Description
Non-conventional military operations — from peacekeeping to the increasing trend of domestic deployments involving non-combat tasks with limited engagement rules — reveal a security closet: a state of protection that dare not speak its name. In this closet, the non-conventional aspects of operations are treated as if they did not exist, leading soldiers to quietly translate personal and mission uncertainties into a legible, conventional, heteromasculine narrative that disciplines the unusual into what counts as proper protection. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with soldiers deployed in France’s Vigipirate plan and UNIFIL in Lebanon, the paper examines how soldiers describe these operations as ‘travestite’ missions, perverse relative to combat standards and war logics. Puzzlingly, the paper shows how soldiers still carried out those missions by operationalising and weaponising their personal vulnerabilities as fathers/husbands/soldiers. In doing so, they engage in hetero sense-making — equating the mission with familial duties — to render the otherwise deviant, incomplete, and unintelligible mission legible. Hence, back to the security closet, the result is a double denial of anxiety: the state hides its own insecurity through military visibility, while the army conceals its unease at being used in a travestite way with an intimacy that re-settles its hegemonic identity through heteromasculine and familiarist practices of care.
