Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror - Book Report/Review Example

The book is a result of her trying to make sense of the political world, experience, and events.Mann expresses interesting opinions on gender and feminism. According to her, gender is related to the evaluation of status and can be viewed as a biological reality or as a social construction. She agrees with the latter paradigm, saying that the biological body does not determine how gender is lived. Gender is an important part of language too since vituperative terms such as whore and bitch are a product of the gender wars.

The war on terror brought an entirely new perspective to the whole idea of gender. She talks of cases where detained male terror suspects are interrogated by female officials who harass them sexually. This is done in a nation that prides itself as a sexually progressive society. She attributes these occurrences to the misplaced perception that Muslim men are sexually needy persons. She further extends her case by stating that although women have been allowed to join the military, they are sexually harassed, and this sexual violence is often wrongly blamed on combat stress.

Bonnie Mann presents a curious dialogue, but she is not particularly convincing. She keeps employing the use of anecdotal evidence and makes sweeping assumptions in her summations. Her claim that contractors working with the military are corrupt and inefficient is speculative. She presents an interesting and feminist approach to gender and activism.