Description

In the past it was assumed that men as good citizens would serve in the armed forces in wartime In the present however liberal democratic states increasingly rely on small allvolunteer militaries deployed in distant wars of choice While few people now serve in the armed forces our cultural myths and narratives of warfare continue to reproduce a strong connection between military service citizenship and normative masculinityIn Support the Troops Katharine M Millar provides an empirical overview of support the troops discourses in the United States and the United Kingdom during the early years of the global war on terror 20012010 As Millar argues seemingly stable understandings of the relationship between military service citizenship and gender norms are being unsettled by changes in warfare The effect is a sense of uneasiness about the meaning of what it means to be a good citizen good person and crucially a good man in a context where neither war nor military service easily align with existing cultural myths about wartime obligations and collective sacrifice Instead we participate in the performance of supporting the troops even when we oppose waran act that appears not only patriotic and moral but also apolitical Failing to support the troops either through active opposition or a lack of overt supportive actions is perceived as not only offensive and inappropriately political but disloyal and dangerousMillar asserts that military support acts as a new form of military service which serves to limit antiwar dissent plays a crucial role in naturalizing the violence of the transnational liberal order and recasts war as an internal issue of solidarity and loyalty Rigorous and politically challenging Millar provides the first work to systematically examine support the troops as a distinct social phenomenon and offers a novel reading of this discourse through a gendered lens that places it in historical and transnational context