re-organization of the division of labor within the military. In this paper, I will suggest that this
reorganized division of labor also serves as a site of symbolic politics reinforcing the gendered
dimensions of the national identity of the American soldier.
Consider the words of Paul Cerjan who, in defending the outsourcing of vital support
services, points out that this outsourcing serves in part as a means to reduce costs and in part as a
way to enable the soldier to maintain a “proper attitude” as a “war fighter.” Cerjan laments that
he “spent his entire career watching soldiers pull KP [kitchen police] in the kitchen.”
the matter, “why do we have to do that with soldiers?” To pull KP—to perform the reproductive
labor of preparing and cooking food and cleaning a kitchen—is apparently to detract the soldier
from his/her proper role. And so, in addition to being a way of cutting costs, outsourcing this
labor enables a division of labor that symbolically reinforces the soldier’s role as a “war fighter.”
This paper explores the underlying gendered dimensions of this division of labor on U.S.
military bases, where as we have seen, most reproductive labor is performed by men from poor
Asian countries. The structure of this organization of social reproductive labor builds off of a
long tradition of gendered dynamics framing military service. In particular, it updates a tradition
of armed masculinity in reinforcing the aggressive masculine production of the American soldier
as a “war fighter”—regardless of the race, economic class, or even gender of that soldier. The
displacement of reproductive labor, which remains coded as effeminate, onto poor migrant men
from South and Southeast Asian countries serves to reinforce the aggressive masculine version
of American soldiering. That is, the division of labor on the military base has become a site for
positioning members of the U.S. military as bearers of a superior masculinity vis-à-vis feminized
migrant workers who are, significantly, non-Americans performing devalued feminine
3
According to the Dictionary of United States Army Terms 1983, kitchen police refers to “military or civilian
personnel detailed or hired to perform noncook duties pertaining to preliminary preparation of fruits and vegetables,
sanitation and cleaning of dining facility building and equipment.”
7
Convention