Staging Women’s Capability and Suffering in Military-Themed Television Formats

Gender, Capability and Military Legitimacy

Research on women’s participation in military contexts suggests that capability functions as a central evaluative marker of legitimacy. Capability is commonly evaluated through bodily performance, control, and the ability to meet physical and psychological standards. These criteria are well established within military training and operational doctrine (Nindl et al., 2017; Tharion et al., 2023). Research on women in combat roles, however, demonstrates that such evaluations are rarely neutral. Physical performance has been afforded disproportionate symbolic weight in judgments of women’s suitability and legitimacy, positioning bodily capacity as a key site of gendered evaluation (MacKenzie, 2015; Goldstein, 2018). Steder and Rones (2019) further show how legitimacy can be temporarily produced through organizational differentiation and resource parity, without necessarily being institutionalized over time.

Drawing on the case of the Jegertroppen – a globally unique all-female special operations unit established to recruit, select, and train women for elite military roles – they demonstrate how legitimacy can be generated under highly specific organizational conditions. While the Jegertroppen succeeded in recruiting and educating highly motivated and capable women, the absence of clear career pathways within special operations rendered women’s inclusion contingent and potentially reversible. Their analysis thus illustrates how legitimacy may function as a situational and time-bound accomplishment rather than a stable organizational recognition. Notably, this contingency cannot be explained by women’s inability to meet military demands. Drawing on a field-based study, Schaefer et al. (2021) describe how objectively measured male and female physical performance are evaluated differently, complicating persistent assumptions of bodily inadequacy.

Across these studies, “capability” refers not only to measurable performance outcomes, but to how bodily competence is interpreted and recognized as legitimate within military hierarchies. Historical comparisons further suggest that women’s access to and performance in combat roles does not reliably translate into enduring symbolic legitimacy, as women continue to be framed as in need of protection rather than as default agents of military action (Greener, 2023; Enloe, 1994). Together, these findings indicate a persistent disjunction between empirical performance, public narratives, and institutional change, underscoring that capability alone is insufficient to secure recognition as a legitimate combat soldier.

Suffering, recognition, and the limits of legitimacy

By contrast, feminist research on war and militarization has often conceptualized women’s suffering – manifested through pain, exhaustion, injury, or emotional strain – through protection-oriented and gendered frames that foreground vulnerability, moral concern, and ethical recognition rather than operational competence (Enloe, 2017; Freedman, 2012). Within this body of scholarship, suffering is frequently made intelligible through logics of protection that render women visible as affected subjects or as agents of critique and resistance, while leaving its relationship to professional authority and military legitimacy largely unexplored. As a result, women’s suffering has historically been acknowledged in ways that emphasize loss, endurance, and emotional cost, with weak connections to evaluations of capability, belonging, and legitimacy within military institutions.

Taken together, previous research suggests that capability and suffering do not function as symmetrical evaluative markers: while women’s capability is closely scrutinized and often discounted, suffering is recognized and morally validated, yet rarely translated into professional or operational legitimacy.

Resistance and the maintenance of legitimacy boundaries

Resistance to women’s inclusion in combat roles has been widely documented and has often been articulated through appeals to physical standards, unit cohesion, and operational effectiveness. However, scholarship shows that such opposition cannot be reduced to empirical concerns about performance. Rather, it operates as a form of boundary work through which military legitimacy is protected and reproduced, independently of demonstrated performance.

Critics such as van Creveld (2000) have argued that women’s presence in combat threatens the moral and symbolic foundations of military institutions. In this line of reasoning, women’s injury, death, or capture is framed as socially intolerable, regardless of demonstrated capability. Legitimacy is thus undermined not by women’s failure to perform, but by the perceived costs of their participation. Similarly, van Vugt’s (2009) evolutionary account of warfare interprets combat as grounded in evolved male patterns of group cooperation in conflict, framing women’s participation as biologically anomalous rather than shaped by organizational and social context. Together, these perspectives naturalize male bodies as the default subjects of military legitimacy while narratively casting women as perpetual exceptions.

