Death Becomes Him: The Hypervisibility of Martyrdom and Invisibility of the Wounded in the Iconography of Lebanese Militarised Masculinities1

The visual landscape of Lebanon both mirrors and reasserts the country’s complex socio-political, economic and gendered order. Using public memorialisations of the dead in the Lebanese and Syrian Civil Wars as a starting point, the chapter analyses how these reflect Lebanese realities and imaginaries, and how particular militarised masculinities are constructed through them. The chapter then contrasts these visualisations with the invisibilisation of conflict-related disabilities and the war-wounded and what these mean for the reproduction of gendered and other social hierarchies.

Seize the Time!: Military Aesthetics, Symbolic Revolution and the Black Panther Party

Government agencies like the FBI and CIA and both local and statewide law enforcement agencies would successfully meet the challenge of the Black Panther Party with a military intervention that would destroy its political power, but they were relatively powerless to counteract their successes in the realm of the symbolic in which the Panthers successfully re-scripted a visual language of military might to argue for Black liberation. While most militaries conceive of propaganda as a way of ‘selling’ the violence that they are charged with conducting, the BPP saw propaganda as one of their most primary imperatives. Just as the Panthers used images of the Black body in military poses and formations to challenge ideas of national belonging in the US, the Panthers’ use of a military aesthetic challenges us to think in new ways about the uses to which a militarised body might be put beyond further state sponsored notions of masculinity.

Embodying War, Becoming Warriors: Media, Militarisation and the Case of Islamic State’s Online Propaganda

This chapter investigates digital media as new spaces for the promotion and normalisation of war and violence and marks a shift in analytical focus from the content of digital text, images or videos to the wide range of senses and practices involved in providing meaning to these forms of representation. To this end, the chapter presents an embodied reading of Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda video ‘Flames of War’. This draws out, firstly, how the organisation’s online propaganda addresses the embodied and affective sensibilities of spectators to facilitate a felt sense of intimacy and, secondly, how the affective potentials and intensities generated by such experiences are mobilised through the networked dynamic of digital and social media. These, the chapter argues, are distinctive features of how war is experienced on and through digital media, revealing new possibilities for promoting military action for insurgent groups like IS who do not have the communicative capacities that state militaries do.

Svetlana Alexievich’s Soviet Women Veterans and the Aesthetics of the Disabled Military Body: Staring at the Unwomanly Face of War

Aesthetics, embodiment and militarisation are particularly closely joined in representations of and reactions to the military body disabled as a result of war. Against militarised depictions of the vigour and glamour that military training and service bestows on bodies, experiences and representations of disabled veterans become embodied evidence of the other transformations that war inflicts. By investigating aesthetic practices of representing disability and disfigurement in Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of interviews with women Red Army veterans, The Unwomanly Face of War, this chapter views the gendered structures of emotion and aversion projected on to disabled military bodies through the cultural and literary turn in disability studies to explain what is affectively at stake when the military body disabled by war becomes a literary device.

The Political Aesthetics of the Body of the Soldier in Pain

This chapter explores the recent work of Australian artist Ben Quilty on combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) collected in the exhibition After Afghanistan. After Afghanistan presents a series of large-scale paintings of soldiers and veterans evoking the bodily imprints of combat fatigue and PTSD. The bodies are naked, in the grasp of sensations and emotions. The chapter argues that this work has an ambivalent relationship to militarisation, whereby it proposes an alternative iconography of the modern soldier which seeds transformative potentials against the militarisation of the body; simultaneously, however, the iconography of the body of the soldier in pain has been co-opted as a militarising technology that silences opposition and contestation to war in the name of compassion towards the soldiers.

