Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0847694445
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What happens in a tradition that links citizenship with soldiering when women become citizens? Citizen Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition provides an in-depth analysis of the theory and practice of the citizen-soldier in historical context. Using a postmodern feminist lens, Snyder reveals that within the citizen-soldier tradition, citizenship and masculinity are simultaneously constituted through engagement in civic and martial practices. Seeking to sever the connection between masculinity and citizenship, Snyder calls for women to make 'gender trouble' by engaging in the practices traditionally constitutive of masculine republican citizenship. However, in order to reconstitute the Citizen-Soldier tradition–the only tradition we have that holds the military up to democratic standards–we must not only 'trouble' but also reconfigure our understandings of gender and citizenship. Thus gender parity in the American military is not enough. We must also change the type of masculinity produced by the military, reintroduce the military to its civic purposes, expand the 'citizenship of civic practices' to include other non-martial forms of service, and give citizens a greater role in political decision making.
they will become better if united, when they see themselves commanded by their own prince and by him honored and maintained. It is necessary, therefore, for her to prepare such armies in order with Italian might to defend herself against foreigners.14 Here Machiavelli advises the prince to arm his subjects. In so doing, he advises the prince to lay the foundation for a republic because—as we shall soon see—Machiavelli considered engagement in martial practices as constitutive of republican
sense of civic virtue, defined as the characteristic whereby individuals place the common good ahead of individual self-interest.39 In Quentin Skinner’s words, a self-governing republic can only be kept in being . . . if its citizens cultivate that crucial quality which Cicero had described as virtus, which the Italian theorists later rendered as virtu, and which the English republicans translated as civic virtue or public-spiritedness. The term is thus used to denote the range of capacities
American allegiance to the ideals of civic republicanism included a commitment to the ideal of the Citizen-Soldier. For example, the most explicit advocates of civic republicanism during the founding, the antifederalists, emphasized the traditional republican fear of a standing army. In order to ensure the protection of republican liberty and self-rule from tyranny, the antifederalists embraced the Citizen-Soldier tradition as previously articulated by Machiavelli and Rousseau. One civic
prepolitical entities—rational individual voters—who then choose whether or not to engage in political discourse or patriotic martial rituals. Instead, the individual actually becomes a citizen as he participates in “communal ritual.” In other words, for civic republicanism, citizenship should be understood as a set of practices that eventually produce a civic identity, rather than as a pre-political category established through residence within a particular bounded territory (ius solis)—or
Militia movement actually brings together many diverse groups of angry white men and their supporters. For all its faults, the New Militia movement does speak to some Americans who have legitimate political and economic grievances. The economic woes of New Militia supporters are very real. New Militia supporters include many working-class men and farmers, two constituencies that were seriously hurt by the tax cuts and military spending of the Reagan administration.55 As another author puts it,