Helmetcams, militarized sensation and 'Somatic War'

McSorley, Kevin

doi:10.1386/jwcs.5.1.47_1

Cited by 27 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Given such issues with mainstream media coverage, it is not surprising that many in the military have turned to new media technologies to tell their own story. Such service-member-created media has also been studied, and research has considered military blogs and letters (Shapiro & Humphreys, 2013), visual media (Kennedy, 2009;Struk, 2011), video (McSorley, 2012;Silvestri, 2013), and the differences between first-person accounts distributed via social media and traditional news coverage (Maltby & Thornham, 2016;Parry & Thuminim, 2017;Silvestri, 2015).…”

Section: Coverage Of Military Service Members and Veteransmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Hero-Worship” or “Manipulative and Oversimplifying”: How America’s Current and Former Military Service Members Perceive Military-Related News Reporting

Schmidt

2020

JVS

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Military-related journalism serves an important purpose, and has a special relevance in the modern era of nearly continuous American military involvement. Yet, conflicting goals have long made relations between journalists and the military difficult, and both institutions have faced abundant criticism regarding the role each plays in providing information to the public. This study seeks to provide additional perspective on the topic, and involves a consideration of the views held by individual military service members and veterans regarding military-related news. Data gathered from interviews suggests that, while a diversity of perspectives exist, widespread frustration with military-related reporting is very common among the military population.

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Section: Coverage Of Military Service Members and Veteransmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Hero-Worship” or “Manipulative and Oversimplifying”: How America’s Current and Former Military Service Members Perceive Military-Related News Reporting

Schmidt

2020

JVS

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“…Approaches consonant with this agenda can be found within a disparate body of literature, old and new. It covers such areas of enquiry as science and technology (Bousquet, 2009, 2018; DeLanda, 1991; Grove, 2016; Howell, 2011; MacKenzie, 1993; MacLeish, 2012; Shah, 2017), training and combat (Barkawi, 2017; King, 2013; McNeill, 1995; Protevi, 2013), experience and embodiment (Blackmore, 2005; Lisle, 2016; McSorley, 2012; Malešević, 2019; Sylvester, 2013), perception and sensation (Goodman, 2012; Pettegrew, 2015; Virilio, 2009), and architecture and landscape (Gordillo, 2014; Hirst, 2005; Rakoczy, 2008; Weizman, 2007). Conceptually and methodologically pluralist in outlook, this scholarship draws attention to the configurations of people, things and processes that come together to make war possible and shape its mutable characteristics.…”

Section: The Study Of War So Farmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism

2020

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Under the banner of martial empiricism, we advance a distinctive set of theoretical and methodological commitments for the study of war. Previous efforts to wrestle with this most recalcitrant of phenomena have sought to ground research upon primary definitions or foundational ontologies of war. By contrast, we propose to embrace war’s incessant becoming, making its creativity, mutability and polyvalence central to our enquiry. Leaving behind the interminable quest for its essence, we embrace war as mystery. We draw on a tradition of radical empiricism to devise a conceptual and contextual mode of enquiry that can follow the processes and operations of war wherever they lead us. Moving beyond the instrumental appropriations of strategic thought and the normative strictures typical of critical approaches, martial empiricism calls for an unbounded investigation into the emergent and generative character of war. Framing the accompanying special issue, we outline three domains around which to orient future research: mobilization, design and encounter. Martial empiricism is no idle exercise in philosophical speculation. It holds the promise of a research agenda apposite to the task of fully contending with the momentous possibilities and dangers of war in our time.

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“…Although rarely elaborated in such terms, the recognition of the utility of sexual violence by armed groups and militaries themselves implies a whole logistics, where strategists design and optimise the soldierbody-weapon, calculate its likely effects, and arrange for supply and reinforcement. 8 However, recent attempts to unpack the embodiment of soldiering suggest that technology is not an uncomplicated resource, but instead is deeply entangled with the experience and routines of historical war forms (McSorley, 2012). The warring body has been treated as a kind of technology, or experience as part of a larger bio-technical apparatus (Brighton, 2004;McSorley, 2012;Martin, 2015).…”

Section: "This Is My Rifle This Is My Gun"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…8 However, recent attempts to unpack the embodiment of soldiering suggest that technology is not an uncomplicated resource, but instead is deeply entangled with the experience and routines of historically-specific war forms (McSorley, 2012). The warring body has been treated as a kind of technology, or as part of a larger bio-technical apparatus (Brighton, 2004; McSorley, 2012; Martin, 2015). References to the body weapon in war thought parallel what Daniel Pick has identified as a ‘machine mentality’: ‘a certain crossroads of representation: the psyche potentially reduced to a machine-like state, and the machine imbued with excessive destructive power, even a kind of sexual energy’ (Pick, 1993: 21).…”

Section: ‘This Is My Rifle This Is My Gun’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The transgressive character of rape means it may only imperfectly become part of public legitimation in the manner of other ritualized dramas like the show trial or public execution. Martial empiricism offers one promising route for the study of such ‘aesthetic regimes’ of war (Bousquet et al, 2020: 99–118; McSorley, 2012: 56), at least in those cases where sexual violence is a consistent part of war practice (which is by no means guaranteed; see Wood, 2018).…”

Section: Weapons and The Weirdmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The body weaponized: War, sexual violence and the uncanny

Kirby

2020

Security Dialogue

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It is today common to argue that rape is a weapon, tool or instrument of warfare. One implication is that armed groups marshal body parts for tactical and strategic ends. In this article, I interrogate this discourse of embodied mobilization to explore how body weaponry has been made intelligible as a medium for sexual violence. First, I show that, despite wide rejection of essentialist models, the penis and penis substitutes continue to occupy a constitutive role in discussions of sexual violence in both political and academic fora, where they are often said to be like weapons, a tendency I term ‘weapon talk’. Second, I trace the image of the body weapon in key threads of feminist theorizing and commentary, to show how the penis has appeared as a ‘basic weapon of force’ in various permutations. Third, I explore the weaponization of the body as it appears in military thought and in the cultural circulation of ideas about the soldiering body in which sexual pleasure and violence are frequently conflated. Building on this foundation, I propose that these literatures collectively describe an uncanny weapon object, and I draw out the significance of this term for feminist security studies and martial empiricism. In short, the uncanny haunts accounts of sexual violence in the collision of sexuality and machinery in the image of a body weapon, in the unsettling designation of sexuality as itself both familiar and dangerous, and in the strange movement of violent bodies across the boundary between wartime and peacetime. A concluding discussion draws out implications and challenges for thinking about embodied violence, advocating renewed attention to the history of weaponization as a fallible and confounding process.

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Helmetcams, militarized sensation and 'Somatic War'

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Cited by 27 publications

References 17 publications

“Hero-Worship” or “Manipulative and Oversimplifying”: How America’s Current and Former Military Service Members Perceive Military-Related News Reporting

“Hero-Worship” or “Manipulative and Oversimplifying”: How America’s Current and Former Military Service Members Perceive Military-Related News Reporting

Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism

The body weaponized: War, sexual violence and the uncanny

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