Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community

Abstract

This work examines support the troops discourses in the US and UK during the war on terror (2001–2010). These practices are important in their own right and a window into a broader transformation in liberal military-society relations. Few people now serve in the armed forces but gendered and sexualized cultural narratives of warfare continue to reproduce a strong connection between military service, citizenship, and normative heteromasculinity—the liberal military contract. It argues that supporting the troops reflects a gendered civilian anxiety arising from non-service in wartime, wherein normative citizenship and normative masculinity are apparently inaccessible to a large number of citizens. The book works through the ways that support the troops discourses attempt to address and resolve this anxiety by recasting support for the military as itself the hallmark of citizenship and masculinity. On that basis, supporting the troops is not really about the military at all, or even the legitimacy of war, but rather society’s maintenance of appropriate civil-military relations. Support is also increasingly transnationalized, as a seemingly apolitical vector for racialized, colonial hierarchy. Military support is the new military service—with a number of negative implications for democratic dissent. War opposition is sharply constrained, as martial obligation makes it possible to contest one war, on behalf of the troops, but not the practice of war itself. Overall, the book demonstrates the importance of gendered solidarism and loyalty, rather than solely dynamics of enmity and antagonism, in producing political community, the transnational liberal order and liberal wars.