Description
A ‘signature injury’ of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been associated with ‘mental or physical deficits’, and ‘difficulties with attention, memory, concentration, and impulsiveness.’ Treatment is designed to assist the injured in ‘reaching maximum levels of independence’ (Military.com 2019). This article examines this treatment, focusing on the psychiatric care offered in some cases, and the gendered, raced, arguably ‘posthuman’ relationship engendered in the process between the soldier-patient and state-caregiver. Critical scholarship on the rehabilitation of those diagnosed with ‘invisible injuries’ such as TBI and PTSD has pointed to ways that treatment is bound up with and reinforces normative heteromasculinities in the service of an ongoing national self-construction project in which the body of the wounded soldier figures as an object of anxiety and tension. Building on such ideas, this work argues that one must also read within these regimens the US military’s deep investment in certain instrumental conceptions of techno-medically mediated ‘posthumanity’. This ‘posthumanity’, mobilized both explicitly and implicitly by the military and national security state, functions as a way to manage a complex and paradoxical relationship engendered between the injured soldier and the state, with implications for the way gender, race, and security come to be configured.
