The Military Mobilities of Army Wives
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by LSE Theses Online The London School of Economics and Political Science Inhabiting No-Man’s-Land: The Military Mobilities of Army Wives Alexandra Hyde Thesis submitted to the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy London, April 2015 1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 68,080 words. 2 Abstract This research is an ethnography of a British Army regiment from the perspective of women married to servicemen. Its aim is to question wives’ power and positionality vis-à-vis the military institution and consider the implications for how to understand the everyday operation of military power. The project is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on and around a regimental camp in Germany during a period when the regiment’s soldiers were also deployed in Afghanistan. As social relations are spun across multiple times and spaces, it analyses women’s negotiation of presence and absence, home and away, and distance and proximity. Women married to servicemen emerge as mobile subjects, whose gendered labour and identities serve to trouble the boundary between the military and civilian ‘spheres’. The research explores multiple conditions for women’s encounters with military presence on a day-to-day basis, from the mandate for international migration and the regiment’s production of social cohesion, to the formal hierarchy of rank and the temporal and spatial registers of an operational tour. The analysis highlights the dependence of these structures on a military-sexual division of labour, at the same time as women can be argued to mobilise social, cultural and discursive resources to appropriate or transcend the place they are allocated in a military social order. It is in this sense that they might be argued to bargain with the terms of their militarisation. 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank the people who participated in this research, and the Regimental community as a whole for welcoming me so openly. The requirement for anonymity demands that my gratitude be articulated by reference to people’s everyday acts of kindness rather than their names, but this seems somehow fitting for the kind of project this was. Thanks then to the women who ran spinning classes in the gym, without their hard work to create a social space that was energising and dynamic, my absorption into camp life would have been much slower. Thanks to all those who invited me for dinner, who provided home- made soup over interviews, who included me in book club, pottery parties, dinner plans and nights out and provided an escape from my barrack room. Thanks to one woman and her husband in particular, who provided valued friendship and also transported my bicycle, the beloved Alpina, back to the UK. Thanks also to them and others for allowing me to house-sit while they were away, entrusting their pets to my care and offering me some restorative sense of normality in the process. I would also like to thank those members of the Sergeants’ Mess who accommodated my presence at dinner every night and shared stories and advice on many quirks of regimental culture. In particular, I would like to thank the three members of the Mess whom I interviewed, and who helped me settle in with humour and sensitivity. Finally, I would like to thank the one member of the Sergeants’ Mess who was a woman, and whose insights and wry observations provided me with some sense of solidarity! I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the staff of the welfare office. My thanks to the welfare clerk for helping me get to grips with my new life on camp, for inviting me into her family life, and for starting the house-sitting trend. My thanks to the welfare senior for his time and energy facilitating my research, but also for providing some of the most astute and articulate observations about life with the regiment throughout my stay. Thanks also to him and his wife for the release and relief of hysterical laughter. Finally, I would like to thank the welfare officer, who was committed to working with integrity and respect, and who approached me and my project with the same. He helped me to navigate some of the trickier social dynamics of fieldwork, while also helping me to make sense of some of my observations. I have relied on many of his perceptive thoughts and ideas throughout my fieldwork and beyond, and it was a privilege to be a small part of his last year in the Army. I am grateful to the Officer in Command of the Regiment’s Rear Operations Group, who made clear the Regiment’s duty of care for my own wellbeing while I was on camp. Thanks also to the Regimental Sergeant Major for overseeing the dynamics of my presence in the Mess. Finally, I would like to thank the Commanding Officer of the Regiment for supporting my research and permitting it to take place during his command, and for welcoming me in his own inimitable style. Thanks in equal measure however, must go to the woman who took up her own active role and interest in the Regiment as well as the Colonel, and who supported my project throughout. Finally, I would like to thank the Colonel in Chief of the Regiment for granting permission for this research to take place, and as such, for acknowledging the importance of the issues and experiences it documents. Finally, none of this would have been possible without the support of the Regimental Secretary. He and his wife provided background information and advice that helped me 4 shape the scope and aims of my project. He facilitated meetings and guided me through the protocols, advocating on my behalf to facilitate this extraordinary level of access. I am indebted to him for making this research possible, for trusting me with his own cherished Regiment, and I am so very pleased to count him as a member of my family. My fieldwork for this project was intense but relatively short compared to the years based at the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My PhD studentship provided the financial support necessary to even contemplate taking this path into academic life. More than this however, my gratitude goes to the members of faculty at the Gender Institute who create an open and stimulating atmosphere that allows research to fulfil its potential. I would like to thank all the students and faculty who read various drafts of chapters throughout my time as a PhD student. In particular, I would like to thank Harriet Gray, a colleague and friend whose own work I deeply admire, with whom it has been a pleasure to work while we conduct our own projects and explore the connections between them. I would also like to thank Hazel Johnstone MBE, Departmental Manager, who went along with my optimism even when it was delusional, and has been a steadying source of wisdom. I would also like to thank Clare Hemmings for advising on my thesis and much beyond it: for taking an interest in my work more generally and reading tangential things, and for stepping in with frank and honest advice. During my PhD I received generous funding from LSE for a semester at Columbia University in New York. My thanks to Tina Campt at Barnard College, not only for her refreshing feedback on a chapter of my thesis, but also for taking me beyond its reach and providing new inspiration. Finally, I would like to thank Marsha Henry for her steadying, reassuring and encouraging presence throughout my PhD. I have been incredibly fortunate to find a supervisor whose expertise relates so closely to what I want to achieve with my own work, and whose own analytics have pushed me in thrilling new directions. I am grateful for the career opportunities she has facilitated, and for the exposure to different academic networks she has encouraged. This mapping of a field, and the guidance and opportunities I have received in navigating it, has been as much a part of gathering knowledge as writing this thesis. Finally, my thanks to Marsha as a friend as well as a supervisor and colleague, and for providing the kind of support and reassurance that was personal as well as professional. At the absolute centre of my support network are Katherine Natanel and Guy Natanel, to whom I owe love and thanks for the creative ideas and life-affirming perspective they both provide. Through her sensitivity and skill as a mentor, as well as her own knowledge and analytical voice, Katherine Natanel has forged ahead and illuminated the path I have tried to follow. Her critical insights and feedback on chapters so often gets right to the core of things, to her I owe an intellectual debt for opening up and sustaining the creativity of writing.