Susan Jeffords’s The Remasculinization of

America: Gender and the Vietnam War

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
Amanda Howell
We must ask more often how things happened
in order to find out why they happened. . . .
Joan W. Scott’
In the eighties we witnessed an effort to recuperate the figure of the
Vietnam veteran, an effort made official when Reagan presided over
the burial of the Unknown Soldier from Vietnam in Arlington National
Cemetery in 1984. Furthermore, we witnessed the reworking, popu-
larization, and recycling of the story of the Vietnam War. Most notably,
the Gulf War was presented, by Bush and by national and local tel-
evision commentators, as an opportunity for the American public to
undo “mistakes” it made in Vietnam: our failure to engage in total
warfare, our failure to support our troops, and our poor treatment of
returning veterans. Activating public guilt about the Vietnam War was
a way to focus public opinion about the Gulf War: to rally support
for soldiers (and by extension for war itself), to shame anti-war protes-
ters, to sell Bush’s anti-negotiation stance, and to convince us that it
was America’s duty to use its full military might to finish the war
quickly. The political specificity of the Gulf War was lost when it
became an opportunity for national therapy. Given the use to which
representations of the Vietnam War have been put, it becomes crucial
to understand its fictions -their structure, development, and present
status. Susan Jeffords’s provocative study, The Remasculinization of
America: Gender and the Vietnam War,2 addresses the largely ne-
glected issue of sexual difference in representations of Vietnam. Jeffords
argues that the recuperation of the war for the popular imagination
is figured as, and contributes to, a recuperation of masculinity in
contemporary American culture. While Jeffords’s argument does not
allow her to investigate the problems attending individuals’ relation
to sexual identity, her work nevertheless suggests the complex relation
between constructions of masculinity and the reconstruction of the
Vietnam War as a historical event.
Jeffords looks at wartime and post-war representations, those fic-
tions -novels, short stories, memoirs, literary criticism, and film -by
which the Vietnam War and its veterans have been successfully, that
is to say, usefully, recuperated for the imagination of the American
public. Through popular narratives like the ones Jeffords analyzes, the

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 American public is recovering from a period of “ideological exhaus- 167
ti or^,"^ a period when it seemed unable to maintain belief in those
fictions by which it had formerly recognized itself: nationalism, pa-
triotism, and phallic masculinity. Toward the end of the war,4 films
expressed this “ideological exhaustion” by portraying veterans re-
turning to the U.S. as threats to society: vigilantes, psychos, and social
misfits. The veterans in films like Billy Jack (1971), Chrome and H o t
Leather ( 1971),5Welcome Home, Soldier Boys (1972), Black Sunday
(1977),Taxi Driver (1976),and The Ninth Configuration (1980y are
men whose insanity, violence, and/or military-trained prowess make
them unassimilable to American society. In such films, masculinity
goes awry. It is appropriate, then, that Jeffords should discuss the
recuperated Vietnam War narrative in terms of its construction-or
reconstruction -of phallic masculinity.
According to Jeffords, the primary function of recent popular re-
presentations of Vietnam is to “remasculinize” American culture
through the “revival of the images, abilities, and evaluations of men
and masculinity.” Jeffords sees masculinity in crisis as a result of the
Vietnam War as well as of a number of cultural changes-“women’s
rights, civil rights, the ‘generation gap,’ and other alterations in social
relations”-that took place in the United States in the SOs, ~ O Sand ,
70s (xii). In this context, Jeffords reads Memorial Day 1984 as a
ceremonial rebirth of American masculinity: “Laying the ‘old man’ of
Vietnam officially to rest- the individual, named soldier who had been
rejected, spat on, and denied-Reagan has authorized the entrance of
the ‘new man,’ the emblematic soldier whose unknown identity lays
him open to a renaming . . . a renaming that retrieves him from his
marginalized position” ( 125).
For Jeffords, the namelessness of the honored soldier is particularly
important in that strategies of “remasculinization” in Vietnam War
narratives depend primarily on removing the historical and political
specificity of the war. In her first chapter, “Fact, Fiction, and the
Spectacle of War,” she notes in the narrative structure of these repre-
sentations a shift in emphasis from ends to means, a shift marked by
a preoccupation with the spectacle of war- both the spectacle of tech-
nology and that of a technologized male body. These narrative features
allow for not only a dissociation from the actual political circumstances
of the fighting, but also for a privileging of the transhistorical qualities
of the warrior and the “technology of performance” ( 7 ) .Jeffords
identifies the structure of Vietnam’s representations as that of a ro-
mance where “plot variation alters little and readers’ pleasure is
grounded on the working out of a predictable ending less significant
than the events leading to it” ( 6 ) .Because the narratives are dominated

