Kevin McSorley

Towards an embodied sociology of war

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes.

Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences, and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being ‘military’ and the ex-soldier’s body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands.

War and the Body: Cultural and military practices

In their introduction to an earlier special issue of this journal, The Body at War: Wounds, Wounding and the Wounded, Cooper and Hurcombe note that ‘the centrality of the wounded body to war demands that we continue to make it the focus of scholarly enquiry’ (2008: 121). This issue takes up that call and revisits the crucial subject of war and the body, building upon the previous work developed in the pages of this journal and elsewhere. Our aim here is not specifically to examine further the act and idiom of wounding, but rather to illuminate and explore some of the multiple modes of embodiment and disembodiment through which political, social and cultural worlds are enacted and contested in conflict and post-conflict societies. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. However, as Scarry notes, although war is ‘the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate’ (1985: 71), much military and political discourse surrounding war is marked by a profound denial of embodiment and the bodily mutilation at the heart of war. From the abstractions of ‘rational’ strategic thinking to the