Description
The UK Armed Services have benefited from a recent rise in applications from ‘diverse’ candidates, achieved through recruitment campaigns and public announcements emphasising organisational commitment to offering equality of respect and opportunity to LGBT and female Service Persons (SP). Within military institutions, context and the situatedness of the protagonist predicate whether the powerful affordances of love are derided or valorised. Influenced by queer theory (Berlant, 2011) and the politics of emotional affect (Ahmed, 2004), this paper analyses how women, LGBT and nonbinary SP are emotionally or affectively conscripted into supporting organisational structures and narratives that reproduce inequality. Through discourse analysis of interview data with 36 heterogenous SP, I suggest that the realisation gap between organisational claims of equality and the daily workplace experience of individuals is bridged by emotional labour and affective defence of the system; often from those SP who are the most marginalised by it. My research argues that the fervent affective commitment evinced by ‘diverse’ SP (in particular) facilitates the UK MoD to silo and abdicate the work of interrogating its own systems and practices whilst maintaining the appearance of being committed to cultural transformation.
