Uniform Matters: Body Possibilities of the Gendered Soldier

This chapter analyses the military uniform as a material and symbolic gendered marker of identity and belonging. It investigates the ways in which the military uniform affectively relates body possibilities of enacting profession with gendered identities. Taking the intersection of affect and discourse as our point of departure, we conceptualize and study affective-discursive body possibilities as experienced and expressed by male and female soldiers. We develop four affective figures of body possibilities from our empirical material: becoming-soldier, becoming-woman-not-soldier, becoming-soldier-not-woman, and becoming-soldier-woman. These four figures become affectively charges as the uniform accommodates different bodies differently, thereby inviting diversity, but also positing diverse bodies as minorities, as deviations from the normal soldierly body. We end by discussing how such charging is always inhibiting, but also enabling.