Embodying Militarism

Exploring the Spaces and Bodies In-Between

Synne L. Dyvik, Lauren Greenwood, Synne L. Dyvik, Lauren Greenwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138715196
• eBook ISBN: 9781351770705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

How are militarism and militarisation embodied and why is it important to study these concepts together? This volume highlights a lack of research into people's emotions, bodies and experiences in global politics, and brings these important dimensions to bear on how we study militarism and process of militarisation.

This collection showcases innovative research that examines people's everyday lived experience and the multiple ways militarism is enshrined in our societies. Emphasising the benefits of interdisciplinary thinking, its chapters interrogate a range of methodological, ethical, and theoretical questions related to embodiment and militarism from a range of empirical contexts. Authors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds reveal the myriad of ways in which militarism is experienced by gendered, raced, aged, and sexed bodies. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of social media; gender, queer, and feminist research on the military; the challenges of writing about embodied experience; and the commercialisation of military fitness in civilian life.

This book fills a gap in the study of militarism and militarisation and will be of interest to students and scholars of critical military studies, security studies, and war studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Military Studies.

INTRODUCTION

Embodying militarism: exploring the spaces and bodies in-between

Synne L. Dyvik and Lauren Greenwood

‘My body knows unheard-of songs’.

(Cixous 1976, 876)

This Special Issue of Critical Military Studies creates an inter-disciplinary space to explore embodied experiences of militarism, militarization, and war, and engages with some of the challenges faced when studying the military. Through the myriad ways that embodiment conceptually informs each contributing author’s research, collectively these pieces examine the deep bodily interconnectedness of everyday lived experience, the multiple ways militarism intersects with society, and how this interweaves with the ‘generative power’ of war (Barkawi and Brighton 2011). The contributory disciplinary perspectives range from anthropology to the creative arts, political geography, history, international relations, and sociology.

The pieces reflect, in part, different attitudes and approaches to the study of embodiment, militarism, militarization and war. Mascia-Lees, drawing on Van Wolputte (2004, 259), describes embodiment as the connections between bodies and their lived experience: ‘a way of inhabiting the world as well as the source of personhood, self, and subjectivity, and the precondition of intersubjectivity’ (Mascia-Lees 2011, 2). With this comes the recognition that embodied selves are “‘mediated” and “hybrid”; “they” are constituted by, and constitutive of, political economic formations, whether colonialism, post-socialism, late capitalism or neoliberalism’ (Mascia-Lees 2011, 2). The articles in this issue of Critical Military Studies highlight different ways of engaging with and studying embodiment and the multiple and contested conceptualizations of militarization and militarism (see for example the debates presented by Stavrianakis and Selby 2012a). Through this, and the exploration of the additional themes of ‘methodology and positionality’ and ‘complicity and co-option’, each author illustrates reflexively their own engagements and negotiations with the emerging field of critical military studies.

Militarism and militarization have in recent years often been sidelined in much academic debate, consequently creating a gap in research across the social sciences. For instance, in international relations (IR), while these were important concepts of analysis during the Cold War, they have since fallen out of fashion. This is likely in part due to the political and intellectual hegemony of liberalism, and the rise of ‘new wars’ and ‘failed states’ literature, along with an increased emphasis on ‘security’ (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012b, 6; see also Barkawi 2011; Williams at al. 2016). As a starting point, militarism might broadly be understood as ‘an ideology that prioritizes military force as a necessary resolver of conflict’ (Woodward 2014, 41) or as ‘the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence’ (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012b, 3). Relatedly, militarization might be understood as ‘that multi-faceted set of social, cultural, economic and political processes by which military approaches to social problems and issues gain both elite and popular acceptance’ (Woodward 2014, 41).

While embodiment has been a central focus in anthropology, notably during the paradigmatic shift of the 1970s and 1980s towards the ‘anthropology of the body’, there is a distinct lack of anthropological work that connects these themes with militarism, with some important exceptions (see for example, Ben-Ari 1998; Lutz 2001; Robben 2010; MacLeish 2013; Wool 2015). Likewise in IR, which has only relatively recently begun to explore how ‘the international’ is also an embodied and emotional space (Crawford 2000; Edkins 2003; Shinko 2010; Holmqvist 2013; Åhäll and Gregory 2015). Within sociology, attention has predominantly been on the quantitative, with military sociology a sidelined sub-field. As Hockey has noted, a sociology of the body for the most part has conceptualized ‘the body as a terrain of signs and discourses which [is] to be read as a text, with the material flesh seemingly dissolved’; this, he argues, has resulted in a ‘sensory lacuna’ and a neglect within studies of the ‘interrelationship between social and sensory processes’ (Hockey 2009, 478; see also McSorley 2014).

