Description
In this chapter of my dissertation, my venture point are bodily practices and (care) practices around the body in the emerging veteran’s movement in Germany. These practices not only mobilize a narrative of veteran-as-victim and its political capital, but importantly address veterans in precarious circumstances such as isolation, addiction and poverty. Building on Butler’s thoughts on what we can learn through the embodiment of precarity about the social structures around it, I identify the figure of the veteran body vanished. This figure marks the lens I develop through the analysis of my empirical material (qualitative/ethnographic) and it captures the ambiguous position of veterans: My argument is that ‘the veteran’ thus understood is shaped by and dependent on an interplay between state-practices and practices within the veteran scene. I point out how that interplay carves out and contours certain absences, for example of state provided care structures and symbolic recognition, while simultaneously recovering ideas of a state that actually has the capacity of care and a veteran as its affective center. The veteran body vanished takes part in the consolidation of an understanding of veteran and the state practices which produced them, paradoxically as its most visible form.
