Militarizing Femininity on Social Media: Female Empowerment and Heteronormative Logics in the Representation of the Japan Self-Defense Forces

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between changing representations of women in military advertising and remilitarization processes by analyzing portrayals of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) on official Japanese government social media. While servicewomen have historically been portrayed as unserious in JSDF promotional materials, often through infantilization or sexualization, recent portrayals increasingly frame them as “professional” military actors. While prior research argues that representations of women in JSDF military advertising serve a “camouflaging” function, sanitizing its image for a “military-allergic” population, this article demonstrates that servicewomen increasingly play a constitutive role in the construction and reproduction of the military’s masculinized identity. Thus, the article contends that portrayals of servicewomen as professionals and narratives of female empowerment reflect and facilitate (re)militarization processes by reinforcing masculinized conceptions of military institutions and the state. The article thus demonstrates that digital and gendered representations of the military substantiate official discursive practices of (re)militarization by becoming part of government’s narratives. At the same time, an analysis of the heteronormative logics onto which these narratives of empowerment rely shows that, despite their professionalized image, Japanese servicewomen continue to be presented as the “Other” onto which militarism and masculinity are constructed.