Combat boots and liberal feminism

The ban on women in combat has been lifted.

Following last year’s lawsuit pressed by four servicewomen that challenged the 1994 ban, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced women will be able to serve in combat as early as this May.

I was immediately excited, but soon I questioned myself for being happy about women gaining formal legal equality to kill for the military industrial complex. It seemed like a hollow civil rights victory that won’t actually help many women.

Then I read the comments sections for articles about the change. Comments everywhere from The Washington Post to Mother Jones to Fox News were so disappointing they were hard to believe.

It’s all too easy for me to forget how many people deeply believe women are inferior to men or intrinsically suited to middle-class feminine roles.

Men’s rights advocates and other misogynists often argue women are privileged for their ineligibility to serve in combat. That’s about to change, even if it doesn’t change much in reality.

“We have women in combat roles right now. We are just not able to promote them,” former Navy Lieutenant Carey Lohrenz said in an National Public Radio interview.

The new circumstances mean women will become eligible for 238,000 military jobs and proper recognition for their roles in combat.

These are substantive changes that will challenge anti-women sentiments and reveal some of the basic assumptions and violences committed by gender-normative sentiments.

Yeah, liberal feminist theory often eludes meaningful confrontations with co-articulated oppressions based on race, class and sexuality in its arguments for individualist equality. But there’s a tactical place for it.

Let’s get this right: access to combat roles in the sacred U.S. military will change controlling images of women in dominant culture.

Current language about women in the military represents and enforces widely felt misconstructions about women as a category.

Women’s limited role in the U.S. military has long been used as evidence to naturalize binaristic gender difference.

Women’s weakness would jeopardize their fellow soldiers. Women aren’t capable of leading men in battle. Women can’t handle tough battlefield conditions. Women would distractingly sexualize the frontlines. Women are always getting too pregnant to fight.

Allowing women access to previously restricted roles can at worst destabilize some of these assumptions and at best force online commentators to change their tune.

If this change was paired with comprehensive reform on the treatment (cover-up) of sexual assault and rape within the military, it’d be an even greater victory.

As the lifted ban stands, it’s important to remember the way we talk about people relates how we perceive and interact with the world.

­— ptbeane@indiana.edu