Queering the Military ― Sexuality in the Armed Forces

This book offers a systematic and detailed analysis of the integration of gay and lesbian personnel into state militaries, and the implications of this for feminist scholarship. Existing research in this area has focussed on the prohibition of sexual minorities in militaries and the likely impacts of their integration, and suggests that this integration should be evaluated in terms of whether it subverts gendered power relations within the institution.

This book moves beyond this approach, using queer deconstructive analytical strategies to examine how the military produces gendered subjects. The author argues that the integration of sexual minorities into the military is not inherently subversive of the military gender order but that this does not mean they have been successfully co-opted either. This is because attempts to integrate sexual minorities into the military gender order are unstable and open to contestation. Ultimately the book argues that ‘queering’ the military gender order in this way reveals the limits of any attempt to order and regulate gender, which opens up radical new ways to think about feminist critique and praxis. Consequently the analysis employed in this book has radical implications for thinking about the resilience of gendered regimes of power, and the possibilities for critique and political intervention; not only in state militaries, but in world politics more generally.

This book will appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience including feminist and critical IR, Critical Military Studies, sociology, political geography, anthropology, queer and feminist theory, and sexuality studies.

Sarah Bulmer is a Lecturer of Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter, UK. She is very involved in the development of Critical Military Studies as an interdisciplinary field of study, and is a member of the Steering Committee for the journal Critical Military Studies. She is also co-editing (with Victoria Basham) a forthcoming book entitled Advances in Critical Military Studies.