Maintaining Male Exclusivity: Porcelain Privilege in the Military

• Author: Alesha Doan,Ashley Mog,Shannon Portillo
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X21992369
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X21992369

Armed Forces & Society

2022, Vol. 48(3) 571 –588

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X21992369

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Article

Original Manuscript

Maintaining Male

Exclusivity: Porcelain

Privilege in the Military

Shannon Portillo

1

, Alesha Doan

1

, and Ashley Mog

2

Abstract

Current debates about bathrooms and bathroom policy contribute to a long history

of how space shapes norms and expectations about privacy and gender equity in

the workplace. The military serves as a significant site of discussion, particularly as

the Department of Defense moves forward with efforts to integrate women

into combat positions. Relying on an analysis of 27 focus groups with a total of

198 participants we collected from Special Operations in the U.S. Army, we examine

bathrooms as a site where male soldiers contest and resist female integration. Using

Sasson-Levy and Katz’s concept of institutional de-gendering and re-gendering, we

argue that men’s resistance to gender-neutral toilets is an effort to re-gender Special

Forces and maintain the hegemonic masculine culture that acutely defines it.

Keywords

special forces, gender integration, gendered organizations, toilets, equity,

stereotypes

The military is the largest male-dominated organization in the United States.

Defined by masculine codes and rules that have been constructed over decades, the

military’s culture and policies have created a gendered institution that has facilitated

discriminating against women (Belkin, 2012; Duncanson, 2009; Enloe, 2000;

Hinojosa, 2010; Mackenzie, 2015) A complex labyrinth of combat and leadership

1

The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

2

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Seattle, WA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Shannon Portillo, KU Edwards Campus & School of Professional Studies, The University of Kansas, 12600

Quivira Road, Overland Park, KS 66213, USA.

Email: sportillo@ku.edu

572 Armed Forces & Society 48(3)

exclusion policies, dating back to 1948, have restricted women’s career paths in the

military (Morden, 1990). More recently, the military’s 1994 Direct Ground Combat

and Assignment Rule (DGCAR) has limited the positions available to women. The

implementation of DGCAR closed approximately 15%of all positions across

the armed forces to women, translating to about 142,000 (29%) positions in the

Army, 43,400 (25%) positions in the Marine Corps, 33,300 (9%) in the Navy, and

2,300 (1%) in the Air Force. However, in 2013, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon

Panetta repealed DGCAR, which restricted women from serving in combat posi-

tions. Military departments were provided with a January 2016 deadline for

“expeditiously” integrating women into previously unavailable positions, including

elite nonconventional units (Panetta, 2013).

The military has vowed to use gender-neutral “occupational performance

standards,” to determine positions; however, this policy change has not been

embraced by all. The prospect of integrating women into all units, including those

within Army Special Operations Forces (SOF), faced resistance from the cloistered

all-male units, many of whom were hoping SOF units would be exempted from the

policy. In male-dominated workplaces, men will often come together to “resist

women as equals” due in large part to the “comfort” ideals men construct about

what it means to be with other men (Bird, 2003). According to Sasson-Levy and

Katz (2007), as institutions actively work to “de-gender” the workplace, a corollary

“re-gendering” of the institution subtly takes place. As the prospect of gender inte-

gration in the Army’s Special Forces (SF) units has become a reality, the toilet, as a

gendered concept, has become an increasingly salient focal point where men

actively attempt to re-gender the organization in the face of organizational change.

In this article, we analyze focus group data collected from U.S. Army SOF to

examine how men serving in SF use the bathroom as an embodied space and

gendered site to resist organizational change. Using Sasson-Levy and Katz’s concept

of re-gendering, we argue that men’s resistance to gender-neutral toilets is an effort

to reinstate a strict gender binary in SF and mainta in the hegemonic masculine

culture that acutely defines it. We begin with a brief overview of the historical

emergence of bathroom politics in the United States. Then, we contextualize our

research in a theoretical framework based on military masculinity. Next, we discuss

our current study, including the setting of SF, the data, and methods of analysis.

Turning to our results, we examine the ways in which men invoke the themes of

hygiene, risk, and privacy in an attempt to re-gender SF. Finally, we discuss how our

findings from the military context contribute to broader discussions of women’s

integration into male-dominated workplaces.

Bathroom Politics

In the United States, a toilet is euphemistically referred to as a bathroom or restroom,

which obfuscates its function and underscores long-held cultural taboos that

discourage discussions of defecation, urination, and most acutely, menstruation in

2Armed Forces & Society XX(X)