Every level of the aff – from their conception of military career advancement to interstate geopolitical competition – is permeated by military masculinity.

In addition to terminological and methodological objections, feminists seek to recover women's and men's experiences that often drop out of levels analysis in mainstream IR. As feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe argues, the IR feminist insight that the "international is personal" has the radical implication that "governments depend upon certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs."22 Thus, many feminists focus on the domestic and personal aspects of IR and the problematization of the private/ public dichotomy. This focus is, in part, a response to the state-centrism of the predominant Waltzian system-level analysis in academic IR, and in part an ethical commitment of gender analysis to the marginalized and voiceless. Feminist empirical analysis has sought out experiences that are difficult to fully capture in the traditional levels models. 65

Following these commitments, IR feminists have argued persuasively that standard-level schemas at best fail to capture gender dynamics in world politics and at worst dangerously mislead in their obfuscation of significant power relations. Feminists have instead preferred to view IR, particularly war and violence, in terms of a continuum linking international relations to activities (such as sexual violence) and phenomena (such as militarism) not normally viewed in the same frame as interstate war.2 3 Encouraging curiosity about how international relations is dependent on constructions of domestic, private, and personal phenomena formerly thought irrelevant to international politics, feminist IR raises questions about both the analytic separation of explanations for war into distinct levels and the identification of security with state borders. Jacqui True cautions against an unthinking adaptation of the levels of analysis, warning that disciplinary moves can obscure important relationships. For example, True argues that an uncritical acceptance of levels schemas can locate danger in a place outside state borders, downplaying the role of many states in producing women's insecurity and ignoring the violence that routinely occurs in the private spheres (i.e., family and household) as emphasized by feminist theory.24 More recently, Laura Sjoberg, borrowing from political geography, has offered a provocative proposal to use scales rather than levels to study IR.2

Though IR feminists have resisted the imposition of hierarchical levels schemas, there are good reasons for not discarding the levels approach prematurely when studying masculinity. First, levels of analysis offer a familiar entry point for new students of masculinity. Second, while all metaphorical schemas emphasize some elements of a given reality and hide others, levels approaches can force the focused, bracketed consideration of seemingly discrete realms of world politics, clarifying rather than assuming the connections between them. For instance, the levels of analysis schema can be a resource for feminists to engage biological and genetic explanations of human differences and contest those accounts that rely on an unproblematized biological determinism. 26 Third and more pragmatically, sociologists still think in terms of levels, and this includes the key masculinity theorists whose work has inspired feminist IR. In a recent reformulation of masculinity theory, Connell and James Messerschmidt advocate the analysis of hegemonic masculinities at three levels: local, regional, and global.27 While they point to linkages between the levels, such as pressure from global to regional levels, they find levels to be an important framework for analysis. The following section traces the operation of masculinity through a feminist-influenced expansion of the traditional tripartite levels of analysis 66 framework to include the individual, family, small groups, sub-state organizations, domestic politics, international system, and global levels.

INDIVIDUAL

Individual-level analysis has traditionally stressed the actions of great leaders, the perceptions and psychology of individuals, and the decision-making process as explanations for international phenomena. Feminist explorations at this level consider the ways bodies, personal gender representations, psychology, and decision making impact the classic concerns of IR, such as war and diplomacy. For example, military training is centered on the construction and disciplining of the masculine body, as "the individual body and the self that is identified with that body are shaped into the collective body of men" that constitutes the military force. Such physicality ranges from mandated haircuts and uniforms to the risk, danger, and deprivation that bodies face during combat.28

At the individual level, masculinity, often intersecting with class and race, has featured in many politicians' efforts to remold themselves into candidates suitable for national office and underwrite their masculine authority and leadership. For example, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt's use of masculinity as a political resource enabled him to reinvent his image. A privileged but sickly child, he transformed himself into a cowboy "Rough Rider" and promoter of the "strenuous life," a vision of self-reliant masculinity and militarism driven by a fear of feminization.29 John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson both pulled strings to experience military service and placed glamorized and exaggerated wartime ordeals at the center of the heroic narratives underwriting the creation of their political selves. 3 0 More recently, the Kremlin released a series of photographs that depict Russian President Vladimir Putin as a bare-chested outdoorsman testing himself against nature. These images use Putin's body to project a model of Russian masculinity that, when linked to nationalist discourses, buttresses Putin's claims to virile leadership."

