"We are Gripen pilots"- The hidden politics of militarisation and pop culture as political communication (original) (raw)
Related papers
Militarization matters: rhetorical resonances and market militarism
Critical Military Studies, 2024
“Militarization is not the problem” was the title of a recent conference contribution by Mark Neocleous. Many scholars in critical security studies share its message. Researchers on their account should shun a concept that does more harm than good. They should ‘forget militarization’ as Alison Howell puts it. While sharing the concern that the term might direct attention away from policeviolence and epistemic racism underpinning such conclusions, this article argues that the term militarization may be worth preserving in spite of this because it also does important political and analytical work that needs to be preserved if not strengthen. Recovering what Frazer and Hutchings term ‘rhetorical resonance’, I suggest that the term ‘militarization’ resonates with debates, discursive classifications and atmospheres, giving us a better grasp of contemporary, capillary, market militarism in its many morphing guises. Jettisoning militarization is to relinquish analytical openings and political attunement. I unpack this argument focusing on the resonances of militarization with market processes diffusing and deepening the grip of military concerns and de-mobilizing resistance. The resonances of militarization make managing, marketing, and materializing security into infrastructures less innocuous and hence trouble the de-mobilizing of resistance that ease them. The resonances of ‘militarization’ break the silence surrounding market militarism, the processes generating it and the imbrication of knowledge practices (including the academic and scholarly) with them. Militarization therefore matters even when it stands in tension with epistemic racism and police violence. Therefore, deepening the engagement with militarization, to transform it, is important analytically and politically.
How do representations of militarised masculinity in war video games help us understanding the gendered nature of discourses of international security in the post-9/11? The relevance of this question lays in the fact that war-themed video games have proliferated and reached peaks of popularity and commercial values in the post-9/11, when international politics has undergone a stark reaffirmation of masculinity. Its importance resides in the new possibilities it opens to deconstruct through visual culture the binary between international and domestic that permeates the discipline of international relations (IR). Connell has rightly pointed out that there are multiple masculinities, and that their hegemonic forms are more likely to be upheld if there is some connection between cultural ideals and institutional power. Militarised masculinity, which refers to the configuration of “manhood” in relation to the combatant experience, is hegemonic in international politics during times of war. Building upon this observation, I will argue that representations of militarised masculinity in war video games epitomise the gendered politics that underpins discourses of security in the post-9/11. Visual and discursive representations of the tough, heroic male soldier, ready to sacrifice his life in name of the nation and of adventure, reproduce and propagate the gendered discourses that have underpinned the war on terror. Exploring representations of militarised masculinity in war video games in an era of militarised masculine international politics will help us understanding how certain values permeate the whole society in times of war, but also how we reproduce a culture of militarism in our private sphere. The peculiar interactive nature of video games will allows us reconsidering the idea that militarised masculinity emerges in military environments, which are commonly understood as public and international spaces, vis-à-vis the new avenue that war video games have opened to think about the relation between the international, the domestic, and the private.
Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarisation
Review of International Studies, 2009
In this article we critically consider the idea that feminism has performatively failed within the discipline of International Relations. One aspect of this failure relates to the production of sexgender through feminism which we suggest is partly responsible for a weariness inflecting feminist scholarship, in particular as a critical theoretical resource. We reflect on this weariness in the context of the study and practice of international politics – arenas still reaping the potent benefits of the virile political energies reverberating since 9/11. To illustrate our arguments we re-count a familiar feminist fable of militarisation – a story which we use to exemplify how the production of feminist IR is ‘set’ up to ‘fail’. In so doing we clarify our depiction of feminism as seemingly haunted by its inherent paradoxes as well as explaining why it matters to discuss feminism within the locale of the academic study of international politics. We conclude with a consideration of the gra...
Politics, pleasure, violence: Swedish defence propaganda in social media
In recent years, the Swedish Armed Forces have produced and distributed highly edited video clips on YouTube that show moving images of military activity. Alongside this development, mobile phone apps have emerged as an important channel through which the user can experience and take an interactive part in the staging of contemporary armed conflict. This article examines the way in which the aesthetic and affective experience of Swedish defence and security policy is socially and (media-)culturally (co-)constructed and how the official representation of Swedish military intervention (re)produces political and economic effects when these activities are distributed through traditional and social media such as YouTube and digital apps. Based on Isabela and Norman Fairclough’s thoughts on political discourse, Michel Foucault’s dialectic idea of power/knowledge, and Sara Ahmed’s concept of the affective, I discuss how the Swedish digital military aesthetic is part of a broader political and economic practice that has consequences beyond the digital, the semiotic, and what might at first glance appear to be pure entertainment.
