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: Adkins, Kirsten A. “WHO WE ARE: The Blurring of Gendered Subjectivities in 21st-Century British Military Promotion.” MAST, vol. 4, no. 1, April. 2023, pp. 62-85.
Copyright is retained by the authors.
© 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
Published: 26 April, 2023
