The fixing and haunting of borders

While there has been, and remains, a real utility in using masculinities and the figure of a militarised masculine subject to think through gendered practices of soldiering, war, and violence – indeed my own thinking and the research that follows is indebted to the feminist literature on militarised masculinities that has gone before me – I would like to suggest a moment of reflection on feminism's own implication in the (re)production of this subject. It is my reading that although scholarship on militarised masculinities broadly claims there can be no fixed or stable militarised masculine identity, a militarised masculine subjectivity continues to be inadvertently ontologically ‘solidified’ in and through feminist-inspired research and engagement. Building on Maria Stern and Marysia Zalewski's observation of the ease at which ‘generalised renditions of feminist narratives of militarisation continue to be generated … even though much of the scholarship upon which the generic storyline rests is both nuanced and rigorous’,Footnote ⁸ I claim that authors end up working through and within ‘a generalised story’Footnote ⁹ of militarised masculinity. The traces of this generalised story may ‘constrain the storylines of feminist IR scholarship more generally’Footnote ¹⁰ and operates to ‘fix’ a militarised masculine identity to particular attributes and characteristics. Drawing on Judith Butler's theory of performativityFootnote ¹¹ – a ‘reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ Footnote ¹² – Stern and Zalewski argue that ‘feminist scholarship performatively reproduces the sexed identities and attached gendered harms it sets out to eviscerate’.Footnote ¹³ In short, in writing on/about militarised masculinity feminists are implicated in the (re)production and ontological solidification of the subject, despite, perhaps, their best intentions of disrupting this. The reiteration and recitation of their scholarship – even invoking ‘militarised masculinity’ as a subject of analysis – within a generalised story inevitably works to (re)produce that subject. As Butler states, ‘[p]erformativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes’.Footnote ¹⁴

What then is this ‘generalised story’, or what Stern and Zalewski call a ‘familiar feminist fable’,Footnote ¹⁵ that works to inadvertently ‘fix’ the subject? While space constraints restrict me from carrying out a detailed engagement with the existing feminist literature,Footnote ¹⁶ I want to briefly point to some familiar tropes that appear within much of the scholarship. Tropes that through their linguistic reification work to reiterate and recitate a familiar feminist fable that, in turn, ontologically solidifies a militarised masculine subject. Before I proceed however, a caveat; while I seek only to make visible this generalised story before offering a potential methodological intervention into it, to do so is to not unpack and pay attention to many of its nuances, its rigour. It is not my intention here to construct a strawman – or perhaps ‘straw-feminist’ – argument, but rather to point to how easily a generalised rendition of soldiering identities can be generated, despite that so much of the work this generalised rendition rests upon points to the complexities, contradictions, and fragility of militarised masculinity. In fact, like many of the authors referenced here, I believe my research too will contribute to this familiar feminist fable while simultaneously working against it. Indeed, I am doubtful if any feminist research on militarisation and militarised masculinities can completely avoid this (re)articulation, rather, what this article seeks is to offer us a methodology and a language through which we are both reminded of our own practices of boundary-marking and the incompleteness of the generalised feminist stories we slide into.

What then is militarised masculinity's familiar feminist fable? What does this ontologically solidified subject look like? Authors writing on militarised masculinities frequently point to the inculcation and prioritisation of particular traits within the soldier, including, ‘courage and endurance; physical and psychological strength; rationality; toughness; obedience; discipline; patriotism; lack of squeamishness; avoidance of certain emotions such as fear, sadness, uncertainty, guilt, remorse, and grief; and heterosexual competency’.Footnote ¹⁷ Such traits are understood as being forged through widespread and pervasive dichotomies. Binary pairings such as masculine/feminine; violent/passive; strong/weak; heterosexual/homosexual, provide the prism through which militarised masculinity is constructed, with the identity aligning itself with the former terms in the partnership. The latter terms are excluded from understandings of what it is to ‘be’ militarised and masculine, and instead come to represent what a militarised masculine subject is not.Footnote ¹⁸ Echoed in much of the literature surrounding militarised masculinities is R. W. Connell's term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and her language of a hierarchy of masculinities.Footnote ¹⁹ Both as a popularly-conceived conception of what a soldier ‘is’ and within the military itself, the combat soldier has come to be understood as the dominant, or hegemonic, embodiment of militarised masculinity. Typically associated with a Marine, Infantryman, or member of the ‘Special Forces’, this identity becomes intimately connected with attributes such as violence, aggression, and physical strength, and synonymous with the ‘idealized warrior ethic’.Footnote ²⁰ As the dominant conception of masculinity within the institution, militarised masculinity, and the military and soldiering more generally, come to be largely defined by this combat-warrior image. Even those authors who lay their gaze away from the combat arms – Cynthia Enloe, Paul Higate, and Frank Barrett are specifically worth mentioning here – return, in part, to the familiar feminist fable of militarised masculinity above. For example, Enloe traces the performances of a virile heterosexuality amongst militarised nuclear scientists in the New Mexican desert;Footnote ²¹ Higate recalls how administrative clerks in the RAF – occupying the ‘lowest reaches of an informal gender hierarchy’ – attempt to live up to hegemonic conceptions of militarised masculinity by working out in the gym;Footnote ²² and while BarrettFootnote ²³ explores the differing ways in which masculinity is constructed across military communities in aviation, surface warfare and supply corps, the traits and characteristics drawn upon (risk-taking, endurance, technical rationality respectively) are familiar.

