Conclusion

As soldiers returned from the battlefield with horrific injuries, the cultural formation of citizen-soldiers came to orient itself around the disability of veterans whose “impaired state” (in Henry James’s evocative phrase) called forth new relations of physical substitution around an ethics of care, but also became the site for the cultural reconstruction of the state. Claiming the injured veteran as a figure of whiteness, racialized biopower reoriented itself around the abandonment of metaphoric equality and came to embrace metonymic suture as the fraught conjunction of reconstructed bodies and the reconstructed nation. Drawing on categories of exemption inaugurated by the draft, the injured veteran was able to offer a unifying figure for all whites to claim a privileged relation to the nation.