Svetlana Alexievich’s Soviet Women Veterans and the Aesthetics of the Disabled Military Body: Staring at the Unwomanly Face of War

Abstract

Aesthetics, embodiment and militarisation are particularly closely joined in representations of and reactions to the military body disabled as a result of war. Against militarised depictions of the vigour and glamour that military training and service bestows on bodies, experiences and representations of disabled veterans become embodied evidence of the other transformations that war inflicts. By investigating aesthetic practices of representing disability and disfigurement in Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of interviews with women Red Army veterans, The Unwomanly Face of War, this chapter views the gendered structures of emotion and aversion projected on to disabled military bodies through the cultural and literary turn in disability studies to explain what is affectively at stake when the military body disabled by war becomes a literary device.