A woman's work: women soldiers, masculinities and binary panic in documentaries of the East German army

The East German National People's Army employed women in uniformed and civilian roles from its inception, yet in its self-presentation it strongly associated military service with masculinity and cis male bodies. Documentaries and newsreels from the military's own Army Film Studio, the DEFA documentary 'Gabi - Switchboard Position 12' (Uwe Belz, 1985) and the amateur film 'Trying and Prevailing' (Dietmar Schürtz, 1988) provide insights into women's negotiations of gender in the East German armed forces. Army Film Studio productions position women's military jobs as work like any other. To avoid disrupting the link between the military, masculinities and cis male bodies, though, these films overemphasise and stereotype women's femininity to minimise unsettling effects on military masculinities. These documentaries and newsreels constantly foreground and reinforce binary gender in ways that reveal it to be under pressure: I call these reactions to women's presence in uniform a form of 'binary panic'. Both 'Gabi' and 'Trying and Prevailing', by contrast, make space for women soldiers' own words and show how their presence in military training influenced their male comrades. The films show the work that goes into reinforcing binary gender and demonstrate how women embodied military masculinities and forced cis male comrades to reflect on what masculinity meant to them and to the army.