The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (review)

In this work, Christina Jarvis investigates the effects of militarization on male bodies and American conceptions of masculinity during World War II. As the United States entered the war, military and federal institutions processed bodies into physical categories. This process, which included policing bodies for homosexuality, coincided with the predominance of "privileged" representations of strong, youthful, white male bodies that symbolized the re-strengthening of America in the wake of the emasculating Great Depression. Jarvis also considers the difficulty in constructing a strong male body politic that since it had to reimagine a physically disabled president as virile and masculine. Constructing the United States as a muscular nation also required transforming Uncle Sam from his slender World War I form into an imposingly broad-shouldered figure that would eclipse Lady Liberty and Columbia as the primary national and military symbols. Youth similarly experienced such militarization and "musculinization," to borrow Yvonne Tasker's term via ritualized exercise programs at schools and in team sports that aimed to prepare boys and young men for combat.

The containment of women of "easy virtue" in camps and official military brothels to prevent them from squandering the nation's manpower accompanied these practices of increased surveillance on male bodies. Also, wounded bodies, notes Jarvis, threatened the burgeoning national manhood, though the Office of War Information in cooperation with Hollywood studios carefully limited their exposure to audiences in Americans' vicarious experience of the war. However, postwar popular texts, such as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Men (1950), offered methods of remasculinizing these damaged bodies as bearing "wounds of honor" and authored alternative forms of masculinity. Postwar memorialization of the war dead, of the participants, and, finally, of the entire "Greatest Generation" continues to celebrate the second World War as the "good war" and as the preferred masculine template for later U.S. wars. This is a fine work for individuals interested in exploring the ways in which World War II continues to shape American policy, identity, and culture.