Bringing the Military Home: ‘Troubling’ Relationships
By: Maria Rashid (she/her/hers)
When we think of women engaged in the labour of war, we tend to imagine women in army uniforms enlisted as soldiers in industrial modern militaries. And yet, the wives and mothers of soldiers have always been directly implicated in war through practices of social reproduction and emotional labour that is involved in the sustaining the soldiers that serve in these wars. In fact, it is a trend that is on the rise. In the US, for example, the family – especially spouses, a euphemistic reference to military wives and the affective, gendered labour expected from them – are increasingly enlisted to support the mental health of troops returning from combat. To see how gendered and affective logics sustain militarism requires attention to the realm of relationships within military households as a site to understand how militarism and its geopolitical extensions find their way into the intimate and the everyday.
In this blog, I draw upon my recently published article in the IFJP, Precarious Attachments: Soldiers and Erasures of the Feminine in the Pakistan Military, to complicate the notion of emotional labor in military households in Pakistan. I foreground this labor as precarious, ambivalent and constantly negotiated between soldiers, military wives and mothers, and the military institution itself. These enabling yet fragile relationships between the soldier and his female kin are intimate sites to understand how military power and gender work with and through each other to enable and potentially destabilize war making.
Soldiering in the Pakistan military is configured through ghosts of the colony, conditions of rurality as well as local patriarchal relations. Military service for the enlisted class in Pakistan can mean time and lives away from the family for extended periods in terrains and under regimes of living that are far removed from rural homes. Mothers and wives of soldiers represent competing aspirations, loyalties and subjectivities that lie outside the institution and their ambiguity in the project of war is even more pronounced in armies of the global south that may not accommodate these women physically within military spaces.
Attachments within these military homes are premised on ideas of precariousness, a disjuncture that can be better understood through the prism of the military institution’s own complicated relationship with the female subject. The silences and disconnects in the attachments between soldiers and their mothers and wives can be traced to the formation of the soldier and the training regimes that require a shift in the domains of feeling and belonging. This shift is achieved through a crafting distance with earlier objects of love and a disenchantment with the notion of the feminine (other). The feminine and the female subject must be continuously banished if the soldier is to stay in service, stay obedient and commit to violence. The disconnection and the erasures experienced by the soldiers are necessary and actively desired by both the military and by the soldier to enable the destruction and violence of war. Silencing within relationships allows for distance between harrowing memories of combat and life back home. Severing connection with the feminine through protectionist tropes of the weak female members shielded from the realities of soldiering, the sight, smell and horror of battle both in terms of what soldiers suffer and the acts of violence they commit, secures their service and allows them to function within homes. As such, the absences so pronounced in the relationships of soldiers with the women in their lives are to be understood not as an unfortunate effect of soldiering and its demands. These erasures of being and attachment are a deliberate product and requirement of military training and service and need to be understood as the essence of processes that create soldier-subjects.
In my article, I suggest that the spectre of the over-attached soldier-subject swayed by disruptive family connections obligations is ever present within the military imagination in Pakistan. There are points of time when the soldier hints at a continual enchantment, fissures that betray a desire for reversion back to the feminine. These moments challenge the notion of female partners of soldiers as enablers for militarism, and set up a feminist provocation to the war project, where the feminine and relationships with wives and mothers can potentially and in some cases does disrupt soldiering. A look at the everyday lives of those implicated as labor in the project of war reveals that the workings of military power remain unstable and forever in flux.
Read the full article here: Precarious Attachments: Soldiers and Erasures of the Feminine in the Pakistan Military
Each blog post gives the views of the individual author(s) based on their published IFJP article. All posts published on ifjpglobal.org remain the intellectual property and copyright of the author or authors.
Maria Rashid is a post-doctoral scholar at University College London, United Kingdom. Her book Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice was published in 2020 by Stanford University Press and was shortlisted for the IPS-International Political Sociology Book Award, 2021, and for the BASAS-British Association for South Asian Studies book prize in 2022. Rashid is involved in training and research around violence, gender and militarism.