It is then, the reiterative and recitational practice of scholarship on militarised masculinities, and the generalised story it both works within and (re)produces, that operates to inadvertently ontologically solidify a specific (dominant) conception of militarised masculinity. While the generalised story briefly set out above may ignore the nuances elicited by individual authors, that such scholarship can be located to greater or lesser degrees within this familiar feminist fable of militarised masculinity is testament to the ease at which such stories can be reverted to.Footnote ²⁴ While those writing on militarised masculinities recognise the multiplicity and lack of fixity of the subject, the reiteration of the generalised story (which authors cannot help but work within) works to (re)map the subject's identity borders at the same time it seeks to disrupt them. It is not then, that I deny that characteristics such as aggression, violence, and heterosexuality mark the bodies of militarised masculine subjects, nor that I can escape marking borders and (re)producing the subject. As Véronique Pin-Fat states, ‘[d]rawing distinctions is drawing lines. Making distinctions is a feature of language and unavoidable because that's how words get their meaning.’Footnote ²⁵ Rather, what I hope to do is to avoid mapping ‘hard’ lines around this always-shifting subject, and instead offer a methodology and language that reminds us of the untidiness outside this generalised story. It is here that I believe Avery Gordon and her methodology of ghosts and hauntings may offer one such intervention; giving us a language in which to talk about the fluidity and porosity of the border – its ‘ghostliness’.Footnote ²⁶ A way in which to write or talk about the ephemeral and indistinct moments that not only remind us of the instability of the borders we map, but also gives shape to what is ‘haunting’, what is disrupting this familiar feminist fable. The belief that we can capture the/a/any subject through language, through drawing lines, is to ignore the “so many ways of being in the world … [to ignore] so many overlapping practices of subjectivity that each person enacts and is subject to’,Footnote ²⁷ and it is this refusal of ‘capture’ that Gordon gives language for.

In her book, Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon seeks a ‘new way of knowing’, one that is more ‘attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us’.Footnote ²⁸ Gordon argues that there is an inability of the social sciences' normal methods to recognise the ‘exclusions and the sacrifices required to tell a story as the singularly real one’,Footnote ²⁹ and that there is a need to preoccupy ourselves with what has been lost; how certain individuals, things, or ideas, have been rendered marginal, excluded, or repressed.Footnote ³⁰ It is through an appeal for her readers to start recognising the ‘ghostly matters’ that trouble us at every turn that Gordon believes these exclusions and sacrifices can be rendered visible. Haunting, Gordon claims, is a constituent feature of contemporary modern life,Footnote ³¹ and she uses the term to describe the ways in which the lived realities of social lives fail to be explained by current social and cultural analysis. Hauntings refer to the ‘un-visible’Footnote ³² and unspoken – but vibrantly ‘real’ and present – socialities that fall outside mapped and fixed social forms. A social form that is haunted is troubled and disturbed by the haunting. We are reminded that what was once assumed as fixed and fully formed, is always fragile and remains in a continual state of becoming. It is then through Gordon's methodology and language of ghosts and hauntings that I seek a way of understanding militarised masculine subjectivities that avoids ‘fixing’ the subject and mapping hard borders. Hauntings remind us of the ‘ghostliness’ of the borders we cannot help but mark.

‘If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign … that tells you a haunting is taking place.’Footnote ³³ Ghosts are ‘one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us’.Footnote ³⁴ Ghosts are the materialisation of a haunting presence; they will get in the way, distract us from what we were searching for, disrupt what was previously considered known and completed, and give shape to that which troubles the border. Like the border itself, the appearance of ghosts is not fixed; the ways in which they are rendered visible and the shapes they take shift with the context. They are however, always already present. Haunting, and the appearance of spectres and ghosts, therefore, is a way of notification of what has been concealed is in fact very much present, ‘interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us’.Footnote ³⁵ Ghosts draw attention to the ways in which subjectivities are haunted, revealing identities to be always forming, always in a state of becoming.

My use of Gordon however, is not merely a reminder of the impossibility of a stable subjectivity. I believe that by paying attention to the spectres that haunt a militarised masculine identity, militarised violences – in all their ranges – can be rendered both visible and explicable. Following on from a burgeoning feminist scholarship and my discussion above, militarised masculinities have been shown to come into being through the making of distinctions and marking of borders; in short through the expulsion of, and relation to/against, ghostly ‘others’. By taking notice of these ghostly aspects of subjectivity, both their ‘always already’ presenceFootnote ³⁶ (and absence), and the ways in which they make their (violent) returns can be traced. For example, while haunting spectres are present both during basic training and when a soldier embarks on a tour of duty, intersecting, and context-specific discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and power circulate in both sites, making particular violences possible and marking particular bodies as the surfaces of their (re)enactment.

To summarise: to follow ghosts is to pick up where abstractions and hard borders leave off. It is to remind us that though we cannot escape the inadvertent marking of lines, they can never be fixed, they will always be haunted. Such a methodology will not lead us to an uncomplicated or conclusive place of knowing. It is a methodology of ‘getting lost’,Footnote ³⁷ a mapping of only ghostly lines and a refusal to delimit the boundaries of a militarised masculine subject. It is then, to a brief discussion of basic training, and the promises and myths of asexuality and discipline that circulate, that this article now turns. Searching for the ghosts and spectres that haunt these myths, and paying attention to the ways in which they make themselves visible, will help us understand ongoing militarised violences, in all their ranges, committed by (and to) British troops.

