Description
Sweden and Canada position themselves as early adopters of ‘feminist’ policy and pioneers of gender equality and LGBTQIA+ rights in military contexts. We compare data from our projects on military gender relations in the Swedish and Canadian contexts. Through a feminist narrative analysis, we highlight temporal continuities/ruptures, demonstrating the productive work narratives around being “first” and “early” does for their state brands. We focalize military members' lived experience in backlash times against the same inclusion policies these states have supposedly championed. We argue that in the midst of funding cuts and tangible policy rollbacks, Canada and Sweden maintain a minimalist stance that equality remains important. Positioning ourselves in Critical Military Studies’ debates on militarization as a process and its gendered implications, we offer three frames through which the minimalist gender narrative remains stable across time. First, in backlash times, these militaries focus on ‘hard’ security issues, sidelining ‘gender issues’. Second, this minimization is supported by invoking past tense, claiming that gender equality and LGBTQIA+ rights have already been achieved “at home”. Third, to uphold the notion that equality remains important these states show silent disapproval to explicit backlash occurring in states like the US, maintaining a moral high ground.
