‘War Ink’: sense-making and curating war through military tattoos

Veterans have long sought to make sense of and capture their wartime experiences through a variety of aesthetic means such as novels, memoirs, films, poetry and art. Increasingly, scholars of IR are turning to these sources as a means to study war experience. In this article we analyze one such sense-making practice that has, despite its long association with war, largely gone unnoticed: military tattoos. We argue that military tattoos and the experiences they capture can offer a novel entry point into understanding how wars are made sense of and captured on the body. Focusing on a web archive – ‘War Ink’ – curated and collected for and by US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, we analyze how tattoos perform an important ‘sense-making’ function for participating veterans. We focus on three recurring themes – loss and grief, guilt and anger, and transformation and hope – demonstrating how military tattoos offer important insights into how military and wartime experience is traced and narrated on and through the body. The web archive, however, not only enables a space for veterans to make sense of their war experience through their tattoos, the archive also does important political work in curating the broader meaning of war to the wider public

Liberal warriors and the violent colonial logics of “partnering and advising"

Building on the feminist literature that traces the (re)production of militarized masculinities in and through military interventions, this article details some of the ways British soldiering subjects are being shaped in today's counterinsurgency context. Required now to be both nation builders and war fighters, contemporary soldiers are a “softer,” less masculinized subjectivity, and what Alison Howell has termed “liberal warriors.” British troops with their long history of colonialism and frequent overseas military campaigns are understood to be particularly suited to this role. Taking the British military's involvement in the “partnering and advising” of the Afghan National Army (ANA), this article pays attention to the interlocking gendered, raced, and sexualized discourses through which the British/Afghan encounter is experienced. Exploring first British troops' preoccupation with the perceived femininity and homosexuality of their Afghan counterparts, and second, Afghan hypermasculinity as demonstrated by the characterizations of their violent and chaotic fighting tactics, colonial logics are revealed. While British liberal warriors come to know “who they are” through these logics, (mis)represented Afghan soldiers are rendered increasingly vulnerable to the very “real,” very material violences of war

Violence and the contemporary soldiering body

This article asks what is the significance of making the soldiering body (hyper)visible in war. In contrast to the techno-fetishistic portrayals of Western warfare in the 1990s, the recent counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan witnessed a re-centring of British soldiering bodies within the visual grammars of war. In the visibility of this body, violences once obscured were rendered viscerally visible on the bodies of British soldiers. Locating the analysis in the War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, the article details two moments of wartime violence experienced and enacted by British soldiers, tracking how violence was mediated in, on and through these hypervisible soldiering bodies and the attending invisibility of ‘other’ bodies. The article argues that during the Afghanistan campaign, soldiers’ bodies became not just enactors of military power but crucial representational figures in the continuance of violent projects abroad and their acceptance back home

Feeling and militarism at Ms Veteran America

This article examines US women service members' and veterans' feelings about their military lives and afterlives as they participate in and attend the annual Ms Veteran America (MVA) contest. Drawing on observations and qualitative interviews, the article explores the workings of gendered power within the US armed forces, and US militarism more broadly, through the tensions and contradictions of these women’s experiences. The article makes two contributions: First, MVA is shown to be a rich site for feminist analysis, with the contest constituting a distinct political space, which permitted the expression of emotions and affects that contestants felt otherwise unable to express in their everyday military lives. Second, through its attention to the range of emotions and affects felt by the women, the article complicates stories of militarised desire as contestants are simultaneously drawn towards and pulled away from their military lives and US militarism. The article argues that the everyday functioning of US military life relies on, and is productive of, particular feelings of its women members, and that these affective experiences matter for understanding US militarism and military power

Joy and war : reading pleasure in wartime experiences

In recent years there has been a ‘turn’ to thinking about war through the experiences of those touched by it. While this scholarship has generated numerous important insights, its focus has tended to remain on wars’ violences, those responsible for enacting them, and the effects of such violence. In this article, the experiences of pleasure and joy in war that simultaneously take place are placed centre stage. Drawing on three war novels, the article tracks three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences related to war: bodily pleasures, the ‘togetherness’ of war, and moments of joy that escape war’s reach. Through this focus, war is shown to work across a range of affective registers and as never totalising or universalising in its experience. The article argues that paying attention to joy and pleasure can work to displace war as a focus of analysis, directing attention instead to the experiences of those who live through war and how they survive, sustain, and resist it