Bring Me (Men) Integrity
Religious Re-buttressing of Armed Masculinity at the United States Air Force Academy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rsth.v33i2.193Keywords:
gender, hypermasculinity, performativity, Queer Theory, Critical Theory, military, EvangelicalismAbstract
United States military policy on gays and lesbians “evolves” within an institutionally developed environment of religiously reified “sexual mythologies”; these sexual mythologies assert and exploit a determinative connectivity between anatomical sex categories and gender expression. For the past fifty years, the Air Force Academy’s detailed construction of sexual mythologies reveals an overwhelming institutional commitment to a complex foundational expression of heteronormative hypermasculinity. Within the last two decades however, the Academy’s mythological re-buttressing of these foundational illusions has encountered ever more “unsettling trouble.” This article explores the Academy’s use of conservative Christian religious rhetoric, and the mercantile tactics of evangelical Christian organizations to re-mythologize and re-stabilize the foundational hypermasculinity so essential to what Timothy
Kaufman-Osborn regards as “the logic of masculinized militarism.”
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