Basic training as a site of construction

Basic training's role in the construction of militarised masculine identities has long been noted by both those writing on militarised masculinities, and by soldiers themselves. Occurring only once, at the beginning, basic training is the most overt indication that active constitution is indeed necessary. While this is not to suggest that the conceptualisations of a militarised masculine subject produced in and through basic training are the sole ‘maps’ of a soldier, basic training is significant in its role as the popularly-conceived start-point of a soldier's ‘making’. Regardless of the arm or section of the British army a recruit will eventually join, all must complete ‘Phase One’ training; the 14 week long Common Military Syllabus (CMS). During these 14 weeks a range of activities are undertaken with the aim of transforming a civilian recruit into a British army soldier (Phase Two training will build upon these skills with regard to a recruit's specific role). The British army websiteFootnote ³⁸ details activities undertaken including personal administration (‘everything to do with looking after self and kit, in the field as well as in camp’); weapons training; drill (military procedures and movements, such as marching and parading); field craft (‘basic skills a soldier needs to work and survive in the field’); fitness; and teamwork. The course ends with a passing out parade, proclaimed by the British army's website as ‘one of the proudest moments of a soldier's life’; suggesting, at this point, that the individual is indeed a soldier, as opposed to a ‘civvie’.

To make the claim that it is in and through these practices that soldiers are ‘made’ is not to claim something new. Writing in 1975, Michel Foucault stated that, ‘[b]y the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay; an inapt body; the machine required can be constructed’,Footnote ³⁹ and it is not my intention here to reproduce the significant body of research that deals with this construction in any great detail. What many of those writing and reflecting on the role of basic training appear to have in common however, is their belief in its transformative effects.Footnote ⁴⁰ A belief that basic training is a ‘rite of passage’,Footnote ⁴¹ a period of identity reformation and the forging of a ‘new self-identity’,Footnote ⁴² specifically a shift from a civilian identity to soldier identity, from boy to man.Footnote ⁴³ There is then a continuing belief amongst many of those writing on militarised masculinities that something occurs during those 14 or 26 weeks that profoundly changes the recruit and ‘makes’ him (or her) a soldier.

Such a remoulding of the subject is understood to occur in and through particular gendered – masculinist – discourses of male superiority, dominance, and control (and its corollary of ‘feminine’ denigration). These, in turn, circulate, intersect, and interact with discourses of male bonding, and heteronormativity. It is worth noting at this point that the army already functions within gendered discourses and not just the ones it constructs. For example, that there are perceived irreconcilable differences between men and women can be seen in the banning of women from ‘front line’ combat roles due to fears of women disrupting unit cohesion, and the separation of genders during basic training. Understandings of gender pass both in and out of the army;Footnote ⁴⁴ bodies of recruits entering basic training are not ‘blank canvases’ for the military to work upon, but always already marked by particular discourses of gender.

Two ‘sites’ of basic training are the focus of this article; the presumed asexuality of the barracks and the centrality of discipline in the ‘making’ of a soldier; in particular, the impossibility of ever fully achieving these claims, and the ways in which they help make explicable ongoing militarised violences. Inasmuch as an absolute asexual environment and absolute discipline during basic training and beyond are unattainable, to claim that they are is to constitute them as myths. It is then an exploration of the myth of asexuality and the myth of discipline that this article is concerned with. This is not however, to suggest that the myths of asexuality and discipline are the only two myths operating to constitute a militarised masculine subject. Interacting and intersecting with these myths will be numerous others, including, among others, a myth of ‘whiteness’Footnote ⁴⁵ and a myth of ‘sameness’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The myth of asexuality

Basic training, and the army more generally, offers one of the most intensely homosocial environments in contemporary society. An exclusively male environment,Footnote ⁴⁷ recruits sleep, eat, and shower together. Routine, male group nakedness is a persistent feature of the contemporary British military; both incidental practices of nakedness (for example, showering, getting changed together, stripping off clothes in the heat of the desert) and more specific practices of group nudity. During fieldwork I carried out at Catterick Barracks in South Yorkshire, I saw numerous photographs adorning recruits' rooms depicting them naked save for a strategically-placed SA80 assault rifle or other piece of weaponry. British troops also partake in games featuring nudity, perhaps most infamouslyFootnote ⁴⁸ ‘Naked Bar’, a popular drinking game in which once the call of ‘Naked Bar’ is given, participants immediately remove all their clothing. While such nakedness, or certainly the level of ‘physical togetherness’, is at its highest during a soldier's time in basic training, it is a continuing feature of life in the army. Woodward and Winter recall one former Royal Marine telling them – taking care to emphasise the completely ‘routine and non-sexual nature of this nakedness’ – that ‘being naked together with other men is a completely normal part of contemporary British military life’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this homosocial context, group nakedness is just another body practice (like eating together, wearing the same uniform, or physical training) that works to produce a bonded team of militarised and masculine men.Footnote ⁵⁰ As numerous authorsFootnote ⁵¹ have pointed to, much of the discourse surrounding military life is concerned with this important bond, or even love, between ‘the boys’. There is a sense that recruits have entered a new family, the military family. Theirs is a family of men; a ‘warrior brotherhood’. Such ‘male bonding’ is a ‘doing’ of a British militarised masculine subject. Nakedness in this context represents unity, fraternity, the singularity of male bodies; it serves as an ‘insistent reminder that the group are “one body”; that is, male bodies’.Footnote ⁵² A militarised masculine identity is constructed in and through these practices and the gendered discourses that surround them.

