“War, the Body, and Communities”
War experiences and legacies affect individual bodies and broader communities. War violates and traumatizes bodies as it simultaneously destroys and builds communities. War contributes different narratives about the body and communities in relation to conflict and violence. Our panel series explores themes that includes the forming and disciplining of bodies for war, the disfiguration of bodies during war, “disembodied” contemporary warfare, and the disappearances of the body during war. The body can carry the actual scars of violence and become a metaphor for the terrain of pain. The body can be a weapon as well as a victim of war; it can execute, document, archive, aesthetize, and politicize war. Wartime communities can develop from the idea of a shared “bodily” wartime experience. Communities represent a dynamic entity constructed by common encounters, attitudes, and emotions and can include victims, mourners, widows, protesters, veterans, survivors, perpetrators; and their respective representations, experiences, and negotiations with their own (or other) bodies. Papers could explore how war can build and undermine “war communities” and how aesthetic and historical works about war can shape a sense of community. Proposals can address the topic in the time span from the Medieval Ages to today.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Militarizing bodies and shaping collectives
War wounds and victims, broken bodies, refugees
The image of the war hero and its role in nation building
War, fashion and uniforms, rationing and consumption
Sensing war, War and ecstasy
Literary works on war, body, and communities
Search for bodies and missing communities
Gender and the body and gendering (war) communities
Visual renderings and experience-making – enactments, films, monuments, memorials