[Commlist] Culture, Theory and Critique: special issue on militarization & pleasure

*/Culture, Theory and Critique: /*

*SPECIAL ISSUE ON MILITARIZATION & PLEASURE*

How do we enjoy our everyday militarization? This special issue will 
investigate the production, experiences, and problems of the pleasure 
that we derive from cultural products that uphold the values and logics 
of militarization and securitization. We contend, first, that cultural 
products and practices are actors embedded in global processes of empire 
and capital. Second, we observe that recent civil unrest and state 
responses to it have mademore people than ever aware that militarism 
plays a normalized and pleasurable role in their everyday life. Apart 
from the obvious extension of military culture and technology (i.e./Call 
of Duty,/personal drones, camouflage fashion), this special issue will 
explore less visible and non-obvious sites in which pleasure helps 
condition subjects to become complicit with their own and others’ 
militarization and the wider systems that enable it.

In other words, how can we, and/can we/, laugh with Brooklyn 99 and 
still attend Black Lives Matter rallies on the same day?

We plan to explore how pleasure is a channel through which 
militarization occurs in the rhythms and rituals of everyday life, 
including consumption, epistemologies and reasonings, desires, 
aesthetics, and more. This collection of essays will reflect on how 
militarization and pleasure queer and/or reinforce one another without 
seeking to resolve inherent contradictions or rationalize the messy 
affects of pleasure; we want to get into the intractably contradictory 
and complicit character of pleasure and explore potentialities for 
resistance. What can we/do/with the contradictory pleasures we find in 
militarized values, processes, and practices at work in our daily lives?

We ask whether and how we are surviving now inwhat Berlant (2011) calls 
“crisis ordinary”and imagine what it might mean to flourish and find joy 
amongst the “everywhere war” (Gregory 2011). This issue hopes to 
contribute nuanced understandings of the pleasure-militarization 
relationship, expand perceptions of militarized aesthetics, and theorize 
new modes of immanent critique and resistance that allow for pleasure 
without projecting fantasies of innocence or exceptionalism. We welcome 
contradictions and disagreements within this dialogue as long as we 
share the common aim to provide new theoretical vantage points on and 
terminologies for pleasure as a social catalyst that motivates desire, 
structures subjectivities, and obscures the militarization of the everyday.

Scholars from any humanities or social science discipline, especially 
those engaged in interdisciplinary work, are encouraged to contribute 
350-word abstracts with a short bio note 
to*(militarizingpleasure /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(militarizingpleasure /at/ gmail.com)>***by*1st April 2022.*Authors 
should expect a response by 1st May, and full articles will be due on 
September 1st for publication in early 2023 (or earlier online). We 
respect the unpredictable schedules and needs we all differently have 
and will try to make accommodations where possible. Authors needing 
extensions for the abstract and/or paper submission should contact the 
editors at the email address above.

We expect articles to fall into the three categories. Suggestions for 
papers could include but are not limited to:

1: What is Militarization to/in/with Pleasure Now?

  * Conceptualizations of the relationship between militarization and
    pleasure
  * Militarization with specific reference to pleasure & the ‘non-martial’
  * Methods and affirmations of knowing, discovery, & enquiry (e.g.
    ‘fake news’)
  * Confluence of identity politics and the relational roles of
    militarized subjects. How are subjects differently militarized due
    to race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.?

2: Immanent Critique: Implicated and Contradictory Subjects

  * Material cultures, food, domesticity, fashion, media/texts, & leisure
  * Everyday use of military medicine & diet and fitness practices
    (e.g., meal substitute drinks, ‘warrior fitness’)
  * Domesticized & democratized military technology (e.g., home
    surveillance tech, smartphones, Alexa)
  * Culture and aesthetics of and around sex and violence
  * Commodification of revolutionary aesthetics and language &
    performative activism

3: Policing Pleasure: Resistance, Unconscious and Conscious, to 
Militarization

  * Mutual aid, grassroots activism, & forms of protest (e.g. carnival,
    drag, Rest for Resistance)
  * Contestatory/activist texts, media, practices, & social media tactics
  * Forms of critique (e.g., trolling, satire, stand up comedy, memes)
  * Fictional and fantasy worlds: superheroes, speculative, and other
    sci-fi/fantasy forms

Alex Adams is an independent scholar based in the UK. He has written 
widely on securitization, torture, and drone warfare, and has published 
three monographs:/Political Torture in Popular Culture/(Routledge, 
2016),/How to Justify Torture/(Repeater, 2019), and/Death TV: Drone 
Warfare in Contemporary Popular Culture/(Drone Wars UK, 2021). He is 
currently working on/Godzilla: A Critical Demonology/, a critical work 
on Godzilla. See his website atadamswriting.com 
<http://atadamswriting.com> for more information.

Amy Gaeta is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies and Visual Cultures 
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Amy arranges aspects of 
disability studies and feminist technoscience studies to explore 
21st-century human-technology relations. Her dissertation,/Drone Life: A 
Feminist Crip Analysis of the Human/theorizes the drone as a prosthetic 
that is altering the human condition against the backdrop of AI, mass 
surveillance, automation, and endless war. Her scholarship has recently 
been published in the/Journal of Visual Culture/and the forthcoming 
edited collection/Drone Aesthetics/(Open Humanities Press).

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