Are you tough enough? The image of the special forces in british popular culture, 1939–2004

Connelly, Mark; Willcox, David R.

doi:10.1080/01439680500064918

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Within sociological analyses of the military, memoirs have been used as sources of empirical information for understanding the forms, functions and spatialities of military masculinities (Duncanson, 2009, 2011; Higate, 2003; Woodward, 1998; Woodward & Jenkings, in press-a), the practices of military communication and cohesion strategies (Baker, 2010a, 2010b; King, 2006; Kinzer Stewart, 1991), the organisation of military capabilities (King, 2009, 2010), the articulation of citizenship ideas amongst military personnel (Woodward, 2008) and the understanding of mental and physical trauma and narratives of trauma in war (see Robinson, 2011, 2012; Woodward & Jenkings, in press-b). As cultural documents, they invite analysis for the ideas they promote about distinct groups such as Elite and Special Forces (Connelly & Willcox, 2005; Newsinger, 1997), and inform popular ideas about military life so influential in recruitment (Gee, 2007). …”

Section: Military Memoirs and Popular Geopoliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war

Woodward

2012

Political Geography

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This paper argues for the continued significance of the text as a source and focus in critical geopolitical inquiry. It establishes the utility of the military memoir in explorations of popular contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, and considers the memoir as a vector of militarism. The paper examines the memoirs written by military personnel about service in Afghanistan with the British armed forces, specifically about deployments to Helmand province between 2006 and 2012. The paper explores how Afghanistan is scripted through these texts, focussing on the explanations for deployment articulated by their authors, on the representations they contain and promote about other combatants and about civilian non-combatants, and the constitution and expression of danger in the spaces and places of military action which these texts construct and convey. The paper then turns to consider how a reading of the military memoir with reference to the genre of testimonio might extend and inform our understanding and use of these texts as a source for exploring popular geopolitics and militarism.

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Section: Military Memoirs and Popular Geopoliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war

Woodward

2012

Political Geography

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“…Military memoirs, on the other hand, have been used extensively to analyse the connections between war, militarism and military labour in other disciplines (e.g., Connelly & Willcox, ; Duncanson, ; Duncanson, ; Gee, ; Higate, ; King, ; King, ; Kinzer Stewart, ; Newsinger, ; Robinson, ; Woodward, ). For Duncanson (), they provide important secondary data for understanding the lived experience of war and military labour, because they are first‐hand accounts by authors who have not just observed war but also experienced it.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Nowhere else sells bliss like this’: Exploring the emotional labour of soldiers at war

Godfrey

Brewis

2018

Gender Work & Organization

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Reading secondary data from military memoirs of recent conflicts through the prism of scholarship on emotional labour, this paper discusses feeling rules fostered by the total institution of military service. The military is a significant context for such analysis, given that it socializes its personnel into mastering the practices and skills of lethal violence for combat operations. It is, moreover, a total institution, and the disculturation new recruits must endure creates fertile ground for the inculcation of a specific emotional regime. Further, unlike most other service occupations, the military is both male‐dominated and highly masculine. The paper also makes a case for using memoirs in the study of emotional labour. Being examples of what we call identity writing, they offer different insights to those we might attain through other methods. Indeed, we argue that memoirs provide a fruitful source for future organization studies research into the emotional regime of the military especially. Third, our discussion expands the concept of emotional labour in that the emotional regime the memoirists index: is not undertaken for a specific group of customers; entails a distinctive range of emotions; and involves the conscious cultivation of gendered communities of coping among soldiers.

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“…Three features of the cover stand out in this threshold to the text. One is the insignia of winged dagger and 'Who Dares Wins' motto of the Special Air Service, an elite Army unit that as John Newsinger (1997) observes has currency in popular cultural imaginaries of the British Army out of all proportion to its size as a unit (see also Connelly and Willcox 2005). The second is the citation of the military honours 'DCM' and 'MM'.…”

Section: Judging a Book By Its Covermentioning

confidence: 96%

Military memoirs, their covers and the reproduction of public narratives of war

Woodward¹,

Jenkings²

2012

Journal of War & Culture Studies

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Military memoirs, their covers and the reproduction of public narratives of war abstRactThis article explores the role of the covers of military memoirs in articulating and reproducing ideas about men at war. Drawing on the range of published military memoirs about service with the British armed forces from 1980 onwards, the article looks at the covers of these texts as paratextual features that provide a threshold for the reader. The article explores how these covers contribute to public narratives of war, which include discourses that prioritize a specific model of military masculinity. It does this by examining features such as specific design features, dominant conventions and changes in covers over time. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which memoir covers correspond with the stylistic conventions and discourses about men and war evident in other media entertainment formats. It also considers the disparity often evident between the messages promoted by a cover's design and that of the text itself.Military memoirs, the personal narratives about experiences of military participation, have long been a source of social ideas about men and war. These are books written overwhelmingly by men, about a specific aspect of experiences in war that remain predominantly those of men. From the emergence of the genre in the mid-nineteenth century to the present, of the many readings KeyWoRds military memoir armed forces masculinity book covers paratext

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Are you tough enough? The image of the special forces in british popular culture, 1939–2004

Cited by 6 publications

References 1 publication

‘This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war

‘This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war

‘Nowhere else sells bliss like this’: Exploring the emotional labour of soldiers at war

Military memoirs, their covers and the reproduction of public narratives of war

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