AUB CASAR Lecture – Sex Toys and Soldiers: Life in the US Military Sexual Complex
CASAR organized a lecture presented by Dr. Frances Winddance Twine on March 19, 2013. Since 1973 the US Armed Forces has become increasingly dependent upon American women to enlist and serve in the military. However, as a series of sex scandals and the continued abuses that women encounter demonstrate, the US military remains a ‘masculine’ organization in its command structure, sexual culture and gender ideologies. This talk will examine how class inequality and gender hierarchies and a civilian culture of violence shapes the experiences of female soldiers and the failure of the US government to protect female and male soldiers from routinized sexual abuse over the past four decades.
France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology and documentary filmmaker at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the former deputy editor of American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association. Twine currently serves as a member of the International editorial boards of Sociology, the official journal of the British Sociological Association and the Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Twine’s research examines the intersections of racial, gender, and class inequalities. Her recent publications include Girls With Guns: Firearms, Feminism and Militarism (2012) and Geographies of Privilege (2013).
