Abstract
In Support the Troops, Katharine M. Millar provides an empirical overview of "support the troops" discourses in the US and UK during the early years of the global war on terror (2001-2010). As Millar argues, seemingly stable understandings of the relationship between military service, citizenship, and gender norms are being unsettled by changes in warfare. The effect is a sense of uneasiness about the meaning of what it means to be a "good" citizen, "good" person, and, crucially, a "good" man in a context where neither war nor military service easily align with existing cultural myths about wartime obligations and collective sacrifice. Instead we participate in the performance of supporting the troops, even when we oppose war--an act that appears not only patriotic and moral, but also apolitical. Failing to support the troops, either through active opposition or a lack of overt supportive actions, is perceived as not only offensive and inappropriately political, but disloyal and dangerous. Millar asserts that military support acts as a new form of military service, which serves to limit anti-war dissent, plays a crucial role in naturalizing the violence of the transnational liberal order, and recasts war as an internal issue of solidarity and loyalty. Rigorous and politically challenging, Millar provides the first work to systematically examine "support the troops" as a distinct social phenomenon and offers a novel reading of this discourse through a gendered lens that places it in historical and transnational context.
About the Speaker
Katharine Millar is Associate Professor of Gender and International Relations in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics.
Her broad research interests lie in examining the gendered cultural narratives underlying the modern collective use of force. Katharine recently published her first book, Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, with Oxford University Press. Her on-going research examines gender and cybersecurity; the politics of hypocrisy; and death and the politics of international order. Katharine has also published on female combatants; race (particularly whiteness), militarism, and populism; gendered representations of violent death; military and civilian masculinity; and critical conceptions of militarism. She is also researching, supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, the relationship between grief, mass death, and social order in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Katharine does policy engagement on various aspects of gender and security politics/policy for various national governments and international organisations, particularly on gender and the armed forces, gender and professional military education, and gendered dimensions of cybersecurity.