Joy and war: Reading pleasure in wartime experiences

Abstract

In recent years there has been a ‘turn’ to thinking about war through the experiences of those touched by it. While this scholarship has generated numerous important insights, its focus has tended to remain on wars’ violences, those responsible for enacting them, and the effects of such violence. In this article, the experiences of pleasure and joy in war that simultaneously take place are placed centre stage. Drawing on three war novels, the article tracks three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences related to war: bodily pleasures, the ‘togetherness’ of war, and moments of joy that escape war’s reach. Through this focus, war is shown to work across a range of affective registers and as never totalising or universalising in its experience. The article argues that paying attention to joy and pleasure can work to displace war as a focus of analysis, directing attention instead to the experiences of those who live through war and how they survive, sustain, and resist it.

Wars of excess: Georges Bataille, solar economy, and the accident in the age of precision war

“…Julia Welland has also recently illuminated how war rests not just on the production of trauma, injury, and terror, but also on personal (and positioned) forms of pleasure. According to Welland (2018), war does not provide a univocal experience, but a multiplicity of textures that are productive, playful, and horrifying.…”

De-securitization, sexual violence, and the politics of silence

“…Nuanced discourses emerged and were brought in and out of the feminist fold. War and the violence-of-peace context became increasingly understood as imbued with the ‘process, nature, and the practice of gender’ (Sjoberg, 2015: 452), including through complex, affective registers such as joy and pleasure (Welland, 2018). The state as the patriarchal protection racket (Peterson, 1992), women as inescapably ‘rapable,’ and, equally, the reductionist rape-as-a-weapon-of-war script, were revealed as ‘problematic, theoretically, and practically’ (Sjoberg, 2016: 16).…”

Historical Everyday Geopolitics on the Chile‐Peru Border

“…An overt military presence can be a reassuring sight for some. For Julia Welland (: 439), war ‘encompasses a plurality of experiences and works across a range of affective registers’. She uses joy and pleasure as experiences that exist amidst war to contest narratives that war is universally experienced through pain and suffering.…”