods cheap..."[1] Such "goose-bump" giving speeches with ensuing manly heroic war triumph saturate the cycle of production and consumption of representations that constitute what is "manly" or "masculine."
But why is that so? War can be seen as an expression of masculinity perhaps because predominately (though not exclusively) the chief agents of battle—those who fought, died, and were memorialized by their nations—have been men. The logic of this argument reveals the importance of the age-old notion of differences in gender that holds men as active, domineering and women as passive and submissive. Based on the persistence of these basic assumptions of male domineering and female passivity, and the creation of separate worldly spheres for men (work) and women (home), men have been placed at the very center of discussions of war--indeed they are privileged as the very active agents of its being carried out. This leads to the question of how and why men have been used as the primary instruments of war. Women, overwhelmingly, have been excluded from the field of battle but nevertheless, and of course, have been active participants in the process of war. Is it because, as some may argue, since the moment humans stepped out of their primordial ooze men went about hunting and women went about gathering? And when other hunters infringed upon hunting ground, men were responsible for fighting them off? Or is it the articulation and rearticulation of dominantly expressed cultural views of gender in instrinsically different ages marked as "modern" versus "pre-modern" or "postmodern"? The answer lay in seeking to understand first that gender is constructed socially, produced and consumed culturally. Second, we must see gender, particularly its various defining characteristics such as "manhood" or "masculinity," as a category of difference in cultural expression that, through war, is brought to the fore of society. War has shaped and been shaped by concepts of gender.[2]
Perhaps the most striking evidence of the role of concepts of gender in war can be found in “the war to end all wars.” With the advent of consumer and commercial culture around the turn of the twentieth century, new and emerging forms of mass communication altered the manner in which individuals gained a sense of the collective. During the Great War, posters, post-cards, photographs, and even government sponsored moving pictures communicated to the broader public its role and the role of each nation in the conflict. The use of propaganda in this process revealed the entanglement of political culture, consumer culture, and military mobilization. From these new forms of communicating the “nation” and the concepts of class and gender embedded within them, print culture of WWI fashioned identities that displayed the intersection of these important categories of difference.
[1] St. Crispen's Day Speech, Shakespeare's HENRY V, available at: http://www.chronique.com/Library/Knights/crispen.htm
[2] Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge University Press, September 2001) Chapter 1.
