Standing Up to Combat Trauma

Abstract

The trauma of combat is as much about the pain of war as it is about the painful return of soldiers to civic life. Of particular concern is the contemporary normalization of wounded warriors as ordinary occurrences in modern warfare. This essay engages the stand-up comedy of Bobby Henline, a severely injured veteran, in order to examine combat trauma as a problem not only of soldiers in arms, but also of a broader war culture. Henline is significant because he corrupts through his abject body the contours of bodily intelligibility, amplifying his own injuries as evidence of the instability of nationalistic appeals to the manliness of suffering through war and its aftermaths. In performing the (comic) ugliness of combat trauma, Henline exposes our (un)spoken and (un)seen constructions of able-bodied soldiers. Thus, while stand-up serves as a mode for enabling a disabled performer to both revile and make risible the social trauma of recovery, it also runs the risk of reifying as a personal problem the manly work of coming home. Consequently, Henline is approached as both a pleasure for and a pain on the body politic.

Keywords:

• Masculinity
• Returning soldiers
• Pain
• Pleasure
• War

The author thanks John Lucaites and Sara McKinnon for their guidance on early iterations of this project, as well as the peers who participated in the Rhetoric and Violence seminar, in which the first draft of this essay was conceived. He also wishes to thank the Text and Performance Quarterly editorial staff for their comments, criticism, and encouragement, along with Dustin Bradley Goltz, Mindy Fenske, and the anonymous reviewers for their steady votes of confidence. A draft of this essay was presented at the 2013 Southern States Communication Association annual convention.

The author thanks John Lucaites and Sara McKinnon for their guidance on early iterations of this project, as well as the peers who participated in the Rhetoric and Violence seminar, in which the first draft of this essay was conceived. He also wishes to thank the Text and Performance Quarterly editorial staff for their comments, criticism, and encouragement, along with Dustin Bradley Goltz, Mindy Fenske, and the anonymous reviewers for their steady votes of confidence. A draft of this essay was presented at the 2013 Southern States Communication Association annual convention.

Notes

[1] Consider, for instance, the ocular-centricity of abjection (not to mention Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) typified by a recent photo essay, which preceded numerous pictures of wounded warriors (including Henline) with the warning: “graphic” and/or “objectionable.” The general sense is that we can hear about trauma but should not have to be subjected to its visual reproductions (see Nelson).

[2] For this essay, most references to Henline's performances are culled from the following YouTube videos: Henline; The Huffington Post; Luana Schneider.