Book Review: Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898-2001

• Date: 01 April 2015
• Published date: 01 April 2015
• Author: Clayton Fordahl
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X14529253
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Aaron Belkin. 2012. Bring Me Men: MilitaryMasculinity and the Benign Fac¸ade of American Empire,

1898-2001. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 256 pp. $25.00(paperback).

ISBN: 9780199327607

Reviewed by: Clayton Fordahl, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X14529253

Departing from the understanding that masculinity is both ubiquitous and resolute in

the military, Aaron Belkin’s Bring Me Men offers a timely and necessary rejoinder.

Challenging popular wisdom, Belkin suggests that masculinity in the American mil-

itary has seldom existed as a fixed, exclusive category. Rather, military institutions

have, in a variety of circumstances, incorporated the feminine and the queer into the

practice of masculine identity.

In suggesting that military masculinity emerges through the fusion of binary

identities, Belkin offers up a provocative thesis. The book’s enduring contribution

will likely be the cases deployed to support this argument—as a catalogue of

organizational depravity, this book is perhaps without equal. It analyzes systematic

hazing of cadets in the nation’s military academies, the enduring and widespread

occurrence of rapeacross military branches, the bizarre ‘‘crossing the line’’ equatorial

ceremony practicedaboard US Navy ships, and the well-documented instances of tor-

ture and sadism carried out by US soldiers at prisons in Iraq. Belkin also emphasizes

the contradictions bundled together in each of these cases. In instances of hazing and

rites of passage, he argues that the many ways in which initiates are penetrated—

literally and figuratively—empower the initiators and contribute to the reproduction

of rank and hierarchy.The perpetrator in such ritualsgarners masculine status through

dominance. In these initial passages, Belkin illustrates the ways in which masculinity

and hierarchyare co-constitutive. Throughthese and other instances, Belkin illustrates

the ways in which military masculinity emerges from the fusion of supposedly

opposed binaries. Military masculinity does not merely oppose figurations of

femininity or queerness but absorbs and uses them to perpetuate the masculine ideal.

These diverse cases are all explored in the book’s first half, the stronger and more

intriguing portion of the text. The second half of the text explores US military

involvementin the Philippines atthe turn of the last century. Focusingon the categories

of cleanliness and filth, Belkin attempts to illustrate the ways in which these

Armed Forces & Society

2015, Vol. 41(2) 388-391

ªThe Author(s) 2014

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

afs.sagepub.com