An interest in these themes, stemming from our personal and scholarly engagement with and experience of military research, provided the impetus for a workshop in September 2014 to highlight, explore, and contribute to addressing this research gap. This workshop was held in Cardiff, and was generously funded by the Body, Health and Religion Research Group (BAHAR), and supported by the Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research (SCSR). Participants were invited to write creative and personal papers guided by the following themes: experiences, narratives, and stories from ‘the field’; exploring methods; embodiment, emotion, and empathy in research; negotiating insider/outsider perspectives and the politics of co-option; and militarism, identity, and the everyday. Three key themes emerged from the workshop: ‘embodying militarism’; ‘methodology and positionality’; and ‘complicity and co-option’. Embodying Militarism represents the outcome of this process, and these themes are taken forward to shape seven articles and four Encounters pieces.

The pieces collected here, in their own ways, stretch the concepts of militarism and militarization in directions that pay attention to its emotional, embodied, sensed, and corporeal manifestations. They recognize the ways in which processes of militarization are not always conscious, not always deliberate, but, in the words of Kevin McSorley (this volume), ‘something that is felt, as much as, if not at times more than, something that is explicitly thought about’. In so doing, these chapters demonstrate some of the different ways in which the social sciences and humanities should begin to reengage with the study of militarism, militarization and military forces more specifically. Crucially, they raise questions and open up understandings of how people are – and become – militarized.

The first article is a co-authored piece by Peter Adey, David Denney, Rikke Jensen, and Alasdair Pinkerton (Royal Holloway, University of London), entitled ‘Blurred lines: intimacy, mobility, and the social military’, in which they explore the impact of social media on the British Armed Forces. They show how the increased use of social media effects intimate and affectual military spaces in ways that not only are surprising, but can also pose potential challenges to prevailing notions of military cohesion. In so doing they challenge conceptions of embodiment in virtual and non-virtual spaces, while reflecting on their own embodied experiences of doing ethnographic fieldwork on board the highly militarized space of a British Royal Navy warship.

The focus on this lived experience and negotiating engagements between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ bodies is taken forward in the innovative co-authored piece by Sarah Bulmer (University of Exeter) and David Jackson (Independent researcher, UK) – ‘“You do not live in my skin”: embodiment, voice, and the veteran’. Taking issue with current research on veterans in the UK, they set out to promote engagement and dialogue through structuring their piece as a conversation between themselves. Through searching for the ‘spaces in-between’ they alternate between being researchers and researched, thus pushing embodied research in new directions and challenging the monologue style of academic writing.

Paying attention to the various roles afforded the veteran and the soldier body is continued in the piece by Jesse Paul Crane-Seeber (North Carolina State University), ‘Sexy warriors: the politics and pleasures of submission to the state’. He argues that critical military studies should pay more attention to the soldier as an object of desire, not just of violence. Drawing on queer scholarship, he explores the intimate links between submission and desire, opening up a space to ask questions about how embodied ‘kink’ practices can help us interrogate the links between sexiness, sexuality, and militarism.

The challenge of reading and writing embodiment is introduced in the chapter by Synne L. Dyvik (University of Sussex), ‘Of bats and bodies: methods of reading and writing embodiment’. It explores how the concept of embodiment can help scholars working with memoirs to bridge the schism between the ‘author’ and the ‘reader’ that these often insist on. Through framing embodiment as a series of ‘entanglements’ (Mensch 2009) and through learning to pay attention to her own embodied reading of these memoirs, she argues that this can help us in critically understanding and translating the embodied experiences in military memoirs and the political work they do.

Harriet Gray’s (University of Gothenburg) chapter, ‘Researching from the spaces in between? The politics of accountability in studying the British military’, explores the embodied experience of doing feminist research within a military institution. It evaluates the difficult negotiations between the opposing and often unhelpful poles of ‘collaboration’ and ‘disengagement’, showing how the complexities of ethnographic research and a sense of responsibility and accountability towards one’s research subjects should invite a more nuanced position ‘in-between’.

Exploring the spaces ‘in-between’ also runs through the chapter authored by Lauren Greenwood (University of Sussex), entitled ‘Chameleon masculinity: developing the British population-centred soldier’. She explores some of the practices and processes that become embodied by specialist ‘population-centred’ soldiers, through her participant observation as an anthropologist and officer in the Royal Naval Reserves. Touching on her own experience of ‘in-betweenness’ she sees this mirrored in the experiences of her research subjects, leading her to develop the concept of ‘chameleon masculinity’, a form of militarization where agency is directed through a range of embodied masculine practices and performances.

‘Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism’, by Kevin McSorley (University of Portsmouth), analyses the growing trend of military-themed fitness training in the UK. Through participant observation he reflects on the embodied regimes, experiences, and interactions between civilian and ex-military personnel. He argues that commercial military fitness rearticulates collective military discipline within a late-modern culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility.

