| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II. By Christina S. Jarvis. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. xvi, 243 pp. $43.00, ISBN 0-87580-322-9.)
Men who fight modern wars face many contradictions. Our culture glorifies war, promising young men a path to individual self-realization through patriotic struggle. The implicit or explicit promise is that of glory, honor, sacrifice, and heroism, a way to realize an idealized masculinity. The experience of individual soldiers is often very different; the anonymity and the industrialized butchery of modern wars rarely matches the narrative ideal. Christina S. Jarvis, a scholar of English and American studies, addresses these contradictions in The Male Body at War.	1
Jarvis uses a cultural studies approach to explore the representation and the deployment of bodies by the wartime state. She argues that the government "shaped the male body both figuratively and physically in an effort to communicate impressions of national strength"; the deployment of men for war meant not only the maiming and death of American male bodies but also that bodies were "examined, classified, categorized, disciplined, clothed in particular uniforms, sexualized via venereal disease screenings," and marked by racial and other categories (pp. 4–5).	. . .

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