Where Are the Women? Dilemmas of Invisibility and Hypervisibility in the Canadian, Norwegian, and UK Armed Forces

As an institution, a nation’s military is responsible for training and educating its members in a number of areas. This education takes place in a specific cultural context according to unstated rules, premises, and assumptions – in short, what Geertz (1957, p. 33) described as “the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action.” The difference between formal rules and informal norms and conventions speaks to a difference between espoused ideals and everyday experience. While institutional ethos and formal learning relate to an ideal culture, informal learning can contribute to sustaining systemic issues such as sexual misconduct, discrimination, and exclusionary practices. In this article, we consider both invisible and hypervisible elements of military culture and how they contribute to preserving the military as a masculine domain. Drawing examples from Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom, we question, first, how the military organizational culture contributes to the gendering of military personnel and, second, the extent to which military cultures contribute to and reinforce the gendering of the military subject. By considering the physical environment and photographic representations of women in uniform, we attempt to unravel and trace certain threads in the “fabric of meaning” that envelops gender discourses in the three military institutions.