Michael Eisenbrey—Response 4

QUESTION

Does Joanne Nagel make an adequately broad analysis of the “military-sexual complex” in her essay “Sex and War”?

ABSTRACT

Nagel’s analysis makes sexual violence, at least where the military is concerned, more about ethnicity than gender, and elides a history (and a current serious problem) of intra-ethnic sexual violence in the military and in spaces associated with the military.

BODY

Both David Grazian and Joanne Nagel explore ways in which male (mostly hetero-) sexual activity is an intragender performance which serves as much to “reinforce dominant sexual myths and expectations of masculine behavior, boost confidence in one’s performance of masculinity and heterosexual power, and assist in the performance of masculinity in the presence of women” (Grazian 221) as to achieve sexual or romantic goals. In Nagel’s case, however, there is another component—sexual performance (particularly sexual exploitation and violence) are, in her estimation, about ethnic supremacy more than gender dominance.

The title of this chapter of Nagel’s book is, all-encompassingly, “Sex and War,” and she promises in the second paragraph to “survey the ways that sexuality is deployed in military missions and the uses of sexual technologies in making war and keeping the peace” (177), but her focus ends up being exclusively on the ethnic dimensions of the “military-sexual” arena. She presents the “military-sexual complex” as a space of ethnosexual conflict in which the soldiers of one nation or group meet the sex workers of the Other, or in which they rape the Other as a kind of sexual mirror of military conflict between dissimilar groups. She paints this sexual exploitation and violence as being instrumental, as when she explains that “raping local women is a spoil of war…[and] also a technique of terror and warfare designed to dominate and humiliate enemy men” (181). Notably, this instrumental use of sexual violence is directed not at women as a gender, but rather at the men of the Other ethnicity.

Her insistence on the instrumentality of sexual violence in warfare or in other military contexts is problematic. She writes that “casualties of ethnosexual assaults are not collateral damage associated with military campaigns; they are designated targets of sexual attack…they are the sexual means to an ethnic end, a sexual stopover on the path toward a final solution” (193). Certainly it is true that this can be the case, and some of the most horrific incidents of mass rape in recent history have taken place during ethnically charged conflicts, with the tacit approval or even outright encouragement of military leaders, but sexual exploitation and violence by military men doesn’t stop where ethnic boundaries do. What about the women and men subjected to sexual violence in the course of civil wars (at least, ones fought on ideological as opposed to ethnic lines, e.g. in Peru or Nicaragua) or those assaulted or raped by their own countrymen, as many women serving in the US military have been in recent years? The cultural and masculine ideals of the military, the lawlessness of combat zones and other areas under military control, and a long history of violence as an instrument of enforcing sex roles should all be considered in the discussion of sex and war; ethnic conflict is only one part among many.

DMU Timestamp: April 18, 2012 21:11