Ephemera(l) Geopolitics: The Material Cultures of British Military Recruitment

ABSTRACT

This paper explores contemporary cultures of British military recruitment and considers the domestication of geopolitics as matters of the ephemeral (fleeting, sensory encounters), and of ephemera (everyday objects). It employs an auto/ethnographic approach toward spaces critical to recruitment – the airshow, the home and the body. Three central contributions are developed: first, building on a recent turn to the material in political geography, the paper argues that taking seriously materiality, objects, and ‘stuff’ enhances our understanding of the connections between geopolitical, militarised and everyday; second, deploying a notion of the geopolitical social, it explores the geopolitical as it is situated in everyday lives and spaces; third, it investigates the tendency for militarised objects to find their way onto and around bodies and into domestic spaces. Set at the interface of literatures in critical geopolitics and critical military studies, the paper concludes that material encounters and everyday objects are matters central to the business of geopolitics and militarism.

Notes

1. Object Lessons is a popular book and essay series which allows contributors to ‘develop original insights around and novel insights about [a chosen] object’. Spanning anthropology, ecology, archeology, history, literature, STS and many other disciplines, each lesson involves a close, fine-grained analysis of (usually) single objects and the framing of such objects by a variety of conceptual traditions. Much like the current article, Object Lessons is committed to unpicking the social, political, cultural and/or economic significance of what often amounts to ephemera, or to exploring how, when and where ‘matter comes to matter’ (after Barad 2003).

2. A growing preference for recruits into the British military who are skilled gamers is due in part to the increased importance of remote warfare in contemporary military operations, and thus the sorts of tactile skills required for modern computer gaming (see for example Wintour 2016).

3. In large part, received notions of military masculinities and heteronormativity remain unchallenged at airshows in respect of wider discourse (e.g. men as warfighters and women as caregivers). However, this is not to say ‘classically’ masculine or feminine activities are engaged with materially by male and female visitors in expected ways. It is just as likely that a young girl will be encouraged to pose with a weapon as a young boy, for example, or that this same boy might engage with objects associated with a medical branch (and so with a ‘caregiving’ role). This is perhaps unsurprising given the recent change in government policy which has opened up close combat roles to women (Farmer 2016). An ephemera(l) approach to militarism, therefore, is a useful opportunity to avoid a ‘short-hand’ labelling of social behaviors in a way that fits convenient gender narratives (Basham and Bulmer 2017) and to embrace a more nuanced understanding of how gendered military identities are played out situationally. This theme will be returned to in the conclusion.