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 168 not by the war’s timetable, but by soldiers’ time in Vietnam, the
“predictable ending” would be the end of a tour.
Jeffords’s reading of the shape of Vietnam narratives- their focus
on means rather than ends and their celebration of spectacle -has
particular resonance given the recent treatment of the Gulf War, es-
pecially in terms of that war’s visual representation and the uses to
which the Vietnam experience was put in terms of technological de-
terminism. Yet, one also finds in Jeffords’s discussion of spectacle
aspects of Vietnam narratives that signal a significant departure from
the conventional association of phallic masculinity with control over
vision and representation. On one hand, she describes the way in which
the focus on and identification with the spectacle of technology allows
for disavowal of the body’s vulnerability: “To link the body and tech-
nology through the erotic locates that object for control in an external
frame- the display and beauty of technology- that enables the disa-
vowal of the body’s own vulnerability” (10).Yet, in her discussion of
Rambo: First Blood, Part I I , we find that the positions of spectacle
and spectator have shifted, that the “frame” is not resolutely external
to the body and the male body itself is fragmented, technologized, and
specularized when it becomes a weapon.’ Jeffords emphasizes Rambo’s
“godlike qualities,” which, she argues, are reinforced by the camera’s
“strategy of disclosure . . . he can appear from nowhere, disappear
into nothing . . . .” “Through him, as him, this technology is un-
challengeable. . . .” Yet, while she maintains that the “body/technology
seems to belie the fragmentation of body parts” and that these parts
appear “(merely) synechdochic,” it is difficult to accept her conclusion
that “[als the camera’s intimate examination of Rambo’s body declares,
this ideology is seamless” (13).Projection and disavowal are, of course,
those structures by which the authority of a male look is supported
in classic cinematic practice. However, that look is usually directed
toward a female rather than a male body;’ and, even in the case of a
specularized female body, the “mastery” that mechanisms of projection
and disavowal offer is never complete, never seamless. The emphasis
on the male body as spectacle in the Vietnam War film-its fragmen-
tation, the fetishization of its parts-recalls not only the visual control
and overvaluation of the female body in classic cinematic practice, but
also its disruptive potential, suggesting that these images, of an erot-
icized, technologized male body, are equally multiple and shifting in
their effects.
Jeffords argues that the high value that Vietnam fictions place on
experiences particular to the all-male community of war works toward
remasculiniza tion. These all-male communities depend entirely on
strategies that allow for the exclusion of “the feminine” or for the

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 control of stereotypically female roles: these strategies include the 169
feminization of the enemy, the “feminization of loss” and masculine
usurpation of reproduction and parenting. Jeffords is quite persuasive
in her argument for the way in which the emphasis on male bonding
in these narratives helps to depoliticize the war by elevating commit-
ment and camaraderie to the level of transhistorical values for which
only war affords the opportunity. She notes too that the exclusionary
structure of the all-male bond works on several levels of Vietnam
narration. For example, the emphasis on subjective points of view
excludes readers from the Vietnam “brotherhood” whose bond “in
the field” overcomes differences of race and class ( 5 5 ) .Yet, male bond-
ing ultimately extends beyond the battlefield and its narratives when
a community of critics claims the Vietnam War narratives for an Amer-
ican literary tradition that is quintessentially male. She focusses on
three works as being of particular interest: John Wheeler’s study of
the effect of the war on American society, Touched With Fire: The
Future of the Vietnam Generation (1984), John Helleman’s American
Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (1986) that traces “the myth of
American innocence and frontierism through Leatherstocking and
Daniel Boone to the Green Berets” (76) and Philip Beidler’s American
Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (1982) which reads war
fiction in the context of American literary tradition. In these works,
explains Jeffords, “gender is the suppressed/expressed category on
which the individual analysis depends” and “masculine bonding -the.
collectivity-is projected as a basis for the regeneration of society as
a whole” (74).
Basic to the social and literary male bonding that Jeffords describes
is a kind of territorialization of gender. What Jeffords finds in Vietnam
fictions is a homotopian move away from spheres of domesticity and
culture, spheres that are consequently reified as feminine. The most
problematic sections of Jeffords’s work are those chapters where she
repeats this kind of territorialization in her own analysis, particularly
in her discussion of reproduction: “Read through the “am syndrome’
[the name Army psychiatrists gave to soldiers’ homoerotic fantasies]
and the technology of reproduction, men can now not only take the
place of the feminine, but can overtake reproduction as well and
eliminate women from their narratives” (84). One can certainly see in
the war narratives that Jeffords discusses and in the structure of the
military itself the articulation of a desire for masculine self-generation,
for a self-consciously willed and controlled male body. However, be-
cause in her chapter “False Labors: Compensatory Reproduction and
the Narration of Vietnam” she discusses reproduction and parenting
in terms of masculine “usurpation” and “colonization” of female roles

