‘It wasn’t because a woman couldn’t do a man’s job’

uncovering gender ideologies in the context of interviews with American female and male war veterans

Authors

  • Joanna Pawelczyk Adam Mickiewicz University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.26348

Keywords:

ideology, army, gender, membership categorization analysis, interview

Abstract

Women currently serve in 95 percent of all US Army occupations and make up 16.3 percent of the active Army forces. Numerous measures have been taken in the form of regulations and policies to advance the presence and position of women in the military (e.g., the recent lifting of the ban on women serving in combat roles). It is claimed, however, that the broader ideology of masculinity prevalent in the institution is much more effective in constraining women’s participation than either specific institutional or interpersonal limitations. This paper, drawing on membership categorization analysis and conversation analysis, exposes some of the gendered propositions and gender ideologies produced by war veterans in the context of interviews. To this end, selected interviews with American female and male war veterans taken from the Veterans History Project (run by the Library of Congress) are qualitatively scrutinized. The analysis demonstrates how gender is occasioned and accounted for when describing military experiences and dayto-day operation of the army. It furthermore reveals the categorization work performed by the veterans that allows us to access various commonsense assumptions concerning the positions of women and men in the contemporary US Army. All in all, the paper points to the continuous relevance of gender in the military.

Author Biography

  • Joanna Pawelczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University

    Joanna Pawelczyk is associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her primary research interests are in language, gender and sexuality issues, discourses of psychotherapy and discourse analysis. She has published in a range of international journals and edited collections on gender, psychotherapy and identity. She is the author of Talk as Therapy: Psychotherapy in a Linguistic Perspective (2011) and co-author of Gender and Sexuality in English Language Education: Focus on Poland (2015).

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Published

2017-03-28

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Pawelczyk, J. (2017). ‘It wasn’t because a woman couldn’t do a man’s job’: uncovering gender ideologies in the context of interviews with American female and male war veterans. Gender and Language, 11(1), 121-150. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.26348