David Serlin

Crippling Masculinity: Queerness and Disability in U.S. Military Culture, 1800-1945

In the spring of 1945 Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., sponsored a series of weekly revues, featuring big band orchestras and singers, comic vignettes, and other vaudevillian residue from wartime USO shows, to entertain veterans undergoing rehabilitation in nearby hospitals and convalescent centers. Among the most popular and memorable that season were performances by a group of veteran amputees from a convalescent center in Forest Glen, Maryland, who called themselves the Amputettes.1 Dubbed the “high-kickers on artificial legs,” the Amputettes apparently did dance routines with Rockette-like precision in Carmen Miranda–inspired outfits or in full “Gay 90s” regalia (figs. 1–2). Forest Glen, an elite nineteenth-century women’s finishing school converted to a hospital by the armed forces during World War II, would have been an ideal setting for the rehabilitating Amputettes. They reportedly “stole the show” at Walter Reed, while their antics decidedly revealed “what rehabilitation can do.” The pleasure that servicemen and veterans experienced at the sight of the Amputettes must have derived not simply from seeing the men in drag (an image not incompatible with military service) but from seeing artificial limbs, usually associated with the solemnity of rehabilitation, peeking out incongruously from beneath billowy skirts associated with the frivolity of cross-dressing camp. The frequency with which cross-dressing has entertained homosocial communities underscores a long-standing and visible component of queer activity among putatively heterosexual men.2 Typically, such traditions have taken root at elite institutions such as Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Club or the University of Pennsylvania’s Mask and Wig Club. But they are visible even in less privileged circles, such as drag balls and fraternity parties, as well as in supposedly homophobic institutions such as the U.S. military. For example, in the journals of

Constructing autonomy: smart homes for disabled veterans and the politics of normative citizenship

At a time when the US military is cutting costs for retired service members and veterans, there are many charitable and corporate organizations looking to fill in these gaps. For example, the US Department of Veterans Affairs offers small grants to enable some retrofitting of houses for disabled veterans. Meanwhile, charities offer purpose-built Smart Homes to a small minority of severely disabled veterans that utilise technological and spatial engineering and feed into the culture of what might be called home improvement pornography. Smart Homes for disabled veterans are situated at the intersection of various and discrepant fantasies – domestic, consumerist, gendered, professional, military-industrial – of the automated home, and as such are full of technologies that are marked as much by their claims to independence and autonomy as they are by their claims to security and privacy. This article explores the ways in which discourses of independence and autonomy – as instantiated through the example of the Smart Home – represent a contradictory historical shift, one that is structured around a simultaneous movement away from government commitment for the welfare of veterans and a movement towards the promotion of technology as a neoliberal tool for remaking the character of post-service civilian life and private citizenship. Veterans and their civilian counterparts are made dependent on technological devices which offer an illusion of autonomy but are highly orchestrated products of social control through which citizens are spatially and politically isolated.