Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture/gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping

CAMP ALL-AMERICAN, HANOI JANE, AND THE HIGH-AND-TIGHT: GENDER, FOLKLORE, AND CHANGING MILITARY CULTURE, BY CAROL BURKE, BOSTON: BEACON PRESS, 2004 GENDER, CONFLICT, AND PEACEKEEPING, EDITED BY DYAN MAZURANA, ANGELA RAVEN-ROBERTS, AND JANE PARPART, OXFORD: ROWMAN AND LITTLEFIELD, 2005 Scholars of gender and war, conflict and peacekeeping, global governance and imperial designs will be intrigued by the debut ot these two books, one a monograph by a folklorist and the other an edited collection by contributors who in many cases straddle the academic/practitioner divide. books provide critical insider accounts of U.S. and Canadian military culture (Burke) and ot international agencies and states that manage conflict (Mazurana et al.). Carol Burke's catchy title, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the Highand-Tiglit, does not disappoint. military lore that she has obtained and collected is remarkable upon reflection, given her outsider status in relation to the military. While Burke did teach as a civilian professor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, tor seven years, this book may well render her persona non grata in those circles. Its frank and haunting accounts ot soldier initiations, misogynist songs for new recruits, and amazingly detailed lore ot military culture, in both the United States and Canada, is shocking at times. She opens the book with the lyrics ot an officially banned song that is still sung by new recruits in small groups to the tune of the The Candy adapted and called The S&M Man: Who can take a chainsaw Cut the bitch in two Fuck the bottom half And give the upper half to you . . . [Chorus] S&M Man, S&M Man, S&M Man 'cause he mixes it with love And makes the hurt feel good! Who can take a bicycle Then take off the seat Set his girlfriend on it Ride her down a bumpy street. . . [Chorus] Who can take some jumper cables Clamp them to her tits Jump-start your car And electrocute the bitch [Chorus] Who can take an icepick Ram it through her ear Ride her like a Harley As you fuck her from the rear, (xii) I found these lyrics brutalizing and the authors attempt to expose such misogyny to a wider audience brazen. Burke walks a fine line in her book: she aims to change the highly sexist, racist, and violent tactics of military culture, without fully assessing the legitimacy of violence within the military as an institution. She is a feminist who believes that there is a place for women in the military, that they are unfairly separated, marginalized, and excluded at every turn. This must change, she argues. As Burke notes at the outset, In military life there is no female counterpart to the high-and-tight (ix), a reference to the short style of haircut for male recruits. Official segregation may be on the wane, she observes, but a more insidious system of gender subordination takes place as the military aggressively practices the unofficial rites handed down from man to man through the generations (xiv). author illustrates how the presence of women threatens a concept of militarized masculinity, one that is reproduced through a series of rites unofficially practiced in military culture. Burke argues that the uncritical repetition of these unofficial traditions threatens both the recruitment and acceptance of women, have become absolutely crucial to the maintenance of the armed forces' strength, and the good order and discipline upon which the military must stake its readiness (10). Equality and the full integration of women into military culture is a laudable goal, though one I find problematic for feminists who remain uncritical of the ways in which the military requires women to subscribe to masculinist institutional norms within military culture. …

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