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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
144782
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| Summary/Abstract |
Recent contributions within international relations place embodiment, experience and emotion at the centre of their analysis of war. Recognizing that war should be ‘studied up from people and not down from places that sweep blood, tears and laughter away’ (Sylvester, 2012: 484), I extend this aim to analyse embodiment and experience through Norwegian military memoirs from Afghanistan. These are relevant empirically not necessarily because they contest political aims or offer policy recommendations, but because of how these embodied narratives, influenced by particular gendered conceptions of ‘warrior masculinity’ and Viking mythology, can trouble Norwegian public narratives. Through focusing on how memoirs construct the sensory experience of combat, I argue that these enable us to push conceptual understandings of embodiment and experience. Memoirs show how war is experienced as an assemblage of pleasure and pain, and how this is caught up in complex blurrings of individual and collective militarized bodies. Analysing how the pain and pleasure of war is made sense of through and between bodies allows us to advance the usage of embodiment as a concept in international relations, in turn leaving the discipline better equipped to understand war’s complex embodied assemblages.
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| 2 |
ID:
163712
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| Summary/Abstract |
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 international relations (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: the military tattoo. 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—and demonstrate 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, it also does important political work in curating the broader meaning of war to the wider public.
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