In mainstream IR scholarship, a focus on decision making is often included in individual analysis and sometimes seen as its own separate level because, as Robert Jervis writes, "it is often impossible to explain crucial decisions and policies without reference to the decision makers' beliefs about the world and their images of others."32 At this level, scholars consider actors' perceptions and beliefs to be causal factors in their behavior, and these beliefs and images are often strongly influenced and framed by gender. According to Michael Hunt, feminized conceptualizations of Latin Americans and Mexicans-for instance, the image prevalent during the Mexican-American War of "the Latino as a white 67 maiden passively awaiting salvation or seduction"-dovetailed with racialized and infantilized images to help rationalize U.S. foreign policy decision making and justify interventionist obligations.33 The tendency among statesmen and decision makers to imagine foreign policy opponents in derisive racial and gendered terms is well known and has signifi- cant effects. Michael Kimmel argues that President Kennedy's tendency to see " many of his brief administra- tions tests as tests of manly resolve" and President Johnson's recourse to belligerent, gendered rhetoric and insecure but "aggressive masculinity" contributed to the escalation of U.S. military action in Vietnam. 34

While masculinity is a significant factor in the images and beliefs held by elites, leaders, and important decision makers, feminists ask us to also consider the experiences of less-powerful actors on the peripheries. One increasingly visible issue at the individual level concerns social-psychological insecurities caused by the traumas of military service, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Militaries have resisted accommodating soldiers' claims of PTSD because its existence undermines the myths of masculinity deployed by military organizations to initiate recruits and mold them into soldiers. From basic training onward, militaries rely upon the linkage of soldiering with masculinity, privileging "courage and endurance; physical and psychological strength; rationality; toughness; obedience; discipline; patriotism; lack of squeamishness; avoidance of certain emotions such as fear, sadness, uncertainty, guilt, remorse and grief; and heterosexual competency."35 Because psychological distress from military service undermines this carefully constructed identity, soldiers are reticent to report PTSD, fear, or emotional pain, and the ones who do are often ostracized. Moreover, the limits of organizational support systems contribute to traumatized soldiers' insecurity.

FAMILY

A number of globalized developments-neoliberal economic restructuring and women's improved access to global labor markets and increased participation and autonomy-challenge men's traditional roles as fathers and household authorities within the family unit. Feminist IR work on the international political 68 economy and violence against women has identified the household, or more generally the family level, as a site where traditional theoretical commitments to nation-states and systems mask significant gendered economic and physical insecurities. As feminist theorists of nationalism have recognized, the family and nation are inextricably linked. In fact, the "idea of the nation as family helps to secure the 'naturalness' of social hierarchies within nations by associating them with the purported 'naturalness' of the Western family: the patriarch with subordinate wife and children, all supposedly forming an organic unity with the same inherent interests."36

At this level, men's insecurities can arise from a threat to "breadwinner masculinities," a model that includes "working (for pay), forming a family, having children, and becoming the household authority." 37 Paradoxically, in light of the assumed benefits of economic globalization, the threat posed to masculine identities, standing and entitlements by the advances of women (higher status, independence, and increased economic opportunities) can contribute to rising levels of domestic violence.38

SMALL GROUPS

Gender scholars have demonstrated how masculinity affects foreign policy planning and decision making among security elites and small advisory groups as well as sub-state militias. Though it does not explore the group's dynamics, Carol Cohn's classic investigation of Cold War defense intellectuals demonstrates the importance of masculine club mentality. The "nuclear priesthood" of men charged with crafting U.S. nuclear strategy shared a language of abstraction and masculine imagery that normalized, sanitized, and legitimized the discussion of mass killing, leaving them detached from the realities of the potential use of nuclear weapons. 9 Relatedly, Robert Dean shows how President Kennedy surrounded himself with elite advisors who were shaped by and drew upon institutionalized ideals of masculinity to form a privileged "brotherhood." These gendered ideals intersected significantly with class: the exclusively male boarding schools these men had attended were seen by parents as paths to help their sons overcome upper-class effeminacy. The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm), the elite all-male group of national security advisors Kennedy gathered to manage the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, was an assembly of warrior-intellectuals credentialed through the process of passing through such boarding schools, Ivy League fraternities, and 69 clubs; validated by voluntary military service; and mentored by men "connected across generations by institutional ties of patronage, class tradition, education, and fraternalism" and "bound together by a common conception of patrician 'manliness' and heroism."40

