Gender and the Canadian Armed Forces: Does Change Mean Feminist Progress?

An introduction to the special issue Gender and the Canadian Armed Forces: Does Change Mean Feminist Progress? It situates the special issue within the significant gendered changes that have occurred within the Canadian Armed Forces over the past two decades. The introduction highlights the importance of continued feminist critique of, and engagement with, the military to achieve feminist progress.

M ilitaries are an important site for feminist inves tigation because they are one of society's key in stitutions of gendered power. Militaries privilege and empower men and masculinities, reinforce gendered protection myths, and perpetuate discrimination and violence against women. Militaries also claim a large part of societal resources-resources that could be di rected towards nonmilitarized security concerns that disproportionately impact women's lives, such as hu man and food security. While some feminists empha size the importance of military service to women's full citizenship, most feminists are critical of, if not op posed to, militaries and militarism, seeing the end to war and militarism as part of broader feminist struggles for change. But in the early twentyfirst century, femi nists in Canada and globally need to grapple with a new reality-one in which states wage wars in the name of protecting women's rights, foreign policies are declared to be feminist, and militaries themselves are actively recruiting women and integrating gender per spectives into planning and operations (Eichler 2020).
Twenty years ago, Atlantis published a special collec tion of articles dedicated to feminist analyses of the military. "Women and the Canadian Military" (Gouli quer 2001) highlighted the many ways in which wo men had contributed to the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), even as discriminatory policies and gender norms had limited their ability to participate. at spe cial collection included articles on women's roles as sol diers and as partners of servicemen and servicewomen. With the current special issue presented here, we revisit the topic of women's involvement in the Canadian military by examining recent changes within militaries and in feminist scholarship on militaries.

Changing Context
Much has changed within the CAF over the past twenty years, and it is therefore an opportune time to reconsider questions of feminist progress in relation to the Canadian military. ree distinct shifts have taken place that inform the contributions of this special is sue. e first is the war in Afghanistan (20012014), the longest military engagement in Canadian history. e CAF opened combat occupations to women in 1989 as a result of a Human Rights Tribunal Decision, but it was Canada's more than decadelong military deployments to Afghanistan that changed the public's perception of women's role in war. With ten percent of deployed troops being women, Canada's war in Afgh anistan led to a greater recognition of the contribu tions of servicewomen. e war brought the first death of a female combat soldier in Canadian history. But the death of Captain Nichola Goddard also high lighted the continuing unease in Canada's relationship to its servicewomen. Media reporting oscillated between contradictory portrayals of a military in which gender no longer mattered and a military that was eager to emphasize the apparent utility of military women in counterinsurgency warfare (Chapman and Eichler 2014). e war in Afghanistan also stood out as one of the first in Canadian history that was justi fied on the basis of protecting and promoting women's rights, a common gendered justification put forward in the Global War on Terror (see Hunt and Rygiel 2006). e second significant shift we have seen in Canada is the military's public acknowledgement of military sexual violence as a systemic problem. While media re ports had drawn attention to sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military since the 1990s, it was only in 2014-in response to another series of media reports-that the Chief of Defence staff ordered an ex ternal review into the matter. e External Review into Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Harassment in the CAF, known as the Deschamps Report and referenced in several of the contributions in this special issue, was re leased in 2015. It found that the military had a sexual ized culture hostile towards female and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning members (Deschamps 2015). e first external survey on sexual misconduct in the CAF was conducted in 2016 by Statistics Canada and confirmed the findings of the Deschamps Report. at survey found that four in five military members had reported "seeing, hearing or experiencing inappropriate sexual or discriminatory behaviour" in their workplace during the previous 12 months, and that more than one in four women in the Regular Force and close to one in three women in the Reserves have experienced sexual assault during their military service (Cotter 2016, 25). In response to the Deschamps Report, the military embarked on Opera tion HONOUR, a mission aimed at ending sexual misconduct in the CAF. Despite these efforts, the mil itary continues to struggle with finding an effective way to address military sexual violence (Eichler 2019). Operation HONOUR has been recently reframed as an ongoing and longterm culture change strategy in recognition of its limited success so far (National De fence and CAF 2020).
