Abstract
The emotional cycle of deployment theorized by Logan and adapted by Pincus, House, Christenson, and Alder is often applied by academics and military support agencies to define, explain, and provide advice on the experiences and possible emotional reactions of military families during phases of deployment. Interviews with army partners showed that spatiotemporal experiences and perspectives are more complex than those afforded by the emotional cycle of deployment. This article argues that applying the concept of liminality uncovers some of this complexity, illuminating the in-between times experienced during deployments that are otherwise hidden. Army partners move through and between deployments and deployment phases haunted by specters of past and future deployments. By disrupting seemingly chronological and discrete spatiotemporal narratives, which often frame research on military families and deployment, this article demonstrates how army partners move through and between deployments and deployment stages negotiating past and future deployments. It shows how they continuously adapt and evolve practices while negotiating interpreted pasts and imagined futures in pursuit of becoming “ideal.”
Highlights
The emotional cycle of deployment theorized by Logan and adapted by Pincus, House, Christenson, and Alder is often applied by academics and military support agencies to define, explain, and provide advice on the experiences and possible emotional reactions of military families during phases of deployment
This is exemplified by the “emotional cycle of deployment” model, adapted by Pincus et al (2001), organizing deployment into stages: “predeployment,” “deployment,” “sustainment,” “redeployment,” and “postdeployment.” Through thematic analysis of interviews with 26 army partners, this article demonstrates how this model, which relies on a chronological conception of discrete times, is limited in its utility of framing experiences of time around deployment
Role handover is cursory postdeployment as partners maintain a state of readiness for imagined future deployments, a strategy often learned from previous separations
Summary
The emotional cycle of deployment, theorized by Logan (1987), is a model outlining U.S Navy wives’ experiences of deployment It has been adapted since, notably by U.S military psychiatrists (Pincus et al, 2001) who extended the model’s application to military family members across all services. Faber et al (2008) looked at how partners of U.S reservists experienced the absence of their serving partner They considered Boss’ (2007) concept of ambiguous presence—when a family member is perceived as physically present but psychologically absent—to show how families experience loss outside of the deployment stage. They focused on the postdeployment phase, but the concept of ambiguous presence can be applied across deployment stages and beyond to further complexify the model. The model presents deployment as something which happens as military phenomena, but it is made possible through the labor of nonserving partners
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