A focus on the role of masculinity within another type of small group, autonomous nationalist militias such as the ones that participated in sexual violence atrocities committed in Bosnia in the 1990s, or more recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), reveals the roles of masculine hierarchies and frustrations related to unachievable and idealized militarized masculinity. Enloe's analysis of interviews conducted with men accused of raping and killing Bosnian Muslim women in the 1990s revealed hierarchies among Serbian militia, illustrating how systematic rape during wartime is "fueled" by inter-male relations.4 ' Members of militia groups in the DRC were asked to explain the way they justified and normalized sexual violence. Their answers relied upon logics derived from discourses of masculinity and femininity, inculcated in part by the institutional promotion of ideals, such as the "(hetero)sexually potent male fighter," that code certain types of rape as inevitable and a result of the sexual needs of the soldiers, while others are seen as less legitimate deviant expressions of frustrations due to wartime circumstances.42 These soldiers "explicitly linked their rationale for rape with their inabilities (or 'failures') to inhabit certain idealized notions of heterosexual manhood," including that of the economic provider, seen as legitimately dominant in their households.4 3

SUB-STATE BUREAUCRACIES AND ORGANIZATIONS

Militaries are among the most significant domestic-level organizations and have been a prominent focus of gender and masculinity research. Feminist IR scholarship has highlighted "the way the military functions in our societ[ies] as a central guarantor and producer of masculinity."" The tenuousness of the military's production of official masculine legitimacy is signaled by military efforts to exclude gay and female soldiers using ostensible morale and unit cohesion concerns to camouflage anxieties over "maintaining the institution's heterosexual masculinity."45

The dependence of military organizations and bureaucracies on the construction of a variety of military masculinities is evident from their recruitment strategies and organizational structures. There is a complex relationship between militarism, masculinity, and military recruitment strategies." Melissa T. Brown 70 discusses the variety of masculine constructions underwriting American military recruitment campaigns in the wake of the end of the draft and inception of the all-volunteer force. Brown argues that recruitment materials for the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force evoke varied masculinity types, not just traditional warrior masculinity, tailoring their appeals to meet particular recruitment targets depending on the branches' needs for combat-related or technical skills, for women and military careerists, or for larger or smaller numbers of recruits.

The importance of masculinity extends beyond the recruiting stage to the organization of state militaries, distinct from the smaller, non-state militias . . discussed previously. Connell has argued that internal masculine hierarchies, "physically violent but subordinate to orders on the one hand, and dominating and organizationally competent on the other" are foundational to military organization. 8 In these organizations, occupational status and career advancement cannot be disentangled from the operation of masculinity. This is seen, for example, in the way U.S. Navy personnel draw upon different elements of a menu of masculine qualities to navigate the branch's competitive atmosphere and advance their careers. Lower-status supply officers (tasked with administration, inventory, and accounting), who are excluded from the risk-taking behavior and autonomy reserved for high-status pilots and Naval aviators, distinguish themselves by emphasizing the professionalized technical rationality, efficiency, and responsibility in their roles." Pressure on these officers is attenuated by the Navy's organizational culture of constant evaluation and competitive testing that demands officers continually demonstrate their masculinity and avoid acquiring a reputation for failure. This masculine competition has spillover effects outside the organization. According to the Department of Defense's "Tailhook Report" issued in 1993, Navy members' notorious behavior (including the sexual harassment and assault of female naval officers) in a convention hotel was also an outgrowth of competition between units of the Navy.50

STATE LEVEL

At this level, IR scholars typically focus on the impact of the internal workings of the nation-state, including factors such as domestic politics, the character of a state's political-economic system (or regime type such as democratic or authoritarian), culture, nationalism, the role of interest groups, and public opinion. The number of powerful critiques concerning security and the state provided 71 by feminists is too voluminous to summarize.5 ' Relative to the volume of mainstream scholarship on the state level, feminists have paid less attention to the possible relationship between gender and the democratic peace-the influential thesis that democracies rarely fight other democracies but can be quite belligerent in their dealings with non-democracies. Thus, feminists left it to non-feminists such as Francis Fukuyama to speculate, without evidence, that "feminized" developed democracies, where women's political participation has expanded, are more peaceful than authoritarian states, and thus vulnerable to predations of more masculinized states. 52 Feminists have, however, problematized both this posited relationship between women and peace and the common link between alleged peacefulness of democratization and women's political participation. 53

Like feminists, masculinity theorists have noted that the institutions that make up the state have been subject to male domination and continue to remain so. The link between nationhood and manhood and the centrality of masculinity to nationalism are stressed by masculinity scholars who point to the value nationalist movements place on terms such as honor, bravery, cowardice, duty, and patriotism, which "are hard to distinguish as either nationalistic or masculinist, since they seem so thoroughly tied both to the nation and to manliness." Furthermore, the way nationalist movements reflect "a masculinist definition of femininity and of women's proper place in the nation" relegates women to the roles of mothers and symbols of national honor."

