Sovereign Wives? An Emotional Politics of Precarity and Resistance in the UK's Military Wives Choir

Abstract

Abstract This article provides a feminist analysis of the politics of vulnerability and resistance at work in the UK's Military Wives Choir. Military spouses represent vulnerable and “militarized subjects,” providing countless forms of unpaid labor in service of the military that range from the material labor of childcare to representational work in popular culture and everyday life. And yet as scholars of critical military studies and international politics, we so often fall short in our exploration of how military spouses engage with the militaristic processes in which they are embroiled. Indeed, work on the critical and resistant capacity of military wives as political agents is in particularly short supply. This article will use the example of the Military Wives Choir to argue that rather than seeing military wives simply as vulnerable militarized subjects without the capacity for resistance, it is in and through this vulnerability that the possibility of resistance can appear. As such, this work speaks to broader questions regarding the sites in which militarization occurs; even the most militarized of spaces and bodies do not necessarily only provide the preconditions for the emergence of military power. Rather, there is always the possibility for something more.