Violence and the contemporary soldiering body

Abstract

This article asks what is the significance of making the soldiering body (hyper)visible in war. In contrast to the techno-fetishistic portrayals of Western warfare in the 1990s, the recent counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan witnessed a re-centring of British soldiering bodies to the visual grammars of war. In the visibility of this body, violences once obscured were rendered viscerally visible on the bodies of British soldiers. Locating the analysis in the War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, the article details two moments of wartime violence experienced and enacted by British soldiers, tracking how violence was mediated in, on and through these hypervisible soldiering bodies and attending invisibility of 'other' bodies. The article argues that during the Afghanistan campaign, soldiers' bodies became not just enactors of military power, but crucial representational figures in the continuance of violent projects abroad and their acceptance back home. Unlike the high-technology wars waged by Western nations during the latter years of the twentieth century, for the British public at home watching the recent Afghanistan conflict unfold via a range of mediums, British soldiering bodies, as well as the violences inflicted on them, was central to the war's depiction. In this article I use the concept of hypervisibility to describe this heightened 'seen-ness' of British soldiering bodies during the conflict 1 (and attending invisibility of other bodies), and argue this was crucial both for how wartime violences were mediated and understood, and for putting in place the conditions of possibility for their continuation.

Reproducing the military and heteropatriarchal normal: Army Reserve service as serious leisure

“…Dyvik’s (2016) review of recent international relations scholarship (inter alia McSorley, 2013, 2014; Sylvester, 2011, 2012; Wilcox, 2015; see also: Welland, 2017) reveals growing interest in the ‘embodied legacies of war and of enduring preparations for war-making upon the structuring and reproduction of social life’ (McSorley, 2014: 112). Much scholarship on wartime experience has concentrated on ‘war as a site of suffering and pain’, but, as others argue, war and war preparations can engender a gamut of embodied and emotional reactions that constitute an ‘assemblage of pleasure and pain’ and respite (Dyvik, 2016: 136; Higate, 1998; Welland, 2018).…”

How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework

“…Although scholarly discussions on war's representations in Western discourse have critically interrogated how violence, or the use of force, 1 is made seen and known (e.g. Åse and Wendt 2019;Malm 2019;Simons and Lucaites 2017;Welland 2017, and many others), the literature would be well served by a coherent framework that allow a structured analysis of how violence dis/appears. The framework advanced here combines three concepts -in/visibilization, de/naturalization and dis/identification -to theorize and illustrate how violence appears and disappears in the discursive structuration of war and in stories told to legitimate the use of force.…”

Gender, memories, and national security: the making of a Cold War military heritage

“…Recent IR research has revealed a growing interest in the relationship between security politics and productions of cultural memory. Important issues include how commemorations of the military past affect perceptions of threats and security (Heath-Kelly 2020; Reeves 2018b) and how contemporary military conflicts and security discourses inform the ways in which cultural memories are produced (Danilova 2015;Gustafsson 2014;Welland 2017). Investigating discursive representations as well as spatial, visual, and acoustic arrangements, research also analyzes how security narratives become embodied and felt at war museums and memorials and how such affective framings condition critical reflection and (political) agency (Daugbjerg 2017;Koureas 2018;Reeves 2018a).…”

“…Representations of war and conflict reinforce gendered notions of citizenship, with the ideal citizen being a (male) soldier who fights to defend his country (Szitanyi 2015). In reproducing an idealized military masculinity, national military violence becomes erased or heroized (Baggiarini 2015;Reeves 2018a;Welland 2017), while often silencing women's experiences of war and the consequences of armed conflicts for women and children (Acton 2007;Jacobs 2017;Muzaini and Yeoh 2005).…”