Gender Roles In The Naked Citadel

Feminism has long been a highly intensive subject debated for many generations by both men and women. From the early writings of female authors during the Age of Enlightenment to the heated marches on Washington D.C. for women’s suffrage, feminism has not only strengthened throughout the centuries, but also has gained wide acceptance. At the start of Susan Faludi’s The Naked Citadel, immediately the idea of feminism is introduced with the first female admission to an all-male military school, the Citadel. However, moving deeper into Faludi’s story, it is quickly realized that the plot actually does not focus on the theme of feminism. On the contrary, the hated towards the woman is created through an interesting alignment or alliance of the

Particularly upperclassmen have substituted “knobs”, a name used to denote the lowerclassmen, for women at the Citadel. Just like how they would treat women with violence and hateful gender-specific language, the upperclassmen would behave the same with students they would deem to be more feminine: “Virtually every taunt equated him with a woman: whenever he showed fear, they would say, “You look like you’re having an abortion,” or “Are you menstruating?”” (Faludi 85). The students could “re-create a male-dominant society…by casting male knobs in all the subservient feminine roles” (Faludi 85). Through these actions, it can easily be inferred that the student body itself has created male and female roles within itself. This shows that even without women, the men still had the need to divide their society by gender ranks. With the admission of a woman, the entire structure of the society the students had built would fall apart. Thus the negative reaction to the admission of a female student is supported here by the need of defending the strange situations the students have created for