Staging Women’s Capability and Suffering in Military-Themed Television Formats

Military-themed television programmes depicting physical and mental challenges have become increasingly visible in an era of recruitment pressure and public debate over who can credibly belong in physically demanding military roles. This article examines how women’s military legitimacy is symbolically negotiated through the televisual staging of capability and suffering. The study draws on a qualitative, interpretive analysis of four narratively weighted scenes from three programmes: two national adaptations of SAS: Who Dares Wins (Sweden and Australia) and the Norwegian documentary Jenter for Norge. Focusing on two analytically selected narrative situations, rule violations and physical confrontation, the analysis exposes a breadth of dramaturgical mechanisms through which moments of judgment and evaluation are staged. The findings show that capability and suffering function as gendered dramaturgical resources whose meaning is contingent on how exposure is allocated, how authority is performed by instructors, and how narrative and audiovisual techniques frame bodily performance. Across the analysed scenes, women’s physical competence is either framed as exceptional and spectacle-laden, or situated within a professional training logic in which endurance and pain are presented as trainable, credible, and routine rather than extraordinary. These dramaturgical choices shape whether women’s performance is normalized as legitimate military competence or rendered anomalous, fragile, or narratively marginal. By approaching capability and suffering as dramaturgical currencies within televised physically demanding military contexts, the article shows how such formats participate in producing and stabilizing the symbolic boundaries of who can credibly belong in these roles, and under what conditions women’s performance is allowed to register as ordinary competence rather than exceptional disruption.