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Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can't Fight. By MacKenzie Megan . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2015. 220p. $94.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.
Book Reviews: American Politics
This book is a welcome contribution to the literature in international relations (IR), demonstrating why feminist IR scholarship matters for understanding IR topics of war, peace, and security, and the ways in which gender differences/orders/hierarchies are evident in IR. There is now extensive feminist scholarship of case studies on women, gender, militaries, and war around the world; yet, as Megan MacKenzie notes, there is little work on Western militaries--and this is what makes this book especially noteworthy. She examines the U.S. military's combat exclusion policy in which, until 2013, women were prohibited from combat roles. Rather than focusing on the question of whether women "can" or "should" fight, however, MacKenzie considers "how the combat exclusion has been used throughout military history to shape ideals of 'good,' 'honorable,' and 'real' soldiers" (p. 18).
The book convincingly shows that the "band of brothers" myth is a powerful one that has affected military policy and "public perceptions of and emotional responses to war" (p. 194). To show the connection of the band of brothers myth to the combat exclusion and U.S. military identity, she uses a discourse analysis of three kinds of sources: U.S. government military reports, statements, press briefings, and policies related to the combat exclusion; news articles and opinion pieces in major U.S. news outlets (i.e., New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post); and public comments to three online articles on The Daily Beast website on the combat exclusion (one of which was published in January 2013 when the combat exclusion policy was lifted, and one published two months later). Debates...