Description
This paper explores the idea of ‘war stories’ as a form of narrative power, examining the ripple effects of violent force as they become incorporated into soldiering narratives and embodied processes of self-making and self-care. Based on an ethnography of a British Army Regiment based overseas, the paper uses ‘thick description’ and reflexive data from six months living in the Sergeants’ Mess. Highlighting the relevance of critical feminist ethnography to international studies writ large, the paper insists on an approach grounded in questions of gendered, classed and racialised intersubjectivity, drawing attention to the atmospherics of military power in everyday life.
The paper offers glimpses of ‘regimented life’ in military-institutional space, capturing the affective repercussions of stories as they ricochet around the room. It is in barrack rooms, shared bathrooms, at dinnertime or in the welfare office where war stories, memory and experience feed into the processes through which soldiers construct themselves as social subjects. And it is through such narratives, this paper argues, that war becomes a frame for gendered experience and vice versa, and where the meanings of state-sanctioned violence are co-opted, resisted and reproduced long after the immediate force of their operations have passed. Developing an affective analysis that posits war stories as a form of narrative force in their own right, this paper explores the impact of their telling and the meanings they produce as an extended mode through which violence endures. It is here that bodies and subjects are granted life, suffer death, are made legible or abject, heroic or base, all of them filtered through the familiar narrative structures of gender and rank, class and race, ally and enemy other.
