Jesse Crane-Seeber

Sexy warriors: the politics and pleasures of submission to the state

This essay examines links between sexuality, sexiness, and militarized bodies. While scholars have persuasively established links between militarization, hyper-masculine identities, and sexual assault, I want to trouble the soldier as an object of desire, not merely as a subject imposing violence. This paper analyses the fetishism of militarization to argue that the relationship between soldiers’ bodies and the state might be usefully understood using theoretical categories derived from kink communities. While few would dispute that dominance and submission are involved in all hierarchical social relations, I follow Foucault in arguing that communities that eroticize these roles have broadly applicable insights into the productivity of power. Combining theoretical arguments with empirical illustrations of how fetishism and militarization concatenate, I demonstrate how to think critically about the relationships between gender, war, desire, and agency. I do so because, like it or not, war is sexy in contemporary US culture.

Contesting Essentialist Theories of Patriarchal Relations: Evolutionary Psychology and the Denial of History:

This essay emerges from an ongoing mother-son dialogue about contemporary gender relations and their genesis in the history of patriarchy. In order to reframe patriarchy as a relational construct, rather than a simple group-based oppression, a performative notion of identities grounds the paper. It offers a critique of the body of literature that has developed under the broad heading of “evolutionary psychology,” insisting that gendered relations are not outcomes of genetic selection, divine mandate, or historical inevitability. An antidotal, millennia-spanning history of gender is offered as an epistemically and politically preferable explanation for patriarchal relations.

The Four Boxes of Gendered Sexuality: A Lesson Plan for Teaching About the History and Effects of Gendered Sexuality.

Why might intelligent, assertive females overlook sweet, caring guys, choosing instead to date males whose traditional masculinity makes them popular with other powerful males but who treat females and “weaker” males poorly? This lesson provides a structure for, reflection on, and critique of contemporary gender stereotypes. Students explore the history and effects of gendered sexuality, which begin at birth and continue until death. Gendered sexuality refers to the ways in which we experience our sexuality based on the interaction of our biological sex and gender socialization. The story told in this lesson illuminates how expectations for males and females are based on an historical and cultural legacy that all too often goes unexamined. We describe this legacy as an historically constructed pair of binaries, called the Four Boxes of Gendered Sexuality: Good Girl vs. Bad Girl and Tough Guy vs. Sweet Guy. Educators may use this lesson to assist a range of populations in understanding where these expectations come from, what enforces them, and their effects on sexual attitudes and behavior.

On pleasures, fantasies, and soldiers: a reply to Catto's critique

ABSTRACT Responding to Cattos critique of my 2016 article “Sexy Warriors,” this piece reaffirms both the tentative nature of my earlier observations as well as the importance of thinking broadly about the role of fantasy and desire in animating militarized institutions and identities. While Catto is critical of my approach, this essay argues that many of his objections are misplaced. Addressing some of his points directly, and emphasizing the ways that feminist and post-structural insights should be brought together to make sense of perverse desires, I call for continued explorations of the intersection between sexual desire and war.

Everyday life, participant observation, and the bodies caught between wars on terror and drugs

ABSTRACT Fieldwork with U.S. veterans showed me many things I never expected. As good fieldwork should, it disrupted my questions and showed me answers I was not seeking. Drawing on that experience, this essay reflects on the bodies of soldiers, particularly the ways they are medicated and surveilled. Looking into everyday life reveals how the twin logics of the ‘war on terror’ and ‘war on drugs’ concatenate, showing a side of the state security apparatus that is underappreciated.

Responding to #AllMalePanels: A Collage

Are all-male panels (AMPs) a symptom of continuing gender inequality that needs calling out? Undoubtedly. Does ensuring the presence of women on every panel, or even creating all-women panels, offer an effective solution? I’m unconvinced. Insisting that all panels should include women finds support because it is a direct and tangible response to a persistent phenomenon, made infinitely more frustrating by the blithe thoughtlessness that underpins its recurrence. It appears to be a small but welcome and quantifiable step toward correcting the chronic underrepresentation that women in the majority of professional fields still experience. However, settling for this quick fix has some potentially serious side effects for gender equity and diversity. Apparent practicality aside, a “just add women” response to AMPs risks perpetuating not only the notion that gender is binary, essentialized and visible, but also that gender parity between women and men should to be prioritized over other axes of diversity. The binary categorization of gender utilized in the AMP discourse, in which “woman” is the sole logical other of “man,” closes down space for other (non-western, non-binary) gender identities. It also reduces “women” to a reified identity husk, with the complexity and multiplicity of individual identity stripped out in favor of a single monolithic generic label. Gender binarism is a deficient basis on which to try and address difference and inclusivity. In the case of AMPs, it is compounded by reliance on visible markers of gender – principally appearance, but also names and gendered pronouns – to determine whether panelists are men or women. This further reduction of gender identity to what is not only visible but intelligible to the viewer is deeply