The military is one of the largest and most politically influential institutions in the United States, and yet its inner workings remain a mystery even among many Americans. As the sociolinguist Edith A. Disler has argued, the military is commonly understood through “the monolithic notion of the military as an arbiter of American masculinity” (2008, 20)—an assumption that continues despite the increasing role of women and visibility of LGBTQ+ servicemembers.
In talking about “queering” the military, Dr. Mararac draws on queer theory to show how the U.S. military not only enforces societal norms like masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality, but also has the ability to challenge them. For instance, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (a federal law that prevented the marriages of same-sex couples from federal recognition) in 2013, the U.S. Department of Defense began to give equal rights to same-sex military couples who had gotten married in states where it was allowed. This included a Pentagon policy that granted leave to gay servicemembers to travel from where they were stationed (if that state did not grant legal marriages to same-sex couples) to states where they could get legally married to then receive federal spousal and family benefits from the military.
As an unprecedented number of states pass anti-LGBTQ+ legislation today, the military becomes an important site for understanding the evolving relationship between states and the federal government, and the impact this has on civil rights more broadly. I was completely taken aback when I learned during this talk that the military will relocate troops with transgender children to states with trans-affirming healthcare and non-discrimination policies, if they are stationed in a state with anti-trans legislation. Policies like these reveal that the military is shaped by competing norms that place gender and sexuality front and center even while others decry this as mere politics that should be kept out of the armed forces.
Following the interactional sociologist Erving Goffman, Dr. Mararac views the military as a “total institution.” Dr. Mararac also employs sociolinguist Jan Blommaert’s (2007) notion of “polycentricity” to consider how politicians, service members, and veterans orient to national security as a center of authority to inform their views of what the military should or should not do, while simultaneously orienting to other centers such as religion and the family to inform those views. Coming away from Dr. Mararac’s discussion, we have more insight into the value of linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh’s call for greater breadth of linguistic anthropological work on military discourses, especially “ethnographies of speaking among military personnel and in zones of military violence” (2021, 242).
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April 21, 4 pm CST
Talking Politics with Nicholas Mararac
Queering the Military: How Ideologies about Gender and Sexuality Shape(d) the U.S. Armed Forces
About the Webinar: Opponents to social change in the military often say, “Keep politics out of the military.” However, the military is inherently political: mandated civilian oversight by the U.S. Congress has since World War I regulated who can serve and on what terms, and all language use is itself political—especially talk about what counts as politics at all. This webinar will explore the discourse of the politicization of the U.S. military through the regulation of gender identity and sexual expression.
Presenter: Nicholas Mararac is a U.S. Department of Defense contractor and an adjunct professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks. He completed his Ph.D. in sociolinguistics at Georgetown University in 2022. He is also a veteran advocate and serves on the Board of Directors for Student Veterans of America.
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