Week 10 Blog Post
For this week’s readings, we read three different articles that all depicted different forms of the body and how it is used to understand ideas of war through rhetoric. In comparison to other weeks, these articles did not share a common connection, but rather took looked at the physical aspect of the body through three different lenses.
In Jesse Paul Crane-Seeber’s article, he researches and examines contemporary US culture’s view on the sexualized aspects of war. Seeber establishes the critical relationship between gender, war, desire and agency through his research and provides the soldiers body as verification. In addition, he analyzes societies’ fetishism of militarization by identifying with the “kink” community, and how the military is depicted in their culture. The soldiers body is used frequently in Seeber’s research, reiterating the symbolization of the “sex appeal” that society has created for them. With the common phrase, “I love a man in uniform”, the narrative of a uniform sends the message of masculinity and heroism, which visually generates a sense of desire from our community. This article provides context behind why women generally are attracted to a man in uniform, which adds depth to Crane-Seeber’s article. Personally, I have heard this expression many times before, and have never considered the objectification it imposes on soldiers. According to Seeber, Society dwells on the sexualized aspect of the militarized male body, introducing them to society as an object, rather than a subject, and completely ignoring the female body. This cultural view of militarization can be in result from the media’s influence and representation of soldiers.
I found this article to be interesting because it focuses on the narrative of a “warriors body”. Seeber introduces the notion of this feeling of desire, in which our society creates in response to male soldiers’ bodies. Through this specific form of emotion, I realized how majority of individuals, including myself, unintentionally swoon at military men because of this societal norm created in objectifying their bodies, and the common expression of “loving a man in uniform”.
In Dr. Achter’s article, he analyzes public discourses in three dominant strategies regarding their visual and rhetorical representation of Afghanistan and Iraq injured war veterans. The first dominant strategy is the focus on the portrayal of veterans’ bodies as a “metonymy of the nation-state at war”. The second dominant strategy is the contextual discourse that strategically place veterans in scenarios that make them look like they’re overcoming any limitations created by war. The last dominant strategy is the shift in visual discourse that construct veterans from a war setting into a setting of normalcy. Through these three strategies, Dr. Achter constructs a discussion about the narrative of a war veteran’s bodily injury, and the contextual misrepresentation that public discourse emit within their visuals and rhetoric.
With the media being extremely significant in our society, our perception of war is extremely influenced and manipulated through the news and other types of media. In this article, Dr. Achter points out the extensive strategical tactics in the ways the media can frame a certain situation. Personally, I found the example of Marissa Strock to be extremely eye opening because of the alarming and upsetting visual of her that was published on the cover of Newsweek, exposing her horrifying war injuries. Strock’s publication was in reaction to the inadequate medical care she had received from the army, leaving her with prolonged suffering and pain. Nonetheless, most publications about injured war veterans lack this honesty and sensitivity within their rhetorical and visual context, and naturally skew the public’s perception into thinking these veterans have overcome all their obstacles.
Lisa Silvestri’s article, analyzes and explores the performance of American’s citizenship through the civil participation of “surprise military homecomings” YouTube videos and their perpetuation by the media. In this article, Silverstri watched a total of 40 YouTube homecoming clips from 2007 and 2009. She then made notes regarding “(1) the primary subject(s) in the clip; (2) upload date; (3) number of views; (4) viewer commentary; (5) miscellaneous observations” (Silverstri, 2013, pp. 103). From this content analysis, Silverstri was able to support her argument that the homecoming videos place spectatorship as a “civic duty” that engages civic participation, which she coins as “vicarious sacrifice” (Silverstri, 2013, pp. 101).