e final notable shift has been the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in 2000. Referred to as the Women, Peace and Security agenda, this resolu tion, together with its nine followup resolutions, deals with a host of issues related to the protection of wo men and girls during armed conflict and their parti cipation in peacekeeping, conflict resolution, the prevention of conflict, and postconflict recovery. As one of the nonpermanent members of the United Nations Security Council at the time, Canada was at the forefront of global efforts to adopt UNSCR 1325 but was slow in its own implementation of the Wo men, Peace and Security agenda over the following decade. is trend was reversed under the first Trudeau government. In early 2017, the Chief of De fence Staff passed a directive that follows through on Canada's international commitments to gender main stream its defence policy through UNSCR 1325 and its followup resolutions. e directive commits the military to apply a gender perspective and gender based analysis "plus" (GBA+) to all CAF planning and operations (Chief of Defence Staff 2016a). As a result of this directive, most Department of National De fence (DND) employees and CAF members have completed GBA+ online training through the Depart ment of Women and Gender Equality. e CAF has also established three Gender Advisor positions, has committed to having Gender Advisors on all military operations, and has created a Directorate for Integra tion of Gender Perspectives that works jointly with the DND Directorate for Gender, Diversity, and Inclu sion (Eichler 2020).
e three shifts described here highlight some of the key changes we have seen in the CAF over the past two decades. ey have taken place within the context of other noteworthy changes such as Canada's adop tion of a feminist foreign policy (Woroniuk 2020), the implementation of a new defence policy that explicitly includes gender concerns (National Defence and CAF 2017), and many other initiatives such as the develop ment of a CAF Diversity Strategy (Chief of Defence Staff 2016b). e last decade has also been one of im mensely strong activism from current and former mil itary members challenging the military's gender culture. Two class action law suits were settled in 2018 and 2019: the LGBT Purge Class Action and the CAFDND Sexual Misconduct Class Action. Many of the significant changes we have seen within the CAF over the past few years would not have happened without the pressure of this legal activism.

Contributions to this Special Issue
What do these changes mean for feminist progress? What is their transformational potential? Does the in creasing recognition of women, acknowledgement of military sexual violence, and adoption of gender per spectives by the Canadian military indicate feminist progress or a cooptation of women and feminism? ese are the questions this special issue of Atlantis tackles. In doing so, the contributors take up the chal lenge put forward by British scholars Claire Duncan son and Rachel Woodward (2016). In their 2016 article "Regendering the Military: eorizing Wo men's Military Participation," they argued that we need to consider and pay attention to the possibilities of transforming military institutions-both their mas culinized ideals of soldiering and their primary pur pose as agents of violence. ey cautioned against assuming that militaries are necessarily and determin istically hypermasculine and violent. is special issue showcases critical, feministinformed research on the CAF by five emerging scholars. e first two contributions, by Victoria Tait and Vanessa Brown respectively, most directly engage with the ar gument put forward by Duncanson and Woodward (2016). Both Tait and Brown find that there are tent ative signs of a regendering of the CAF, while both offer cautionary notes about its present limitations.
Tait's article, "Regendering the Canadian Armed Forces," examines how Canadian military personnel think about recent initiatives aimed at changing the military's gender culture-in particular the imple mentation of UNSCR 1325 and the use of Gender Advisors on deployments. Based on interviews with military personnel, Tait finds that servicemen's atti tudes towards women and other military minority populations are changing for the better, while service women themselves are more willing to embrace attrib utes stereotypically associated with femininity (and historically devalued in militaries) and champion the use of gender perspectives. Tait cautions us, though, that the results presented in her article may not reflect the CAF as a whole and that changing attitudes also run the risk of being framed in ways that construct Canada as more progressive and "civilized" compared to other countries, thus reproducing a racialized global hierarchy of states.
Brown's article, "Locating Feminist Progress in Profes sional Military Education," similarly finds seeds of change in the military's gender culture, but locates these in the introduction of feminist ideas into Profes sional Military Education. Based on interviews with officer students as well as teaching and other support staff in the Joint Command and Staff Programme at Canadian Forces College, Brown shows that Profes sional Military Education can be a mechanism through which Canadian military personnel achieve greater awareness and understanding about intersec tional social inequalities within and beyond the milit ary. Yet Brown also notes that, in their current form, initiatives to integrate gender perspectives and GBA+ in training and education are likely not sufficient to create culture change within the military. Significantly, though, she argues that feminist change within milit aries can happen and that feminists should continue to engage with militaries. e next three contributions, by Tammy George, Leigh Spanner, and Walter Callaghan, offer critical as sessments of how far the CAF has come in terms of transformational change. George's article, "Troubling Diversity and Inclusion: Racialized Women's Experi ences in the Canadian Armed Forces," outlines recent diversity and inclusion initiatives in the CAF and jux taposes these initiatives with the lived experience of ra cialized women who have served in the military. As George shows through analysis of interview tran scripts, the experiences of racialized servicewomen demonstrate the limits of current military diversity and inclusion initiatives and their neoliberal logic of governing racialized minority subjects. George warns that these initiatives create illusions of progress instead of meaningful change, and leave the work of inclusion up to individual racialized servicewomen rather than challenging the integral place of racism, sexism, het eronormativity, homophobia, and other intersecting forms of power in military culture.