In addition to these chapters, this volume also includes four Encounters pieces. In ‘Writing about embodiment as an act of translation’, Catherine Baker (University of Hull) reflects on the challenges of writing about embodied experiences. Through the analogy of the audiovisual translator and learning from scholars of translation, this Encounters piece unpacks the process of imagination and feeling that writing (about) embodiment involves. The codes involved in this form of work, through theory and critique, are particularly important when writing about militarism and the military in order to see how ‘the military produces, disciplines, treats, and unmakes bodies’ (Baker, this volume).

Torika Bolatagici’s (Deakin University) photo essay entitled ‘Somatic soldier: embodiment and the aesthetic of absence and presence’ is a reflection on her own art practice and research into Fijian military embodiment. Through exploring the tensions within the visible and invisible, the lived and the represented, the absent and the present, she shows how art can encourage us to nurture our ‘critical curiosity in exploring and presenting the lived experience of the contemporary soldier’ (Bolatagici, this volume).

Examining how stories and memories make both people and war, Susanna Hast (University of Helsinki) explores different and embodied forms of bringing insight to international relations, and in so doing, she challenges the dominance of academic language. Hast reflects on the method she happened upon, of exploration through performance (song and movement) connecting with the ‘unheard-of songs’ (Cixous 1976, 246) that her body knew. In doing so, she finds that ‘music touches what cannot be said’, and through this visceral in-between space stimulates insight and feeling (Hast, this volume).

The final contribution to this volume is the Encounters piece entitled ‘Diary of a plastic soldier (extracts)’. It is a piece of poetry and prose by Pip Thornton (Royal Holloway, University of London). Thornton uses poetry to explore her own embodied sensory experience and the inseparability of this from the bodies and perceptions of those she was serving alongside, while deployed operationally as a British Territorial Army Soldier in Iraq in 2003.

These chapters all illustrate what it might mean to understand the concepts of militarism, militarization, and war, through the concept of embodiment. This challenges prevailing ideas of how militarism is often understood as an ideology disconnected from the embodied self and the everyday. Discussions raised in these contributions trouble the binaries of insider/outsider and civilian/military in various productive ways, offering an understanding of militarism and war that is responsive to the complex and interconnected ways in which they colour all our lives. With a view to neither privileging the ‘mind’ over the ‘body’, nor treating these as disparate entities, the contributions rather analyse how embodiment is a term that captures the intricate webs spun amongst senses, emotions, experience, individuality, and collectivity.

The second contribution this volume makes connects to methods. Authors’ unique subjectivities and range of academic backgrounds provide a rich arena of methodological approaches, all of which highlight the challenges of positioning. Debates raised herein capture the negotiation of empathic ‘closeness’ and critical ‘distance’ through participant observation, in-depth interviewing, reflexivity, oral histories, photography, song, the analysis of military memoirs, and the development of ‘ethnographic imagination’. Those with former military identities engage with their military membership in relation to service, rank, branch, and operational experience, and their use of this identity and knowledge when examining and negotiating power and gender in their research.

Methodological discussions also connects with the third contribution this volume seeks to offer, specifically in relation to negotiations of ‘complicity’ and ‘co-option’. Including embodied selves into research invites both reflexivity and transparency, helping to reveal some of the hidden and embodied complexities and politics of working on, alongside, or with militarization and militarism. In so doing, these texts challenge the field of Critical Military Studies to think beyond these concepts and trouble the often assumed binary of ‘closeness/complicity’ and ‘distance/critique’.

The introductory quote above – ‘My body knows unheard-of songs’ – from Helen Cixous (1976, 876) has inspired our work with this Special Issue from the outset. In her seminal feminist text, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous encourages women firstly to write and, secondly, to write themselves into how they write. Through the pieces we’ve collected here we hope to show that learning to listen, see, and feel a variety of embodied selves, their stories, their experiences, their images, and their songs, is a critical, productive, and powerful way to study militarism, militarization, and war.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

References

Åhäll, L., and T. Gregory, eds. 2015. Emotions, politics and war. Abingdon: Routledge.

Barkawi, T. 2011. From war to security: Security studies, the wider agenda and the fate of the study of war. Millennium-Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3: 701–16. doi:10.1177/0305829811400656.

Barkawi, T., and S. Brighton. 2011. Powers of war: Fighting, knowledge, and critique. International Political Sociology 5: 126–43. doi:10.1111...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Blurred lines: intimacy, mobility, and the social military
• 3. “You do not live in my skin”: embodiment, voice, and the veteran
• 4. Sexy warriors: the politics and pleasures of submission to the state
• 5. Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment
• 6. Researching from the spaces in between? The politics of accountability in studying the British military
• 7. Chameleon masculinity: developing the British ‘population-centred’ soldier
• 8. Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism
• 9. Writing about embodiment as an act of translation
• 10. Somatic soldier: embodiment and the aesthetic of absence and presence
• 11. Sounds of silence: reflections on songwriting and international relations
• 12. Diary of a plastic soldier (extracts)
• Index