Grieving Dead Soldiers, Disavowing Loss: Cindy Sheehan and The Im/possibility of the American Antiwar Movement

Abstract

The article investigates the conditions of emergence of Cindy Sheehan (mother of soldier killed in Iraq) as a spokesperson of the American antiwar movement and its so-called ‘spark.’ It interrogates the emotional pull of the current ‘support the troops’ rhetoric and the usurpation of this and other patriotic signs and symbols by various antiwar groups as both a constraint on the realm of legitimate dissent and an enabling condition of intelligible subject formation – with particular attention given to the figure of the grieving mom. This article argues that the sympathetic, albeit tenuous, identification with this figure emerged through a simultaneous psychic identification with and disavowal of loss – with implications for the possibility and impossibility of dissent in the aftermath of 9/11.