War craft: The embodied politics of making war

Abstract

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ War Craft: The embodied politics of making war This article makes the case for examining war from a 'making point of view' (Bunn, 2011). Makers and their material production of and for war have been neglected in our accounts of war, security and international relations. An attention to processes of making for war can reveal important things about how these international processes are lived and produced at the level of the body. The article focuses on the particular phenomena of martial craft labour-the recreational making of 'stuff', including hats and pillowcases, by civilians for soldiers. To explore embodiment within this social site an ethnographic method is outlined that enables the reading of objects as embodied texts, the observation of others in processes of making, and the undertaking of making by the researcher. Analysing embodied registers of aesthetic expression and the social values that attend such crafting for war reveals how this making is a space through which intimate embodied, emotional circulations undertake work for liberal state and military-institutional logics and objectives, obscure violence, normalise war and produce the military as an abstract social cause. Beyond the immediate empirical focus of this article a much wider political entanglement of violence, embodiment and material production necessitates a concerted research agenda. Suicide Vest: Component part of suicide vest. This element comprises the handmade empty vest made out of dark green fabric which has been hand stitched and one side sewn to create a compartment to place objects in. Hole created in the centre to place head through. Single strap sewn at the four corners of the base of the vest. One side of the vest has been cut open.

Knowing Through Needlework: curating the difficult knowledge of conflict textiles

“…To introduce conflict textiles to this conversation, we highlight the multiplicities of the forms of (military) violence they depict, their geographical locations, and their different positionalitiesboth proximate and more distantvis-à-vis war and militarized violence. Similar to Tidy's (2019) inroads in drawing practices of stitch to the forein her case as martial craft labourwe draw attention to the ways in which needlework and textiles are used to represent, speak of, and resist war and militarized violence. The accounts of events that conflict textiles present us with do not add up to a single or coherent truth or experience, but instead produce, as Tomoko Sakai (2018) describes in relation to an exhibition of Chilean arpilleras in Japan, 'multi-layered and often conflicting sentiments'.…”