‘It Changed Me As A Man:’ Reframing Military Masculinity in the Army’s ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ Suicide Prevention Campaign

Abstract: As the suicide rate among U.S. active-duty troops surpassed the nationalaverage for the first time. Responding to what was widely perceived as acrisis brought on in part by indifference to soldiers’suffering, media coverageincreasingly criticized the Army’s hypermasculine culture as a barrier to sol-diers needing mental health care faced. The Army’s 2010 ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ campaign, however, represents one location in which the Army chal-lenged dominant discourses of military masculinity, privileging familial andhomosocial responsibility over stoicism, toughness, and self-reliance andcasting suicide as a failure to be appropriately masculine.