Subsequent research has shown that such arguments persist even as empirical evidence of women’s combat performance accumulates. Studies demonstrate that women who meet or exceed formal military standards nevertheless continue to face symbolic and cultural resistance, indicating a persistent disjunction between demonstrated capability and recognized legitimacy within military institutions and public discourse (Rosman & Rickover, 2025; Cohn, 2000). Analyses of public discourse surrounding women’s integration into combat roles further show that such resistance is structured through intersecting logics of effectiveness and cost, underpinned by categorical and essentialist understandings of sex and gender (Collins-Dogrul & Ulrich, 2018). Resistance thus functions less as scepticism about women’s capability and more as a mechanism for maintaining gendered boundaries of belonging within physically demanding military roles. Importantly, these legitimacy boundaries are also produced and negotiated through mediated representations that shape public understandings of who can credibly belong in these roles.

Scholarship on military culture and gender (Alvinius et al., 2016; Sasson-Levy, 2003) further shows that such mediated processes draw on broader cultural and narrative frameworks through which capability and suffering are interpreted and evaluated in public discourse. In this sense, resistance operates not only as an institutional boundary, but also as a narrative logic, making media a critical site for examining how such boundaries are articulated, reinforced, and potentially unsettled.

Media, dramaturgy, and the staging of military legitimacy

Scholarship on documentary film and television has long emphasized that such media do not simply record reality; they actively construct meaning through selection, framing, narration, and dramaturgical organization. As Bonner (2013) argues, documentary film and television can be understood as non-fiction forms that make truth claims about the social world while relying on representational conventions to render events intelligible and meaningful to audiences. In this sense, documentary meaning does not emerge from events as such, but from dramaturgical choices that mobilize narrative, visual, and affective resources to make a claim about the world.

This understanding is relevant not only for documentary film, but for a broader set of television formats that aim to present real people, real situations, and real consequences outside the domain of news. Often referred to in media scholarship as factual television, these formats – including documentary and reality television – combine claims to authenticity with narrative and staging techniques designed to guide interpretation and evaluation (Bonner, 2013).

At the core of such televisual forms lies the production of emotional engagement. As Hall and colleagues (2013) note, television works by organizing meaning through affect, inviting viewers to be moved, invested, and positioned in relation to what is shown. In formats that foreground the “real”, emotional engagement functions not only as entertainment but as a mechanism through which performances are rendered consequential and open to judgment. From this perspective, exposure operates as a normalizing mechanism: through the repeated circulation of particular representational types, televisual formats stabilize interpretive frames that shape how performances are recognized, evaluated, and rendered meaningful over time (Hall et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2009).

Reality television intensifies this logic. As Kavka (2012) argues, reality television derives much of its appeal from the tension between staging and authenticity: performances are presented as unscripted and ordinary, yet are structured through recurring narrative situations, evaluative commentary, and dramaturgical choices. Through this process, reality television actively organizes regimes of meaning and evaluation, encouraging audiences to assess character, effort, endurance, and worth across repeated trials.

Seen through this broader understanding of documentary and reality television as representational and dramaturgical forms, military-themed programmes constitute a particularly powerful site of analysis. In these programmes, engagement is most often generated through the exposure of physical capability and suffering, which function as dramaturgical resources that render performance visible and meaningful to audiences. When military norms are represented on television, such formats organize moments of evaluation through narrative structure, visual emphasis, and affective intensity. Within representational logic, research on women in military media shows that capability and suffering are frequently mobilized as evaluative cues, positioning women’s bodies as sites where legitimacy is tested, conferred, or withheld (Tasker, 2002; Burkett, 2014; Carver, 2007).

Building on earlier film-based analyses, research on military reality television has shown how contemporary formats translate these narrative logics into unscripted settings. In her analysis of the British original series SAS: Who Dares Wins, Pears (2022) demonstrates how hypermasculine military ideals are reproduced through instructor authority, ritualized suffering, and dramaturgical control of exposure. Editing, pacing, and evaluative commentary organize moments of endurance, failure, and recognition, producing a hierarchy of worth that privileges stoicism, aggression, and bodily control. While Pears’s analysis centres on the reproduction of hegemonic military masculinity, it also reveals how capability and suffering function as key evaluative mechanisms through which participants’ performance is assessed. What remains under-theorized, however, is how these evaluative mechanisms operate when women participate, and how gendered interpretations of capability and suffering shape women’s legitimacy within elite military television.

