ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the discourse regarding male—male sexual violence that emerged between 2014 and 2016 alongside Heath’s individual narrative in order to critically explore the gendered constructs that shape dominant conceptualisations of male—male sexual violence. It explores rape as being productive of the very gendered categories that are said to pre-exist the act of violence, as one of many violent processes through which ‘men’, ‘masculinity’, and ‘masculine’ are constructed. The chapter argues that male—male sexual violence is constitutive rather than disruptive of the project of military masculinity, a cultivated process whereby the abject feminine is continually engaged, rather than merely rejected, in an attempt to secure the borders of masculine and feminine. It considers the ways in which it operates as a mode—both physical and discursive—through which military masculinity is negotiated, as real and symbolic violence enacted in an attempt to enforce the unenforceable boundaries of masculinity.
