THE MAN OF HOBBES - MASCULINITY AND WARTIME NECESSITY

The primary focus of this article is on the wartime (1939-1945) necess ity of the British Army intervening into the personal lives of soldier s in order to maximise military effectiveness. Analysis of administrat ive discourse on masculinity suggests that the Army was only too well aware of the fact that men approximated the exemplary masculinity of t he combat soldier to greatly varying degrees and that, in practice the Army worked not only to achieve a division of labour among servicemen which reflected a range of military masculinities, but also to find a means of dealing with the fears and anxieties of all men which often centred on death or marital infidelity. It suggests that the necessity of such state intervention into the private lives of soldiers was con tingent on men's emotional investment in the both the gender order and the particular relations of trust which bound them to it.