Research gap and contribution

Overall, previous research demonstrates that women’s military capability and suffering are evaluated through deeply gendered lenses, and that neither demonstrated performance nor endurance reliably secures legitimacy. However, much of this scholarship has focused on institutional practice, policy debates, or fictional representations, leaving the role of contemporary elite military-themed television underexamined. In particular, we lack empirical analyses of how capability and suffering are staged, evaluated, and made meaningful through recurring narrative situations when women participate in these television formats in which legitimacy is made publicly visible and subject to interpretation. This study addresses that gap by examining how gendered legitimacy is dramaturgically produced in military-themed reality television.

Research Design

This study adopts a qualitative research design to examine how women’s capability and suffering are staged in televised physically demanding military formats, and how such staging contributes to constructions of legitimacy and belonging. The analysis focuses on elite military selection and training environments as mirrored in televised formats, where bodily performance, endurance, and emotional exposure are central to narrative progression and evaluation.

The study addresses the following research question: “How are women’s capability and suffering staged in military-themed television, and how is such staging implicated in constructions of legitimacy in physically demanding military contexts?”

To address this question, the article employs a case-based design that examines variation in dramaturgical staging across selected television episodes. Rather than treating television formats as representative categories in themselves, the comparison is used to capture how similar military-style challenges are organized and evaluated across different cases. This design allows the study to identify patterns and variation in how women’s bodily performance and endurance are rendered visible within elite military settings on television.

Analytical approach

The analysis adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach to televised material, informed by sociological and feminist perspectives on mediated meaning and evaluation. Instead of treating the programmes as reflections of military practice, the analysis approaches them as mediated representations in which norms, values, and evaluations of performance are produced through narrative structure, interaction, and aesthetic choices.

The analytical reading is dramaturgical in the sense that attention is directed to how bodily performance, endurance, and emotional exposure are staged for an audience. This includes a focus on how scenes are structured, how authority and evaluation are performed through interaction, and how visual and auditory elements shape the intensity and significance of key moments. In this respect, the study draws on established approaches within media and cultural analysis that attend to how television organizes meaning through narrative, affect, and aesthetic form (Hall et al., 2013; Bonner, 2013).

The analysis is also informed by discursive sensibilities associated with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), particularly the understanding of media representation as sites where cultural norms and power relations may be reproduced or contested (Winther Jørgensen & Phillips, 2000). Rather than applying a formalized CDA model, this perspective functions as a sensitizing framework that guides attention to how capability and suffering are framed, questioned, or normalized through language, interaction, and visual presentation.

Taken together, this analytical approach is well suited to examining how gendered military performance is made meaningful within televised elite military settings, without presuming a direct correspondence between mediated representations of military performance and the practices of military institutions.

Scope of analysis and scene selection

The empirical material consists of three television programmes depicting elite-style military selection and training environments: Elitstyrkans hemligheter (Sweden), SAS Australia: Who Dares Wins, and the Norwegian documentary Jenter for Norge. Together, these programmes are treated as analytically selected cases of elite military training as staged on television, in which bodily performance, endurance, and emotional exposure are central to narrative progression and evaluation.

The two national adaptations of SAS: Who Dares Wins were selected because they share a common format logic while being embedded in different national media contexts, allowing analytical comparison of how similar military-style challenges are dramaturgically staged. Jenter for Norge, by contrast, follows the formal training of Norway’s all-female special operations unit, Jegertroppen, in a documentary mode, offering a distinct dramaturgical context without competitive elimination.

The cases were selected to capture variation in dramaturgical staging rather than to represent television formats as such. All three programmes draw on elite military aesthetics – physical testing, hierarchical authority, discipline, and endurance under pressure – but mobilize these elements through different narrative, interactional, and aesthetic arrangements. As elite military environments featuring women remain rare in contemporary television despite such programmes reaching broad audiences, this variation makes the cases analytically suitable for examining how women’s capability and suffering are made visible, emotionally charged, and normalized within elite military contexts on television.

