Who We Are: the blurring of gendered subjectivities in 21st-century British military promotion

Adkins, K. A. (2023) Who We Are: the blurring of gendered subjectivities in 21st-century British military promotion. MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, 4(1), pp. 62-85. (doi: 10.59547/26911566.4.1.04)

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Adkins, Dr Kirsten
• Authors: Adkins, K. A.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies
• Journal Name: MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory
• Publisher: The Northeast Modern Language Association
• ISSN: 2691-1566
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Author
• First Published: First published in MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory 4(1):62-85
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License