Producing difference: Interrogating the ‘ban’ on ...



Producing difference: Interrogating the ‘ban’ on homosexuality in the British military. Sarah Bulmer.

Until 2000 Britain’s Armed Forces enforced a total ban on homosexuality, deeming it ‘incompatible’ with military service. ‘The homosexual’ was produced as abnormal, disruptive, and uniquely threatening and the military employed a range of strategies to police sexuality including surveillance, raids, witch hunts, investigations and interrogations. However, despite strong Ministry of Defence objections, a series of legal challenges in the 1990s by ex-Servicemen and women discharged for homosexuality successfully challenged the legality of the ban. Overnight the policy changed and the military now presents itself as an equal opportunities employer, even advertising in the pink press. Yet few personnel have chosen to ‘come out’ and problems around the retention of women and sexual harassment persist. I suggest that these problems may be attributed in part to problematic assumptions about ‘integration’ of minority groups. Lifting the ban was widely conceptualised in the media and by the Ministry of Defence as a progressive policy change that lead to the full integration of homosexuals. In this paper I explore how these discourses of integration conceal the production of gendered difference. I trace the production of the ‘homosexual threat’ in military policy and practice, showing that it can only be understood within the context of heteronormative military culture in which personnel are sexually segregated. I argue that the ban was a central regulatory mechanism which enabled the military to produce itself as masculine. I show that in producing different military subjects defined against the ‘norm’ of the (assumed) straight, male soldier, the military marginalises women, gay and lesbian personnel. Consequently, any attempt to ‘integrate’ homosexuals or women without questioning the production of that gendered difference, will unwittingly reproduce a ‘gender order’ that continues to privilege male personnel and leave aggressively masculine military cultures beyond scrutiny.

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