This ‘male bonding’ and homosociality relies upon the exorcism and expulsion of sexuality,Footnote ⁵³ specifically homosexuality, from the practices of basic training. Homosexuality becomes the materialisation of the ghost that threatens to disrupt the ‘doings’ of a militarised masculine identity through particular homosocial practices. If constructions of a militarised masculine subject are aggressively heterosexual, it is important that practices of group nudity and ‘soldierly love’ are carefully policed against encroachments of the ghostly homosexual ‘other’. Following on from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who suggests that homosociality is frequently applied to activities such as ‘male bonding’, and ‘which may … be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality’,Footnote ⁵⁴ homophobia within the British military (and other homosocial institutions or occurrences of ‘male bonding’) can be understood as marking a boundary between non-sexual male behaviour (a ‘doing’), and sexual male behaviour (an ‘undoing’). As authors writing on militarised masculinities have demonstrated,Footnote ⁵⁵ basic training, and army life more generally, is set against a backdrop of heteronormativity and is aggressively heterosexual (while as of 2000 openly gay men can now serve in the British armed forces, the ‘high-testosterone environment’Footnote ⁵⁶ of the barracks remains with its pin ups and bragging of [heterosexual] sexual encounters).Footnote ⁵⁷ Such discursive structures operate to expel homosexuality, and mark the intensely homosocial, and at times homoerotic or sexualised, practices of basic training as definitively asexual. Far from being situated on an unbroken continuum, the homosocial and homosexual are instead radically disconnected from one another.Footnote ⁵⁸ Constructed as an asexual site of male bonding, the homosociality of basic training operates as a ‘doing’ of a militarised masculine identity through its expulsion of, and disconnection from, homosexuality.

In constituting a militarised masculine subjectivity through an exorcism of a ghostly and ‘othered’ homosexuality, a violence has always already been committed.Footnote ⁵⁹ Expelling homosexuality – and thus all things marked as homosexual, or simply not heterosexual – denies a recruit so many possibilities of becoming. For example, a recruit may be marked by homosexuality by any number of ‘non-heterosexual’Footnote ⁶⁰ performances; crying, failing to complete a physical training exercise, or simply by looking ‘effeminate’.Footnote ⁶¹ While this expulsion of homosexuality is a violence in itself, further violences emerge from it; violences aimed at particular bodies both present in basic training and not present. Violences are committed at the level of denigration of homosexuals in homophobic slang, while a recruit deemed by his peers to be ‘marked’ by homosexuality may encounter violences; be they verbal or physical. An adjutant of one regiment which had suffered a spate of bullying between recruits, saw that victims tended to be those deemed as ‘effeminate’ (a ‘marker’ of the ghostly and disruptive homosexuality) in appearance or manner.Footnote ⁶² The materiality and gestures of their bodies appeared to signal their potential transgression from the masculine norm of heterosexuality. These ‘doings’ of a militarised masculine identity rely on the assumption that a clear and hard border exists between the ‘homosexual’ and the ‘homosocial’ (asexual, and implicitly heterosexual). While the homosocial practices of basic training are marked as asexual, it is assumed they are performed by heterosexual bodies. Heterosexual bodies are (re)constituted as heterosexual in and through these asexual performatives, while the practices themselves remain asexual in and through their ‘doings’ by heterosexual bodies. The relationship between the asexual practices and heterosexual bodies then, is co-constitutive. The violences detailed above can thus be viewed as directed toward those who threaten the idea of a broken continuum of homosociability and homosexuality (for example, the effeminate or gay recruit). The idea, that the ‘doing’ of homosociality (asexual male bonding) and ‘undoing’ of homosexuality are not two distinct, symmetrically opposing positions, but are in fact intimately related.

It is not only the attempted expulsion of the ghost that is a violence; a violence is committed in the very attempt of mapping a hard border between asexuality and homosexuality. Just as Sedgwick appeals to us to ‘hypothesize the potential unbrokeness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual’,Footnote ⁶³ the boundary between asexual and homosexual performative doings, marked as hard by the myth of asexuality, is always ghostly. A (heterosexual) militarised masculine identity can never simply be in a process of ‘doing’ through a recruit's performative asexual and homosocial enactments, as the identity will always already be in a state of ‘undoing’ through the haunting presence of (homo)sexual ghosts. The myth of asexuality within basic training severs this relation between doings and undoings, and it is through attempts at both marking this separation, and upholding the myth (itself an impossibility) that militarised violences perpetrated by British troops can be made sense of.

