Woman Know Your Defense: A Discourse-Theoretical Study of Women as a Focal Point for a Diverse Defense

Abstract

This thesis concerns itself around the question on how the Danish Armed Forces perceive women within their organization. The Armed Forces of Denmark has been undergoing a slow development towards a stronger number of women in the organization, this despite a growing wish for a more diverse workplace. Thus, the Danish Armed Forces struggle to retain and recruit female employees. The Armed Forces is a 500 years old organization with rooted traditions where women have only been officially part of the organization since 1962. The roles and identities of women in the Danish Armed Forces have therefore undergone changes throughout the past decades, which it is wished to identify in a historical and present point of view. Hence, the following thesis seeks to answer: How can the subjectification of women in the Danish Armed Forces create challenges for the organization's goals of diversity? The thesis consists of four main parts: two analysis, a discussion and an intervention. The theoretical framework is conducted with the inspiration of Michel Foucault and his theories of discourses. The first analysis is a genealogical analysis of the historical process of the female employees in the Danish Armed Forces. Prior to the analysis, documents that applied to certain criterias were gathered in an archive and divided in three phases starting from 1962 and ending in 2020. In the analysis, the focus point has been to search for discontinuities and continuities for the way the Danish Armed Forces has affected the current discourse on the matter of women in the army. The findings of the first analysis (diachronic analysis) point to a subjectivation, where women were seen as less able to do the same work as the male employees. Furthermore, influenced by the UN Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Safety, the women were and are expected to contribute with military operations concerning peacekeeping. Five interviews were conducted with employees who all work in relevant positions within the Danish Armed Forces. With the information obtained through these interviews, it was possible to get a contemporary insight into the organization. The second analysis is a governmentality analysis (synchronic analysis) that investigates how the Danish Armed Forces position themselves and women in relation to power, knowledge and subjectivity. Through the data collected, it has been made possible to see how technology of truth, techniques of self and subjectivity is managed and activated. From this it has been possible to discover paradoxes and a relation between the two analyses. The second analysis shows how the power relations seek to conduct a certain behavior of the women, but that the subjectivation creates diffuseness due to the relation between the main discourse and other identified relevant discourses: women, diversity and masculine leadership. The diffuse way the discourse of women in the army occurs, has been the focus point in the discussion, where the paradoxes made visible have been inspected for further understanding. Lastly, an intervention strategy has been produced as an offer for the Danish Armed Forces. In the intervention strategy, feministic leadership will be presented and put to use. The plan serves to both support the work made initially on this topic by the Union of Female Veterans in Denmark and as a strategy for the specialists of diversity within the Danish Armed Forces.