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The Choir: Military Wives’ Durham E-Theses The Hero, The Monster, The Wife: Geographies of Remaking and Reclaiming the Contemporary Military Hero CREE, ALICE,SARAH,JEAN How to cite: CREE, ALICE,SARAH,JEAN (2018) The Hero, The Monster, The Wife: Geographies of Remaking and Reclaiming the Contemporary Military Hero, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12561/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The Hero The Monster The Wife Geographies of remaking and reclaiming the contemporary military ‘hero’ Alice Sarah Jean Cree Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography, Durham University 2017 Abstract Who is the military hero? What does he represent? And, how is he remade and brought into recognition? This thesis uses four diverse ‘sites of remaking’ to explore these questions, specifically drawing on the Plymouth military community theatre project Boots at the Door, the Invictus Games, Help for Heroes, and the Military Wives Choir. Using these sites, I argue that the remaking and reclaiming of the hero in the framing of war takes place through complex, spatially and temporally situated negotiations which mobilise not only the hero subject himself, but also his performative others. This research draws into conversation feminist theory from Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant with existing literature in critical military studies and political theory. Crucially, I argue that Butler’s (2009) analysis of the frame does not go far enough in telling us how it is that the frame might function. The research presented in this thesis helps to give texture and detail to our understanding of the framing of war, and allows us to consider how the hero might function within it as a deferred promise of happiness (Ahmed 2010). Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 3 List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... 9 List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................ 11 Statement of Copyright ................................................................................................... 13 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. 15 1. Narratives of Heroism and Sacrifice: An Introduction ................................................ 23 The Hero .......................................................................................................................... 23 The Monster ..................................................................................................................... 34 The Wife ........................................................................................................................... 35 Beyond the subjects of fantasy ........................................................................................ 39 Research Questions .......................................................................................................... 41 Chapter outline ................................................................................................................ 41 2. Framing the ‘hero’ ....................................................................................................... 47 Sovereign Heroes ............................................................................................................. 49 Frames of War: The ‘hero’ as sovereign subject .............................................................. 56 Militarism and “everyday practices of seeing and showing” ........................................ 63 The hero as a sovereign fantasy in the “promise of happiness”................................... 70 Sovereign Wives: Gender and “the promise” ............................................................... 75 The resistant subject: Breaking the frame ....................................................................... 81 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 86 3. Methods....................................................................................................................... 89 Sites of the hero ............................................................................................................... 91 Plymouth ...................................................................................................................... 93 The intimate, the prosaic, the mundane ...................................................................... 94 Boots at the Door ............................................................................................................. 95 Challenges .................................................................................................................... 98 Invictus Games and Help for Heroes ................................................................................ 99 Challenges .................................................................................................................. 100 The Military Wives Choir, Plymouth ............................................................................... 103 On “emotional fieldwork” .......................................................................................... 103 The comfort of things ................................................................................................. 110 5 Boredom and bad singing .......................................................................................... 111 Research with the military ............................................................................................. 114 The ethics of an emotional ‘military geography’ ............................................................ 117 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 119 4. Boots at the Door: Recovering the hero through theatre ........................................ 121 Recovery through Theatre ............................................................................................. 123 The Plymouth legacy project: Boots at the Door ........................................................... 124 The story of Boots at the Door ....................................................................................... 126 The process of making Boots at the Door ...................................................................... 126 What does it mean to “recover” .................................................................................... 129 Part 1: The sovereign subject ......................................................................................... 132 The sovereign space of performance ......................................................................... 132 Homer’s The Odyssey and the hero ........................................................................... 136 Penelope .................................................................................................................... 141 Part 2: The disrupted subject ......................................................................................... 145 No longer “my story my pain”: Community theatre and Boots at the Door .............. 147 Theatricality ............................................................................................................... 150 Humour ...................................................................................................................... 154 Ambiguity ................................................................................................................... 161 Unrecoverability ........................................................................................................ 164 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 174 5. [Techno]Heroes and Monsters.................................................................................. 177 The challenge of the wounded military body................................................................. 177 The remaking of the wounded hero .............................................................................. 184 Invictus and Performance .............................................................................................. 190 About the Invictus Games .......................................................................................... 191 Snapshot 1 – ‘Heroes triumphing at the Invictus Games’ .......................................... 193
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