Description
This paper examines the 2023 UK state apology for the LGBT military ban. Public apologies are often regarded as operating to bring matters previously shrouded in secrecy to public visibility through recognition. We suggest, however, that a critical Feminist and Queer approach to secrecy instead highlights how apologies create visibility whilst reproducing states of public secrecy in new ways. Engaging debates in Critical Military Studies, secrecy studies, and symbolic forms of justice, we argue that political apology is a clear site at which we can examine the negotiation of binaries of secrecy/transparency and private/public, which we suggest are inherently gendered and sexualised. In the context of the LGBT military ban, we demonstrate that the UK state apology simultaneously performs a seemingly enlightened politics of renouncing harm to LGBT military subjects whilst obscuring contemporary military cultures of homophobia alongside the especially degrading and violent methods used by the Armed Forces to uphold the ban.
