GLBT Activists and Militaries: Israel and the United States

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

_Brothers and Others in Arms_ by Danny Kaplan, who interviewed gay
and bisexual soldiers in combat units in the Israeli Defense Force,
tells us much about how the military serves to construct hegemonic
masculinity and how some gay men try to assimilate into it.  It also
offers a fascinating description of the vocabulary of Israeli male
bonding: the very names -- sabra, sachbak, and the "Turkish" heap --
of male bonding in what is distinctly Israeli national culture (as
opposed to diverse Jewish cultures in diaspora) are rooted in the
images of the Middle East.  Investigating the experiences of gay men
and lesbians in the IDF, which has become far more tolerant of gay
men and lesbians than the US military, may give us an opportunity to
learn from negative examples -- an argument against putting the equal
rights to marriage and military service above all else as some
mainstream gay rights organizations in the USA have in recent years.
. . .

The full text is at
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/06/portrait-of-detroit-mosques.html>.
--
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>