[csaa-forum] Culture, Theory and Critique: SPECIAL ISSUE ON MILITARIZATION & PLEASURE

[Culture Theory and Critique]

Hello,

*Culture, Theory and Critique *is excited to announce the following CFP for
a Special Issue on Militarization and Pleasure, guest edited by Amy Gaeta
and Alex Adams. Abstracts (350 words) are due April 1, 2022.

Please find the full details copied below.

Best,

Culture, Theory and Critique

*Professor Greg Hainge*
*Editor in Chief*
*Culture, Theory and Critique*

<https://www.facebook.com/CTCJournal>    <https://twitter.com/CTCJournal>

*Culture, Theory and Critique: *

*SPECIAL ISSUE ON MILITARIZATION & PLEASURE*

How do we enjoy our everyday militarization? This special issue will
investigate the production, experiences, and problems of the pleasure that
we derive from cultural products that uphold the values and logics of
militarization and securitization. We contend, first, that cultural
products and practices are actors embedded in global processes of empire
and capital. Second, we observe that recent civil unrest and state
responses to it have made more people than ever aware that militarism plays
a normalized and pleasurable role in their everyday life. Apart from the
obvious extension of military culture and technology (i.e. *Call of
Duty,* personal
drones, camouflage fashion), this special issue will explore less visible
and non-obvious sites in which pleasure helps condition subjects to become
complicit with their own and others’ militarization and the wider systems
that enable it.

In other words, how can we, and *can we*, laugh with Brooklyn 99 and still
attend Black Lives Matter rallies on the same day?



We plan to explore how pleasure is a channel through which militarization
occurs in the rhythms and rituals of everyday life, including consumption,
epistemologies and reasonings, desires, aesthetics, and more. This
collection of essays will reflect on how militarization and pleasure queer
and/or reinforce one another without seeking to resolve inherent
contradictions or rationalize the messy affects of pleasure; we want to get
into the intractably contradictory and complicit character of pleasure and
explore potentialities for resistance. What can we *do* with the
contradictory pleasures we find in militarized values, processes, and
practices at work in our daily lives?

We ask whether and how we are surviving now in what Berlant (2011) calls
“crisis ordinary” and imagine what it might mean to flourish and find joy
amongst the “everywhere war” (Gregory 2011). This issue hopes to contribute
nuanced understandings of the pleasure-militarization relationship, expand
perceptions of militarized aesthetics, and theorize new modes of immanent
critique and resistance that allow for pleasure without projecting
fantasies of innocence or exceptionalism. We welcome contradictions and
disagreements within this dialogue as long as we share the common aim to
provide new theoretical vantage points on and terminologies for pleasure as
a social catalyst that motivates desire, structures subjectivities, and
obscures the militarization of the everyday.



Scholars from any humanities or social science discipline, especially those
engaged in interdisciplinary work, are encouraged to contribute 350-word
abstracts with a short bio note to *militarizingpleasure at gmail.com
<militarizingpleasure at gmail.com>* by *1st April 2022. *Authors should
expect a response by 1st May, and full articles will be due on September
1st for publication in early 2023 (or earlier online). We respect the
unpredictable schedules and needs we all differently have and will try to
make accommodations where possible. Authors needing extensions for the
abstract and/or paper submission should contact the editors at the email
address above.

We expect articles to fall into the three categories. Suggestions for
papers could include but are not limited to:



1: What is Militarization to/in/with Pleasure Now?

   - Conceptualizations of the relationship between militarization and
   pleasure
   - Militarization with specific reference to pleasure & the ‘non-martial’
   - Methods and affirmations of knowing, discovery, & enquiry (e.g. ‘fake
   news’)
   - Confluence of identity politics and the relational roles of
   militarized subjects. How are subjects differently militarized due to race,
   gender, sexuality, religion, etc.?



2: Immanent Critique: Implicated and Contradictory Subjects

   - Material cultures, food, domesticity, fashion, media/texts, & leisure
   - Everyday use of military medicine & diet and fitness practices (e.g.,
   meal substitute drinks, ‘warrior fitness’)
   - Domesticized & democratized military technology (e.g., home
   surveillance tech, smartphones, Alexa)
   - Culture and aesthetics of and around sex and violence
   - Commodification of revolutionary aesthetics and language &
   performative activism



3: Policing Pleasure: Resistance, Unconscious and Conscious, to
Militarization

   - Mutual aid, grassroots activism, & forms of protest (e.g. carnival,
   drag, Rest for Resistance)
   - Contestatory/activist texts, media, practices, & social media tactics
   - Forms of critique (e.g., trolling, satire, stand up comedy, memes)
   - Fictional and fantasy worlds: superheroes, speculative, and other
   sci-fi/fantasy forms



Alex Adams is an independent scholar based in the UK. He has written widely
on securitization, torture, and drone warfare, and has published three
monographs: *Political Torture in Popular Culture*(Routledge, 2016), *How
to Justify Torture* (Repeater, 2019), and *Death TV: Drone Warfare in
Contemporary Popular Culture* (Drone Wars UK, 2021). He is currently
working on *Godzilla: A Critical Demonology*, a critical work on Godzilla.
See his website atadamswriting.com for more information.





Amy Gaeta is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies and Visual Cultures at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Amy arranges aspects of disability
studies and feminist technoscience studies to explore 21st-century
human-technology relations. Her dissertation, *Drone Life: A Feminist Crip
Analysis of the Human *theorizes the drone as a prosthetic that is altering
the human condition against the backdrop of AI, mass surveillance,
automation, and endless war. Her scholarship has recently been published in
the *Journal of Visual Culture* and the forthcoming edited collection *Drone
Aesthetics*(Open Humanities Press).
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