'Deeply Odd': How sharing past experiences shone a light on our gendered experiences of military service

We met as PhD students, drawn into conversation by our common pasts as former RAF and Royal Navy officers respectively. As we got talking, we started to revisit buried memories, realising how much we had normalised incidents and behaviours we had experienced when serving, unable to see them as ‘odd’, or worse as unacceptable, at the time. We were motivated to co-write a paper on this very subject – to unpick some of troubling aspects we had encountered but completely accepted at the time.

Conversations as methodological tools

Hannah: "There was a small lockable cage onboard for women’s underwear. And I remember at the time thinking well at least they’ve thought of that, there’s somewhere for us to hang them."

Sophy: "How nice of them."

Hannah: "Implying that they weren’t going to be swiped by any men. But now of course I look back on it and think why on earth did we need to lock away our underwear."

Sophy: "If you left your camera at the bar when you went to the loo or were buying a drink or something, you’d get back. There’d be a camera that you’d have to go and develop in those days, not digital or anything like that.

"And then you’d go to the chemist or send them away to Truprint or whatever. You’d get it back and there’d be a whole load of men’s genitals. Cos they’d have swiped the camera, taken it away and taken lots of pictures just because they thought it was hilarious.

"The guy who’d done it to me one time had left his wristwatch on. We managed to work out who it was and posted it on the noticeboard with his name and everything. But it wasn’t because we were trying to get him into trouble. Everyone thought it was funny, including us."

Hannah: "I totally remember someone who was bordering on hypothermia, he was not in a good way. We managed to get him a dry sleeping bag and yeh, I shared a sleeping bag with him just to keep him warm. And again, that wasn’t at all weird. But I remember telling my mum about it later and her not really understanding the context of it and her finding that really strange."

Sophy: "So there were things that we did and we look back and think, that was a sensible thing to do but still seem odd from the outside. And then there were things that we don’t really remember until we start talking about it that were deeply odd."

Hannah: "Yeh, yeh, really strange."

Reflecting on gendered experiences in the past 

We found a way to catch a glimpse behind the stage-set of a military we thought we had understood but now the memories of which we saw in a whole new light. What most shocked us was the previously unacknowledged, recollections of the sexualised and gendered character of this institution, and the degree to which we needed distance and time from it to properly interrogate our pasts.

Of course, we had agency while we were serving, but we chose, for the most part, to subvert ourselves to the structure we had joined, rather than challenging it. That said, since we couldn’t appreciate the strange nature of the institution we were trying to fit into – we couldn’t see it for what it was – perhaps that also made it hard to resist.

But going further we could see that we started to believe our own rhetoric and stopped questioning inappropriate behaviours and potentially discriminatory practices in order to keep our heads down and make career progression. As a result, we couldn’t see the ‘deeply odd’.

In the arc of our military careers, we can see that our initial complicity hid an inner resistance that has only fully emerged now that we have reached a critical distance from our former lives. As we broke away from our military identities subsumed within a military culture, through conversations with each other, we began to ask questions of ourselves and others.

We felt an increasing divergence with our friends and former colleagues who remained serving, and who dismissed our recollections, as well as realization of the difference in treatment between women and men in the military. The dismissal of the issue of discrimination by former colleagues seemed to us to expose a tension between the association of soldiering with strength and masculinity and any potential admission of vulnerability by them.

The resonating effect of other’s memories

It is perhaps more than happenstance that our journeys as academic researchers and reflexive female veterans have coincided with the rise of the #MeToo campaign. They have occurred at a time of increased discussion of discrimination and sexual harassment within strongly hierarchical institutions and/or distinctly delineated disparities in power between members depending on rank, age, gender etc. There is a ‘resonance’ effect in listening to other’s memories.

We are certain that we would not have reached these critical insights were it not for our conversational exchange which unlocked buried memories and gave us the confidence to question. As a method this could have application for other minority outsider groups, particularly in exploring institutional cultures. And we believe that our paper demonstrates the need for greater engagement with the full diversity of the veteran community in order to identify new critical insights.

Read the paper the article is based on

Dr Sophy Antrobus is Research Associate at the Freeman Air and Space Institute in the School of Security Studies, King's College London. She joined the RAF in 1991, on graduation from university, aged 21 and left in 2011.

Hannah West is a Research Assistant on the ESRC-funded Project 'Conflict, Intimacy and Military Wives: A lively geopolitics' at the University of Newcastle. She joined the Royal Navy in 2000 as a University Cadet Entrant aged 18, completing her undergraduate degree whilst serving, and left in 2015.