Description
The brainchild of Prince Harry, the Invictus Games is an international adaptive sports competition for wounded, injured and sick veterans and serving military personnel. Claiming to harness “the power of sport to inspire recovery and showcase the resilience of the Invictus community’ while leaving all those spectating “inspired long after the Games finish,” Invictus is positioned as a virtuous transformative and restorative process that is enacted on, within and through Invictus participants’ bodies and identities. This paper explores how these identities are mobilised via a troubling logic of disembodiment/embodiment that is traversed with contradictions and perpetuates everyday militarisation through the aesthetic spectacle that is Invictus. Spectacularisation and aestheticisation combine through this (dis)embodiment logic in powerful, affective ways to advance a militarised aesthetics that in turn shores up an aestheticised militarism. Injury and inspiration lie at the heart of this (dis)embodiment logic to ensure an aestheticising of sensing (sense-making, meaning-making) and feeling (spectators’ being moved, ‘awed’) military power and its effects. Relying on yet resisting logics of supercrip and inspiration porn, the aesthetic of the prosthetic undergrids a military-medical complex of technological advancement and superhero/human subjectivity that in turns ‘restores’ our understandings of these controversial post-9/11 wars. While disembodiment is primarily and problematically enacted in the form of physical/mental injury, Invictus serves as a moment of re-embodiment for various bodies (military/familial/national). This paper interrogates the tensions embedded in Invictus’ undoing and remaking of a particular aestheticised military/militarised subject where an affective/aesthetic entanglement of injury/inspiration creates a ‘frontline’ (in sporting spectacle) to sense and feel these wars and the injuries they inflict through sanitised media(tisa)tions.
