Rescuing Masculinity: Captivity, Rescue and Gender in American War Narratives

A traditional way to persuade young American people they should go to war is to promise them war produces conditions in which they will behave heroically. This tack has been especially effective with young American men, who often learn to equate heroics with masculinity, ostensibly a single, immutable state of power and control that once achieved cannot be altered, and one that occurs in male bodies exclusively. As reflected in many popular American war narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, instead of war's bolstering and confirming masculinity, what can be observed are repeated instances of males attempting to perform this purportedly stable gender condition and, instead of exhibiting traditional forms of masculinity, the men manifest traditional femininity, of being out of control and in need of help. This paradox is especially evident in the trope of captivity and rescue, when in trying to perform heroic masculinity men make decisions that lead them into forms of captivity and subsequently the least powerful and in control feminine position of having to be rescued. As a result, this trope challenges traditional American masculinity and the persuasive tack used to lure young people into the American military, not only in condemning as foolhardy the "John Wayne" efforts of those requiring rescue, but also in blurring traditional distinctions between male rescuers and female rescued. Because the captivity and rescue trope reveals how the urgency to perform masculinity ironically can result in the performance of femininity, it clarifies the precarious and mutable nature of masculinity even under war conditions that, according to the truism, are supposed to convert a (feminine) boy into a (masculine) man. While the repercussions of this situation? of being promised a masculinizing condition and finding oneself in its opposite? can be dire enough for the physical, mental and emotional well-being of the individual, the presence of the trope indicates how such masculinist thinking and its repercussions are also dangerously manifested in war narratives at the national and strategic levels. The notion that war is a gateway, if not the gateway, to masculinity normalizes and even makes seem necessary a nation's using combat to resolve its conflicts. Given these conditions, war can appear to be the only and most natural solution. In a discussion about captivity and rescue during combat it might seem crucial to analyze recent films like Blackhawk Down (2001) or Rescue Dawn (2006). Clearly, one might reason, these films, both based on actual events first depicted in written texts, face head-on the issue of masculine gender when male combatants are captured and require rescue. Were there time or space, one might invest in such analysis of the male soldiers in Blackhawk Down who arrogantly enter combat in Somalia with insufficient weapons, plans, and supplies but are armed heavily with militaristic bravado and a firm belief in their masculine ability to "get some." One might also explore the depiction in Rescue Dawn of US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler's persistent and finally successful efforts in 1965 to free himself from his captors after having been shot down over Laos. These texts and others like them, however, are concerned with explicit cases of captivity and rescue, thus making the situations they depict seem aberrant, as isolated and atypical cases of immutable masculinity gone awry. What is more compelling instead is how this trope is quietly and unobtrusively embedded in texts that are not explicitly concerned with captivity and rescue, that do not represent as abnormal or crazy males trying to perform masculinity in combat, that try to normalize as masculine a broad range of gender behaviors. Those texts and scenes that gender critics have overlooked as constructing masculinity are more interesting to explore, as is how this trope can be used to elucidate the rhetorics of war used in various genres and at various discursive levels. …