Description
How do media report on the experiences and responsibilities of women in military families? Is there any difference between depiction of soldiers’ mothers and public protests led by military wives? What are the hierarchy of familial militarised womanhood and, especially, in relations to the positionality of militarised wifehood? How does reporting delimitate between wives and familial others of professional soldiers, private military contractors, conscript-soldiers, soldier-prisoners, migrant-soldier, soldiers fighting in local militias, when all those groups fight for the same state whilst being separated by the hierarchies of citizenship, financial recognition for their service and moral dilemmas associated with aggressive war-making? Most existing scholarship that cuts across the fields of Feminist IR, CMS, and Military Sociology would agree on the premise of the interrelational ‘entanglement between family and military’ (Ketola 2023, 2; see also Enloe 2000, and many others). Yet, these entanglements are often approached through the lens of either co-opted or resisting militarised motherhood. Recent research has highlighted the contradicting positionalities ascribed to military wives as ‘resilient’, supportive and/or ‘wilful’ figures (e.g. Cree 2020; Hyde 2017; Chisholm and Ketola 2020; Spanner 2023). Expanding on this debate, this paper explores the increasing prominence of military wives in Russia in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. It discusses a shift from the centrality of young-conscript-boy-soldiers whose fate inspired the mobilisation of Russia’s soldiers mothers movement in the 1990s to the multiplicity of familial militarised groups. It interrogates the reproduction of positionalities, losses and responsibilities attributed to military wives and militarised familial others through the lens of state-sanctioned and oppositional coverage.