The systematic analysis focuses on a close comparative examination of four selected scenes drawn from the three programmes. While the broader material was reviewed in full, these scenes were chosen for in-depth analysis because they are narratively weighted, comparable across cases, and foreground moments where bodily capability, discipline, and emotional exposure are made particularly salient.

Scene selection was guided by three criteria: (1) narrative weight within the episode, (2) comparability of military-style challenges across programmes, and (3) analytical salience of bodily performance and visible strain. Scenes not meeting these criteria were excluded in order to maintain analytical focus. The selection process involved interpretive judgement, with the final selection refined through iterative review and discussion with senior researchers to ensure that the scenes function as representative instances of broader dramaturgical patterns in the material.

Broadcast years are not foregrounded in the analysis, as the study focuses on dramaturgical staging rather than temporal development. For transparency, the analysed scenes are specified below.

Analysed scenes

Rule violations:

• SAS Australia: Who Dares Wins (Season 3, Episode 6) (TV4, n.d.): A male contestant is accused of breaking the rules during a tug-of-war with a female contestant.

• Elitstyrkans hemligheter (Season 3, Episode 5) (TV4, n.d.): A male contestant is caught violating the rules during a circuit course.

Physical confrontation:

• Jenter for Norge (NRK, 2016): A female recruit undergoes close combat training in which she must handle physical aggression.

• Elitstyrkans hemligheter (Season 3, Episode 3) (TV4, n.d.): Contestants are forced to fight each other in a test of their ability to confront aggression.

Operationalization

The analysis is structured around three analytical dimensions: exposure, agents of military culture, and dramaturgical effects. These dimensions functioned as analytical tools that structured the examination of selected scenes across the programmes. They were developed through an iterative engagement with the empirical material and relevant scholarship and were used to guide the systematic analysis. Capability and suffering were treated as cross-cutting analytical lenses, traced across all three dimensions rather than constituting separate analytical categories.

In this analysis, capability is treated as a dramaturgical resource through which bodily competence, control, and performance are made visible and evaluated in relation to military norms. Alongside this, suffering is also treated as a dramaturgical resource in an ambivalent sense – that is, as a narrative and evaluative element through which visible pain, exhaustion, or emotional strain may either support or undermine perceptions of endurance, worthiness, and legitimacy. Whether bodily performance and visible suffering are read as capability or as vulnerability is shaped by how they are exposed, evaluated by authority figures, and framed through narrative and aesthetic choices. Capability and suffering operate in a dynamic relationship in which the same bodily experience may either reinforce or erode legitimacy for women. These dramaturgical resources are examined as part of televisual staging, where bodily performance and emotional exposure are organized as interpretive cues through which legitimacy can be read.

“Exposure” directed analytical attention to how participants were made visible within the programmes and how this visibility was framed. This included attention to who was shown, in what situations, and with what narrative and visual emphasis. Drawing on media and gender studies concerned with representation and visibility (Hall et al., 2013; Bonner, 2013; Furia & Bielby, 2009; Burkett, 2014; Deller, 2019), exposure encompassed both presence and absence as well as editorial practices through which specific performances were amplified, muted, or rendered ambiguous. In this sense, exposure was treated as a dramaturgical process through which gendered legitimacy could be tested, reinforced, or destabilized.

“Agents of military culture” focused on how instructors and leaders functioned as authoritative figures within the televised environments. In both reality and documentary formats, these actors embodied and enacted norms of military discipline, hierarchy, and physical toughness, while simultaneously performing these traits as part of the programmes’ dramaturgy. Informed by scholarship on gender and military sociology (Connell, 2015; MacKenzie, 2015; Pears, 2022; Diacone et al., 2025), this dimension guided attention to how evaluations of capability and suffering were articulated, legitimized, or challenged through interaction between instructors and participants.

“Dramaturgical effects” addressed how audiovisual and narrative techniques shaped the intensity and evaluative framing of key moments. This included attention to editing, sound, pacing, repetition, and sequencing, which structured how bodily performance, endurance, and emotional strain were made salient to viewers (Bonner, 2013; Kavka, 2012; Deller, 2019). Rather than treating these elements as neutral features of storytelling, they were analysed as analytically relevant features that influenced how performances were framed and interpreted within the programmes.

