Dismembering the dead: Violence, vulnerability and the body in war

Gregory, Thomas

doi:10.1177/1354066115618244

Cited by 40 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…“Everything about war aims to injure people,” Christine Sylvester (, inspired by Elaine Scary) argues, and yet orthodox IR so readily renders people, and their psychological and physical injuries, invisible (p. 3). As Thomas Gregory () contends, the IR discipline is “strangely ill‐equipped to deal with the destruction of the body” (p. 949). He writes, “pages upon pages of text have been written about the delicate balance of power, the reasons why states go to war, and … the excesses of the international system,” but “little has been written about the human beings that live and die on the battlefield” (p. 949).…”

Section: Limitations Of Existing Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

Edney-Browne

2019

Political Psychology

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The U.S.-led drone program has severe and wide-ranging psychosocial and political effects on people in targeted areas. This article draws upon the author's interviews with people living under drones in Afghanistan to argue that drone surveillance and bombardment causes social isolation and self-objectification. Interviewees reported that social gatherings, and any activities that involve nighttime travel, are shortened or avoided out of fear that drone surveillance will spot so-called "nefarious activity" and bombardment will follow. Drawing upon feminist and postcolonial scholarship, the article contends that drone surveillance constitutes a form of psychological colonization. Civilians are frequently made to think of how they look to drone operators and change their behaviors accordingly-therein "self-objectifying." Narratives of "precision" warfare allow citizens of Western liberal democracies leading/supporting the drone program to avoid psychologically confronting these effects, while people living under drones face relentless psychological insecurities.

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Section: Limitations Of Existing Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

Edney-Browne

2019

Political Psychology

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“…This account of the body and language is complicated by Kristeva’s later work on the abject, which is more familiar to IR scholars (Debrix, 2017; Gregory, 2015; Wilcox, 2015). Her treatment of the abject focuses on the way coherent, bounded identity is produced through the repression and exclusion of things that undermine it — in effect, corporeality, the body’s leakiness and continuity with its surrounds, all that blurs the boundary between inside and out, identity and difference (Kristeva, 1982: 1–31).…”

Section: Intertextuality and The Bodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Popular culture, the body and world politics

Aistrope

2019

European Journal of International Relations

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Popular culture is widely understood to intersect with and shape our understanding of world politics. Numerous studies have highlighted the way language and imagery from literature, drama, film, television and other sites of cultural production make their way into political discourses on geopolitics, terrorism, immigration, globalisation and arms control, to name a few. Conversely, world events, especially international crises, provide rich materials for popular culture across mediums and genres. This interchange has often been understood through the theory of intertextuality, which highlights the way the meaning and authority of any text is established by drawing on, or positioning against, other texts from the surrounding culture. This article develops an account of intertextuality that takes seriously the embodied dimensions of popular culture and political discourse. Revisiting the work of Julia Kristeva, I argue that a framework binding together bodies, discourses and social practices offers a promising avenue for International Relations scholars grappling with the embodied aspects of intertextuality. The article explores the implications and potential of this conceptualisation through a case analysis of the sport–war intertext and spectacular war. In doing so, it demonstrates that the legitimising effects ordinarily understood to accompany intertextuality are intensified when bodily drives, impulses and affect are taken into account.

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“…The body that captivates, that prompts ethical reflection or provides resources for understanding power, is most often the body of war's victim (e.g. Gregory, 2016). 'The body'both actual and abstract -thus figures significantly in critical military and feminist literatures as an anchor for experience, a reminder of shared vulnerability and moral obligation, and a rebuke against theoretical abstractions (see e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

The body weaponized: War, sexual violence and the uncanny

Kirby

2020

Security Dialogue

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It is today common to argue that rape is a weapon, tool or instrument of warfare. One implication is that armed groups marshal body parts for tactical and strategic ends. In this article, I interrogate this discourse of embodied mobilization to explore how body weaponry has been made intelligible as a medium for sexual violence. First, I show that, despite wide rejection of essentialist models, the penis and penis substitutes continue to occupy a constitutive role in discussions of sexual violence in both political and academic fora, where they are often said to be like weapons, a tendency I term ‘weapon talk’. Second, I trace the image of the body weapon in key threads of feminist theorizing and commentary, to show how the penis has appeared as a ‘basic weapon of force’ in various permutations. Third, I explore the weaponization of the body as it appears in military thought and in the cultural circulation of ideas about the soldiering body in which sexual pleasure and violence are frequently conflated. Building on this foundation, I propose that these literatures collectively describe an uncanny weapon object, and I draw out the significance of this term for feminist security studies and martial empiricism. In short, the uncanny haunts accounts of sexual violence in the collision of sexuality and machinery in the image of a body weapon, in the unsettling designation of sexuality as itself both familiar and dangerous, and in the strange movement of violent bodies across the boundary between wartime and peacetime. A concluding discussion draws out implications and challenges for thinking about embodied violence, advocating renewed attention to the history of weaponization as a fallible and confounding process.

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Dismembering the dead: Violence, vulnerability and the body in war

Cited by 40 publications

References 41 publications

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

Popular culture, the body and world politics

The body weaponized: War, sexual violence and the uncanny

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