At this level, analysis shows how the operations of masculinity in the domestic political space help account for various types of state behavior. For example, U.S. gender dynamics before the Spanish-American war provide a window into the relationship between gendered domestic political pressures, prevailing notions of masculinity and leadership, and the decision to engage in war. In the late nineteenth century, a variety of factors combined to pose a threat to champions of a "manly ideal of politics" and martial conceptions of citizenship. Such factors included the U.S. political climate at the time, the depression of 1893, the closing of the Western frontier, and more assertive, activist female political participation (presaging a possible feminization of politics)." For fingos (those advocating for war with Spain) of the 1890s, the answer to these threats was to go to war as a way of "inculcating manhood."" Domestic calls for war to avenge the sinking of the battleship Maine eventually pressured U.S. President William McKinley 72 to declare war on Spain, illustrating the extent to which the president's political authority was-and still is-predicated upon martial masculinity.

Masculine imagery in a domestic political culture-including media, fiction, and films-also impacts the evolution of alliance formation between states. For example, Michelle Mart historicizes the close ties between the United States and Israel by analyzing cultural constructions of Israel throughout the 1940s and 1950s.17 Once stereotyped as cowards and passive victims of the Holocaust, Israeli Jews were reimaged during the Cold War struggle as masculine insiders worthy of being allies. Enhanced by Israel's military successes, images of Israelis as tough pioneers, gutsy underdogs, and citizen soldiers were posed against increasingly unmasculine representations of Arab outsiders in a manner that enhanced Israel's perceived value as a U.S. ally.

As these examples demonstrate, masculinity dynamics at the state level can help illuminate patterns of amity and enmity among states. In addition, masculine political culture is a resource for leaders looking to characterize the threat posed by other states, galvanize public support for intervention, and justify military action. This is amply demonstrated by U.S. relations with Iraq before and after Iraq's aggression towards Kuwait in 1990 and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq following 11 September 2001. Messerschmidt argues that the United States overlooked Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses, tilting toward Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), only to demonize the Iraqi leader as a "toxic, uncivilized rapist" in the aftermath of the invasion of Kuwait. In the ensuing discourse of the Gulf War, the George H.W. Bush administration camouflaged its concerns about maintaining American power and the status quo in the Middle East by couching U.S. policy in masculinist terms aimed at overcoming the emasculating Vietnam syndrome and dramatized Bush's heroic rescue of a feminized Kuwait." Relatedly, Michaele Ferguson shows that although the Bush administration's post-9/ 11 rhetoric was focused on the abuses of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes and expressed support for women's human rights, it actually served to justify American intervention in the name of masculine protection by framing the United States as a liberator of Afghani and Iraqi women and children." Further, Jennifer Heeg Maruska has argued that the post-9/1 1 period prompted agents of American hegemonic masculinity to exaggerate traditional masculinity, producing both a hyper-masculine response to "cowardly" terrorist attacks and a climate of violent retribution crystallized by the emblematic and regrettable country music song lyric, "we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way."60

SYSTEM LEVEL

Analysis at this level typically investigates the nature of the anarchical international state system and its impact upon outcomes of interest. This level stops short of politics beyond the state on the one hand while bracketing individual, internal, or domestic factors to focus on state interactions-such as those involving the balance of power, the causes of war, the behavior of alliances, and intergovernmental organizations-on the other. This level has drawn particular interest from feminist scholars who argue that traditional, system-level analysis is guided by Hobbesian metaphors that cast the international system as a dangerously competitive "state of nature" subject to the perpetual possibility of war.61 For gender scholars, a central preoccupation of third image (i.e., the causes of war) theorists cannot be understood without consideration of the gender dynamics found at other levels (such as domestic gender inequality).

