Wounded Warriors: Corrective Castings in Male Activism

The article analyzes the representation of disabled veterans in James Cameron’s Avatar and Duncan Jones’s Source Code. The argument is that these two films use the figure of the heroic, technologically enhanced, white disabled veteran man to alleviate cultural anxieties, fears, and guilt about veterans and disabled people in the contemporary United States. In doing so, however, Avatar and Source Code perpetuate a disability hierarchy that reinforces a variety of oppressive cultural norms. The article, therefore, demonstrates how the films reflect the differential valuation and treatment of different kinds of disabled people in American culture at large via the genre of science fiction and its technological imaginative possibilities.

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Wings for wounded warriors

JAMA ◽

10.1001/jama.200.5.391 ◽

1967 ◽

Vol 200 (5) ◽

pp. 391-398 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

H. F. Funsch

Keyword(s):

Wounded Warriors

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War-Worn Subjects

The Virtues of Vulnerability ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197516645.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 107-130

Author(s):

Sara Rushing

Keyword(s):

Veterans Health Administration ◽

Medical Professionals ◽

Veterans Health ◽

Health Administration ◽

Post Traumatic Stress ◽

Post Traumatic ◽

Wounded Warriors ◽

A Site ◽

And Control ◽

The Military

This chapter explores how humility and autonomy come into play for “wounded warriors” seeking post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment and for the medical professionals treating them within the particular constraints of the military-medical complex. Analyzing military PTSD illustrates how deeply entangled disease construction, diagnosis, and “cure” are with the complex discourse of “choice and control,” or with medicalization under the pressures of neoliberal rationality. Like with birth and death, but perhaps even more so, veteran PTSD as taken up within the Veterans Health Administration is a site of subjection and potential contestation from which we can learn much about the production of citizen-subjectivity in moments of distinct corporeal and psychic vulnerability. This chapter examines how militarism and masculinity conspire with inadequate conceptions of patient (and doctor) humility and autonomy, to produce an assumption of and fatalism about whether “wounded warriors” can be “fixed.”

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