Gender, sexuality, warfighting & the making of American citizenship post-9/11

The so-called global war on terror marked a pivotal moment in the intersection of gender, sexuality, military service, and U.S. warfighting. This essay explores, via paradigmatic empirical incidents, three key dimensions of gendered warfare–military service, support for the military, and protest/dissent–to reveal a central paradox in the post-9/11 U.S. gender-war system. While military service has declined overall, efforts to formally include women and LGBTQ+ people in the armed forces have coincided with the ongoing valorization of a narrow, gendered ideal of soldiering and citizenship (often cisgender, heterosexual, masculine, and white). Despite (potentially temporary) increased formal equality and inclusion, the global war on terror reinforced the existing U.S. heteropatriarchal sex-gender order, characterized by a mandatory heterosexuality and binary, deterministic account of gender. This model of gendered, martial citizenship promotes civilian deference to the military and subverts the democratic oversight of the armed forces.