Images of Insurgency: Reading the Cuban Revolution through Military Aesthetics and Embodiment

A growing global visual culture in the 1950s and 1960s made image and self-presentation techniques critical to the transnational impact of the Cuban revolution. This chapter explores how popular culture shaped the interpretation of events by photographers, journalists and designers, who were often inspired by the anarchic forms of militarism the rebels adopted. When the rebels came into view, they were hypermasculine, complete with cowboy hats, long hair, cigars, and a cheerful contempt for uniformity; they created images of insurgency that were a compelling form of cultural exchange for revolutionary Cuba. They appeared to highlight creativity and subversive visual practices, but their performances were also raced and gendered. The chapter draws on a range of primary sources to consider the significance of aesthetics and embodiment to understanding the images, textures and experiences that characterised the Cuban revolution, but also what it reveals about the shape of twentieth century military insurgencies.

Breaking the Silence: Embodiment, Militarisation and Military Dissent in the Israel/Palestine Conflict

This chapter studies the testimonies of violence published by the Israeli veteran organisation Breaking the Silence (Shovrim Shtika) and explores the role of embodiment as a means of military dissent within the Israel/Palestine conflict. These testimonies represent aesthetic practices that describe the violent behaviour of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) and illustrate soldiers’ embodied experiences of fear, shame, remorse, or empathy for Palestinians during their military service under the occupation. Interested in the political power of emotions within military dissent, this chapter shows that the activism of Breaking the Silence (BtS) is in fact interweaved with the same ideas of power, hierarchy, and violence that it seeks to challenge. It argues that dissenting military practices are fraught with contradictions, ambivalences, and ambiguities that may actually reinforce, rather than destabilise, the militarised discourses that sustain the Israel/Palestine conflict. Despite the best efforts of this organisation in intervening in the dynamics of Israeli militarisation, the aesthetics of BtS activism show that military dissent draws on and discloses embodied experiences which reproduce military masculinity, validate militarism, and may legitimise the further enactment of violence within the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The Defender Collection: Militarisation, Historical Mythology and the Everyday Affective Politics of Nationalist Fashion in Croatia

This chapter explores civilian fashion’s fascination with military aesthetics, and the affective politics of militarisation and ethnonationalism in Croatia a generation since the country’s war of independence from Yugoslavia, through the case of clothing marketed to young people who sympathise with oppositional right-wing and anti-Communist nationalism. The national, ideological and subcultural identifications that this collection of clothing invites customers to make includes but is not limited to identifications with the recent and more distant national military past. An aesthetic approach to how political and historical mythology is visualised in this collection reveal how it constructs a certain contentious ideal of national military masculinity as normal and natural, and how broader processes of societal militarisation in Croatia have laid the foundations for this to be meaningful.

Basic Training

This chapter adds to an increasing body of work on the embodied sociology of war and militarism by detailing the affective experience of basic training and the insights this provided into the nature of habitus formation within the British Army and how bodies react to and are transformed by military training. Unlike more dramatic insights into the embodied experience of soldiering, however, this account of basic training mainly focuses on the banal, everyday ways that recruits learn what Stephen Atherton calls the domestic element of soldiering – the embodied routine and rhythm of barracks life. The chapter is a reflection on a centrally important part of the author’s own enactive ethnographic research into life in the British Army reserve and the ‘enduring modification of the bodily schema’ (in Loïc Wacquant’s words) that basic training entailed.

Ginger Cats and Cute Puppies: Animals, Affect and Militarisation in the Crisis in Ukraine1

Exposure to affective depictions of soldiers with domesticated animals such as cats and dogs encourages civilian audiences to view soldiers, militaries and even the aims of war with sympathy and approval. This chapter argues that Russia and Ukraine are currently engaged in parallel processes of creating and disseminating such depictions in order to rehabilitate the reputations of their armed forces and garner support for their military operations in eastern Ukraine. This positioning of soldiers’ bodies and animals’ bodies together, most notably in photographs circulated on social media, but also in other representations such as statues, is just one example of the wider phenomenon of digital militarism. State militaries and alliances have become very sophisticated and systematic about the use of digital technologies, especially social media and the internet, to disseminate positive messages and images about soldiers, the armed forces and war. The chapter concludes that the differing degrees of success by Russia and Ukraine can be attributed to factors that are highly dependent on context, demonstrating that militarisation is above all a set of social processes.