In "e Strength Behind the Uniform: Acknow ledging the Contributions of Military Families or Co opting Women's Labour?" Spanner details the changes to family policies and support services over the past two decades and the shift in the military's position from taking for granted spousal support to explicitly acknowledging it. But this shift, she argues, is in formed by neoliberal ideas of selfreliance, resilience, and independence and a heteropatriarchal division of labour in support of the operational goals of the milit ary. Military spouses, the majority of whom are civil ian women, are instructed on how to care for an ill and injured spouse, ensure intimacy in their military marriage, and pursue personal growth in the midst of the demands of military life. In a similar vein to George's contribution, Spanner's article concludes that the military's explicit acknowledgement of the indis pensable role of the military family cannot be read as a sign of feminist progress as it has, in fact, exacerbated the exploitation of today's military spouses.
Callaghan's article takes a critical look at the CAF's re sponse to sexual misconduct in its ranks. As a veteran, veteran advocate, and ally to survivors of military sexual trauma, Callaghan is deeply embedded in the community he studies. He takes aim at the military's framing of the problem of military sexual misconduct, insisting that the military pay more attention to how servicemembers' reactions and responses to this prob lem are embedded in the military's sexist culture. Util izing an existing taxonomy of sexism, he explores three archetypes of behaviour he has observed in his ethno graphic research with veterans: (1) potential allyship with victims/survivors, (2) wilful blindness to the pre valence and harms of military sexual misconduct, and (3) a toxic and misogynistic response that denies the problem and blames victims/survivors. He concludes that in order to address sexual misconduct, the milit ary will have to address the fact that toxic and wilfully blind responses towards instances of sexual miscon duct are embedded within its culture and intimately linked to the selfperceptions and identities of military members.
e special issue is rounded off by a short story and a film review by established feminist scholars, some of whom have themselves served in the military. In "Khaki and Emerald Green," Nancy Taber tells the fic tional story of Ruth, who serves in the CAF. Taber weaves together the many threads of her protagonist's life: her deployment to Afghanistan, her experience of military sexual trauma, and her role as a parent and military spouse. e story invites the reader to share in Ruth's pride, her disappointment and sense of institu tional betrayal, and her search for closure and healing. Connecting with the story of another female impacted by war and militarization-a girl in the Ugandan civil war-brings Ruth one step closer to being able to share her own story publically. e final piece is a review of e Fruit Machine by Lynne Gouliquer, Carmen Poulin, and the PsychoSo cial Ethnography of the Common Place (PSEC) Re search Group at the University of New Brunswick. Directed by Sarah Fodey, e Fruit Machine is a groundbreaking documentary of Canada's LGBT Purge. e LGBT Purge was a decadeslong govern ment campaign, running from the 1950s to the early 1990s, that aimed to identify, investigate, harass, and remove "homosexuals" from the Canadian public ser vice. While the authors of our review acknowledge the significant contribution of e Fruit Machine in mak ing visible this part of Canadian history, they also offer critical reflection. ey suggest, for example, that the documentary could have done more to connect the Purge campaign and the experiences of gender and sexual minorities in the military to an analysis of a military culture rooted in sexual violence, hetero normativity, femmenegativity, and hegemonic mas culinity.
e cover image of this special issue has been contrib uted by Jessica Lynn Wiebe (see www.jessicalynn wiebe.com). Wiebe is a Canadian veteran who served in Afghanistan in 2008. After leaving the military, she embarked on a fine arts programme and graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She uses interdisciplinary art forms-including storytelling, performance, and painting-to make sense of her military experiences and the gendered politics of war and conflict more broadly. Creating dialogue between military and civilian actors, and challenging the worldviews of both, are central to her practice as an artist, and also reflect what we hope to achieve with this issue of Atlantis.
is special issue includes the voices of CAF service members and veterans-both through the qualitative research presented and the perspectives of those con tributors who are themselves former military mem bers. is speaks to the feminist conviction that we must hear the voices of those most affected by, and embedded within, the world we seek to understand and change. Today's feminist scholarship goes beyond earlier feminist debates that were polarized between advocating for women's "right to fight" and opposing women's cooptation into militarism. Today's genera tion of feminist scholars is engaged in the daunting task of critiquing, and even opposing, militaries while also engaging with them more deeply than ever. is puts us in a precarious position. But only through feminist engagement with the military-by feminists inside and beyond the military-is there hope that the many changes we have seen over the past decades will lead to feminist progress.