As seen in this YouTube video, homecoming videos engage American citizens in the emotional aspect of the war. The idea of the “warrior” soldier is particularly important in Silverstri’s article. She uses the warriors body as a symbol of physical “self-sacrifice” of the soldier and the emotional sacrifice of the warrior’s family. These videos are seen as a way for the civilian public, who has not given up anything, to actively participate in the war by indirectly showing them how to feel, behave and think. The warrior body is also humanized through the fatherly role the video portrays. The narrative of these videos are interesting to note because they were a way to help Americans, who emotionally felt incapable or helpless during the invasion of Iraq, become the “warrior citizen” (Silverstri, 2013, pp. 105). This article directly related to how the body is used as a hegemonic symbol that can be upheld and circulated by the media. I question how the body can be used in other ways to perpetuate hegemony in society?
As Alexa explained in her post these articles focused on the bodies of soldiers, and I was really interested how the readings discussed how soldiers and their bodies were viewed in relationship to others. These readings, although not explicitly related, all discuss relationships servicemen have with others. “Sexy Warriors” explains the relationship between servicemen and the state, “Surprise Homecomings” discusses the relationship between civilians and servicemen, and “Unruly Bodies” about the bodies of soldiers and their relationship with the state and civilians.
“Sexy warriors: the politics of pleasures of submission to the state” by Crane-Seeber was a very different perspective about the sexualization of soldiers than we’ve talked about in class before. My final project touches on the absence of sexual desire that comes with a women in the military putting on a uniform, as they adhering to beauty standards, uniform standards, and rules that encourage conformity. This article explains the opposite phenomenon, the lust for men in uniform. The article discusses the “fetishization of the militarized body” that heightens sexualization of men in the military, adhering to a kink community . The article also uses the power dynamics BDSM subordinate-dominatrix relationship to compare the relationship between servicemen and the state. Servicemen simultaneously feel pain and pleasure from their service and treatment as subordinates to the state. The military has complete control and power over the bodies of the men, and the men are rewarded with a special type of sex appeal that is reinforced through contemporary culture.
“Surprise Homecomings” relays a narrative that allows civilians to participate in a national identification. These vides create a shared sense of emotion and feeling that connect viewers with the military and with each other as a nation. By watching these videos civilians get emotional and get to feel a vicarious sacrifice, of going to war and or having a family member go to war.
“Unruly Bodies” discusses how bodies of soldiers who have attained injuries form the war have become normalized through domestication. Since borrowed by the military and the state, soldier’s bodies become in a way the visual representation of the nation and the war. “Whole bodied” soldiers are shown as poster children of the war. They are shown as those who have faced death and survived it, inviting civilians to participate in the war through admiration. “Unruly bodied” soldiers are shown in a context meant to inspire citizens, they are promoted as bodies that have already overcome their injuries and strengthened them.
I thought it was interesting how you related the “Sexy Warrior” article back to your final research project. “Loving a man in uniform” definitely encourages the heighten sexualization for men in the military, and I like how your project reflects on the notion of absence of women in uniform and their representation in the military.
As Alexa mentioned, these articles all discussed how the public attempts to identify with war and understand war through physical presence, mainly the soldier’s body.
Achter’s article discusses the idea of Militainment in the forms of video games, using the example of Tommy Rieman, discussing soldiers overcoming some of the limitations of war. I think it is really interesting that they use him in a game, especially because I think his narrative and commodifying his narrative leads to the idea that it is cool to get injured and come back from it. By portraying it in this fantasy video-game world, they are not accurately acknowledging the negative consequences of his injuries. First, the physical trauma and therapy required to get back to what seems like a healthy body, and then also acknowledge the psychological trauma that occurs when being in battle. Achter also discusses the PTSD that Rieman suffers from, although that is almost never discussed in his narrative that has been widely spread to the general public. There are serious implications in fantasizing war like this, especially when exposing it and marketing it to young boys.
That being said, the idea of using soldiers and using Rieman’s story to fantasize war is in line with the dominant discourse that the soldier gave their body to the government and to the United States. Crane-Seeber discusses this idea in her article, especially when talking the about the rhetoric that surrounds objectifying military men. They’ve given their bodies to the U.S, which the public then thinks means that they’ve also given their bodies to the public. This is a very interesting idea, the idea that the military’s sacrifice means that they’re also at the public’s will.
