Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror by Bonnie Mann (review)

As anyone who works in gender theory knows, “gender” is a difficult and elusive concept to define. And yet, the question of what exactly it means to have or live a gender still remains central to philosophical feminism. Refusing to provide a singular narrative on what gender is, Bonnie Mann contributes to this continued discussion through a rich philosophical, cultural, and historical approach in her work. Like Simone de Beauvoir, to whom Mann repeatedly pays homage, she provides us with a multiperspectival account of the ways that gender functions on, in, and through us individually and politically.

Mann’s new book, Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror, offers a provocative and multifaceted study of the ways in which gender is produced, manipulated, felt, and lived in contemporary society. Although the study focuses mostly on the machinations of gender in the United States, Mann’s insights into the “regime of gender” offer tools for exploring the ways in which gender operates not only within the borders of the country, but beyond them as well. It is a book that provides us with a clear, yet scholarly access into the tangled and polydimensional issues surrounding gender in the modern age.

The division of the book is interesting. Mann sets up her project in the prologue by committing to the existential philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir and with a cinematic, literary, and historical narrative of masculinity in the United States. The prologue, which Mann titles “Justifications,” begins with Mann’s own experiences of being invited in 2003 to contribute to a collection on feminism and just war theory. Here, Mann introduces the notion of “gender as justification,” a concept that leads to an insightful overview of Beauvoir’s methodology in The Second Sex, where, as Mann explains, Beauvoir doesn’t so much inquire into what gender is, but what gender does. As Beauvoir makes clear, gender justification has at its heart the subordination and exploitation of women to masculine authority. The accomplishment of this kind of world-historical power imbalance is not the result of a unilateral exercise of power for Beauvoir, but a complex web of material and ideological forces all promoting the subordination of the feminine to the masculine. What makes it so tricky not only to see but to untangle is the fact that “the process of justification occurs at the shifting, messy, blurred demarcation between nature and culture” (Mann, 37).

Throughout the remainder of the book, Mann emphasizes her commitment to these opening insights taken from Beauvoir’s strategy in The Second Sex. Not simply providing us a strictly philosophical-theoretical approach, Mann utilizes literature, memoirs, film, history, political writings, and philosophy to try to circle around the gender problematic. The closing chapter of the prologue is a perfect example of this tactic. Building from the Beauvoirian stakes, Mann goes in to a discussion of the 2008 movie The Hurt Locker, Susan Faludi’s recent work, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, before moving in to the main chapters of the book. While the opening gambit on “Justifications” lays out much of what Mann wants to accomplish in the rest of the book it lacks a certain coherence. The move from personal invitation, to Beauvoir’s feminist investigations, into a brief historical seems initially disconnected. Admittedly, the prologue makes more sense after the completion of the book—one circles back around from the end to the beginning and the logic becomes clearer, but readers will have to do some of that work themselves to complete the circuit. In the “Prologue,” Mann takes a first-person position—a deliberate move to provide both the feminist perspective of the personal as political, and also the existential-phenomenological claim to provide meticulous detail of lived experience. As such, we are treated to many personal accounts throughout the book—Mann sitting in her office in Eugene in the summer, people-watching in...