The analysis followed an iterative and interpretive process in which empirical material and analytical concepts were examined in dialogue. The analytical dimensions guided the analysis but were refined through repeated engagement with the selected scenes, rather than treated as inductively generated themes. First, the material was reviewed broadly to identify recurring patterns related to bodily capability, visible suffering, authority, and emotional framing; this exploratory phase helped establish which situations and interactions were most salient for addressing the research question. Second, the selected scenes were analysed systematically using the three analytical dimensions described above. Scenes were examined with particular attention to how capability and suffering were made meaningful through exposure, instructor–participant interaction, and dramaturgical effects.

Other dimensions – such as collective loyalty, mutual support, or broader organizational symbolism – were present in the material but were not made central to the analysis. This delimitation reflects the dominant dramaturgical logics of the programmes, which consistently foreground individual bodily performance and emotional exposure as primary sites for evaluation and recognition.

Finally, the analysis is grounded in an interpretive understanding of knowledge production, where meanings of capability, suffering, and legitimacy are not treated as inherent properties of performance, but as outcomes of interaction, evaluation and staging. The analytical focus is explicitly oriented toward understanding how these meanings are produced and valued in gendered ways, rather than toward assessing military effectiveness or institutional outcomes. In televised military contexts, these processes are further intensified through dramaturgical techniques designed to engage audiences, such as emotional amplification, narrative contrast, and selective exposure.

This reflexive stance does not treat televisual effects as distortions to be corrected for, but as analytically productive features that make visible how women’s military legitimacy may be clarified, unsettled, normalized, or questioned on screen. Accordingly, the analysis foregrounds how interpretive choices shape what becomes visible and meaningful, rather than claiming neutral or complete readings of the material.

Rule Violations

Scenes involving rule violations constitute decisive moments in which discipline, authority, and conformity to military norms are tested. In such situations, women’s capability and suffering are staged through contrasting models of authority and exposure, shaping how legitimacy is attributed or withheld.

In a scene from SAS Australia: Who Dares Wins (Season 3, Episode 6), a tug-of-war is staged at the edge of a cliff. A male and a female contestant, secured by safety lines, are ordered to pull until one is dragged off the ledge. When the male contestant pulls before the command, an instructor intervenes aggressively, grabbing his harness and shouting that he has cheated. Here, instructor authority functions as an agent of military culture, dramatizing discipline through confrontation, humiliation, and emotional escalation.

When the competition resumes, the woman is urged by the instructor to “think of your children,” while the man is instructed to “pull her off the cliff.” This contrast illustrates exposure dynamics: the man is framed through dominance and competition, while the woman is framed through emotional appeal and motherhood. Although the woman wins the contest, her victory is immediately displaced. The narrative focus shifts to the male contestant’s angry protest against the cheating accusation, culminating in a heated confrontation with the instructors. The male instructors’ aggressive reprimands reaffirm hierarchical authority, and the woman’s physical capability is absorbed into a broader dramaturgy of male conflict. Her success appears less as evidence of capability than as a disruption that must be contained within a masculinity-coded struggle over authority.

In a contrasting scene from Elitstyrkans hemligheter (Season 3, Episode 5), rule violations are staged through a different interactional logic. When contestants underperform at obstacle stations, instructors announce that “someone has cheated” without naming an individual. Rather than escalating confrontation, the episode constructs a collective dilemma. Exposure shifts toward group interaction, allowing female contestants to articulate concerns regarding a male peer’s actions, which are subsequently taken up and authorized by instructors through the introduction of video evidence addressed to the group as a whole. Here, agents of military culture enact authority not through humiliation or punishment, but through collective reflection and procedural clarification, through which women’s contributions are affirmed as equally valid within the evaluative process.

At the level of dramaturgical effects, responsibility is foregrounded as shared rather than individual blame through an emphasis on group dialogue. In this setting, women’s voices are given narrative space, and their participation in evaluating norms becomes visible. Capability is not staged as an exceptional interruption but as part of collective engagement with military discipline.

Taken together, these scenes demonstrate how similar moments of rule-breaking can be staged through different combinations of exposure, authority, and dramaturgical effects. In the Australian scene, women’s capability is briefly visible but subordinated to male-centred conflict, while suffering and emotional escalation serve to restore hierarchical authority. In the Swedish scene, women’s participation is integrated into a collective logic that allows capability and legitimacy to emerge through shared evaluation rather than confrontation. Similar interactional patterns recur across other episodes in the material, but are most clearly crystallized in the scenes analysed here.

