Sisterhood in the British Army: Investigating Suspended Corporeality and Masculine Melancholy

My project will investigate the corporeality - understood as experiences of the physical body - of service personnel in the British Army to examine how notions of identity and the self are forged through military culture. Centring the experiences of military service of trans and ethnic minority service personnel, I will investigate how corporeality can be understood as "suspended" in relation to experiences of masculine melancholy, which I define as gendered feelings of loss.

I will use surveys, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis to critically assess how military discourses of equality and diversity are constructed as well as experienced and understood by personnel in interactions with each other and the military institution. Examining how corporeality may be "suspended" through identifying gendered feelings of loss amongst service personnel in gender specific peer groupings such as sisterhood, my research will reframe how examinations of equality and diversity are conducted and will shift the dominant masculine paradigm currently present in critical military studies.

My research will accordingly contribute to a large body of military scholarship (e.g., Harries-Jenkins, G., & Dandeker, C. 1994; Heggie, J. K. F. 2003), that has investigated the impact of the "Gay Ban", a policy driven by 'the rationale that homosexuality was incompatible with military service' (Osborne and McGill, 2023: 8) and saw LGBTQ service personnel formally discharged from military service in the UK until 2000.

Following a recent public government apology (Ministry of Defence, 2023) for the ban on gay service personnel made in response to the 'LGBT Veteran's Independent Review' (Etherton, 2023), which addressed the lasting impact of the Armed Forces ban on Gay Service Personnel, my project will produce a nuanced and timely examination of gender and race relations through a specific intervention into the lived experiences of trans and ethnic minority service personnel in military service. My research, therefore, offers to produce empirical findings capable of impacting military policies concerned with the recruitment and management of minority members of military service.