Democratic Communique, 2014
A s this special issue moves into production, the world remembers the centennial of the Great War, which sadly was not the war to end all wars. Instead, WWI gave birth to modern war propaganda and established a "symbiotic relationship" between the media and the military. The art and industry of representing war through various media forms was finely tuned over the course of what became a very bloody 20 th century, and the military conflicts of the present are firmly embedded in the 21 st century media environment. Since 9/11, media studies scholars have analyzed the nexus of the media industry and the military and scrutinized the media products of war which result from this unity. Many military media products invite their subjects to dispassionately watch and interactively play war; some, albeit a few, display signs of resistance to it. Today, critical studies that seek to unravel the ties that bind the media to the military require multiple perspectives, theoretical formulations and material practices. This special issue presents timely scholarship at the forefront of understanding and responding to current trends in media and militarism. The Media War At a safe distance from the actual battles of war, civilians read war stories, hear war broadcasts, watch televised war fictions and play war games. Yet this mediated field of spectacular vision and immersive narrative space is never actual war, but a partial, selective, often simulated and mostly partisan representation of it. It is something that has been constructed, scripted and produced, and over the years scholars have appreciated the disjuncture between war and its media representations and contemplated the consequences of the loss of the real. War itself refers to actual material referents: invasions, occupations, violent conflicts and coups, and the cities, deserts and jungles where people fight, bleed, kill and die. Media images, tropes, themes and myths of war often bear little resemblance to war itself. Philip Taylor contends that each time the U.S. military wages war, two kinds of war occur: an actual war and a "media war." 1 Civilians never see the actual war but instead consume or play media-engineered stories of conflict-a media war. Indeed, the products of this media warnews clips, TV shows, films, video games and digital content-represent America at war to U.S. and world publics in ways that often do not inform or foster empathy but instead rein
Visual Communication , 2021
Military-themed videogames are significant cultural artifacts that shape popular geopolitical narratives and venerate dominant post-9/11 War on Terror discourses. Overwhelmingly resonant with the Military Entertainment Complex, these artifacts, not excluding America's Army (2002-2013), envision the world through a Western lens. Over the past decades, America's Army has come to challenge dominant orthodoxies and ideological presuppositions, disseminating new configurations of power. The paper argues that the latest installment of the game, America’s Army: Proving Grounds (2013), marks a paradigmatic shift from the post-9/11 discourse permeating most military-themed videogames. Taking past scholarship on geopolitics and multimodal legitimation as points of departure, the current study unfolds the militarized aesthetics and politics of gameplay unique to America’s Army: Proving Grounds in its capacity to promote redefined ideals of hegemonic masculinity, on the one hand, and substantiate US universal legitimacy, on the other. To this end, the research endeavor proposes a more nuanced multimodal legitimation analytical framework in attempt to capture the full spectrum of the semiotic affordances instilled in the gaming space. Key convergent discourses and practices of hegemony emerge therein, fundamentally: proficiency, efficiency, virtuosity, agility, nobility, solidarity, precision, stoicism, and aggression. The spatio-temporal shift away from post-9/11 discourses reify new militaristic representations of hegemonic masculinity symbiotically entangled with futuristic and non-contemporary ideological war narratives.
Why we need to study (US) militarism: A critical feminist lens
Security Dialogue, 2018
Responding to the special issue call to examine security and militarism alongside one another, this article adopts a critical feminist lens to explore what is at stake when critical scholars study security rather than militarism – and why, for critical feminists in particular, studying one without attention to the other is not helpful. Anchoring the discussion of (US) militarism in ongoing debates about women in combat, the article proposes that studying security without attention to militarism leads scholars to miss the deeply militarist orientation of security studies. It further suggests that feminist scholarship, because it treats militarism and militarization as an integral part of feminist security studies and considers the everyday a crucial site for inquiry, is well suited to studying militarism and security alongside one another. The article then lays out what a critical feminist approach to studying militarism entails and presents some feminist insights on militarization, focusing in particular on what attention to gender can reveal about shared norms of manliness and war. Overall, the article shows why feminist perspectives offer such strikingly different insights into the relationship between militarism and security and what we miss when feminist scholarship is ignored or marginalized in scholarship on these issues.
Wartime's "Undeniable Linkages": Feminist Studies of Everyday Militarisms across Time and Space
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2023
Feminist scholars and social movements have long been important voices against war and empire. Yet the era of global "endless wars" stretches behind and before us, challenging both our longstanding intellectual theories of violence and our political strategies for combating entrenched imperialism. This essay reviews three monographs in the emergent field of "everyday militarisms," a new direction forward for understanding and criticizing global war in the past, present, and future. Threading connections between feminist science studies, cultural studies, and women of color and transnational feminisms, these texts ask us to more closely consider how elements of war show up in ordinary formations. I highlight how these books and the field of everyday militarisms more broadly makes us question what is understood as feminist work in both theory and method, through their shared and novel feminist theories of temporality. Together they open new understandings of ongoing systemic and state violence in the world today and different political paths forward in the face of seemingly intractable conflict.
Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender, space and the everyday
Gender, Place & Culture, 2016
Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, 'gendering' militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisationand transformationpossible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites.