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Joy and war: Reading pleasure in wartime experiences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2018

Julia Welland Open the ORCID record for Julia Welland [Opens in a new window]
Julia Welland*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, War Studies and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
*
*Correspondence to: Julia Welland, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL. Author’s email: J.Welland@warwick.ac.uk
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Abstract

In recent years there has been a ‘turn’ to thinking about war through the experiences of those touched by it. While this scholarship has generated numerous important insights, its focus has tended to remain on wars’ violences, those responsible for enacting them, and the effects of such violence. In this article, the experiences of pleasure and joy in war that simultaneously take place are placed centre stage. Drawing on three war novels, the article tracks three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences related to war: bodily pleasures, the ‘togetherness’ of war, and moments of joy that escape war’s reach. Through this focus, war is shown to work across a range of affective registers and as never totalising or universalising in its experience. The article argues that paying attention to joy and pleasure can work to displace war as a focus of analysis, directing attention instead to the experiences of those who live through war and how they survive, sustain, and resist it.

Keywords

ExperienceJoyEmotionsWarNovelsFeminism
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 438 - 455
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2018 

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References

1 Parashar, Swati, ‘What wars and “war bodies” know about International Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:4 (2013), pp. 615–630 (p. 619)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Hedges, Chris, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), p. 6 Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Sylvester, Christine (ed.), Experiencing War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Sylvester, Christine, War as Experience (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Basham, Victoria, War, Identity and the Liberal State: Everyday Experiences of the Geopolitical in the Armed Forces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Parashar, Swati, Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar; and Dyvik, Synne L., Gendering Counterinsurgency: Performativity, Embodiment and Experience in the Afghan ‘Theatre of War’ (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar.

4 It is not my intention here to imply there is a coherent and bounded school of scholars who ‘do’ experiential research. Rather, I am pointing to a range of contemporary (and predominantly feminist) scholars who have placed the everyday, embodied, emotional, and affective experiences of war at the centre of their research.

5 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 1.

6 Ibid., p. 3.

7 Christine Sylvester, cited in Dyvik, Synne L., ‘“Valhalla Rising”: Gender, embodiment and experience in military memoirs’, Security Dialogue, 47:2 (2016), pp. 133–150 (p. 135)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For a notable exception, see Pentinnen, Elina, Joy and International Relations: A New Methodology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar.

9 A range of emotions, it should be noted, that many of the ‘experiential scholars’ mentioned previously take account of themselves. Parashar, ‘What wars’; Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War; and Dyvik ‘“Valhalla Rising”’ all recognise that as a site of international politics, war is productive of a range of experiences, including those of excitement, celebration, and joy. What I am concerned with in this article is what happens when war is understood as not only productive of these experiences and emotions, but what happens when they are placed at the centre of analysis.

10 With thanks to Paul Kirby for this particular list of meanings and affects.

11 Pentinnen, Joy and International Relations, p. 4.

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17 Pentinnen, Joy and International Relations, p. 62.

18 Ibid., pp. 62–3.

19 Lisle, ‘Waiting for international political sociology’, p. 423.

20 Ibid., p. 424.

21 Ibid.

22 Pentinnen, Joy and International Relations, p. 13.

23 Ibid., p. 8.

24 Ibid., p. 16.

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27 See Duncanson, Claire, Forces for Good? Military Masculinities and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)Google Scholar and Dyvik, ‘“Valhalla Rising”’.

28 Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, p. 3.

29 Sebastian Junger, cited in Crane-Seeber, ‘Sexy warriors’, p. 41.

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32 Åhäll and Gregory, ‘Concluding reflection’, p. 230.

33 Cerwyn Moore and Laura J. Shepherd, cited in Åhäll and Gregory, ‘Concluding reflection’, p. 230, their emphasis.

34 Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, p. 25; see also Bleiker, Roland and Hutchinson, Emma, ‘Fear no more: Emotions and world politics’, Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), pp. 115–135 (p. 132)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism, p. 29.

36 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War.

37 Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, p. 39.

38 One very notable exception to this is, of course, Cynthia Enloe’s significant body of research – for a selection see: Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989); Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (London: University of California Press, 2000); The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (London: University of California Press, 2004) on the everyday militarisation of women’s lives in which she traverses munitions factories, garment factories, and the private quarters of diplomat’s residences in order to uncover the tangle of gendered power relations at the heart of the international political system.

39 Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism, p. 216.

40 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 119. It is worth noting at this point that I am not claiming that war novels or fiction are an unmediated way to ‘access’ war or war experiences. Like any form of representation, fiction is profoundly mediated, with novels in particular often written – and thus marked – by those who have the time, education, and resources to devote to writing and publishing. Rather, my decision to turn to fiction comes from its attention to the personal, the everyday, and the emotional.

41 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 119, emphasis added.

42 See Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases; Alison, Miranda, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; MacKenzie, Megan, Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, Security, and Post-Conflict Development (New York: New York University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Parashar, Women and Militant Wars.

43 Pentinnen, Joy and International Relations, p. 7.

44 Thanks to Sanna Strand who encouraged me to think through my use of the term ‘war experience’.

45 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 100.

46 Ibid.

47 One of the anonymous reviewers to this piece noted that while there is often a lot of sex in war novels, it is rarely about relaxed pleasure seeking. While I agree with this observation in part, my concern here is not with sex in war novels per se, but rather, the ways in which the characters in the three novels I discuss engage in sexual relations and their apparent bodily enjoyment of them. Further, while I very much agree with the reviewer’s comment that sex in war can be about ‘distraction, power, [a] release of tension’, I would argue that this is not necessarily or always mutually exclusive to its pleasures and enjoyments.

