CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Green, Laura |
|---|---|
| Title | "A Soldier is a Soldier?": Constructing the 'Combatant' in British Army Recruitment Media |
| Summary | Military recruitment is a is a multi-million-pound industry in the UK, yet has faced relatively little scrutiny from critical scholars, despite extensive research into the military overall. Recruitment campaigns, employing various media, and digital and experiential spaces, offer valuable insights into how the military constructs and presents itself towards an external audience. The nascent existing scholarship has noted deep tensions between liberal militaries’ current attempts to identify as inclusive, diverse and even peaceful, and their reputations as the training ground for narrow, militarised masculinities. This thesis contributes to this conversation by conducting a Critical, Multimodal Discourse Analysis into British Army recruitment videos from 2017-2024. I introduce an understanding of dyadic co-constructions such as masculinity/femininity and military/civil, while recognising that the ‘paradox’ of feminist analysis is such that it is impossible to discuss these dyads without inadvertently reifying them. I start with an analysis of how masculinities and femininities are constructed in recent recruitment discourses, finding that while a broader conceptualisation of masculinity is presented, femininities remain sidelined and constrained. I then turn to the messy positioning of the Army in relation to the ‘civilian’ world, with further dyads including military/civil and combat/non-combat, the constructions of which have largely not been unpacked by existing literature. This reveals further tensions and contradictions, from the gendered origins of the combatant/civilian divide to a potential ‘existential crisis’ regarding the purpose of the modern military. |
| Supervisor | Roe, Paul |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/green_laura.pdf |
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