WHO WE ARE: The Blurring of Gendered Subjectivities in 21st-Century British Military Promotion
by Kirsten A. Adkins
Abstract:
This essay is concerned with the framing and mediation of gendered soldier subjectivities in twenty-first century British military promotion. It enlists a deconstructed analysis of a 2018 army promotion film, aptly titled Who We Are, to propose that the visual aesthetics of blur produce a military subjectivity that is undecidable. In this short film, soldiers’ bodies are often defocused, missing, or absorbed into the landscape. Such blurred aesthetics exist amid a messy discourse that accompanies US and Allied military actions carried out in the interests of the war on terror—also characterized by an ambivalence surrounding its targets, location, and timescale. In this respect, the condition of blur connotes an instability associated with the image, the body, the subject, and the conceptual framing of war. Blur in this respect diffuses the possibility of injury or death that would be central to fixed representations of the heroic military figure. The recruit is barely a subject. The soldier’s body can hardly be lost, injured, or killed because they are framed as barely present in the first place.
Keywords: blur; sharp-focus; masculinity; identity; military recruitment, war
How to cite:
MLA (9th edition):
Adkins, Kirsten A. “WHO WE ARE: The Blurring of Gendered Subjectivities in 21st-Century British Military Promotion.” MAST, vol. 4, no. 1, Apr. 2023, pp. 62–85.
APA (7th edition):
Adkins, K. A. (2023). WHO WE ARE: The blurring of gendered subjectivities in 21st-century British military promotion. MAST, 4(1), 62–85.
Chicago (17th edition):
Adkins, Kirsten A. “WHO WE ARE: The Blurring of Gendered Subjectivities in 21st-Century British Military Promotion.” MAST 4, no. 1 (April 2023): 62–85.
Licensing:
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright:
Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and may reuse/republish their article as part of a book or other materials, providing acknowledgment is given to MAST as the original source and place of publication. Authors can also post a copy of their accepted/published article on their websites and on their Institutional repository, citing that the article was originally published in MAST.
© 2023 Kirsten A. Adkins
Issue: vol. 4 no. 1 (2023): Special Issue: Blurring Digital Media Culture
Section: Article
Guest Editors: Tony D. Sampson and Jernej Markelj
Author: Kirsten A. Adkins
Submitted: Aug 20, 2022
Accepted: Feb 1st, 2023
Published: 26 April, 2023
