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Gender Ideologies and Military Labor Markets in the U.S. offers a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between changes in military gender ideologies and structural changes in U.S. military and society. By investigating how social and military change have influenced gender ideologies, the author develops an approach that (re-)connects military gender ideologies to the social conditions of their production and distribution and explains their transformation as effects of changing social and political relations and conflicts. Examining the role of different groups o.

AbstractThis article assesses the implications of the shifting market-state relationship for feminism in the neoliberal era. In a case study of the private military and security industry as an actor that is uniquely positioned at the intersections of security governance and global markets, the analysis combines feminist security studies' critique of securitized gender discourses and feminist global political economy scholarship on corporate-led equality initiatives. Based on a critical discourse analysis of documents from industry and nongovernmental organizations, such as codes of conduct and policy recommendations, I argue that the discourses on gender put forward in the context of security privatization merge securitized and marketized discourses to the effect that the emancipatory potential of "gender" is further curtailed, raising new challenges for feminist knowledge in powerful organizations. The article thus contributes to the critical gender research on private security, debates on the neoliberalization and securitization of feminism, and the integration of feminist security studies and feminist global political economy.

The concept of masculinities has been central to the analysis of private security as a gendered phenomenon. This research has either focused on the identity constructions and practices of security contractors as men or on masculinity as a theoretical and ideological framework for making sense of security outsourcing. This article aims to overcome this dualism by developing a relational, strategic, and discursive understanding of masculinities and focusing on the gendering strategies that create them. These strategies are identified as masculinization of the market and feminization of the state, feminization and racialization of (some) security work, hypermasculinization as a critical or affirmative discourse, romanticizing the autonomous male bond, and militarization of private security. It is argued that private security as well as critical discourses on it integrate business, humanitarian, and militarized masculinities in a way that ultimately legitimizes masculinism and reconstructs masculinity as a privileged category in international politics.

This article examines the gendered implications of military privatization and argues that the outsourcing of military functions to the private sector excludes women from newly developing private military labour markets, impedes gender equality policies and reconstructs masculinist gender ideologies. This process constitutes a remasculinization of the state, in the course of which the nexus between state-sanctioned violence and masculinity is being reaffirmed. Recent research has introduced the concept of masculinity to the study of the private security sector. Building upon these approaches, the article integrates feminist theories of the state into the research field and evaluates their potential contributions to the analysis of military privatization. In an exemplary case study of the US military sector, this privatization is embedded within debates on the neo-liberal restructuring of the state and addressed as a gendered process through which the boundaries between the public and the private are being redrawn. The implications of these transformations are investigated at the levels of gender-specific labour division, gender policy and gender ideologies.

The article investigates the relevance of foreign policy discourse and practice for military gender relations. The link between women's status in military institutions and the gendering of foreign policy has so far not been thoroughly addressed in military and gender research or foreign policy analysis. Feminist international relations provides a research strategy to show how foreign policy doctrines and debates are gendered and how they are connected to gender (in)equality in central state institutions such as the military. The article thus applies feminist international relations as a theoretical framework that transcends the constructed dichotomy between national and international levels of analysis. In a case study of the USA from the Clinton to the Obama administrations, patterns of military gender integration are established as a phenomenon incorporating both domestic and international dimensions. Foreign policy discourses and practices in this time period are related to shifts in military gender policies and discourses on gender integration. It is argued that the gender order in military institutions is linked to international politics and state behaviour in the international arena.

"Forschungen zu Krieg und Geschlecht werden oftmals von Begrifflichkeiten wie 'Subjektivität', 'Identität', 'Konstruktion' und 'symbolische Repräsentation' angeleitet (Seifert 1996; 2003; Cockburn 1998). Strukturen, Institutionen, sozioökonomische Verhältnisse - kurzum: die materiellen Grundlagen von Gesellschaft - werden kaum systematisch in die Analyse einbezogen. Dieser Beitrag überprüft die Hypothese, dass der Wandel militärischer Geschlechterideologien auf materielle Faktoren zurückzuführen ist, insbesondere auf Veränderungen geschlechtsspezifischer Arbeitsteilung im militärischen und zivilen Bereich, die Folgen von Technologisierung und Spezialisierung von Ökonomie und Kriegsführung sind. Dies geschieht anhand einer theoriegeleiteten, exemplarischen Untersuchung der Darstellung von US-Soldatinnen in The New York Times in den Jahren 1990 bis 2005." (Autorenreferat)

Research on war & gender is often guided by categories such as "subjectivity," "identity," "construction," & "symbolic representation." Social structure, institutions, socioeconomic relations -- in short: the material base of society are rarely incorporated into research systematically. This article examines the impact of material factors, especially of gender specific divisions of labor in the civilian & military spheres, on gender ideologies. The article analyzes reporting on U.S. military women in The New York Times from 1990 to 2005 to show how social conditions influence cultural representations of masculinity & femininity. Adapted from the source document.