Description
Almost ten years ago, Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski suggested that we should be Rethinking the Man Question in international relations. More specifically, there has been much written about the relationship between gender and the military in recent years and of particular interest are works questioning the dominance of hegemonic military masculinity in contemporary times: to what extent is this central to modern armed forces? How has the integration of women impacted gender practices in the military? What is the role of LGBT personnel? This presentation considers the relationship between militaries and gender in the context of social media, where the British military is comparatively under-investigated. We ask to what extent the British Army constructs itself in hegemonically masculine terms on Instagram, a platform centring images. We focus on 1) the main, official account (https://www.instagram.com/britisharmy/) and 2) the account of the Army LGBT Network (https://www.instagram.com/british_army_lgbt/). Preliminary analysis suggests that the main account is much more hegemonically masculine than we might assume given recent rethinking of military masculinity. In contrast, the LGBT Network account positions the British Army as progressive, subverting representations of the institution as monolithically, hegemonically masculine.