Given these objections and provocations, what kind of masculinity dynamics might characterize the system level? Initially we might note the embedding of dynamics seen at the lower and higher levels of intergovernmental organizations. For example, the club dynamic as illustrated earlier is not relegated to the sub-state level of masculinity; it seems to be evident in international summitry at the global or intergovernmental governance level. Hugo Dobson recounts how dominant masculinities bonded by friendship and intimacy within formal and informal forums, such as the Group of Eight (G8) and Group of Twenty (G20), marginalize certain non-Western masculinities (in the experiences of Japanese Prime Minister Ohira Masayoshi, for example) and urge feminized roles and issue areas on the few women leaders and spouses that do participate in such summits. 6 2 Relatedly, Joshua Goldstein's multi-level survey of gender and war suggests "the interstate system reproduces at the level of large groups the biologically based scripts and dynamics found at the level of small groups." 63

GLOBAL LEVEL

The global level of analysis explains events and behaviors using factors seen emanating from a realm outside of interstate relations such as global norms, global information and communications, global business communities, and transnational religious movements. Within masculinity studies, globalization is seen as a process disruptive and transformative of lower-level (local, domestic) gender arrangements, one that "presents another level at which hegemonic and local masculinities are constructed."6 ' Although it remains an area of intense 74 interest, identifying masculinities, their dynamics, and security consequences at the global level with any precision is difficult, likely because "the 'cultural grid' that structures gender norms is much thinner there than it is within local contexts."65

Students of masculinity in IR have posited that masculinities operate at an increasingly global scale in the economic and security realms. Connell theorizes a global gender order constituted by two often violent processes through which an existing diversity of local gender orders were brought into contact with each other: first, through imperial conquest, neocolonialism, trade, investment, and communications; and second, by the "creation of new 'spaces' and arenas beyond individual countries and regions."66 Among these spaces, Connell lists those created by global corporations, internationally acting sovereign states, global media, and global capital, commodity, service, and labor markets. While there are East Asian and North American variants, a "transnational business masculinity" exemplified by globally operating business executives and their network of political and military contacts has, according to Connell, gained ascendency over its nearest competitor, "the rigid, control-oriented masculinity of the military."16

What other kinds of dynamics might we expect to see at this level? First, evolving global norms of international security, such as those enabling the practices of peacekeeping or environmental protection, interact with gendered global practices to create potentially new forms of masculinity and insecurity. Global norms have consequences for the operation of masculinity at lower levels. Claire Duncanson's discussion of "peacekeeper masculinity," which shows how peacekeepers contest existing military hegemonic masculinities by emphasizing the dangerous challenges of peacekeeping and valorizing impartiality and control of force, illustrates the effects of global norms." Nicole Detraz argues that in Tanzania, global environmental norms influence the state's promotion of wildlife protection and conservation, having the unintended effect of contributing to the militarization of (male) wildlife guards, who are granted some legal protections from strict laws governing prosecution for rape, thus heightening local women's insecurities. 9 The implementation and translation of global norms into masculinized spheres can therefore have both negative local implications and potentially progressive impacts on traditionally militarized masculinities. Second, some scholars have used the provocative, yet still vague, "global gender order" construct to theorize a dynamic whereby exported Western masculinities meet resistance from non-Western men securing their local masculinities against encroachment. For example, Kimmel argues that the politics of many Islamic radical organizations seem to share an opposition to Westernized globalization and prioritize "the recovery of manhood from the devastatingly emasculating 75 politics of globalization."70

CONCLUSION

By disaggregating the workings of masculinity in international politics and security into levels of analysis, this essay has presented a small selection of the myriad ways in which gendered constructions affect international security issues in the hopes of encouraging students of traditional IR to engage with gender analysis, push sociologists to use IR levels of analysis to scaffold their investigations of global masculinities, and persuade feminist scholars to reconsider the levels schema. A more thorough feminist investigation might emphasize interpenetration across the levels presented here-as exemplified by the way elite individuals' masculine ideologies can guide foreign policy decisions, the way intergovernmental and global development agendas impact the family dynamic by eroding some men's traditional roles within the family, or the way military organizations' masculinist practices both shape their members' identities and contribute to the insecurities of both men and women. Further research on internal and external relationships between mascalinities and femininities in different contexts will make significant contributions to our understanding of individual beliefs and traumas, the behavior of groups from violent militias to elite decision-making clubs, the operation of domestic security bureaucracies, the decisions to go to war or form alliances, and the impact of spreading globalized norms.