Silvestri’s article discusses the idea of domesticating the soldier’s body for “consumption at home” using videos of soldiers physically coming home to identify with this idea of national belonging. Using settings that are familiar to the general public in order to do the big reveal, the public is then ale to identify moreso than they otherwise would have. Similar to Achter’s article, this is just another platform that is used to put only show the good about a soldier coming home. It does not discuss the PTSD that the soldier might be going through, or the difficulties he will face in re-entering society, but the video of their physical body coming home is enough to make the public feel better about the war.
I also thought it was interesting how Arhter’s article feature video games of these soldiers with “whole bodies”. The narrative leads Americans thinking that everything is alright once they get back from war.
I really enjoyed the readings for this week. As we have said many times in class, many of these ideologies about war and soldiers are so engrained in our culture and in society’s minds, that, until it is called to our attention, we never even realize that we are mindlessly perpetuating these beliefs.
I found it really interesting when Crane-Seeber writes that “young men often go to war to find themselves, but they often return more confused and broken than when they left” (50). There is an evident tension between the ways that troops are supposed to feel after training – proud of their bodies and accomplished – and the confusion that they often experience when they return. As Alexa said, “a man in uniform” exudes power and confidence, and I think that when men do not feel this way, they feel unworthy and like something is wrong with them. The article briefly mentioned “don’t ask don’t tell,” which is again an example of how the perception of men in the military is that they are heterogeneous, and homosexuality does not have a place in the military.
The discussion in “Unruly Bodies” about the rhetorical power that veterans with visible body damage have was fascinating. The photo-ops that have taken place to try and represent veterans as “becoming whole again,” especially in light of sport photo-ops really reinforced this to me. Achter describes a moment when Bush claimed athletic inferiority to veterans, which perpetuates our beliefs that veterans are fine, because they are able to play a pickup game. I also found it interesting that veteran’s bodies becomes a means by which we make sense and contribute to war. As we see them playing sports or partaking in normal life activities, we assume that the physical injuries are the extent of it. But we know the prevalence of PTSD in veteran, and the sports example silences that rhetoric, because we are supposed to only focus on the physical bodies of the veterans.
As Candace mentions, the physical and mental injuries seen by these soldiers are dismissed through the media of them partaking in normal life activities. It give Americans a sense of false hope that everything is actually ok when it really isn’t.
As Alexa stated, the readings for this week all touched on how war is portrayed by media and understood by the public, and how this understanding relates to a soldier’s body.
I found the example of Tommy Rieman in Dr. Achter’s article, “Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First-Century Veterans of War,” to be incredibly interesting. I had not heard his story before, and I thought he served as an excellent example of how a solider’s physical body determines the value of their story. The video game, America’s Army, serves as an example of integrating war and violence into the everyday lives of Americans. Games like this allow average people to feel like they have a greater understanding of war. These types of games also can desensitize players to the violence and trauma that surround war injuries. For this reason, I was surprised to read the quote from Gerald Wolford stating his support for America’s Army. He stated, ‘‘I’m hoping that through this program people can read of the experiences of myself and others and find the motivation to succeed and work harder at what they do, whether in the Army or in civilian life.’’ I was surprised to read this as I thought that as someone who had violent expereicnes, and spent a portion of their lives incredibly close to others with similar violent experiences, Wolford would be more partial to expressing the detrimental aspects of the game.
I have noticed that many of you have also found Achter’s article, “Unruly Bodies”, to be significant in representing a soldiers physical body when determining the value through their story. In the examples of video games and action figures, we see how American’s perceive American soldiers.
