Description
‘Arms fairs’ are exemplary sites for studying the materialisation of the global military-industrial complex, holding the spectacular-cum-banal everyday of ‘defence business men’ as they trade military technologies. Ripe with drones and desires, these sites brim with a sexual politics endemic to corporate defence culture that takes on new forms in its encounter with bodies out of place, such as the woman researcher. In this paper I dig into the theoretical, empirical and methodological implications of my experience of the sexual politics of ethnographic research in arms fairs during 2023 and 2024, meanwhile global arms stocks hit “all-time highs” amid the ruination of communities in Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine and beyond.
Conducting ‘arms fair fieldwork’ as a young woman is a process of studying-up laden with sexual violence. This violence includes subtle to direct forms of objectification and sexual harassment, denoting the racial, patriarchal and heteronormative ‘politics of desirability’ that structure men’s, women’s and genderqueer experiences in this space: ordering each body in a hierarchy of desirable vs undesirable and alpha vs beta. What does the heavily policed politics of desirability among defence business men disclose about the role of toxic masculinity in rationalising and constituting the military-industrial complex? How does this politics link with a global politics of disposability that renders certain bodies saveable and others disposable in the name of ‘security’? What can the sexual politics of the arms fair tell us about the normalisation of military-industrial interests in contemporary politics?
