Alex Adams and Amy Gaeta, ORCID

Centre for Drones and Culture, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK​

 

https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2024.2394417

Cambridge Repository: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.111571

Pages 1-18

Published online 10 October 2024

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Abstract

As power is everywhere, so is pleasure. Though we may be accustomed to understanding military violence and private pleasure as fundamentally separate, or at least as phenomena that seldom interact, this special issue contends that they are deeply interpenetrated in ways that reveal a great deal about contemporary culture, politics, and subjectivity. If one does think of pleasure and militarisation, perhaps the readiest to come to mind are the histories of depraved torture via sexual humiliation and the high rates of sexual abuse in the military, among other instances of the ways that explicit militarised violence is catalysed by pleasure. Rather than attend to pleasure as a weapon of war, however, for this special issue, we focus on the ways that militarisation is normalised, mobilised, felt, and imagined in the mundane sites in the civilian sphere. By collecting essays that explore the interaction of militarisation and pleasure in sites as diverse as cookbooks, video games, and anti-trans rhetoric, this special issue explores: What affective, consumptive, and sensorial regimes enable us to consider ourselves untouched by militarised infrastructures and state forces? How can we nonetheless sense our militarisation through sites of pleasure? How does militarisation function through our enjoyment?

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