Armor and Anesthesia: Exposure, Feeling and the Soldier's Body

Subjectivity, 2016

This article investigates how the contemporary war dispositif in cinematic representations captures and integrates bodies, gestures, space and desire. It focuses on two analytic aspects of this process, suture and interpassivity, and shows how soldiers, in cinematic space, confront trauma that results from an incompatibility between the accelerated speed of military dispositif and the slower rhythms of everyday life. It analyzes the clash between life speeds through three cinematic texts-The Hurt Locker, American Sniper and Good Killand clarifies how such disruptions motivate attempts to manage and renegotiate realities fractured by traumatic war experiences. More generally, it analyzes the ways in which war disfigures the phenomenology of bodies and the life world.

[[This is a revised version of a paper submitted to Biosocieties in fall 2017]] The basic structure of contemporary military biopolitics, in which military bodies and minds are kept alive and allowed to die, entails both an institutional problem of how to shore up life that is exposed to harm and a cultural problem of how to reckon with a routinized trade in life and death that happens not incidentally, but on purpose. Amidst this tension, the military psyche becomes both an inhabited, embodied site and an imaginative point of reference for the question of how to feel about war. This article takes stock of the contemporary landscape of war-related mental affliction via three relatively novel interventions: military suicide prevention, the framing posttraumatic stress as "moral injury," and resiliency training meant to inoculate soldiers against the stress of the battlefield. Drawing on a range of clinical and media sources and ethnographic research with post-9/11 military personnel, I show how each of these efforts constructs specific forms of war-related psychic destruction as objects of public and institutional concern, normalizes the institutional arrangements that produce it, and informs public perceptions of what war is by constructing figures of what it does to those who fight it.

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

Based on many years of fieldwork with US veterans, this essay examines the production of “toxic subjects” through three types of toxic exposures in the history of US soldiering—from Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, to still unspecified exposures that produced Gulf War Syndrome in the first Gulf war, and to the burn pits used for waste disposal on bases throughout the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. While all toxic subjects are at odds with established systems of medicine and law, we argue that toxic subjects in military formations are especially challenging. Deeply entrenched ideas about soldiers’ able-bodied masculinity and readiness for sacrifice (coupled with the logics of entrenched legal and biomedical systems) make toxic soldiers particularly difficult to account and care for. We describe the experiences, structural positioning, dispossession and resistances of toxic soldiers at different historical conjunctures, pointing to cultural logics that connect them. Worki...

North American Dialogue, 2008

The US military's creation and deployment of “Human Terrain Teams” and the use of anthropology as a weapon in counterinsurgency operations bears a disturbing similarity to militarized forms of medicine and biotechnology currently in development for US military personnel. Through the mobilization and instrumentalization of health, the US military intends to manipulate the bodies of soldiers while claiming that this manipulation is to protect the well-being of the soldier. This sort of deployment of health has little to do with the health of the individual, and is directly linked to “improving” the combat abilities of the individual, and of creating better and more encompassing means of control of the individual. As I see it, the Human Terrain System, and attempts to deploy a militarized anthropology to aid in counterinsurgency operations utilize a similar rationale, a rationale directly at odds with the AAA code of ethics and what I think it means to be an anthropologist.

Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 66 (2013), 2013

Critical review essay of Erin Finley "Fields of combat: Understanding PTSD among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan" (2011) and Susie Kilshaw " Impotent warriors: Gulf War syndrome, vulnerability and masculinity" (2009).

Geopolitics, 2018

The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication Figurations of wounding: soldiers' bodies, authority and the militarisation of everyday life.

Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2022

This article examines exposure in the mobile reach of care in war in order to theorise exposure as care. It does so from the margins, focusing on US military medical professionals of the officer class in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who feel distanced from the 'real' war experience represented by the infantry soldier, and thus engage in practices of exposure to gain the 'trust' and 'respect' of their soldier-patients. To grasp something of the promise and perils of exposure and its everyday enactments, I analyse one army physician assistant's accounts of secretly stealing away on combat missions and the use of an ambulation tool called 'the walkabout' by the military mental healthcare community. The material, operational, and tactical settings of counterinsurgency and the professional cultures of military care occupations dynamically intersect to engender specific contexts for, opportunities within, and risks associated with exposure among military elite. An examination of exposure reveals that military medical professionals recast the hegemonic authority of proximity to soldiering in terms of the ethical norms and professional values of medicine: in a word, as care.

British journal of pain, 2013

This paper outlines the system developed by the United Kingdom's Defence Medical Services to manage the pain associated with combat trauma from the point of wounding, through repatriation back home to rehabilitation and eventual discharge from the Forces, whenever that may be. The system is founded upon the principles of integration and sustainability and this article includes discussion of both clinical and non-clinical components.

IJASS JOURNAL, 2022

Technical objects," such as War Neuroses (Shell shock, Hysteria and Neurasthenia) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, are considered emerging from historical and cultural practices within the medical field rather than just epistemological achievements. These objects were coiled by disciplines such as surgery, neurology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. They threaded a powerful cobweb within trauma and warfare during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also, these objects emerged from clinical and experimental experiences oriented towards the understanding of human pain and social suffering derived from warfare. Nevertheless, often unable to go beyond the medical stance and its limits on behalf of understanding human pain and collective suffering. Interestingly, the discovery of memory and its bond with fear, shame, guilt, and trauma, wove threads of the cobweb. As expected, trauma achieved a central position within the web. Nonetheless, it encompasses multiple meanings, connections, and quarrels. Trauma is a unique signifier for a plurality of sufferings and illnesses. The purpose of this review is to unveil the cobweb woven by trauma, unfolding its trajectories since its emergence during the First, Second, and Vietnam Wars. This, to embrace a further understanding of human pain and social suffering, and its core issues within the practice of medicine.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2014