Returning then to practices of ‘routine’, ‘non-sexual’ nakedness during basic training; in this homosocial context nakedness constitutes unity, bonding, and fraternity between recruits. As a persistent feature of army life, group nudity is just another body practice that works to produce a militarised masculine identity. Homophobia operates as a boundary-marking device, severing any relation between the homosociability of this nakedness and the (potential) homosexuality of male group nakedness. Such boundary-marking exorcises the ‘ghostly’ aspects of nakedness ([homo]sexuality). However, as the first paragraph of this article detailing the abuses carried out by British soldiers at Camp Breadbasket has signified, group nakedness does not always work to produce militarised masculine subjects.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, if the naked bodies are simultaneously marked and ‘othered’ by intersecting discourses of race, sexuality and gender, group nakedness can operate to undo particular subjects' masculinity.

It is in the enforced nakedness at Camp Breadbasket that we see the ‘unhappy echo’ of soldiers' own routine and non-sexual nakedness,Footnote ⁶⁵ and the concrete materialisation of ghosts that had been rendered un-visible. Unlike recruit nakedness during basic training or on a camp base while on a tour of duty,Footnote ⁶⁶ the nakedness that took place in Camp Breadbasket did not signify togetherness, bonding, and asexuality. Instead the nakedness took place in and through intersecting gendered, raced, and sexualised discourses, marking the bodies of the Iraqi detainees performing it as ‘other’ and (homo)sexualised. The ghost of sexuality then has not been expelled from the enactments of nudity at Camp Breadbasket. Rather the abuses – particularly the sexual abuses – work to reveal the haunting spectres of colonial logics and (homo)sexualised transgressions.

That the acts of violence and humiliation at Camp Breadbasket followed an ‘aggressively homophobic script’Footnote ⁶⁷ can begin to be made sense of if we understand them as part of a continuum of the heteronormative performative enactments of basic training used to uphold the myth of asexuality, intersecting with colonial logics which are, in turn, gendered, raced, and sexualised. Following on from the work of Sherene RazackFootnote ⁶⁸ and Melanie Richter-Montpetit,Footnote ⁶⁹ such practices can be understood as grounded in colonial desires and located on a continuum of colonial violences that reaches back in time to the modern ‘civilising mission’.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Richter-Montpetit states; ‘[f]rom the “discoveries” of the Middle Ages on, the racialized sexualisation of colonial conquests played a central role in western imperialisms in terms of constructing boundaries along the intersecting lines of class,Footnote ⁷¹ gender, race, nation and civilization.’Footnote ⁷² Colonial logics portrayed those within the colonies as racially inferior, and as the passive and effeminate receivers of Western aid – ‘the white man's burden to civilize … racial others awaiting assistance into modernity’.Footnote ⁷³ Simultaneously, and somewhat contradictory, Western responses to the Middle East continue to be shaped by Orientalist ideasFootnote ⁷⁴ of the ‘duplicitous character of “orientals” who cannot be trusted’,Footnote ⁷⁵ and the ‘Arabic Orient’ as a site of particular sexual excess and deviance.Footnote ⁷⁶ So then, when Iraqi detainees in Camp Breadbasket were forced to strip naked and simulate anal and oral sex on one another, it was not merely the ghosts of (homo)sexualised transgressions that were being rendered visible, but their intersection with, and emergence in and through, gendered, raced, and sexualised colonial logics.

While practices of male group nakedness and homoerotic play during basic training operates to mark the bodies of those involved as masculine, (homosocially) bonded and heterosexual, as these performances pass from the barracks to Camp Breadbasket, the ghosts of (homo)sexuality intersect with colonial discourses, and the bodies of Iraqi detainees become the site upon which these (homo)sexualised hauntings are revealed. Here, male group nakedness is not designed to represent asexuality and fraternity. Instead, the aggressively homophobic abuse is intensely (homo)sexualised, plays out according to colonial logics, and works to ‘other’ the detainees along racial, gendered, and sexualised lines. The ghost of (homo)sexuality however, is always already present in both sites of male group nudity. While in basic training the ghost is rendered un-visible through the boundary-mapping processes of homophobia, during the prisoner abuse at Camp Breadbasket, forcibly performed by bodies already marked by colonial discourses, the nakedness is explicitly marked as (homo)sexualised and the ghost violently visible on the bodies of the detainees. To present these two performances of nakedness as distinct, symmetrically opposing practices is to fail to pay attention to the ghostly haunts of (homo)sexuality in basic training, and more generally throughout British military life. For while abuses by British troops that both reach the public eye and result in prosecution, such as those at Camp Breadbasket, remain relatively infrequent,Footnote ⁷⁷ viewing these as exceptional or unrelated to the homosocial and aggressively heterosexual practices of basic training reinscribes a boundary that works to make un-visible their connectivity. By considering instead, an unbroken continuum between the ‘harmless’ homosocial behaviour of basic training and the ‘excessive’ and highly (homo)sexualised abuses at Camp Breadbasket, particular gendered and sexualised discourses can be seen to be operating ‘properly’ (or so the military would claim) and obscenely, in both sites; discourses of male bonding, aggressive heterosexuality and masculinism. Discourses that work to uphold and (re)produce the myth of asexuality.

