Writing about embodiment as an act of translation

Baker, Catherine

doi:10.1080/23337486.2016.1139314

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…It is important that recreational crafting was a social space in which I was embedded so that the method was an exercise in observing and writing an iteration of ‘myself’, and through this self-observation translating (Baker, 2016) that which I had previously or might otherwise have experienced as tacit and felt into something that could be written. I was observing myself as a recreational crafter who turned their skills and time to making things for war.…”

Section: Towards Embodied Method: Ethnographies Of Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is significant for our understanding of how ethnographies of making might work as a method for researching embodiment. Going back to Baker’s (2016) point that writing about embodiment is an act of translation, this inability to articulate my sense of soldiers’ unworthiness for handmade goods was the moment at which I ceased to translate. The simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of the act of crafting for war enabled a mediation between the embodied, the felt and the lived, and the written page.…”

Section: Ethnographies Of Making: a Methods For Translating Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Academic to bodies and embodiment in relation to the particularities of war, security and international relations has been a relatively recent and burgeoning area (Dyvik and Greenwood, 2016; McSorley, 2013; Wilcox, 2015). As Catherine Baker (2016: 120) has observed, writing about embodiment is an act of compression, abstraction and translation, an interpretive endeavour that requires the researcher to mediate between that which is fleshy, felt and lived (often by others) and the page. This mediation raises epistemological challenges (see, for example, Dyvik, 2016).…”

Section: Introduction: War From a Making Point Of Viewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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War craft: The embodied politics of making war

Tidy

2019

Security Dialogue

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https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ War Craft: The embodied politics of making war This article makes the case for examining war from a 'making point of view' (Bunn, 2011). Makers and their material production of and for war have been neglected in our accounts of war, security and international relations. An attention to processes of making for war can reveal important things about how these international processes are lived and produced at the level of the body. The article focuses on the particular phenomena of martial craft labour-the recreational making of 'stuff', including hats and pillowcases, by civilians for soldiers. To explore embodiment within this social site an ethnographic method is outlined that enables the reading of objects as embodied texts, the observation of others in processes of making, and the undertaking of making by the researcher. Analysing embodied registers of aesthetic expression and the social values that attend such crafting for war reveals how this making is a space through which intimate embodied, emotional circulations undertake work for liberal state and military-institutional logics and objectives, obscure violence, normalise war and produce the military as an abstract social cause. Beyond the immediate empirical focus of this article a much wider political entanglement of violence, embodiment and material production necessitates a concerted research agenda. Suicide Vest: Component part of suicide vest. This element comprises the handmade empty vest made out of dark green fabric which has been hand stitched and one side sewn to create a compartment to place objects in. Hole created in the centre to place head through. Single strap sewn at the four corners of the base of the vest. One side of the vest has been cut open.

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Section: Towards Embodied Method: Ethnographies Of Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ethnographies Of Making: a Methods For Translating Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: War From a Making Point Of Viewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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War craft: The embodied politics of making war

Tidy

2019

Security Dialogue

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“…It is a commonplace of phenomenological inquiry that the body cannot be apprehended directly, only askew, in the discourses, codes and fantasies that help grant it coherence. An act of sensory translation is therefore required (Baker, 2016; see also Kinsella, 2020, for a different domain of war experience). Feminist and martial theorists draw on, even as they also rearticulate, the interpretations of combatants and others who experience war with greater immediacy.…”

Section: Animate Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…An interviewer's positionality towards war and the military may also emerge into the psychodynamics of the interview in ways that, before the project or the encounter, they did not expect, through processes of 'transference and countertransference' that psychotherapists who practice deep listening are trained to recognise but oral historians and other qualitative interviewers often are not (Jessee,in press: 16). 10 Researching military topics will almost certainly, sooner or later, force researchers to confront their family histories of engagement or disengagement with war and the military, their own imaginations of war and conflict within the cultural imaginaries to which they have belonged (see Dawson 1994), their own experiences of any military or semi-military service, and the ways in which the 'militarization' (Enloe 2000) of wider society has involved them personally (Baker et al 2016). The intersubjectivity of interviewing and deep listening may bring such memories and (dis)identifications to the surface more than any other research method except ethnography, where the researcher's body is directly present in militarised material spaces -yet since certain interviews also, less immersively, take the researcher into such spaces, the ways in which researchers use their senses to gather knowledge in ethnography and interviewing are not completely separate.…”

Section: ) 'Military' and 'Civilian' Identities In Interviews On Languages And Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interviewing for Research on Languages and War

Baker

2019

The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict

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Every participant in war encounters war through its languages. Languages are the basic ingredients of many of the sights and soundscapes of war, whether troops and civilians encounter them as temporary sojourners in a foreign territory or whether war is taking place on soil they regard as home: from the slang and patois with which foreign soldiers have learned to communicate with local civilians to go about the business of everyday life, to the 'weaponization' (Rafael 2012) of language through counter-insurgency and interrogation, to the impressions that the very perceptibility of linguistic difference in itself can leave on individuals' experiences of war -consider how often the adhan or Islamic call to prayer, in Arabic, became 'the most striking and memorable non-weapon-related sound' for so many coalition soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror (Daughtry 2015: 58), or how the designers of simulated environments on military training ranges commonly use foreign languages, signs and scripts to communicate the practical and symbolic implications of linguistic difference to troops before they deploy (peacekeepers in Bosnia who did not read Cyrillic script, for instance, could not count on being able to read place names from all road signs).In certain wars, especially ethnopolitical conflicts such as the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their aftermath, the matter of which languages are present or absent, and in what form, is part of the war itself: an armed force taking control of territory and claiming it as part of a historical national homeland, to the exclusion of competing claims, will strengthen its claim by driving out the language(s) as well as the individual members of the group(s) it considers a minority, while an army of occupation pursuing irredentist war aims, like Italy occupying the Julian Alps in 1915-17, will likewise impose its national language across public space in extending the power of the occupying state and assimilating those minorities who remain under its authority (Svoljšak 2012). Such instances of language as war, not just language in war, are ruptures in the very fabric of everyday life for inhabitants of the region, and symbolic politics that foreign interveners, during their involvement in the conflict, may or may not strive to understand.Most participants in war have also encountered war through the mediations of meaning between languages (written translation and spoken interpreting) that occur at every stage of planning, warfighting and peacemaking yet until recently went largely unnoticed in the wider study of war. Even in wars where troops have not been deployed abroad and the languages spoken by each side are the same, experiences of war raise the question of 'translation' between military and civilian registers and vocabularies: indeed, they pose the thorny literary question of whether embodied wartime experiences can be adequately 'translated' at all through language that conveys them to readers and listeners who do not have the same embodied memories...

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Writing about embodiment as an act of translation

Cited by 11 publications

References 17 publications

War craft: The embodied politics of making war

War craft: The embodied politics of making war

The body weaponized: War, sexual violence and the uncanny

Interviewing for Research on Languages and War

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