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ABSTRACT
This article examines a recent Kickstarter campaign, titled Always Loyal, aimed at funding the publication of a photographic project, with the intent of investigating its gendered and sexual aesthetics of militarism. The photographic project features physically disabled US veterans who pose in a sexually evocative way; for this reason, Always Loyal has been described as homoerotic. This representation of homoerotic disabled veterans runs against conventional aesthetic regimes of militarized militarism. The article investigates whether the addition of disability and homoerotism to the aesthetization of militarism challenges the aesthetics of militarized masculinity. Through visual and discourse analysis, I establish that sexing the disabled veteran does not undermine the problematic gender relations produced by militarized masculinity. In fact, the disabled veteran of Always Loyal is re-masculinized in a post-human subject via prosthetics and sexual power. This techno-militarized masculinity is sold to the public via emotional labour that Michael Stokes, the photographer, performs to engage an audience that believes in western civilizational superiority on the ground of its liberal and liberated sexual politics. Always Loyal epitomizes the dangers of sexy militarism, where sexual politics is combined with militarism to normalize militarization.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Sarah Warner, Robert A. Saunders, Ryan Walter, and Richard Shapcott for reading and commenting on the draft of this article at different stages. Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers and to the editors of Critical Military Studies for their constructive feedback and encouragement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I use aesthetics to refer to the entanglement of visual and emotional politics.
2. It turned out that the sailor was engaged to a woman who was not the nurse he kisses in the photo. His future wife has claimed that she was there when her future husband kissed the nurse. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/14/us/vj-day-kissing-sailor/
4. An online crowdfunding platform for creative work.
7. Notably the inclusion of women in the military, and more recently the repeal of the so-called ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy that made homosexuality in the military a taboo.
8. Certainly this demonstrated the narrow space that masculinity as a gender identity is granted, and the prevalent dichotomous thinking that envelops gender, whereby if it is not masculine, it is necessarily feminine.
15. While not entirely clear, the censoring process of Facebook is believed to be done at users’ request and is effected by Facebook employees. Stokes claims that Facebook employees who make the final decision to remove his photos from his Facebook page are located outside of America and do not share western values about sexuality and gender. While this cannot be proved because Facebook ignored Stokes’ request to provide further explanations, Stokes seems convinced about the nature of this process. Even if this were true, however, the fact remains that Stokes is aware of the fact that the people who report his photos for removal are mostly white servicemen and veterans. While he is willing to make a distinction between bad Americans who oppose homoerotism in the military and good Americans who endorse it as a way of claiming sexual liberation, he is not willing to make a similar distinction for non-western people who are indiscriminately blamed for not sharing American values about sexual liberation.
20. http://www.advocate.com/politics/media/2015/01/30/why-does-facebook-censor-gay-images and http://www.buzzfeed.com/emaoconnor/god-bless-these-troops#.is76KQqlN and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iKm2cT_Jn4
22. Nudity is posited to be the cause of removal in the first narrative that calls upon the objectification of men’s bodies.
24. Here, I invoke queerness as a political project of contestation rather than a synonym for LGBT identity. Being outside identity politics, queerness is not as easily assimilated into liberal identity politics as LGBT politics is.