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Maximo Badaro 's ' One Of The Guys ' : Military Women, Paradoxical Individuality, And The Transformations Essay

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In the article “‘One of the Guys’: Military Women, Paradoxical Individuality, and the Transformations of the Argentine Army,” the author Máximo Badaró analyzes how the addition of women into the Argentine military has lead to institutional changes within the military. The article’s main focus is on the how the addition of female soldiers has redefined what it means to be a soldier and how this has changed the military as an institution. He also analyzes the agency available to women in the military and the role their femininity plays in their lives as soldiers. Badaró studied both male and female soldiers of varying ranks in the Argentine Army, most of whom were cadets or young officers at the Colegio Militar de la Nación (CMN), the only officer academy of the Argentine Army, to collect ethnographic data. Badaró gathered his data through observations, interviews, and informal conversations carried out over the course of nine years. He cites other anthropologists’ studies of female inclusive militaries to support his conclusions. While the article provides deep analysis into how the military is changing as an institution, it is lacking in its analysis of individual experiences.
The article begins with a brief history of the women in the Argentine Army, explaining that when Argentina transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy, the public had a negative view of the military. In 1997, the military decided to admit female soldiers to recover its poor public image because

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