Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898-2001

The masculinity of those who serve in the American military would seem to be indisputable, yet it is full of contradictions. To become a warrior, one must renounce those things in life that are perceived to be unmasculine. Yet at the same time, the military has encouraged and even mandated warriors to do exactly the opposite.

Bring Me Men explores these contradictions in great detail and shows that their invisibility has been central to the process of concealing the darkest secrets of American empire. By examining case studies that expose these contradictions--the phenomenon of male-on-male rape at the US Naval Academy, for example, as well as historical and contemporary attitudes toward cleanliness and filth--Belkin utterly upends our understanding of the relationship between warrior masculinity and American empire and the fragile processes sustaining it.