People want to see tears’: military heroes and the ‘Constant Penelope’ of the UK’s Military Wives choir

Abstract

This article offers a feminist analysis of the UK’s Military Wives Choir as a vehicle for depicting the subject of the ‘Penelope’ military wife. The Penelope subject is characterised by patriotic feminine stoicism, and is a figure through which the masculine military hero is created and reflected. This paper will use the example of the Military Wives Choir to the argue that the making of the Penelope military wife subject in the national imagination is an important means through which women married to servicemen are rendered useful for the military. Drawing on primary fieldwork with the Plymouth branch of the choir alongside an analysis of secondary material such as song lyrics and Gareth Malone’s BBC television programme The Choir: Military Wives, my discussion will centre on three themes; lyrics & music, history & time of the state, and violence & representation. By discussing the making of the Penelope subject through these lenses, this paper will contend that there are clear, yet often nuanced, forms of violence at work in the representation of the choir. And yet, as this article will conclude, in order to shed a more textured light on this violence what is needed is a critical and in-depth engagement with the lived experiences of the women of the choir.

Keywords:

• Critical military studies
• feminist geopolitics
• gender
• military wives
• Military Wives Choir

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Rachel Woodward, Louise Amoore, the editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the paper at various stages of the writing process. Thanks also to members of the Plymouth Military Wives Choir for being so generous with their time during this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the author.

Funding

The work was supported by the ESRC under grant number 1332438.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice Cree

Alice Cree is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Geography, Politics & Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. Her main area of expertise is in Critical Military Studies, with a particular focus on military wives, as well as feminist and creative methodologies. She holds a PhD in Political Geography from Durham University.