Gender, Dissenting Subjectivity and the Contemporary Military Peace Movement in Body of War

Abstract

This article considers the gendered dynamics of the contemporary military peace movement in the United States, interrogating the way in which masculine privilege produces hierarchies within experiences, truth claims and dissenting subjecthoods. The analysis focuses on a text of the movement, the 2007 documentary film Body of War, which portrays the antiwar activism of paralyzed Iraq veteran Tomas Young, his mother Cathy and wife Brie. Conceptualizing the military peace movement as a potentially counter-performative reiteration of military masculinity, drawing on Butler's account of gender, subjectivity formation and contestation, and on Derrida's notion of spectrality (the disruptive productivity of the “present absence”), the article makes visible ways in which men and women who comprise the military peace movement perform their dissent as gendered subjects. Claims to dissenting subjecthood are unevenly accorded within the productive duality that constitutes the military peace movement, along gendered lines that can reproduce the privileges and subordinations that underpin militarism.

Keywords:

• dissent
• performativity
• Body of War
• masculinity
• injured veterans

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Gendered Insecurities workshop, University of Bristol, October 2013. I would like to acknowledge the valuable comments of the contributors, and of this journal's editors and anonymous reviewers.

Notes on contributor

Joanna Tidy is a Research Associate at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. Her research considers the politics of military dissent, militaries and war, particularly the ways in which security logics and practices constitute, play out and are contested at the level of the subject.

Notes

1 Ron Kovic is a paralyzed Vietnam war veteran and an icon of the Vietnam-era veterans’ antiwar movement whose autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July, (Kovic [1976] 2005) was adapted for film by Oliver Stone.

2 The synopsis of the film on the documentary's official website has changed over the years since its release, possibly to reflect the changing fortunes of its subject.

3 Of course, there are many ways to approach such a reading, and so by utilizing alternative methodologies such as film analysis (for example, Stadler and McWilliam 2008) additional or differing analytical perspectives could be reached.

4 Tommy Reiman is an American Iraq “war hero” whose (invisible) injuries were represented by George W. Bush as evidence of a “willingness to sacrifice his body for his country” (Achter 2010, 51). He was later hired by and starred in the US Army's “video game and recruitment initiative, America's Army” (Achter 2010, 52).

5 In Derrida's Specters of Marx ([1994] 2006), this haunting was of the present presence of contemporary capitalism by the ghost of absent, excluded Marxism.

6 See Vatter (2005, 13): “The revolutionary spirit (Geist), if it is to have revolutionary effects, must remain a ghost (Gespenst), that is, must resist the temptation to realize itself and instead serve to de-realize (de-reify) the given forms of domination.”

7 “The Gold Star Lapel Button, also referred to as the Gold Star pin, is distributed to members of the immediate family of a fallen servicemember by the Department of Defense” (Gold Star Family Registry 2013).

8 Overwhelmingly but not exclusively male.

9 Tomas subsequently decided to “hold on for as long as I can”, to “spend as much time as possible with my wife, and no decent son wants his obituary to read that he was survived by his mother” (Wing, 2013). He died of complications relating to his injury on 10 November 2014.