These three articles explore how the bodies of soldiers are used in the rhetoric of war and the military. In “Sexy Warriors” by Jesse Paul Crane-Seeber, he uses a kink lense to explore how the body of the heterosexual militarized man is constructed in the context of the power structure between it and the military. When heterosexual men join the military, they consent to essentially being subjected to “surveillance and lost autonomy” that is exchanged for certain images, among them “a powerful sexualized social identity” (51). Within all relationships, there is a power structure that is either explicit or implicit and Seeber makes the argument that in the kink community, people tend to enter into relationships while having an explicit negotiation of power, something that more traditional heterosexual couples may not experience throughout their courtship. Similar to these BDSM relationships, heterosexual men enter into the military willingly, knowing that they are giving up much of their freedom in exchange for other privileges. He writes that after coming out of basic training, the newly-minted soldiers are encouraged to “take enormous pride in their new bodies, stripped of excess, and their new sense of self.” With this new body comes a new identity that is reinforced through the mainstream culture. What I thought was really interesting in this article was the dichotomy between the “desiring agent” and the “desired object” and how through the sexualization of heterosexual men in the military, these roles were reversed. Typically, men are portrayed as the “desiring agents” which fulfills their role of predatory man who look towards the “desired object,” women. But with the establishment of hierarchical positions, military men are positioned as the “desired object” not only to those who objectify men in uniforms but also by the dominant institution – the state.
In “Surprise Homecomings” by Lisa Silvestri discusses the rhetoric of “homecoming” videos where U.S. soldiers stage a triumphant return to their families in a public space. She discusses how these videos are contributing to a type of spectatorship that she calls “vicarious sacrifice” in which an audience empathizes with the emotional sacrifice of the family. Silvestri makes the argument that in a world where civilian involvement in wartimes is much more limited than it has been in the past. Through these videos, civilians are given a space to participate in the war by identifying as the children who have been impacted by the familial sacrifices their fathers’ have made. When being given a space to identify with the position of the child, the American public is thus infantilized. The author claims that the public actively seek out these videos but I would challenge that notion. I am unsure if people themselves actively seek the videos out or if they are passively encountering them through a larger distribution system.
Achter’s article “Unruly Bodies” discusses how the bodies of veterans have been “domesticated” in two different senses in order to “maintain support for US foreign policy at home” (48). The domestication of veteran bodies serves to provide for a transition period between the war zone where the body is meant to serve a specific purpose and when they return home where the body is meant to serve a very different one. This domestication also serves as a cleansing mechanism through which the story of the war can be cleansed and prepared for civilian consumption. George W. Bush calls upon the image of Tommy Rieman to serve as the idealized version of a veteran who went to war and was successfully reintegrated into civilian life after putting his body on the line. He suffered from thirteen gunshot wounds, yet has no widely visible scars. The deliberate choice of someone who has been invisible affected by the war serves to disguise a lot of the physical scars of war that have been left on other people. When other veterans who have much more visible wounds – amputees for example – their injuries are portrayed as the catalyst to almost a new beginning. Through their wounds they are able to find a new sense of “wholeness.”
As Alexa mentioned, I also thought the “Sexy Warriors” article was interesting in distinguishing between the “desiring agent” and the “desired object”. In this article men are described as the agent while women are desired as the object, because of the sense that men are sexualized through the military.
I found the different discussion points about the common rhetorical text of soldiers’ bodies in Crane-Seeber’s and Achter’s articles to be intriguing. While Crane-Seeber’s piece focuses on the idealization of the military body and our society’s underlying desires that attribute to this objectification, Achter’s piece looks at veterans’ “unruly” bodies, which result from serious and explicit physical injuries during war. Crane-Seeber argues that insecure masculinity in US culture pushes men to go to war where they can link their identities to social institutions and remake their bodies (50). The concept of remaking one’s body comes up multiple times within the Crane-Seeber article as it is central to the objectification and fetishization of the militarized male phenomenon. Crane-Seeber states that soldiers surrender themselves to the state, giving up certain freedoms and their autonomy for certain social pleasures, one of which is the sexualized social identity of the military man. The concept of remaking your body and taking pride in this remodeling is starkly contrasted with the prevalence of “unruly” bodies that Achter discusses in his article. Achter states that technology changes have significantly reduced death counts in recent wars but increase the portion of veterans who are living with combat-induced injuries. These injuries leave a multitude of damaged bodies, which Achter argues occupy a central role in communicating the meaning of contemporary wars (47). Achter states that the issue is not censorship of these bodies, since veterans frequently appear in the media, but instead centers around the population who controls the circulation of how veterans with unruly bodies are represented in the dominant discourses over time. Both articles agree that our culture sees the idea of a “proper” body through rigid binaries yet how being in the military can present, opposing ways, the male militarized body as a result of war.
