As Razack suggests, depoliticisation constitutes “a determined look away from anything systemic” (2004: 152). Depoliticising processes work by the encircling of a difficult event or experience as separate and exceptional; as somehow removed from the normal processes through which the political body is constructed (Edkins 2003: 17). Depoliticisation thus refers to processes by which the structural, political nature of a given social issue is disguised, removing the rationale for political engagement with it. Klinenberg (2004) usefully highlights this in his study of the deaths which occurred during the 1995 Chicago heat-wave. For Klinenberg, particular groups of Chicagoans were exposed to serious danger when the heat-wave hit because of the underlying structural violence which made their lives precarious on an everyday basis (see Chapter Six). However, this precarity was obscured, he suggests, by the discourses of individual responsibility employed by the city’s authorities in response to the soaring temperatures. In Klinenberg’s example, the political issue of the social inequalities which produced particular Chicagoans as vulnerable to the harms of the heat-wave was masked by depoliticising discourses which cast their experiences in separated and individualised terms - as atypical rather than systemic - and which therefore undermined the basis for political analysis and intervention. Similarly, as I illustrate in this chapter, narratives which cast domestic abuse as an exceptional, individual problem serve to obscure the gendered social inequalities which underpin abuse. Moreover, they also serve to obscure the gender-based social forces - both structural and discursive - which shape responses to domestic abuse, as explored in the previous two chapters. If domestic abuse is approached on an individualised basis, its occurrence does not imply any need to analyse or to work to challenge gendered social inequalities, and the political structures which underpin it are thus left unquestioned.
Whilst the forces which depoliticise abuse within the British military community are important and worthy of analysis for their own sake, and are the focus of this chapter, I suggest that analysis of these processes can shed light on the ways in which militarism in the broader sense is subject to depoliticisation. Militaries themselves, of course, are political spaces; politics are implicated not just in the specific acts of violence that militaries undertake at a particular time, but in their very existence as institutions established to exert dominance through violence. The processes which depoliticise militarism are myriad, and include, for example, certain geographical imaginaries (Dalby 2013) as well as the assumption of a rigid civil-military divide (Basham 2013: 21-23). Militarism is also depoliticised through recourse to gendered norms; as Peterson argues, the naturalisation and widespread social acceptance of the superiority of the masculine over the
174 feminine within the binary system of gender plays an important role in the construction of “war stories” which normalise and legitimate acts of war. Subordinated or enemy groups are feminised and thus devalued; and the appropriate response to such feminised groups, whether for the purposes of protection or of control, subsequently requires a masculinised response. “This conveniently justifies both the necessity of rule and who should rule” (Peterson 2010: 20). Militarism writ large is also depoliticised through processes of scaling which, as discussed in Chapter Four, separate the everyday gendered processes which underpin it from its more dramatic enactments of violence on the geo-political stage. Experiences cast as individual are deemed irrelevant to understanding the large-scale events of war, and broad political structures are deemed irrelevant to understanding personal everyday experiences such as gendered performance. When connections between the ‘the normal’ and ‘the extraordinary’ are thus erased, opportunities for political analysis of the co-constitutive processes at work across these sites, for recognition of the rootedness of the extraordinary in the normal and opportunities for effective strategies to counter them are lost, and militarism is naturalised.
Domestic abuse within the military community, as a site at which gendered power and militarism clearly intersect, provides a potential avenue for political work to denaturalise militarism. This is because paying political attention to the ways in which the precarious status of civilian women married to British servicemen shapes their experiences of abuse could allow us to identify and to problematise some of the militarised gendered relations and enactments which structure the everyday lives of military families. Given the co-constitutive relationship between the logics of militarism as it operates in all contexts from the intimate everyday to the geopolitical, such an analysis would present a powerful opportunity for highlighting and undermining the often unspoken everyday assumptions through which the use of violence, both within intimate relations and on the geo-political stage, becomes possible. The analysis of military abuse presented in this thesis thus works to resist the encirculation of difficult or traumatic experiences and events as separate from the linear stories of national mythology, highlighting the socially and politically constituted pain which underpins the normal (Edkins 2003: 17). Despite the potential which is thus inherent in analyses of military abuse for identifying and challenging militarism’s political construction, when abuse within military communities is not interpreted in this way but is actively depoliticised, which, as I show in this chapter, is commonly the case, it is part of the wider processes through which the gendered basis of militarism itself is normalised and depoliticised.
175