Description
Paper title: Theatricality, liberal soldiering and the ‘messy’ politics of subversion
Presenters: Dr Natasha Danilova and Marianne Fossaluzza (University of Aberdeen)
Abstract: Although advances have been made in the analysis of art (e.g. painting, poetry, photography), aesthetics and visual politics in IR (e.g. Bleiker 2017; Silverster 2020), war-thematic theatre has remained a relatively unexplored site of global war-sense-making. Furthermore, existing research has prioritised veterans’-led artistic forms of expression (e.g. Cree 2020; Dyvik and Welland 2018; Caso 2020), leaving less intellectual space for discussion of theatre as a complex space of (re)making the sense and sensibilities of modern Western liberal soldiering. Building on the in-depth analysis of the International Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2022), and over 40 interviews with artists, venue curators, military engagement teams, and feminist auto-ethnographies of productions staged across different festival locations (2017-2022) (e.g. Purnell and Danilova 2018; Dolan and Danilova 2022), we argue that theatre emerges as a multidimensional space in which neither state militaries nor veterans, nor artists or spectators have an upper hand at creating particular representational logics and modes of performativity. Instead, war-thematic theatre function as a gendered and racialised space which is shaped by multiple ‘patriarchal confusions’, (in)visibilities, embodied and affective contradictions of Western ‘gender-inclusive’ soldiering in the era of liberal wars.
