Synne L Dyvik

Valhalla rising: gender, embodiment and experience in military memoirs

Recent contributions within international relations place embodiment, experience and emotion at the centre of their analysis of war. Recognizing that war should be ‘studied up from people and not down from places that sweep blood, tears and laughter away’ (Sylvester, 2012: 484), I extend this aim to analyse embodiment and experience through Norwegian military memoirs from Afghanistan. These are relevant empirically not necessarily because they contest political aims or offer policy recommendations, but because of how these embodied narratives, influenced by particular gendered conceptions of ‘warrior masculinity’ and Viking mythology, can trouble Norwegian public narratives. Through focusing on how memoirs construct the sensory experience of combat, I argue that these enable us to push conceptual understandings of embodiment and experience. Memoirs show how war is experienced as an assemblage of pleasure and pain, and how this is caught up in complex blurrings of individual and collective militarized bodies. Analysing how the pain and pleasure of war is made sense of through and between bodies allows us to advance the usage of embodiment as a concept in international relations, in turn leaving the discipline better equipped to understand war’s complex embodied assemblages.

Women as ‘Practitioners’ and ‘Targets’: GENDER AND COUNTERINSURGENCY IN AFGHANISTAN

Abstract Feminist scholarship has shown how gender is integral to understanding war, and that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was partly legitimated through a reference to Afghan womens ‘liberation’. Recognizing this, the article analyses how gender is crucial also to understanding the practice of ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Because this type of warfare aims at ‘winning hearts and minds’, it is in engaging the population that a notable gendered addition to the US military strategy surfaces, Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Citing ‘cultural sensitivity’ as a key justification, the US deploys all-female teams to engage with and access a previously untapped source of intelligence and information, namely Afghan women. Beyond this being seen as necessary to complete the task of population-centric counterinsurgency, it is also hailed as a progressive step that contributes to Afghan womens broader empowerment. Subjecting population-centric counterinsurgency to feminist analysis, this article finds that in constructing women both as ‘practitioners’ and ‘targets’, this type of warfare constitutes another chapter in the various ways that their bodies have been relied upon for its ‘success’.

Embodying militarism: exploring the spaces and bodies in-between

How are militarism and militarisation embodied and why is it important to study these concepts together? This volume highlights a lack of research into people’s emotions, bodies and experiences in global politics, and brings these important dimensions to bear on how we study militarism and process of militarisation. This collection showcases innovative research that examines people’s everyday lived experience and the multiple ways militarism is enshrined in our societies. Emphasising the benefits of interdisciplinary thinking, its chapters interrogate a range of methodological, ethical, and theoretical questions related to embodiment and militarism from a range of empirical contexts. Authors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds reveal the myriad of ways in which militarism is experienced by gendered, raced, aged, and sexed bodies. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of social media; gender, queer, and feminist research on the military; the challenges of writing about embodied experience; and the commercialisation of military fitness in civilian life. This book fills a gap in the study of militarism and militarisation and will be of interest to students and scholars of critical military studies, security studies, and war studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Military Studies.

Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment

ABSTRACT Military memoirs are embodied texts of war. They therefore pose particular challenges to scholars who work with them, as they seem to insist on the uniqueness of particular wartime experiences and the impossibility of communicating these embodied experiences to a wider public. In this article I unpack some of the tensions in the ways that war scholarship approaches these ‘flesh-witness accounts’ and argue that these can productively be challenged, in ways that open up new possibilities for research methods. I begin by explaining what is meant by ‘flesh-witnessing’ and the significance of corporeal experience in constructing particular stories about war. From this I argue that while placing significance on embodiment when studying war is crucial, embodiment is not a concept that should be assigned to others ‘over there’, without also acknowledging how it works within ‘us’ ‘back home’ as civilians and scholars. Rather, embodiment as a concept compels us to analyse its numerous ‘entanglements’, which in turn challenge us to rethink the relationship between the ‘author’ and the ‘reader’ of military memoirs. Reflecting on my own work with these memoirs, and learning to pay attention to what I do and feel as I read and write, I chart a series of methods for reading and writing embodiment.

Gender and Counterinsurgency

This chapter provides an introduction to the relationship between gender and counterinsurgency. It demonstrates how gender dynamics are important to study as a means to fully understand the theory, doctrine and practice of counterinsurgency. It begins by explaining the core tenets of this form of warfare and its underlying colonial logics. Following this, it focuses in particular on recent ‘population-centric’ approaches to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and discusses its various manifestations of military masculinities, emphasising ‘cultural sensitivity’ and the recent invention of Female Engagement Teams.