Negotiating Identity Performance in the Canadian Forces; Soldiers and Stereotypes

A new security paradigm has driven an expansion in the roles of women in warfare; female soldiers are becoming an increasingly valuable asset in counter insurgency tactics. Female soldiers are uniquely suited to penetrating the private spheres of traditional authoritarian societies, and remain the only means by which females-of-interest can be apprehended while still respecting the cultural mores of the host state. However, this line of reasoning begs the question: If the military is relying on a social construction, in what ways is military subculture influencing it? I explore this question using theories of gender politics advanced by Judith Butler to frame interviews I conducted in 2011 with Canadian combat arms soldiers recently deployed to Afghanistan. The excerpts from these interviews focus on the soldiers’ recollections of female soldiers in active duty from the perspectives of their male and female colleagues. The interviews illustrate that the space permitted for female soldiers to express their identity remains artificially bound by stereotypes concerning their physiological and psychological aptitude. More broadly, this adaptation of Butler’s classic framework suggests that an ideal female gender performance is discursively incompatible with the ideal soldier identity performance.