It is in and through the attempts made at maintaining this myth, and the impossibility of a militarised masculine subject ever fully embodying this myth, that we can begin to make sense of militarised violences in all their ranges. From the discursive severing of the relation between the asexual and (homo)sexual, and the ways it plays out during basic training in homophobic insults; the performance of compulsory heterosexuality through the body's stance, manner, and gestures; and the suppression of emotions marked as effeminate or ‘non-heterosexual’, to the (homo)sexualised prisoner abuse at Camp Breadbasket, these violences can be viewed as an attempt to (re)draw the boundaries of militarised masculinity and mark them as ‘hard’. As numerous authors have pointed to, a militarised masculine self is produced through ‘doings’ that demarcate it from a (subordinate) ‘other’. What Gordon's language of ghosts and hauntings brings is a way to articulate the excess, the other, that is always already there, always already disrupting. Gordon's ghosts give shape to, and allow us to follow, the indistinct and troubling moments that leak from the barracks and basic training to their violent ‘explosions’Footnote ⁷⁸ in Camp Breadbasket.

The myth of discipline

Discipline is one of the central tenets of the British Army;Footnote ⁷⁹ purported to be essential for combat effectiveness and the ‘primary antidote to fear’.Footnote ⁸⁰ With the current shift towards counterinsurgency, and the attendant need for soldiers to be able to not only deploy lethal force but also be capable of holding it back, the emphasis on, and privileging of, discipline is ever-increasing.Footnote ⁸¹ While self-discipline is proclaimed to be the ‘best’ kind of discipline – ‘innate, not imposed’Footnote ⁸² – army training aims to instil and strengthen such discipline.Footnote ⁸³

Much of basic training is structured around this need for discipline; from the rigid timetabling with little free time; ‘personal administration’ and its prescribed routines for the ways in which a soldier washes, shaves, and dresses; an obsession with personal appearance and domesticity; and, of course, hour after hour spent on the drill square – an activity whose place in an operational context has long ceased to be recognised. ‘Official’ (inasmuch as it appears in MoD literature, or on the British army webpage) reasoning for military discipline largely centres around the need for disciplined soldiers on the battlefield; ‘that all soldiers will obey orders, under the worst conditions of war’.Footnote ⁸⁴ That soldiers can wield legitimate violence in part defines them as soldiers.Footnote ⁸⁵ Underlying this, there is an implicit assumption that violence that is legitimate is also controlled. Basic training then, teaches recruits the ways in which violence can and should be legitimately employed; the ways in which enemy combatants should be killed in a controlled and disciplined manner.

Whether a recruit is experiencing discipline with regard to their appearance, on the drill square or during weapons training, what is being expelled, the ghostly others exorcised, remains the same. For the myth of discipline to be maintained, the ghostly spectres of disorder, messiness, uncontrollability, are those that must be forced out. A disciplined soldier will be capable of obeying orders at high speed and under intense pressure, while an undisciplined soldier risks being hysterical and incapable of fighting in battle. Whereas the embodiment, or ‘shape’, of the ghost of asexuality took the form of a homosexual man (specifically the stereotype of the lustful, predatory, gay man; ‘lusting after their buddies in the showers and “hitting on” adamantly heterosexual men’),Footnote ⁸⁶ the ghost of discipline would take the shape of a hysterical, irrational, out-of-control woman, immortalised in Victorian paintings of women fainting. This association between a soldier incapable of fighting and a hysterical woman was most explicitly stated during World War I where there were numerous cases of shell shock amongst male fighters. Doctors treating such men noted that ‘the hysterical soldier was seen as simple, emotional, unthinking, passive, suggestible, dependent, and weak – very much the same constellation of traits associated with the hysterical woman’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Interestingly however, a lack of discipline is also associated with an excess of masculinity, a hypermasculinised identity. For example, in his study of British private military security contractorFootnote ⁸⁸ (PMSC) memoirs Paul Higate notes that one particular binary framing that British contractors deploy is that of the ‘jumpy, trigger happy [American] “cowboy” versus the cool [British] professional’Footnote ⁸⁹ (although it should be stated that Higate makes explicit that the picture is a lot more nuanced than this simplified dualism). For the PMSCs detailed in Higate's article, the ‘low profile’ of the ‘quintessential understated Brit’Footnote ⁹⁰ is juxtaposed with the ‘gung-ho’Footnote ⁹¹ American with a ‘shoot first policy, a shoot-first mindset’.Footnote ⁹² This construction of a restrained and disciplined British soldier through (and against) its relation with ‘The Americans’ is, to a certain extent, mirrored in British soldiers' relations with soldiers from the enemy or local forces. Unlike British troops, who ‘remain the envy or our allies for the professionalism of our conduct’Footnote ⁹³ and who (largely) adhere to international humanitarian law, enemy troops are presented as hypermasculinisedFootnote ⁹⁴ and excessively violent, and likely to operate outside such laws.Footnote ⁹⁵ Discipline therefore, ensures just the ‘right’ amount of masculinity to be imbued within the liberal warrior.

