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- Title
Women Can't Do It, and Men Can't Change: Some Thoughts on Agency and Gender in U.S. Marine Corps Training.
- Authors
Tortorello Jr., Frank J.
- Abstract
In this paper, I use ethnographic data gained from participant-observation as a civilian with active-duty U.S. Marines in martial arts training to interrogate the bases of claims that women ought not to be permitted in direct-combat units (meaning units like infantry, tanks, special forces, and artillery). First is the claim that the relative physical weakness of women compared to men is a fact of human-species biology and so an unchangeable obstacle to their meeting the minimum standards for combat. Second is the claim that women per se are disintegrative of otherwise natural, all-male bonding processes that equate with combat effectiveness. For simplicity's sake, I call these claims "women can't do it" and "men can't change," respectively. I demonstrate how the purpose and values of the Marine Corps are primary components in the generation of Marine identity and use them to reconstruct the cultural logic that leads to their understanding of who and what counts as a "good Marine." Then, I show how that understanding is primarily dynamically embodied: for Marines in training and in combat, deeds speak louder than words. I go on to show that training is a means of maximizing personal and team (dynamically embodied) agency toward the Corps's values and purpose. Training, in short, is a transformative process of enculturation into a total, embodied commitment to the organization and its values. Ideally, being a Marine is a way of being, not a job. I conclude that both objections to women in combat units and in combat are unsustainable from both empirical and theoretical standpoints. Both objections function as justifications of or excuses for ways of being that are antithetical to fundamental military, and especially Marine, values.
- Publication
Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, 2010, Vol 17, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0891-7124
- Publication type
Academic Journal