I also agree with Mia, how the culture sees the idea of a “proper” body goes through these binaries, however, the military opposes the idea by have the male militarized body as a result from war. Through these three articles we can identify the body through three different lenses in understanding war rhetoric.
The readings from this week demonstrated the spectrum by which military bodies can fall on, ranging from an idealized, “sexy” body to an “unruly” and mangled body, yet both are prevalent images circulated by society and the media. A military uniform, in essence, grants a type of privilege to male soldiers in several ways, one of which being the sexualized version that Crane-Seeber highlights. Their bodies represent a certain idealized male that is brave, courageous, strong (physically and mentally), and fearless that is attractive not only to real-life women, but benefits media portrayals of war in general by using “sexy” servicemen as the representation, or, as I would argue, as the scapegoat.
Contrarily, yet still similarly, Dr. Achter discusses how these same military bodies are idolized for their disfigurements, as we see in the case of Marissa Strock. This made me think about homeless veterans that often have an amputation or permanent physical injury that when their sign says “veteran,” those injuries hold a new, more significant meaning. Although these two representations of military bodies manifest themselves in opposite ways, they still serve a larger purpose for the strategic framing of war in the media. While there is sacrifice, there are advantages that both serve important roles in war rhetoric.
I thought it was interesting how Erin connected the military body to homeless veterans and the more significant meaning they have when they have some sort of physical injury. This was an interesting point because of the significance the body has when appealing emotionally to others.
The readings from this week really fit together for me, and I agree with Alexa in that the citizen’s engagement with the soldier is often an emotional one, particularly with the idea of the vicarious sacrifice. For me, reading Silvestri’s quoted sentence “But seeing does not guarantee bearing witness” helped me see the bigger picture of the phenomenon occurring surrounding public perception of the military. Watching sentimental and emotional videos of soldiers coming home always made me happy for them and definitely made me feel emotional in some way, but seeing as I am unable to relate to their feelings directly, I felt a sort of disconnect to this sense of elation. I assume the separation I feel was because I had never experienced a love one return from a perilous situation or long time away, but I was still able to enjoy the video because of its meaning, albeit with a lingering sense of guilt that she discusses. The media and everything that contributes to the framing of the modern soldier does a great job at making a connection where there really isn’t one, namely between an average citizen and a soldier. The sexualization of soldiers, the portrayal of their “healed” and heroic bodies, and the raw emotion of the homecoming videos are all designed to make soldiers seem appealing, gearing the public towards the ultimate goal: to get regular people to agree to risk their lives on behalf of a cause. We agree to these terms of endearment because they appeal to our more favorable emotions (pleasure, happiness, growth), a tactic that almost successfully masks the true reality of war.
The only thing that we read about that didn’t fit into this theme for me at first was the idea that soldiers and their commanders have a hypothetical psycho-sexual submission scenario, which at first I thought was a reach. After reading the article I definitely see the connections drawn, and I think it does in fact create an appealing situation for soldiers because they are choosing to make the sacrifice of pain and simultaneously have been conditioned to associate it closely with pleasure. This is not necessarily a citizen-soldier connection, but an explanation of the soldier itself and his/her motivation to accept that role, proving these types of appeals are often successful in upholding the positive image of a man in uniform.
I agree with Alyssa comment with getting happy and emotional when watching these homecoming videos. However, I also agree that there is some disconnect to relating to their feelings directly because of my personal experience of never witnessing one of my family members return back from the military.