REVIEW ESSAY: MILITARIZED MEDIA AT WAR AND HOME

摘要

As anthropologist Cynthia Enloe (2004) argues, to understand how cultures become militarized requires "feminist curiosity" about the formal institutional strategies and informal cultures of decision-making that make militarization and its institutions of gendered and sexed power, possible. Militarization, she argues, is the process through which social practice becomes defined by or dependent upon the military for its meaning and value—values that privilege social hierarchy, aggressive bodily conduct, and hegemonic forms of masculinity (p. 219). Many social practices can be militarized. Enloe's own work examines the gendered militarization of familial relations, the dress of female soldiers, the organization of laundry labor, commercial products such as cans of soup, tourist zones, the sex industry, and gun manufacturing. Wielding feminist-minded curiosity to their transformations signifies that one attends to their historical and material organization through the lens of gender rather than attributing them to "tradition," "nature," "custom," or "sexual difference." While my own interests lie in feminist engagements with militarized practices, Enloe points to a particularly useful method for thinking about the warlike conditions of culture from a communications perspective as well. She argues for a critical engagement with the archives of militarization, the artifacts, and documents—budgets, rule books, informal and formal guidelines for soldiers and their wives, and so on獁hich evidence the strategies that go into militarization and the possibilities for their disruption (Enloe, 2000, pp. 34, 289).