The Visual Construction of the Romanian Militarized Masculinity on Romanian Army’s Facebook Pages

Because nowadays’ world is visually saturated, many social re- searchers are using visual methods to understand how images contribute to the shaping and perpetuation of social constructs, norms, and behaviors. Gender is such a construct, and the beliefs and principles that contributed to the social and visual construction of gender have been broadly argued in the last decades. However, in today’s digitalized world, there is a space poorly explored by gender and visual researchers, namely how the army as a media actor contributes to the construction of masculinity through the images it promotes online. Thus, with the purpose to explore this gap, the present paper examines how the Romanian armed forces visually construct the militarized masculinity on their official Facebook pages, highlighting how those images contribute to the consolidation of the existing gendered stereotypes. Through the photos it disseminates, the Romanian Army le- gitimizes the main role of men in defending the country by revealing de- sirable male characteristics and the high degree of connectivity with the military theatre.