ABSTRACT
In US culture, questions about what kind of military the United States should have, how it should be used, who should serve, and why they should do so have long been informed by discourses of gender. If the embrace of militarism and the need to defend or claim normative masculinity have often been mutually constituting, the endurance of a militarized culture has also required the continued juxtaposition of the masculine, militarized figure and the non-masculine figure who cannot perform the militaristic task at hand. Most common has been the insistent feminization of women, whether American women who must be saved from external threats, or women abroad who must be liberated from despotism. The impact that US militarism has had on women around the world has led many feminist critics to call for a transnational politics of solidarity and resistance.
