Description
The body of war is a stereotypically a male body. Though there is arguably less consensus than ever about the ways in which war and political violence are gendered, men’s bodies continue to be the most common material for the production of warriors, the experience of combat trauma, the repair-work of prosthesis and the promise of cyborg enhancements. War is not only a kind of effect of masculinity, but also a crucible for it. In this contribution I explore some traces of the project of disciplining men’s bodies, not to ready them for war but to rid them of bellicosity. These traces include, but are not limited to, feminist castration fantasies from the 1970s to the 1990s as a response to wartime sexual violence; the sex strike as a deterrent from Lysistrata to the Liberian civil war; the idea of sexual violence across the war/peace boundary as a public health epidemic; and the recent metaphor of ‘toxic’ masculinity as a murderous strain to be identified and treated. Though these visions are sometimes themselves violent, they are proposed in the name of a wider biopolitical care: as technologies and procedures for achieving feminist peace, or at least a successor feminist political order. I explore the continuing lure of the body as a target for both martial and anti-martial projects, and situate biomedical metaphors in a broader history of the governance of masculinity.
