reproductive labor. This in turn supports the corresponding and increasingly imperial posture that
the United States has assumed in the world. As we will see, the link between the symbolic
politics of the division of social reproductive labor with the ambitious and aggressive aspects of
U.S. foreign policy echoes earlier colonizer-colonized relations in that domestic life and
reproductive labor continue to be critical sites for demarcating lopsided positions of power in
international relations.
The Gendered Dimensions of Reproducing Soldiers
There is, of course, nothing new about the fact that military service is a gendered
phenomenon. Feminists have noted that over the course of the Western tradition gendered
practices have always underwritten the ideal and practice of military service. There is a long
tradition of associating soldiering with masculinity, both in Western political thought as well as
in the practice of armed forces (Snyder 1999; Enloe 2000). It is to this tradition that I turn next in
order to tease out the gendered dimensions of how reproductive labor has historically been
organized in the military.
The tradition of modern “armed masculinity” (Snyder 1999) can be traced back to
Niccolò Machiavelli’s celebration of the manly citizen soldier as the key figure in a republican
polity. Reading The Prince alongside The Discourses of Livy, R. Claire Snyder explains that “the
civic virtue of the citizen and the combatively masculine action of the soldier come together in a
figure that exhibits both characteristics at once” (Snyder 1999, 25). Embodying republican civic
virtue, citizen soldiers are motivated to act for the good of their community. They are
8
Convention