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 170 and narratives, her analysis tacitly presumes them to be rightfully or
necessarily feminine. Jeffords’s reading of the “abstraction and mech-
anization of reproduction and its appropriation by the masculine” (94)
leads her finally to a limited rendering of reproduction as merely a
matter of biology, when what seems at stake in war narratives is not
so much a desire to take over the female biological role in reproduction
as to contain and control both male and female bodies through in-
stitutions and institutionalized violence. Most distressingly, perhaps,
is the fact that her interest in how a “man . . . inhabits the ‘female
position,’ speaking for her and taking over her space’’ leads her to
pose that “female space’’ as a very limited one indeed, bound by a
body defined solely by (one of its) biological functions (101).
What limits the effectiveness of Jeffords’s discussion of sexual dif-
ference in representations of the Vietnam War is that, according to
the terms set by her argument, masculinity and femininity are not
constructed. Rather, fictions and narratives and images are constructed
around a received structure of gender. In Jeffords’s analysis, while
individual subjects may or may not participate in masculinity or fem-
ininity, gender and its binary character is fixed. Jeffords defines mas-
culinity and femininity strictly in terms of their opposition to one
another. In this way, her methodology at times seems to follow the
depoliticizing, generalizing impulse of the fictions she analyzes, and
ultimately limits her ability to deal with their historically specific con-
structions of masculinity and femininity. Her assumption that “the
masculine appropriates the feminine through the matrix of reproduc-
tion,” confounds the maternal and the feminine (102). Equally prob-
lematic are discussions where she reads a character’s feminization
through stereotypes of femininity. For example:
women or what are perceived as the feminine characteristics of weakness,
passivity, nonaggression, and negotiation are shown to be responsible for
America’s loss of the war. . . . Whether ascribed to American soldiers, the
Vietnamese people, Vietnam, or the U.S. government, these features are
associated with the figure that is blamed . , . this fluid and consistent shifting
of positions . . . indicates that the feminine, not any of these single entities
. . . is the subject of representation (160).
Thus, when Jeffords critiques Robin Wood’s reading of The Deer
Hunter, her assumptions about gendered oppositions put her in the
awkward position of defending the fixity of those oppositions:
“Wood’s desire to ‘blur’ the lines of gender is the hidden secret of
Vietnam narratives: to confuse the categories of gender by asserting
the masculine colonization of the territory of reproduction . . . as if
the categories of gender are themselves flexible and available to in-
dividual change” (102).

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 Jeffords establishes the fixed nature of gendered oppositions through 171
such textual evidence as what she calls the “masculine point of view” -
the “disembodied voice of masculinity,” “the voice through which
dominance is enacted’’ (xiii), the voice that lies “behind the narrating
of gender” (40).9The “masculine point of view” may speak through
a character (or not), the character may occupy the position of mas-
culinity (or not), but a subject will in no way negotiate masculinity or
femininity. Nor will the construction of masculinity or femininity
change at the level of text. So, although one of her projects is to address
“tensions between ‘masculinity’ and ‘men”’ (xii) the ability of her
study to do so is limited by her assertion of masculinity’s monolithic
nature as she adopts exactly the terms of popular representation that
she wants to criticize.
Through post-war representations of Vietnam in general and repre-
sentations of the Vietnam veteran in particular, the political specificity
of the war has been eliminated. For Jeffords, the apolitical nature of
these narratives “insures the masculine thematic” (142).Yet it would
seem, rather, that the “masculine thematic” or, more specifically, the
reliance on gender stereotypes as a structural device, signals an attempt
in these narratives to fix and depoliticize the Vietnam War. Gender
conflicts, posed as anterior to military and political ones, work to make
these narratives -and by extension the war itself -appear inevitable
and natural. Jeffords’s work effectively shows the close alliance of war
and gender relations, as she shows the way that Vietnam’s therapeutic
fictions address the recovery and reconstruction of phallic masculinity.
And, she identifies the representational ruse by which ethnic and class
differences are subsumed under the rubric of male solidarity and shows
the way that femininity is used as a space for working through problems
with masculinity. In the course of her analysis, it becomes clear that
the status of the Vietnam War as a “problem’’ simultaneously covers
over and displays a problematic masculinity. However, Jeffords’s con-
clusion that the “real battle [is] that of the masculine to dominate and
overpower its ‘enemy’ -the feminine” (167) is too much in agreement
with the conclusion of the narratives themselves. What The Remas-
culinization of America identifies, then, is a central imaginary aim of
Vietnam War narratives -but without considering where these texts
might be troubled in their attempt to maintain phallic masculinity’s
(fictive) uniformity and strength.
There is a way in which Jeffords’s analysis replays a central quandary
in feminist criticism: if one is limited as a female viewer or reader to
be merely the object of a narrative, not its subject, from where does
one read, view or speak? In feminist film theory, the answer has come
in the form of work that complicates our understanding of pleasure,

