Bring Me Men Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898-2001

by Belkin, Aaron

• ISBN13: 9780199328000
• ISBN10: 0199328005
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The masculinity of those who serve in the American military would seem to be indisputable, yet it is full of contradictions. To become a warrior, one must renounce those things in life that are perceived to be unmasculine. Yet at the same time, the military has encouraged and even mandated warriors to do exactly the opposite.

Bring Me Men explores these contradictions in great detail and shows that their invisibility has been central to the process of concealing the darkest secrets of American empire. By examining case studies that expose these contradictions--the phenomenon of male-on-male rape at the US Naval Academy, for example, as well as historical and contemporary attitudes toward cleanliness and filth--Belkin utterly upends our understanding of the relationship between warrior masculinity and American empire and the fragile processes sustaining it.

Author Biography

Aaron Belkin is Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University and Director of the Palm Center, University of California. He was a MacArthur Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford. He has published more than twenty-five books, chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles, most recently United We Stand? Divide and Conquer Politics and the Logic of International Hostility.