scholarly journals Negotiating Gender: Female Combat Soldiers in Denmark

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
Stine Emilie Knudsen ◽  
Marie Sihm Teisen

Based on interviews with female combat soldiers, we explore what role conceptions of femininity and masculinity play for female Danish combat soldiers’ experiences and behaviour in the military community. We find that female combat soldiers’ status and ability to fulfil their potential as soldiers are determined by their capability to navigate expectations linked to their gender and their position as soldiers, respectively. Female combat soldiers must break down negative expectations linked to their gender while simultaneously and continuously navigating the limitations of forms of femininity accepted in the Danish Military.

Vulcan ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Petter J. Wulff

The military community is a secluded part of society and normally has to act on the conditions offered by its civilian surroundings. When heavy vehicles were developed for war, the civilian infrastructure presented a potential restriction to vehicular mobility. In Sweden, bridges were seen as a critical component of this infrastructure. It took two decades and the experiences of a second world war for the country to come to terms with this restriction. This article addresses the question as to why Swedish tanks suddenly became much heavier in the early 1940s. The country’s bridges play a key role in what happened, and the article explains how. It is a story about how a military decision came to be outdated long before it was upgraded.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1174-1195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Spieker ◽  
Tracy Sbrocco ◽  
Kelly Theim ◽  
Douglas Maurer ◽  
Dawn Johnson ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Katherina S. Sullivan ◽  
Jessica Dodge ◽  
Kathleen McNamara ◽  
Rachael Gribble ◽  
Mary Keeling ◽  
...  

Lay Summary There are approximately 16,000 families of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) service members in the U.S. military, but very little is known about how accepted they feel in the communities in which they live. This study begins to address this question by considering the perspectives of LGBT service members, which they shared both in response to an online survey and in interviews. Findings suggest that many service members believe their spouses and families are accepted by their chain of command. However, a smaller but important group continued to express concerns about their family being accepted in their military community. Many service members appear concerned that family services available to them through the military are not appropriate for LGBT families. Altogether, this article highlights the need for more research to understand the well-being and needs of this group.


Author(s):  
Devorah S. Manekin

This chapter begins with a description of Aviv Kochavi, who served as a commander in a paratrooper unit at the height of the Second Intifada. It talks about Aviv's strict and demanding command style that soldiers often label a “hard head.” The chapter shows how the military first instills and then enforces a set of norms that distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate violence based on the extent to which it serves organizational goals. It analyzes three analytically distinct categories of violence taken from the perspective of deployed combat soldiers: strategic, entrepreneurial, and opportunistic. It also points out how the categories of violence differ on a number of dimensions and highlights the beneficiary of the violence.


2019 ◽  
pp. 169-189
Author(s):  
Andrew Marble

The chapter is set on April 19, 1991, during Lieutenant General John Shalikashvili’s very first inspection of a mountain refugee camp (Isikveren). The chapter demonstrates the absolute misery of life in the camps and outlines the suffering and looming potential for massive death. It reviews the progress the international humanitarian mission has accomplished so far and the upcoming shift in mission goal from “humanitarian assistance” to “humanitarian intervention,” which means Shalikashvili now faces the herculean task of moving all 500,000+ Kurds out of the mountains. Seeing the misery in the camp, Shalikashvili recalls his own suffering when he’d lost people he loved, particularly his loss, within weeks of each other, of both his premature baby girl and his cancer-stricken wife. It explains how all these blows—these “betrayals” by people he loved—are what helped push him to make the military his closest family, to make caring for and even loving the military community an inherent part of his leadership modus operandi.


1980 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Richard A. Gabriel ◽  
Malham M. Wakin

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mei-Chuan Wang ◽  
Pius Nyutu ◽  
Kimberly Tran ◽  
Angela Spears

The goal of this study was to identify positive factors that increase the psychological well-being of military spouses in the areas of environmental mastery. We proposed that positive affect and social support from family and friends would have indirect effects on psychological well-being through their association with a greater sense of community with the military culture. Participants were 207 female spouses of active-duty service members. Data were analyzed using MEDIATE to test the mediational effect. Results indicated that social support from friends and positive affect did predict a sense of community, which in turn was associated with increased feelings of psychological well-being. The findings suggest that a perceived sense of military community helps military spouses gain a sense of mastery and control in a constantly changing environment.


1981 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Palmer

unexplored area in Australian research. Literature on the topic of military base-host community relations in specific is practically nonexistent, in Australia and elsewhere. Those case-studies which have been made (Barth, 1952; Hunter, 1952; Palmer, 1977) reveal that the military community represents a kind of foreign settlement in a civilian locality, that relations more often than not are uneasy and even exploitative in such matters as housing, and that the military style of life in general thwarts civil-military social integration.The communal nature of the military organisation in its own right has been noted by Kilmartin (1974; 444):“Military organisation may be thought of as communities in two senses: spatial and psychological. The latter means simply the affective bonds between members which occur as a result of common experiences, common goals and, in some cases, public antipathy or indifference ... The second sense in which military organisations are communal is in the form of more visible, spatial communities such as those residential communities on or near service bases and in barracks and training camps... These physical arrangements symbolize the relative impermeability of the (civil-military) boundaries — from either side.”How the wives and families of servicemen experience service lifestyle, military communalism and isolation from civilian host comunities is the concern of this paper.


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