Description
This paper explores the feelings and affects of audience members of three sites of ‘cultural militarism’: the Invictus Games, Warrior Games, and the Ms Veteran America contest. Drawing on ethnographic research methods, the paper tracks the affective economies of the contests, detailing how certain feelings, emotions and affects were heightened, while others were marginalised or completely excluded. Forwarding a conceptual argument that militarism can be understood as felt, and is experienced as both pleasure and harm, the paper details how contestants’ feelings of/about militarism across the three sites rely not just on their own participation and affective investment in militarism, but also on the broader ‘affective atmospheres’ of the events and the ‘communities of feeling’ generated by them. Understanding affect as not pre-discursive, but intimately entangled with the social, the paper will argue that these atmospheres and communities rely on, and reproduce, particular gendered, racialised and (neo)imperial imaginaries, and that audience pleasure in the events intermingles with the physical, emotional and affective depletions produced by militarism.
