Gender, race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

Abstract

British Legion's Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of 'communities of feeling', through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their 'place' in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular 'protectors' necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised 'protected'. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.Keywords: gender; race; everyday militarism; remembrance; emotion Though war is often framed as a state activity, the ability of liberal democracies to wage war requires some normalisation in more everyday settings. There must necessarily be some 'emotional energy within the polity' that incites at least some citizens to volunteer to 'defend the security of the state under threat' through military service, and wider citizen support for military power that enables the forfeiting of 'income to taxes' by 'free' individuals in pursuit of collective security (Berezin 2002, 39, 36). In the UK, that emotional energy relies on the drawing of racial and gendered boundaries. Although thousands of West Indians and Indians fought for Britain in the Second World War for example, 'this fact hardly registers in public memory'; instead, the war is celebrated as exemplifying the best of Churchill's (white) 'island race' Soldiers do not of course 'fall' in battle; they are maimed, and they maim; they are eviscerated and they eviscerate; they bleed and make bleed; they are killed and they kill. However, designating soldiers as 'the fallen', and their deaths as sacrifices, enables mourning and remembrance to be separated out from military violence. In this article I therefore examine how contemporary British acts of remembrance serve to reproduce war as a matter of sacrifice and in so doing, work to erase the violence, done to and by the bodies they commemorate and celebrate.Focusing on the RBL's annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the 'everyday', and its sites and materialities, animates the geopolitical and vice versa. Moreover, I suggest that remembrance's ability to 'localise' war deaths, as interpersonal, emotional experiences of collective mourning and sacrifice (Till 2005), is heavily reliant on gendered and racial geopolitical logics, where sacrifice becomes a regrettable but necessary burden for the white, muscular, masculinist British state, threatened by irrational enemy others. At the same time, remembrance, as a public political and everyday ritual, enables 'communities of feeling' to emerge which can 'serve as arenas ...

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