Category: Queer Linguistics

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Queering the military: Thank you for your service (abstract)

I’m excited to present my research again at the Linguistics Society of America’s 94th Annual Meeting. The title of my paper is “Queering the military: Thank you for your service.” The extended abstract is below.

Abstract: In the United States, national identity and military identity are inextricably linked. And, the U.S. military is arguably an arbiter of American masculinity (Disler, 2008). Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, President George W. Bush delivered his address to the U.S. Congress in which he constructed a national identity centered on victimhood and unified Americans in support of the military (Podvornaia, 2013). One manifestation of this support is the phrase “Thank you for your service” (henceforth, TYFYS) (Moore, 2017). In this study, I take a Queer Linguistics turn (Motschenbacher, 2011) to examine through discourse analysis how a “multiplicity of masculinities” (Milani, 2014) are invoked in TYFYS. To do so, I define TYFYS as a speech act (Austin, 1975), and examine how the illocutionary act (i.e. the speaker’s intention) (mis)aligns with the perlocutionary effect (i.e. effect on the recipient) of veterans through their discursive construction of affect and military identity(ies). The data for this study come from interviews, or semi-structured conversations, with seven self-identified veterans who recently discharged from the military and are transitioning into civilian-life at a U.S. college. Copland and Creese (2015) point out that interviews provide an emic, or insider, perspective from the participant’s point of view. But more importantly for my study, the interviews allow the participants to demonstrate diverse text types (e.g., narratives, chronicles, explanations, and questions) where discourse strategies emerge to convey affect and to construct identities. To deduce affect and identity, I draw Martin and White’s (2005) definition of affect and on Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) sociocultural framework. Specifically, I draw on Bucholtz and Hall’s principle of “adequation and distinction” to analyze the construction of military identity at both the micro- and macro-levels. At the micro-level, I analyze specific discursive strategies such as details (e.g., imagery of combat), and negation (e.g. I never deployed) that index a participant’s military identity. At the macro-level, I draw on Kristeva’s (1986) notion of “intertextuality” to connect the micro-level discourse with the public imagery of military identity (i.e. the archetypical masculine soldier and “wounded warrior”) that index “military masculinity” (Belkin, 2012). Intertextuality, which Kristeva introduced in her discussions of Bakhtin’s (1986) theorizing, describes how discourses are reverberations of past discourses and contribute to current and future discourses. In other words, it is a means of exploring connections between discourses. The findings reveal that the veterans in this study discursively construe negative affect (e.g., “I hate it” and “It makes me feel uncomfortable) towards TYFYS, and rely on resources of military masculinity (e.g., fighting in war, risking limbs) to construct military identities separate from their own experiences. The findings suggest a disconnect between the public imagery of military veterans, and how veterans see themselves through the lens of a masculine-gendered military identity. By examining constructions of masculinity through TYFYS, this study connects Queer Linguistics (Motschenbacher, 2011), through discourse analysis, to the interdisciplinary enterprise of Critical Military Studies (Basham et al., 2015) which questions power relations in the military, and the negotiation of military identity through social practice and political contestation. Lastly, as Messerschmidth (2019) points out, hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) can be examined at different levels of abstraction, specifically local, regional, and global. This study demonstrates how hegemonic masculinity of a masculine gendered institution is contested through veteran constructions of military identity and the public imagery of military identity.

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Queering leadership: leadership narratives as stories of self-commodification

Recently, I was invited to contribute my research about how Naval Officers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender talk about their leadership performance through “sea-stories.” The book, which centers on Queer Linguistics as an approach, really forced me to re-examine my analysis through a Queer Theory and Queer Linguistics lens.

The chapter will draw on data from my master’s thesis which takes a social constructionist stance towards how identity is constructed. For my thesis, I interviewed 14 Naval Officers. Six identified as cis gender men, five identified as cis gender women, one identified as a trans man, and one identified as a transwoman. Of the seven total men, three identified as straight, two as bi, and two as gay. Of the five total woman, two identified as straight and three identified as lesbians.

In each of their interviews, each participant had a “sea-story” to tell. A sea-story is a common term in the Navy used to describe some interesting story that occurred while at sea. These sea-stories in particular were elicited, meaning I asked for a specific story. And in each story, the participants talk about standing watch as Officer of the Deck (OOD). While standing OOD, the Naval Officer is pretty much in charge of all operations occurring on the ship. They’re also in charge of navigating where the ship goes. In these sea-stories, the participants shared a story where they talked about a challenging experience while standing OOD. One participant talked about transiting the Straits of Malacca and experiencing a near collision, another participant described conflict between her and another officer while launching and landing helicopters on the flight deck, and one officer described a man-overboard. So what I was interested in examining here is how each participant talked themselves into “being” a leader in these stories.

While writing my master’s thesis I thought it was a first step towards examining how people who identify as queer do leadership. To my knowledge, it is and was the first of its kind.

As so as I mentioned above, I am excited to re-examine my data from a Queer Linguistics perspective and question “what is masculinity” in the context of the military. And I think more exciting – “what is heterosexuality” in the military? What’s fascinating to me about Queer Theory and Queer Linguistics is that even though I’ve always thought that individuals can express sexuality in different ways, I never actually thought about heterosexuality in this way.

So from this perspective, even individuals who identify as heterosexual (and cis gender) are performing a specific type of heterosexuality and masculinity. So quite literally, in the words or Ru Paul, we’re all born naked and the rest is drag.

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