ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergence of a new hegemonic masculinity in the context of the Gulf War. A crucial component of the complex cultural codes and construction of national identity that tied Vietnam to the Gulf War and helped propel American public support for a newly militarized foreign policy had to do with gender relations in the United States. The defeat in Vietnam created a crisis in American foreign policy by raising fundamental questions about the dominant political and military paradigms of how war could be conceptualized, organized, and fought and fostered; once again, there was a suspicion of overseas military intervention on the part of the American populace. The new hegemonic masculinity had not only been shaped by the post-Vietnam realignment of gender relations in the United States but had also been recast to fit the exigencies of the new world order proclaimed by President Bush.
