Description
This article examines how militarized masculinities in Turkey are enacted at home and register as political masculinities through implicit everyday claims. Based on forty-six interviews with military spouses, I read the household as the hinge where gender is embodied in routine practices that are recognized as small-p political, meaning every day and informal exercises of power, and that can scale into Big-P politics when they become publicly acknowledged and institutionally consequential. This vantage shows how seemingly ordinary domestic routines are not only shaped by militarized norms but also articulated as political claims with effects beyond the household. Three interrelated mechanisms specify this process. Domesticating the chain of command describes how military hierarchies spill over into the home, producing correction-based authority that organizes time, movement, and discipline within family life. Truth-setting captures the assumption that military knowledge is the proper standard and superior to civilian forms, recoding disagreement as instruction and positioning the spouse as a co-performer who must model exemplarity. Spiritual-moral governance highlights how loyalty, piety, and grief are mobilized as public composure, transforming patience and silence into demonstrations of duty and respectability. Together, these mechanisms show how authority, knowledge, and moral warrants are enacted in daily interactions and rendered visible as political claims. These claims travel as spouses are tasked with carrying them from private interiors into compound publics and civilian venues. In doing so, spouses are mobilized as exemplars and mediators who embody militarized values for non-military communities, while also managing the frictions and representational crises that result. By situating militarized masculinities and political masculinities as two vital frameworks in direct conversation, the article clarifies how everyday militarization is claimed and recognized as political masculinities and why the home must be treated as a central site in the political registers of militarized masculinities.
