Figurations of Wounding: Soldiers’ Bodies, Authority, and the Militarisation of Everyday Life

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the figures of the wounded and dead soldier are central organising nodes in public objects, events, and institutions and are generative of intense affects and feelings, which are in turn bound to and constitute geopolitical imaginaries. Through these figurations, bodies of wounded and dead soldiers are brought to visibility, becoming key technologies for the production of authority and attachment, and fostering powerful affective responses in publics that work to amplify and enliven particular forms of neoliberal militarised nationhood.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the AHRC Research Networking Scheme, grant ref AH/K006045/1 and the University of Brighton’s Research Investment Fund. Early versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago 2015 and at the University of Exeter, UK. Thanks to participants at these events, and to the editor and reviewers whose generous comments have significantly improved this paper.

Notes

1. Space has limited this discussion to the specific articulations of wounding and death that emerged during the second Gulf and Afghanistan Wars, however, it would be productive to consider how the politics of these figurations differ from those in previous wars. For discussion of soldiers’ bodies during the Second World War and the Vietnam War, see, among others Alker and Godfrey (2016) and Cook (2001).

2. For further discussion of figurative analysis, see Dawney (2018).

3. These parades were criticised by Professor Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute, who referred to ‘an age of recreational grief’ and associated with what Lieutentant-General Sir Robert Fry called in The Times a ‘mawkish view of the military’ (Coghlan 2010). The right-wing journalist and commentator Melanie Phillips, too, has criticised the ‘sentimentality’ performed at these sites (Phillips 2010).

4. The question of personal guilt is particularly interesting in the light of the ‘not in my name’ slogan, used by the Stop the War coalition in protests in the UK against the second gulf war, which effectively worked to perform individual citizen responsibility for war and to contest the lack of democratic representation in engaging in war.

5. It is worth mentioning here that, unlike in the USA, the public display of wounding was suppressed during the beginning of the Afghan and Iraq wars. During the Falklands Conflict in 1982, victory parades did not include those wounded or disfigured. The emergent visibility of wounding can be read as both a response to the backlash from these attempts of concealment and a means of capitalising on the affective draw of the figure.