Military Bases, Gender at

Military bases are largely construed as bastions of hyper-national masculinity and ethnocentrism in which sexual domination and humiliation are a pivotal strategy of geopolitical control and domination over poor and weak countries. America’s foray into global domination necessitates the establishment of these military bases to maintain its territorial advantage and ideological hegemony over countries that it has invaded or controlled in the past.

In the absence of protective mechanisms of social and communal solidarity and in the lawlessness of war zones, the traditional unequal gender [Page 1084]relations are aggravated at military bases. The establishment of military bases in poor countries, at times, is marked by escalation in gender-based violence and increased sexualization of women from otherwise poor and weaker sections of host communities, who act as ...