48 Zoe Norridge, ‘Sex as synecdoche: Intimate languages of violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love’, Research in African Literatures, 43:2 (2012), pp. 18–39 (p. 21).

49 Norridge, ‘Sex as synecdoche’, p. 28.

50 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), pp. 307–308 Google Scholar.

51 Ibid., pp. 391–2.

52 Ibid., p. 392.

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56 Ibid., p. 12.

57 Ibid., p. 123.

58 Ibid., p. 232.

59 Ibid., p. 244.

60 Ibid., p. 185.

61 McNeill, William H., Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2 Google Scholar.

62 Dyvik, ‘“Valhalla Rising”’, p. 143.

63 Ibid.

64 See Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991)Google Scholar; Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997)Google Scholar; Nakamura, Jeanne and Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, ‘The concept of flow’, in C. R. Snyder and S. J. Lopez (eds), Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 89–105 Google Scholar; and Harari, Yuval N., ‘Combat flow: Military, political, and ethical dimensions of subjective well-being in war’, Review of General Psychology, 12:3 (2008), pp. 253–264 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, ‘The concept of flow’, p. 90.

66 Harari, ‘Combat flow’, p. 253.

67 Ibid., p. 254.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid., p. 257.

70 Dyvik, ‘“Valhalla Rising”’, p. 144.

71 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 107.

72 Anam, Tahima, A Golden Age (London: Canongate, 2012), p. 102 Google Scholar.

73 Anam, A Golden Age, p. 103.

74 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 123.

75 Ibid., p. 124.

76 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 107.

77 Ibid., p. 108.

78 Anam, A Golden Age, p. 52.

79 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, pp. 162–3.

80 Ibid., p. 171.

81 Dyvik, ‘“Valhalla Rising”’, p. 143, emphasis in original.

82 Welland, Julia, ‘Militarised violences, basic training and the “myths” of asexuality and discipline’, Review of International Studies, 39:4 (2013), pp. 881–902 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitworth, Sandra, Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping (London: Lynne Rienner, 2004)Google Scholar.

83 See Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006)Google Scholar.

84 Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014 [orig. pub. 2004])Google Scholar.

85 Stewart, Kathleen, Ordinary Affects (London: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 44.

87 It should be noted that both Ahmed and Stewart use the term ‘body’ to mean not just human bodies, but ‘human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise’. See Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory, ‘Introduction: Mapping emotions, politics and war’, in Åhäll and Gregory (eds), Emotions, Politics and War, pp. 1–14 (p. 6).

88 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 4. It is worth noting here that while for some writing within the field of ‘affect studies’ a clear distinction can be made between ‘emotions’ and ‘affects’. See Clough, Patricia (ed.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory J. (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, with emotions remaining within the realm of language and discourse, and affects as ‘non-conscious, non-subjective or pre-personal’ (Åhäll and Gregory, ‘Introduction’, p. 5). I follow Ahmed [The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Afterword] in her scepticism of a clear-cut distinction between emotion and affect. For Ahmed, the claims made by some in the affect literature who argue that the ‘turn’ to affect has qualitatively shifted understanding erases the insights and contributions of feminist and queer work that has consistently challenged the mind-body dualism some affect theorists claim to have newly transcended. As such, Ahmed is uninterested in distinguishing emotions and affects as different aspects of experience, and while her own theorisation makes use of the term ‘emotion’ – ‘because it is the term used in everyday life to describe what I wanted to give an account of’: Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 207 – it ‘involve[s] bodily processes of affecting and being affected’ (ibid., p. 208).

89 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 45.

90 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, p. 128.

91 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 45.

92 Ibid., p. 45.

93 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 107.

94 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 245.

95 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War, p. 107.

96 See Steven Morris, ‘British army is targeting working-class young people, report shows’, The Guardian (9 July 2017), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/09/british-army-is-targeting-working-class-young-people-report-shows} accessed 3 November 2017.

97 Whitworth, Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping, p. 158; see also Harrison, D. and Laliberté, L., No Life Like It: Military Wives in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1994)Google Scholar.

98 See, for example, Razack, Sherene, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Richter-Montpetit, Melanie, ‘Empire, desire and violence: a queer transnational feminist reading of the prisoner “abuse” in Abu Ghraib and the question of “gender equality”’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 9:1 (2007), pp. 38–59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Welland, ‘Militarised violences’.

99 Brown and Pentinnen, ‘“A sucking chest wound …”’.

100 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 347.

101 Ibid., p. 295.

102 Whitworth, Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping.

103 Duncanson, Claire, Forces for Good? Military Masculinities and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)Google Scholar.

104 Norridge, ‘Sex as synecdoche’, p. 19.

105 Anam, A Golden Age, p. 147.

106 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 273.

107 Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You, p. 163.

108 Anam, A Golden Age, p. 142.

109 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 333.

110 Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You, p. 157.

111 Anam, A Golden Age, pp. 99–100.

112 Berlant, Lauren, ‘Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency)’, Critical Inquiry, 33:4 (2007), pp. 754–780 (p. 759)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 Ibid., p. 759.

114 Lisle, ‘Waiting for international political sociology’, p. 426.

115 Åhäll and Gregory, ‘Concluding reflection’.

116 Bleiker, Roland, ‘Learning from art: a reply to Holden’s “World Literature and World Politics”’, Global Society, 17:4 (2003), pp. 415–428 (p. 417)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

117 Pentinnen, Joy and International Relations, p. 108; see also Chan, ‘On the uselessness of new wars theory’.

118 Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, p. 39.

119 Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing War.