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 172 identification, narrative, and sexual difference and itself attests to wom-
en’s critical and theoretical activity. It seems to me that Jeffords’s
reading of Vietnam War fictions dramatizes how not only women but
men would be silenced by these narratives, to the extent that it would
be impossible to identify with the proposed “feminine” or “masculine”
positions. Jeffords’s reading raises the question of from where she or
anyone else might speak about the war, might speak about the way
it has changed and continues to affect the terrain of our political lives.
How can we engage narratives that are so central to our understanding
of our recent history, narratives of which we are, as a result, not only
objects, but subjects? The conclusion of Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Women
and War suggests an alternative to the silence that the Vietnam nar-
ratives seem to demand. Elshtain calls for
[dlevirilizing discourse, in favor not of feminization (for the feminized and
masculinized emerged in tandem and both embody dangerous distortions)
but of politicization, the chastened patriot constitutes men and women as
citizens who share what Hannah Arendt calls ‘the faculty of action.’ This
citizen is skeptical about the forms and claims of the sovereign state;
recognizes the (phony) parity in the notion of equally ‘sovereign states,’
and is thereby alert to the many forms hegemony can take; and deflates
fantasies of
In these terms, an appropriate response to Vietnam War narratives
would be, precisely, to “deflate” phallic masculinity’s “fantasies of
control.”

NOTES

1. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” T h e

American Historical Review 91.5 (December 1986): 1067.
2. For a detailed summary of this book, see Andrew Martin’s review in
Discourse 13.2 (Spring/Summer, 1991): 122-125.
3. Kaja Silverman uses the phrase “ideological exhaustion” in her discussion
of post-World War I1 films in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New
York: Routledge, 1992).
4. As Jeffords points out in her discussion of narrative structure, the Vietnam
War, like its representations, did not have a well-defined “ending.” There
are a confusing number of possibilities: the Tet Offensive in 1968, the
withdrawal of troops in 1973, the fall of Saigon in 1975 (6).
5. Leonard Maltin’s entry for Chrome and Hot Leather sums up the low
cultural status of many of these films and the veterans they portray:
“BOMB D:. . . . Lurid time-waster about some motorcycle thugs who

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 are responsible for a young woman’s death and her Green Beret fiance 173
(Tony Young) who seeks revenge. If only he had been this effective back
in Nam.” Leonard Maltin’s Film and Video Guide (New York: Penguin
Books, 1984).
6 . The last of these, The Ninth Configuration, is a psychodrama that takes
places in a remote gothic castle transformed into an insane asylum by the
military. The film actually bears a number of resemblances to more recent
popularizations of the Vietnam War, particularly in its depiction of crazed
veterans as victims who are themselves terrorized by a gang of crazed
motorcyclists. This and films like Taxi Driver suggest how the deployment
of Vietnam veteran stereotypes has shifted in respect to roles of victim
and victimizer, complicating representations of masculinity in the process.
7. While in this context, the male body is “fragmented” by a camera, another
aspect of the spectacle of war that Jeffords discusses is the infamous “body
count.” Unlike other wars, where progress would be marked by geography,
“performance” was measured during the Vietnam War in bodies con-
quered, and “anything counted as a body-arm, leg, torso” (8). The logic
of the body count’s representation seems to permeate both written and
filmed narratives in their fascination with bodies and their transformation
by violence.
8. Criticism of Ram60 emphasizes the duplicitous nature of Rambo’s rep-
resentation as body/machine: Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser in “Never
Having to Say You’re Sorry: Rambo’s Rewriting of the Vietnam War,”
call Rambo a “castrated and castrating monster,” whose assertion that
“the mind is the best weapon” is belied by “Stallone’s hypermasculinity,
emphasized in the kind of languid camera movements and fetishizing
close-up usually reserved for female ‘flashdancers’ ” (110). And Gregory
A. Waller in “Rambo: Getting to Win This Time,” points out that he is
a hero, but “remains an exploitable ‘piece of meat’ to the extent that the
camera reverently scans his body” (121).Both essays are collected in From
Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, eds. Linda
Dittmar and Gene Michaud (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1990). See also, John Ellis, “Rambollocks is the Order of the Day,” New
Statesman 8 (November 1985): 15.
9. The “masculine point of view” seems to bear some resemblance to the
psychoanalytic category of the phallus as it is discussed in feminist film
theory, but unlike the phallus that exceeds any single subjectivity and has
no motive force, the “masculine point of view” can control or direct a
narrative, and characters can speak the masculine point of view.
10. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Women and War. (New York: Basic Books, 1987):
258.

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