GENDER AND MILITARY CULTURE LIVES, BODIES AND SOCIAL CONTROL UNDER WAR REPORT no. 30 REPORT no. 30 GENDER AND MILITARY CULTURE Lives, bodies and social control under war Nora Miralles Crespo Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau Barcelona, November 2016 Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau Carrer Erasme de Janer 8, entresol, despatx 9 08001 Barcelona T. 93 441 19 47 www.centredelas.org
[email protected] Barcelona, November 2016 Graphic design: Esteva&Estêvão Cover photo: US Army soldier in Afganistan (Nicholas Loyd) D.L.: B-19745-2010 ISSN: 2013-8032 REPORT no. 30 Gender and military culture 4 GENDER AND MILITARY CULTURE REPORT Lives, bodies and social control under war no. 30 INDEX EXECUTIVE SUMMARY INTRODUCTION . 7 When militarism enters a society, it mobilizes all the material resources available in the service of war, including human resources. At the same time, war needs a 1 . MILITARISM, NEW WARS determined economic, political and moral base to be carried out, and values and AND THE VALUE OF LIFE . 8 capacities that generate a society willing to surrender, sustain and nourish it. That is, people willing to die and kill in defence of the state or motherland, and people 2 . MILITARISM AND GENDER: willing to assume the reproduction, upbringing and care of the former for free. A PROFITABLE RELATION . 10 Generalization of violence, life And in this process of generating identities aimed at waging war, militarism will defencelessness and moral rupture .....11 take advantage of structures already created, such as gender roles and hierar- Other consequences: military chies or the sexual division of labour, which reserves for men the exercise of expenditure, public investment political power in the public domain and leaves women in the private sphere, and institutional exclusion .............13 while naturalizing their assumption of reproductive tasks.