Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0001
Catherine Baker
{"title":"Making War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment in International Politics","authors":"Catherine Baker","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction reviews debates about ‘militarisation’ in the disciplines which have contributed to Critical Military Studies (including history, geography, sociology and International Relations) and explains the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘embodied’ turns that this volume shows how to synthesise. To study militarisation, aesthetics and embodiment together, it argues, involves studying combinations of how things are sensed and how bodies experience them, across contexts related to the military and its place in wider society: the complex and contradictory affective interplay of aesthetics and embodiment, which feminist approaches have been particularly fruitful for theorising, informs what we know about militarisation today. However, the very concept of ‘militarisation’ makes assumptions about normal relationships between the state, the public and violence which may not be transhistorically or even globally applicable, especially where state violence has been inherent to enforcing systems of racial oppression.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"17 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132606327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0011
A. Ongiri
{"title":"Seize the Time!: Military Aesthetics, Symbolic Revolution and the Black Panther Party","authors":"A. Ongiri","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Government agencies like the FBI and CIA and both local and statewide law enforcement agencies would successfully meet the challenge of the Black Panther Party with a military intervention that would destroy its political power, but they were relatively powerless to counteract their successes in the realm of the symbolic in which the Panthers successfully re-scripted a visual language of military might to argue for Black liberation. While most militaries conceive of propaganda as a way of ‘selling’ the violence that they are charged with conducting, the BPP saw propaganda as one of their most primary imperatives. Just as the Panthers used images of the Black body in military poses and formations to challenge ideas of national belonging in the US, the Panthers’ use of a military aesthetic challenges us to think in new ways about the uses to which a militarised body might be put beyond further state sponsored notions of masculinity.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114822818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0004
Catherine Baker
{"title":"Svetlana Alexievich’s Soviet Women Veterans and the Aesthetics of the Disabled Military Body: Staring at the Unwomanly Face of War","authors":"Catherine Baker","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0004","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"234 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121244624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0005
S. Jude
{"title":"Breaking the Silence: Embodiment, Militarisation and Military Dissent in the Israel/Palestine Conflict","authors":"S. Jude","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter studies the testimonies of violence published by the Israeli veteran organisation Breaking the Silence (Shovrim Shtika) and explores the role of embodiment as a means of military dissent within the Israel/Palestine conflict. These testimonies represent aesthetic practices that describe the violent behaviour of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) and illustrate soldiers’ embodied experiences of fear, shame, remorse, or empathy for Palestinians during their military service under the occupation. Interested in the political power of emotions within military dissent, this chapter shows that the activism of Breaking the Silence (BtS) is in fact interweaved with the same ideas of power, hierarchy, and violence that it seeks to challenge. It argues that dissenting military practices are fraught with contradictions, ambivalences, and ambiguities that may actually reinforce, rather than destabilise, the militarised discourses that sustain the Israel/Palestine conflict. Despite the best efforts of this organisation in intervening in the dynamics of Israeli militarisation, the aesthetics of BtS activism show that military dissent draws on and discloses embodied experiences which reproduce military masculinity, validate militarism, and may legitimise the further enactment of violence within the Israel/Palestine conflict.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132501845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0007
Jennifer G. Mathers
{"title":"Ginger Cats and Cute Puppies: Animals, Affect and Militarisation in the Crisis in Ukraine1","authors":"Jennifer G. Mathers","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Exposure to affective depictions of soldiers with domesticated animals such as cats and dogs encourages civilian audiences to view soldiers, militaries and even the aims of war with sympathy and approval. This chapter argues that Russia and Ukraine are currently engaged in parallel processes of creating and disseminating such depictions in order to rehabilitate the reputations of their armed forces and garner support for their military operations in eastern Ukraine. This positioning of soldiers’ bodies and animals’ bodies together, most notably in photographs circulated on social media, but also in other representations such as statues, is just one example of the wider phenomenon of digital militarism. State militaries and alliances have become very sophisticated and systematic about the use of digital technologies, especially social media and the internet, to disseminate positive messages and images about soldiers, the armed forces and war. The chapter concludes that the differing degrees of success by Russia and Ukraine can be attributed to factors that are highly dependent on context, demonstrating that militarisation is above all a set of social processes.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116818202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0006
Henri Myrttinen
{"title":"Death Becomes Him: The Hypervisibility of Martyrdom and Invisibility of the Wounded in the Iconography of Lebanese Militarised Masculinities1","authors":"Henri Myrttinen","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The visual landscape of Lebanon both mirrors and reasserts the country’s complex socio-political, economic and gendered order. Using public memorialisations of the dead in the Lebanese and Syrian Civil Wars as a starting point, the chapter analyses how these reflect Lebanese realities and imaginaries, and how particular militarised masculinities are constructed through them. The chapter then contrasts these visualisations with the invisibilisation of conflict-related disabilities and the war-wounded and what these mean for the reproduction of gendered and other social hierarchies.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132584747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0002
Dan Evans
{"title":"Basic Training","authors":"Dan Evans","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter adds to an increasing body of work on the embodied sociology of war and militarism by detailing the affective experience of basic training and the insights this provided into the nature of habitus formation within the British Army and how bodies react to and are transformed by military training. Unlike more dramatic insights into the embodied experience of soldiering, however, this account of basic training mainly focuses on the banal, everyday ways that recruits learn what Stephen Atherton calls the domestic element of soldiering – the embodied routine and rhythm of barracks life. The chapter is a reflection on a centrally important part of the author’s own enactive ethnographic research into life in the British Army reserve and the ‘enduring modification of the bodily schema’ (in Loïc Wacquant’s words) that basic training entailed.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"17 15","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134447063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0003
Federica Caso
{"title":"The Political Aesthetics of the Body of the Soldier in Pain","authors":"Federica Caso","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the recent work of Australian artist Ben Quilty on combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) collected in the exhibition After Afghanistan. After Afghanistan presents a series of large-scale paintings of soldiers and veterans evoking the bodily imprints of combat fatigue and PTSD. The bodies are naked, in the grasp of sensations and emotions. The chapter argues that this work has an ambivalent relationship to militarisation, whereby it proposes an alternative iconography of the modern soldier which seeds transformative potentials against the militarisation of the body; simultaneously, however, the iconography of the body of the soldier in pain has been co-opted as a militarising technology that silences opposition and contestation to war in the name of compassion towards the soldiers.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127624380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Making War on BodiesPub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0009
Catherine Baker
{"title":"The Defender Collection: Militarisation, Historical Mythology and the Everyday Affective Politics of Nationalist Fashion in Croatia","authors":"Catherine Baker","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446181.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores civilian fashion’s fascination with military aesthetics, and the affective politics of militarisation and ethnonationalism in Croatia a generation since the country’s war of independence from Yugoslavia, through the case of clothing marketed to young people who sympathise with oppositional right-wing and anti-Communist nationalism. The national, ideological and subcultural identifications that this collection of clothing invites customers to make includes but is not limited to identifications with the recent and more distant national military past. An aesthetic approach to how political and historical mythology is visualised in this collection reveal how it constructs a certain contentious ideal of national military masculinity as normal and natural, and how broader processes of societal militarisation in Croatia have laid the foundations for this to be meaningful.","PeriodicalId":342578,"journal":{"name":"Making War on Bodies","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133165741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}