Decent and indecent exposures: naked veterans and militarized (counter-)violences after war

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the multiple and contradictory functions of barracks nostalgia for a veterans’ organization in the United States (US), Irreverent Warriors, and for its principal activity, Silkies Hikes. These are day-long events across the US in which military veterans, both men and women, convene to hike in their underwear to prevent veteran suicide. The Hikes are more than exhibitionistic gatherings of nearly naked veterans; they are elaborate rituals where veterans expose and deploy their bodies to navigate and survive return from war. Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical insights, I develop a reparative case study of the Hikes to explore three arguments. First, militarized nudity can be more than, and other than, violation. Second, nurturing militarized masculinity might be experienced as necessary for some veterans’ post-war adjustment. Third, nostalgic re-enactments are not either re-militarizing or de-militarizing; rather, Silkies Hikers are militarized subjects undergoing a de-militarization process that they experience as violent and traumatic, so they in turn seek out, or even demand, re-militarization – but re-militarization re-cast as a counter-violent maneuver. Consequently, Silkies Hikes represent a critical opportunity to elaborate theories of militarized masculinity and foreground dilemmas involved in calling on endangered bodies to do the work of de-militarization.

KEYWORDS:

• Military veterans
• post-war adjustment
• veteran suicide
• militarized masculinity
• nudity

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for generously funding field research, Matthew Hyndman for research assistance in San Diego, Caron E. Gentry, Roxani Krystalli, and Zoe Marks for comments on early drafts, the editorial team for a supportive process and for making space for a longer submission, and the four anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback and suggestions. Special thanks to Danny Maher, Ryan Loya, and all of the San Diego Hikers for their participation and insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jaremey R. McMullin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He received his DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and has published research on ex-combatant re-integration in International Peacekeeping, Review of International Studies, and Third World Quarterly. His 2013 monograph Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State: Challenges of Reintegration was published in Palgrave Macmillan’s Rethinking Political Violence series. He directed and produced a documentary short film series on everyday peace, Liberia: Legacies of Peace (2019). In 2020, he directed and produced another documentary short film, Silkies, which was an Official Selection at Film for Peace (Toronto), the San Francisco Veterans Film Festival, and the Red Rock Film Festival (Utah). This article forms part of a larger project on veteran-led association and mutual support in the United States, also funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

Notes

1 A US Department of Veterans Affairs (2016) study decreased that number to 20 per day, but the figure of 22, based on a 2010 study, is still the one that veterans usually cite.

2 Conversely, Silkies Hikes do not re-enact all militarized symbols and rituals; some are implicitly discarded (such as obedience to hierarchical authority) or explicitly proscribed. A Code of Conduct advises participants against misogynistic harassment and abuse, via three directives: “Be fucking nice!,” “No politics,” and “Irreverence is not a cover for shitty behavior.”

3 I conducted two interviews with Danny Maher in San Diego, on January 19, 2016 and May 31, 2017. I interviewed Ryan Loya in New York City on July 15, 2016. Interviews and participant observation at the San Diego Hike occurred on May 13, 2017. Danny and Ryan gave written consent to use their full names. We discussed how anonymization discounts the contributions and ideas of enlisted soldiers and junior officers, resulting in military officials and veterans of high rank being the few subjects allowed to own their ideas and experiences via attribution.

4 I use Hikers’ first names only, with consent, as part of the approved ethical protocol.

5 For example, Caso (2016) starts with the concept-theory of militarized masculinity to read homoerotic photographs of injured US veterans, analyzing the motivations and work of the photographer in complex and critical ways, but without a concomitant account of the veteran models.

6 Henry (2017, 182) argues that scholarly interest in the multiple identity positions of militarized subjects should “be connected with the ‘originary’ [B]lack feminist project” of intersectionality. She advocates direct research engagement with poor Black women in the military. Minority veterans are at higher risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and Black women veterans face institutionalized racism in diagnosis and treatment of PTSD (McLendon et al. 2019). Notably, experience of intersecting forms of oppression leads many Black women to resist through alternative knowledge systems rooted in empathy and communities of trust (Collins 2000).

7 A broader debate in queer theory concerns what happens when queerness is “despecified” lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) content so that it becomes simply a “generic badge of subversiveness” (Halperin 2003, 341). Nevertheless, several queer theorists highlight the importance of situating queer subjectivity beyond the homosexual/heterosexual binary (see, for example, Berlant and Warner 1995). My selective interpretation is not a distillation of some mythically unified queer theory, but a selective analysis of how queer subjectivity could productively trouble understandings of militarized masculinity.

8 Veteran subjects have long been uniquely adjacent to theorization about queer subjectivity. A partial accounting for this special relationship includes same-sex rape and violent same-sex sexual hazing in the military, how homophobic defense of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” fixates on homoerotic sites like same-sex showering, countless treatments in novels and films about closeted, pathological, and violent veterans, and assumptions about sexuality and feminine lack among women recruits.

9 Danny says that the near absence of severely injured veterans (for example, burn victims) troubles him, too. Paraplegics and quadriplegics frequently attend, however, and Hikers’ non-visible injuries caution against making participation judgments on looks alone.

10 Sedgwick (2003, 128–129) did not want to create binary opposition between the two styles, and suggested that each might need the other.

11 The Hikes also allow active-duty personnel soon to be discharged to participate.

12 Indeed, Bordo (1998, 1999, 29) acknowledges dynamic, subversive, and altered male performance of exposure and warns against construction of “essential” subjects. Male displays can be both arrogant and vulnerable.

13 Goldstein (2018) contributes a nuanced understanding of femininity in military roles beyond conceptualizing femininity as merely a masculine foil.

14 Nothing in this article should be interpreted as diminishing how gendered forms of violent exclusion operate and persist in militarized environments. These observations are about how women also experience and rely on bi-social inclusion within militarized structures and discourses of camaraderie.

15 Space precludes further exploration about how/why the Hikes might be a social movement while disavowing protest. Rich antecedent work brings the paradox into view, focusing on the multiplicity of social movement practices (Sharp 1973), how discrepancies between collective assembly and protest for war veterans are productive (Managhan 2011), and how structures of precarity shape the discursive possibilities and legibility of collective assembly (Butler 2015).

16 Email correspondence, January 15, 2016.

17 It is also adjacent to affect theory work on mental illness that sees potential in the collective sharing of pain outside of clinical norms and treatment sites (see Blackman 2007; Cvetkovich 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland [grant number: Research Incentive Grant / #70061].