Queering civil-military relations: the cultural work of recognition, recovery, and reproduction

Despite spanning a variety of disciplinary approaches, research on civil-military relations (CMR) has not critically engaged with the binary that defines it. Instead, it essentializes ‘civil’ and ‘military’ within an oppositional binary that governs research and separates a distinct ‘us’ from ‘them’. Reading these patterns within CMR as a failure of imagination, this thesis identifies a need for critical-theoretical work to queer the civil-military binary. In denaturalizing the binary, this project identifies cultural work — cultural products and social relations — as the labour which reproduces and sustains it. Empirically, it focuses on American and British cultural work around the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, understanding queer civil-military identities, including the veteran, as a strategic site for theorising CMR. Portraying a dynamic civil-military-relations-in-the-making, the project centres three types of cultural work: recognition, recovery, and reproduction. Specifically, it analyses military medals and stolen valour, forces charities, and war writing. Such cultural work, which templates social relations, unstably produces civil-military and coheres around figurations of military and civil as hero and/or victim and saved and/or saviour, respectively. The project’s analysis reveals that individuals and discourses which are made to be civil and military in cultural work cannot be accommodated in a binary logic. A queerness emerges that is crucial to the contemporary character of CMR. The project makes three main contributions. First, in queering civil-military relations it provides a critical-theoretical conceptualization of contemporary CMR to CMR literature. Second, it joins a growing Queer IR literature that deconstructs essentialised subjects and binaries, and so issues a challenge to dominant theories of CMR. Finally, in embracing cultural work, the thesis offers an account of CMR that provides a basis to question the civil-military binary. Putting either ‘us’ or ‘them’ aside, what futures can ‘us’ and/or ‘them’ identify and enable?