Scandal in a “gender-neutral” military: mundane militarized masculinities and the limits of military exceptionalism in the Norwegian armed forces

Starting in 2022, the Norwegian military was rocked by a series of whistleblowing cases with gendered and often sexualized dimensions. Feminist scholarship gives us two salient lenses through which to understand these scandals: militarized masculinities and military exceptionalism. However, closer examination reveals that the Norwegian cases disrupt dominant understandings of both concepts and how they interact. I argue that the whistleblowing scandals highlight how masculinities in militaries are also masculinities in workplaces. Building on the work of Megan MacKenzie and Paul Higate, I introduce the concept of mundane militarized masculinities to capture the operation of mundanity within militarized settings: maintaining the connection to the military and its (in many ways) exceptional situation, culture(s), and functioning, but departing from standard depictions of hegemonic/dominant/warrior militarized masculinities to ground military life in the workplace setting. The notion of mundane militarized masculinities highlights the operation, within militaries, of masculinities that are neither integral to, nor ideologically or discursively interconnected with, essential military functions. It thus counters the exceptionalizing move that enables or excuses patterns of behavior that would be considered unacceptable in other workplaces, and gestures to the explanatory limits of military exceptionalism and hegemonic militarized masculinities.