Upon entering basic training, recruits offer up their bodies as the primary site of inscription for a militarised masculine identity. The surface and appearance of recruits' bodies comes to constitute ‘a locus of control and strategy for enforcing discipline’,Footnote ⁹⁶ with all aspects of their physical presentation now subject to superiors' inspection and control. John Hockey details the minutiae of ways this discipline can be illustrated; for example, ‘the requirement for all buttons on uniforms to be turned a particular way, laces in boots to be untwisted, [and that is] to say nothing of the need for clothes to be kept almost pathologically clean’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Boots must be polished and ‘bulled’ to look like black glass,Footnote ⁹⁸ and the badge on berets positioned to a precise spot and angle.Footnote ⁹⁹ These obsessions with the ordering and appearance of the body are mirrored in the levels of anxiety a new recruit may experience with regard to the standard and level of domesticity expected of them within the military. Clothing and equipment are expected to be kept obsessively clean, beds made in particular ways, and ‘the ritual geometry of locker layout, with every article of kit positioned in a prescribed manner’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

While such preoccupations with appearance and domesticity may appear paradoxically ‘feminine’ in the masculine figure of a warrior-soldier, such practices are in fact integral to its constitution. Under construction is a very particular soldiering subjectivity; one that is intensely disciplined and capable of engaging in effective, controlled violence as well as withholding it. It is this control and effectiveness that is achieved through the expulsion of, not the ‘feminine’ traits of cleanliness, obedience, and domesticity, but through the demarcation and separation from, messiness, disorganisation, and uncontrollability.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For so many oxymoronic traits (‘controlled violence’, ‘masculine domesticity’) to hold together and work to constitute a militarised masculine identity, the myth of discipline is essential. The myth of discipline ensures a border is marked between the potentially feminising performances of domesticity and taking care of your appearance, and the masculine soldiering performances of instilling self-restraint and control. As the British army website states in its discussion of the CIC training; ‘[t]he more organised a man is, the easier he will find it to live like a soldier’.Footnote ¹⁰²

However, this myth of discipline and the borders marked that withhold feminine messiness and disorder are ghostly. For while the discipline of basic training is explained in terms of a preparedness for combat, the battlefield itself is not a site where disorder, messiness and hysteria can be expelled. The ‘fog of war’ has long been spoken about by military historians and former soldiers, with experiences and decisions made in the midst of combat not controlled, rational, or ordered. On an almost absurd level, the pathological cleanliness and obsessive habits of domesticity that so dominate a recruit's life during basic training are impossible to maintain. In the dusty environments of Iraq and Afghanistan, where sandstorms are common, basic training's expectations of neatly pressed trousers and particularly washed and shaved bodies, are rendered ridiculous. The ghosts of messiness and disorder exorcised from recruits' bodies through daily routine, inspection, and discipline, not only haunt, but take over. Beards and hair grow,Footnote ¹⁰³ soldiers may go days without showering, and every body part, piece of clothing and bit of equipment is covered in a fine film of sand. Rather than the exact placing of regimental badges on uniforms, entire sections of uniforms are discarded in soldiers' attempts to survive the heat of the desert or work on their tans before being deployed back to the UK.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The border that marked a disciplined soldierly body, delineating the appearance, movement, and how to ‘do’ militarised masculinity during basic training, is shown during a tour of duty to not be hard and static, but soft and ‘leaky’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Implicitly feminised traits – disorder, messiness, a lack of control – now come to mark the bio-male bodies of soldiers. Ghosts that were thought to have been expelled through the myth of discipline return, disrupting notions of a controlled and disciplined soldier, undoing understandings of a militarised masculine identity constituted and completed during basic training.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Like the homosocial and the (homo)sexual, a ‘disciplined’ soldiering body and ‘undisciplined’ soldiering body are not two distinct, symmetrically opposing positions, but instead lie on an unbroken continuum. The two positions are related, and the border between them not fixed and hard, but ghostly, porous, and ever-shifting. While this porosity can lead to soldiers stripping off uniforms to sunbathe while on a tour of duty and growing their hair to annoy superiors, such ghostliness may also work to produce more violent effects. For the myth of discipline does not only operate to shape the surface and appearance of a soldier's body, but also works to delimit what level of force, and when such force, should be deployed.

A soldier's unique position in society – sanctioned to wield legitimate violence against particular others – is underwritten by the assumption that this violence is controlled. Basic training and a soldier's ongoing assessment and training throughout their career are assumed to inculcate a soldier with the knowledge, ability, and discipline to be able to inflict violence during combat in a controlled and disciplined manner. The myth of discipline works to mark a border between what is considered to be controlled and disciplined (and by extension legitimate) violence, and uncontrolled and undisciplined (and thus illegitimate) violence. A soldier who gets into a fight while on leave will (in theory) face disciplinary action if his superiors are informed,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ however, a soldier will likewise be disciplined for failing to engage in violence ordered by his superiors while in a combat zone, or may be praised for demonstrating a particular ‘aptitude’ for violence in battle. For example, in 2011, Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun, a Gurkha fighting in the British Army in Afghanistan, was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, the second highest military medal for bravery (thus sanctioning the violence used as legitimate, controlled and proportionate), for single-handedly fighting off around 12 Taliban insurgents. When his ammunition ran out (all 400 bullets, 17 grenades, and 1 mine), Pun resorted to battering his attackers with a sandbag and his machine gun tripod.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While such a distinction may appear obvious and the boundary between such acts clear, what is considered legitimate and controlled violence, or illegitimate and uncontrolled violence is not always so ‘neat’.

