The body at war: wounds, wounding and the wounded

Abstract

This issue looks back, on the one hand, to some of the founding work undertaken by the research group GWACS1 (Group for War and Culture Studies, the research impetus from which the Journal of War and Culture Studies sprang), and looks forward, on the other, to themes and approaches that will be developed in the future in the pages of this journal. The subject of the body at war is indeed a vast one, and one which has received increasing attention over the past few decades. Elaine Scarry’s extraordinarily wide-ranging meditation on the vulnerability of the human body (1985) has provided a blueprint for many researchers in the field. Her focus on ‘the difficulty of expressing physical pain; [...] the political and perceptual complications that arise as a result of that difficulty; and [...] the nature of both material and verbal expressibility, or more simply, the nature of human creation’ (Scarry 1985: 3), provides a compelling portrait of the imbrication of the political with the cultural, of the ways in which the ‘making and unmaking of the world’ are enacted through the body in pain. Joanna Bourke’s hugely influential work on the impact of the First World War on the male body and masculinities, Dismembering the Male (1996), refocused attention towards the social constructions of wartime masculinities, thereby eschewing easy assumptions about the links between virility and war. She shows, through thematic studies of mutilation, malingering, bonding, inspection and re-memberment, that the experience of war ‘fundamentally affected not only the shape and texture of the male body, but also the values ascribed to the body and the disciplines applied to masculinity’ (Bourke 1996: 30). The articles in this issue build upon this work, each demonstrating, in different ways, how ‘culture’ (in its myriad forms) has reacted to the impact of war on the human body. They discuss a number of themes relating to the body at war: the act of wounding, the repair of wounds, the representation of the wounded, the wounded body as metaphor, legacies of war and wounding. In turn these themes open up further areas of enquiry: the purposes and ethics of military training, war and the subversion of gender roles, the political and social functions of the veteran, national narratives of war, and the transmission of memories and legacies of war. In her article, ‘Painful bodies and brutal women’, Carden-Coyne demonstrates how the wounded body forces a renegotiation of archetypal gender roles. As Susan Sontag has noted, there is shame as well as shock