University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: September 22, 2005

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Contributor

Increased militarization in recent years is a growing threat to women's rights, the keynote speaker at the Conference on Military Culture and Gender said.

"Militarization is a process by which anyone, anything, any social institution becomes more dependent on militarized values," said Cynthia Enloe, professor of International Development and Women's Studies at Clark University, speaking on Sept. 15 at the leadoff event of the conference, organized by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy in the UB Law School. "Anything can become militarized when it becomes valuable by serving military goals."

"More aspects of American culture are being militarized than ever before," she added.

According to Enloe, militarization can pressure women's rights advocates into employing military arguments as a means to an end. Such tactics can be successful, but ultimately counterproductive and dangerous. It can encourage people to view women's rights as something subordinate to the "real issue," she said.

She cited an example from the late 1980s in which the House Armed Services Committee was persuaded to take cases of sexual assault seriously only after advocates argued that, according to Enloe, "allowing rampant, uncharged sexual harassment was a threat to national security and military readiness."

"Today, it is all too common to make the argument that the reason we should pay attention to women in the military is because it is a question of national security," she said.

"That is dangerous," Enloe continued. "It is very dangerous to tie women's rights to some other goal that's not about women's rights. That's militarization. Militarization can come from people who devoutly and energetically care about women if they are in a culture or a society that holds so highly aloft a militarized notion of national well-being that the only way to justify anything is to put it in that context.

"In so far as that is true in the United States, the United States' society in 2005 has become deeply militarized."

Depicting service in the armed forces as a form of empowerment in order to get women to enlist is another form of militarization, Enloe noted.

In addition, militarization can foster an "us versus them" mentality. It encourages governments to turn down participation in international efforts, she said, blaming militarization for the Bush Administration's failure to sign treaties on landmines, non-nuclear proliferation and children's rights.

Issues of nationalism or "patriotism" are closely related to militarization, she added. In other countries, nationalist movements have reduced community, privileged masculinity and silenced women, she said.

Enloe, a leading feminist scholar and authority on issues of gender, ethnicity and militarization, has served on advisory boards for the Boston Consortium on Gender and the Gender and Security Project of the National Council for Research on Women. She is the author of "Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarization of Women's Lives."

During her lecture, she reflected on some of the great challenges that have faced scholars interested in the military and gender.

Political science was a male-dominated field in the 1960s, and there were no women's studies courses before the early 1970s, Enloe said, noting the first was at San Diego State University.

In the early 1980s, issues of women and the military continued to go unacknowledged, she said. Enloe spoke about her experience in 1982 at a conference organized by the Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, an institution focused on political issues affecting African Americans. Organized by Edward Dorn, now dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, conference attendees included representatives of the NAACP and Urban League, civil-rights leader Mary Francis Berry and Les Aspin, who went on to become President Clinton's Secretary of Defense from 1993-94.

However, none of the experts gathered to debate issues of race in the military introduced the topic of gender, Enloe said—despite the fact that 46 percent of all women enlisted in the army at the time were African American. Most people still weren't thinking about gender in 1982, she explained.

"Their way of talking about race and racism in the U.S. military was to assume that the only people who were interesting were men," said Enloe. "They couldn't imagine that if you paid particular attention to the experience and ideas of women in the military, you learn something about the men in the military.

"If you take seriously women in the military, you begin to understand the ways that ideas about masculinity have shaped the entire institution," she added, noting that the same principle applies to all institutions, including hospitals, universities and law firms, as well as the military.

"By ignoring women, you make them invisible," she said.