This dissertation studies the Peruvian army's military culture during the Latin American Cold War from a gendered perspective. During most of the twentieth century, the Peruvian military used a gendered structure of representations that excluded women from its institutional narratives. The Peruvian army's foundational myth was that military men forged the Peruvian nation, a female entity, a national body which they had created and needed to be protected from an external and internal enemy. Such creation was a male endeavor, the product of battles fought and male blood spilled in national territory. In this narrative, there was no room for women and other subaltern groups such as Indians and Afro-Peruvians. However, in the 1960s, the military nationalism that emerged in Peru, which was catholic, anticommunist, reformist and revolutionary, shaped an inclusionary rhetoric that aimed to incorporate women to the army's narrative of nation-building. In the context of the Cold War, such a narrative was complementary to the military's project which considered economic, social and political transformation as a basic criteria for achieving national security. Based on archival research, discourse and visual analysis and oral history, this dissertation argues that during the Latin American Cold War the Peruvian military glorified some characteristics of Peruvian women and attempted to incorporate female images into its institutional narratives. In so doing, they highlighted qualities and values that were instrumental for the consolidation of a Peruvian imagined community. The military's vision of women as idealized mothers and producers of the nation, as well as the role assigned to military wives in the reproduction of Peruvian military culture in the 1960s and 1970s, reveal the centrality of the feminine in opposition to and as a complement of the masculine in the army's military discourse in the years prior to the outbreak of the civil war. These idealized notions of femininity, expressed in the images of the military wife, the heroine, the recruit's mother and the sexualized military woman, coexisted at the same time when the Peruvian army emphasized a counter-insurgent warrior masculinity that was consequence of both Cold War anxieties and the army's own historical trajectory. The Peruvian civil war (1980-1993) exposed the limits and contradictions of the Peruvian army's inclusionary discourse and gendered structures. These narratives shaped each other up by showing how the army was an institution where there was room for most Peruvians and how men's labor of defending the nation was fostered, sustained, and complemented by Peruvian women.