Avoiding objectification: Narrative strategies

In this chapter, I have discussed the body and its possible objectification from two different perspectives: the body as an object of the gaze, and as an object of state control. Because objectification has been historically and culturally linked largely to representations of women and femininity, it is now worth considering what – if any – kind of an impact this has on representations of masculinity. If the male body is being treated as an object, is being objectified also feminizing? The emasculating effect of objectification is suggested by Brauerhoch, who notes that, because soldiers serve and thus belong to their country, they are no longer in charge of what happens to their bodies (p. 93). The loss of control is also argued by Ahlbäck (2006, 2014) and Godfrey et al., but their research concerns mostly the strategies used to control and shape the body. Brauerhoch, on the other hand, discusses the consequences of such control, arguing that the state’s claim over the soldiers’ bodies puts said bodies in a position that is – in a patriarchal society – traditionally reserved for women. The subordination of these bodies thus transforms them into feminine objects (p. 93).

While I agree with Brauerhoch on the notion that objectification and the subsequent subordination have generally been gendered concepts, automatically equating subordination with feminization becomes a rather complicated issue in the context of the military and war, and especially in relation to what has been argued previously in this thesis. The starting point of this research was the assumption that war and military are inherently masculine environments that allow the construction of masculinities that would not necessarily be possible in other contexts, and arguing that the military as a subjugating system does, in fact, emasculate men seems to contradict this assumption. Of course, these two concepts – excessive masculinity and subjugation – do not have to be considered mutually exclusive. The military does promote and reinforce a certain type of masculinity, while simultaneously also denying men the autonomy to their own bodies. However, I do not see that this kind of loss of control would necessarily directly translate to the feminization of the body. The concept of feminization is more commonly discussed in cultures that are based on a more hierarchical gender order. In research on masculinity and military, the emphasis on “female- coded” chores such as cleaning and making beds in military training has been seen as a strategy to feminize the recruits and strip them “of their manly honour”, but as Ahlbäck (2014) remarks, Finland and other countries in Northern Europe are

marked by more egalitarian gender relationships than other European cultures. The opposite of manliness in many contexts was not womanliness, but being a boy or a youngster that was not yet a skilled workman. In the Finnish narratives, the soldiers’ manly pride as workmen was taken away by the denial of their ability to perform even the simplest task correctly (pp. 177-178).

It is thus possible to argue that because Brauerhoch’s discussion on feminization takes place within an American framework, it reflects values and traditions specific to that cultural and societal environment, and is not fully applicable in the Finnish context.

Moreover, even if one were to consider the subjugation by the military as a feminizing practice, depictions of military hierarchy constitute only a minor part of Finnish war narratives, as has been extensively discussed in this chapter. In terms of the narrative structure, these films position individual soldiers at the centre of the action, downplaying the role of the military as a disciplinary institution. Individual soldiers are also visually the main focus of the story. Examining the use of character close-ups, Timothy Corrigan (1991) argues that “the dominance of expressive faces are able to absorb the wide-shot complications of political and social history by filling the frame with overdetermined moral and humanistic dilemmas, personal emotions and fears” (p. 42). The war and its meaning to the construction of national and masculine identity provides the context in which these

films tell stories about Finnish men, their struggles, and their victories, whereby the political, societal, and historical circumstances must make way for the individual to take centre stage.

As for the other level of objectification discussed in this chapter, I think it can be argued that the highly gendered practice of objectification that Mulvey describes in terms of the body and its relation to the gaze of the film camera/viewer has perhaps lost a part of its validity over time. The male body has been increasingly subjected to the same kind of eroticised objectification that used to be mostly reserved for the female body. This development can be seen even in the films analysed in this thesis: Ambush displays the male body in a decidedly more sexualised manner than The Partisans, released 36 years earlier. The key issue here is that the normalisation of the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the masculine body means that being objectified does not systematically translate to being feminised. Particularly in action-driven narratives, the male hero’s body is often displayed to demonstrate his masculinity, not to reduce it. It is thus quite difficult to find many narrative or visual elements from these films that could be interpreted as explicit or implicit feminization. Rather, the soldier’s body is the visual manifestation of the norms, ideals and fantasies associated with military masculinity.