Physical Confrontation

Scenes of physical confrontation dramatize bodily performance more directly than any other situation in the material. Through close combat and aggression, these scenes make capability and suffering highly visible, turning physical endurance, pain, and emotional response into decisive markers of legitimacy.

In the documentary Jenter for Norge (NRK, 2016), close combat training is presented as part of a structured professional programme. One female soldier, followed by the camera as she clears an unfamiliar building, is suddenly attacked by an armed antagonist, and must disarm him by force. In subsequent rooms, she confronts two muscular male opponents, sustains heavy blows, yet continues to fight until the exercise is halted. In a final sequence, she neutralizes a surprise attacker.

Here, exposure is sustained and continuous. The camera lingers on the soldier’s endurance, showing both the force of the attacks and her ability to complete each task. Agents of military culture – represented by instructors – exercise authority through guidance and recognition rather than intimidation. Dramaturgical effects emphasize realism and progression: pacing, sound, and editing highlight continuity rather than spectacle, framing capability as trainable and sustainable. When bruises are later shown, they are not sensationalized but presented as evidence of endurance. Suffering, in this context, functions as a legitimizing resource, reinforcing professional competence rather than vulnerability.

A contrasting scene from Elitstyrkans hemligheter (Season 3, Episode 3) stages physical confrontation as spectacle. Contestants are paired and instructed to “bring out your aggression” while fighting with protective gear. Exposure is uneven: men’s fights dominate screen time, while women’s bouts are shorter and marginal. When two women are shown fighting, one expresses hesitation and claims she is “not aggressive,” while the other identifies as naturally aggressive.

During the fight, the hesitant contestant adapts and surprises the instructors with her effort – “She was actually more aggressive than we expected.” Yet dramaturgical effects quickly diminish the moment. Editing and camera focus move on, treating her performance as an unexpected anomaly rather than as evidence of a capacity that could be developed or stabilized through training. The scene concludes with male contestants surrounding her, patting her on the back. This gesture is ambiguous, simultaneously supportive and protective, reinforcing assumptions of female fragility.

In these portrayals, physical confrontation illustrates how the meaning of women’s aggression is shaped by dramaturgical framing. In the documentary Jenter for Norge, suffering and endurance are integrated into a professional logic that legitimizes female capability as expected and credible. In Elitstyrkans hemligheter, women’s aggression is staged as emergent and surprising, and suffering does not accumulate into legitimacy in the same way. Instead, capability risks being rendered exceptional and narratively downplayed. While other instances of physical confrontation appear across the programmes, these scenes most clearly illustrate how endurance and aggression are either normalized as professional competence or staged as exception.

Across both narrative situations, women’s capability and suffering are shown to function as dramaturgical resources whose meaning depends on how they are exposed, evaluated by authority figures, and shaped through aesthetic choices. Rather than being inherently empowering or marginalizing, suffering and capability acquire legitimacy through specific staging practices. These findings illustrate how military-themed television can participate in the construction of gendered boundaries of belonging by shaping when endurance is framed as worthiness, and when it is rendered invisible or anomalous.

Limitations and Future Research

This study examined how women’s physical capability and suffering are represented and staged in contrasting television formats, using a limited selection of scenes across three national contexts. While the analysis provides insight into dramaturgical framing and gendered legitimacy, it does not assess how these portrayals are received by audiences.

Future research could explore this through audience reception studies or interviews with potential recruits to better understand how media exposure is interpreted in relation to perceptions of women in military roles.

Another limitation concerns the gap between mediated representation and institutional practice. The programs analysed here offer constructed portrayals of physically demanding military environments – through a documentary format and through a reality-based competition format. Comparative studies between media portrayals and actual military training could further illuminate how ideals of discipline, strength, and legitimacy are reinforced or reshaped through narrative form.

Future research could examine how instructor figures are constructed as recognizable authorities across military-themed television formats, and how such authority performances are interpreted in relation to norms of legitimacy, leadership, and gender.