That the boundary between the disciplined and undisciplined is messy and unclear does not simply (re)produce contradictory and paradoxical doings/undoings (in the ways particular practices can leak in either direction of the boundary), but also makes unstable the borders tracing the limits of legitimate and illegitimate violence. In the past decade, British troops have been stationed in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and as claims of prisoner abuse, illegitimate troop violence, and mistreatment of civilians have emerged,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ public debates and enquiries have questioned what is considered ‘legitimate’ or ‘controlled’ violence in a warzone, and whereFootnote ¹¹⁰ a boundary between the legitimate and illegitimate should, or does, lie. At what point did the violence inflicted to Baha Mousa by British soldiers cross the boundary mapped by the myth of discipline from the controlled to the uncontrolled? At what point did the violence against the eight other men who were seized alongside Mousa, but survived, pass the border separating legitimate and illegitimate violence? Was the verbal abuse legitimate? Being made to dance like Michael Jackson? Being burned, stamped, and urinated on, and forced to lie face down over full latrines?Footnote ¹¹¹ A 1972 ban (thus an explicit delegitimising of such practices) on hooding, stressing (forcing detainees to stand in ‘stress’ positions, for example, with their legs bent and arms out), deprivation of food and sleep, and coercive use of noise, had been ignored; instead, ‘conditioning’ treatments supposedly used to ‘soften up’ detainees before questioning were deemed necessary.Footnote ¹¹² Given that Mousa and the eight other detainees were already hooded, restrained, and of little or no threat to those who had captured them, the systematic beatings and abuse they were subjected fails to appear as controlled or disciplined violence.

The boundaries marked by the myth of discipline that map the unquestioning obedience of basic training, the risk-taking behaviour of combat, and the uncontrolled violences enacted on the body of Baha Mousa and his eight fellow captives, do not signify separate and mutually exclusive sites, but are instead located on a continuum. It is a continuum that the myth of discipline seeks to deny and make un-visible through its boundary-marking. However, as has been shown, the limits marked, the ways of ‘doing’ a discursively idealised militarised masculine identity, demarcated by the myth of discipline are not fixed by ‘hard’ borders, but can always leak through a porous border. While this means that particular performative and discursive ‘doings’ of a militarised masculine subjectivity can leak through these borders and become an ‘undoing’ (and vice versa), it also means the control and legitimacy that underwrites the violences soldiers are trained to employ through the myth of discipline, are also subject to ‘leakiness’. For example, The Aitkin Report states that some aspects of the banned ‘Five Techniques’ mentioned above may not, in themselves, be illegal. ‘[T]here will be occasions’, the report declares, ‘where it will be perfectly reasonable to deprive temporarily a captured person of his sight or hearing’, and it goes on to give the examples of for the security of our own troops or to stop collusion with other captured personnel.Footnote ¹¹³ The section ends stating, ‘[t]he issue is therefore to an extent one of context; and the Army's challenge must be ensure that as clear a delineation exists as possible to guide all soldiers in what is and is not acceptable.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is then, not the actions themselves that are illegitimate, but the context in which they are enacted within that makes them so, and that it is further, or ‘harder’, line drawing that is required in order to safeguard the legitimacy or discipline of soldiers' actions. Given that the dead body of Baha Mousa did not just display the marks of the ‘Five Techniques’ but was catalogued at having sustained 93 separate injuries, there appeared, in this instance or ‘context’,Footnote ¹¹⁵ to be a complete absence of a border, a complete disregard for the discipline and control that was inculcated during basic training. However, this ‘uncontrolled’ violence inflicted on Mousa, a seeming complete lack of discipline, is present along the whole entirety of the continuum; it is a ghost that haunts whether a soldier is located in the barracks or on the battlefield. Like the (homo)sexualised violences that took place at Camp Breadbasket, Gordon's methodology of ghosts and hauntings gives us a way to mark the excess, the incompleteness, along this continuum of violence and give it shape; to render it ‘traceable’. While the haunting spectre is always ‘other’ to militarised masculinity, it is the context that changes it and gives it form, the context that renders it visible in such different ways. While during basic training the incompleteness of discipline and control may reveal itself in any number of resisting practices (for example, a particular ‘styling’ of the uniformFootnote ¹¹⁶ or deliberately misinterpreting drill commands),Footnote ¹¹⁷ on a tour of duty this ghost appears in the long hair and beards of soldiers, in their fear and confusion during conflict, and on the broken and bloodied body of Baha Mousa. It is then, in the impossibility of holding steady the borders – in attempts at even marking such borders – that violences can begin to be made explicable.

It is not that there are serious failings in army leadership, planning, and training, but that, in some ways, the contradictory practices of basic training are working. It is because of the attempted constitution of a militarised masculine subject within such impossible borders that transgressions occur and identities rendered unstable. Constituted in and through paradoxical practices (for example, the banning of the ‘Five Techniques’ except in ‘particular contexts’) a militarised masculine subject emerges who is always already incomplete, never ‘fixed’, and who is rendered precarious in the very moment of ‘becoming’. In effect, soldiers produced this way are set up to fail. There can be no external effects to this identity that are not as messy, uncertain, and fragile as the subject produced. This is not to suggest that all those who enter into the military and (re)produced through its discourses will engage in the sexual abuses or illegitimate violences detailed here, nor that there is some way in which militarised masculine subjectivities could be produced as stable, predictable, and completed forms. Rather, this article has sought to reveal and remind us of the impossibility of a generalised story and the marking of hard lines around a militarised masculine subject. Militarised masculinity will always fail in its very moments of becoming, with haunting spectres and ghosts giving notice to its incompleteness, giving the shape of the excess, and providing us with the possibility to trace their disrupting effects through a range of violences.