Description
Working at the intersection of feminist security studies and feminist political economy (FPE), this paper examines how militarism is experienced by military families – predominantly wives – tasked with the material and immaterial labour of caring for injured service members and veterans. Drawing and building on the broader FPE literature of affective labour, social reproduction, and their associated depletions, the paper will also explore the attendant pleasures, joys, and rewards that such care affords those responsible for it. The paper draws on and adapts the FPE concept of depletion (Rai et al 2014), exploring it in relation to the overarching structure of militarism as opposed to capitalism. Depletion is thus used both to take account of the myriad of harms – including those oftentimes ignored or marginalised in dominant tellings of war and militarism – that unfold in the everyday and domestic (re)production of militarism, and how such depletion occurs within consensual social relations. The paper argues that the reproduction of militarism relies on this affective labour of carers, and that such labour both works through and supports unequal and deeply gendered relations of power.
