Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898-2001

Aaron Belkin

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Paper, 224 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-70284-3
$25.00

July, 2012
Cloth, 224 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-70285-0
$75.00

The masculinity of those who serve in the American military would seem to be
indisputable, yet it is full of contradictions. To become a warrior, one must renounce
those things in life that are perceived to be unmasculine. Yet at the same time, the
military has encouraged and even mandated warriors to do exactly the opposite.

Bring Me Men explores these contradictions in great detail and shows that their
invisibility has been central to the concealment of American empire’s darkest secrets.
By examining case studies that expose these contradictions—the phenomenon of maleon-
male rape at the U.S. Naval Academy, for example, as well as historical and contemporary
attitudes toward cleanliness and filth—Belkin utterly upends our understanding of the relationship between warrior masculinity, American empire and the fragile processes sustaining it.

Related Subjects

• American Studies
• Gay and Lesbian Studies

About the Author

Aaron Belkin is associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University and director of the Palm Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been a MacArthur Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He has published more than twenty-five books, chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles. His most recent book is How We Won: Progressive Lessons from the Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

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