Zoe Wool
My research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork with war injured American soldiers and explores social, cultural, ethical, intimate, carnal, and clinical situations within which such special categories of life, death, and personhood accrue value or are debrided of it.
I'm interested in the specificity of soldiers' experiences of living on among others after combat and the uneven distribution of the value of life that is broadly discernible across many exceptional and deathbound categories of embodied personhood in late liberal democracies.
I tend to coordinate my work through three overlapping thematic fields:
Intimate attachments--heteronormative masculinity, disability, sociality and solitude, the making of whole personhood.
National feelings--the public figuring of patriotism, sacrifice, late liberal economies of the value of and compensation for life, sovereignty and the ironies of exceptionalism.
The sensibility of trauma--critical genealogies of the history and epistemology of the science of trauma (especially PTSD), aesthetic technologies of trauma as a clinical object since the 19th Century, the phenomenology of being after combat.
Phone: (office) 713 348 3393
Address: Office: 574 Sewell Hall;
Mail: Rice University
Department of Anthropology, MS-20
P.O. Box 1892
Houston, TX 77251
I'm interested in the specificity of soldiers' experiences of living on among others after combat and the uneven distribution of the value of life that is broadly discernible across many exceptional and deathbound categories of embodied personhood in late liberal democracies.
I tend to coordinate my work through three overlapping thematic fields:
Intimate attachments--heteronormative masculinity, disability, sociality and solitude, the making of whole personhood.
National feelings--the public figuring of patriotism, sacrifice, late liberal economies of the value of and compensation for life, sovereignty and the ironies of exceptionalism.
The sensibility of trauma--critical genealogies of the history and epistemology of the science of trauma (especially PTSD), aesthetic technologies of trauma as a clinical object since the 19th Century, the phenomenology of being after combat.
Phone: (office) 713 348 3393
Address: Office: 574 Sewell Hall;
Mail: Rice University
Department of Anthropology, MS-20
P.O. Box 1892
Houston, TX 77251
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Books by Zoe Wool
This chapter explores how injured soldiers’ carnal attachments become biosocial anchor points for a kind of life worthy of living after having killed and almost died in war.
As a special form of exceptional citizen, American soldiers are configured within liberal displacements of sovereign violence, economies of sacrifice, and the anxious heteronational reproduction of valued lives in a historical moment characterized by spectacular war death as well as endemic decay (Berlant 2007; Povinelli 2011). The enfleshed, exposed lives of American soldiers are thus addressed not only to the destruction of bodies, but to the gendered reproduction of life in nationally meaningful forms (MacLeish Forthcoming; Linker 2011; see also Mosse 1998; 1990).
When soldiers are injured, their bodies, and the special worth and iconic value invested in them, compel attention and care. Turning to the heteronormative forms of life cultivated at the U.S. military’s flagship medical facility as well as public talk of male soldiers’ genital injury death pacts, this chapter will consider the intimate attachments of masculinity and conjugal couplehood (Povinelli 2006) through which injured soldiers lives are reconfigured. These attachments are carnal, simultaneously fleshy and ethical. The young male soldier’s limbs, genitals and supplements—from prosthetic limbs to Viagra—constitute the sufficiency of his personhood, always in relation to significant others and gendered material arraignments of domesticity and dependence.
Conference Presentations by Zoe Wool
This panel is a kind of companion to the one on "Sociality and Deadly Solitude" that I co-organized with Ken MacLeish for the 2012 SCA meetings. Below, you can read the abstract for that panel, and the paper I gave on "Precarious Solitude."
PRECARIOUS SOLITUDE ABSTRACT:
For grievously injured U.S. soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, life is lived in proximity to death. The deadliness of the warzone remains resonant and palpable. Soldiers’ bodily fragility and disintegrity coincide with existential and social disorientations to render life and its future radically uncertain. Amid the simultaneous intensity, pain, uncertainty, and boredom that characterize life in this disorienting space, suicide and other forms of life threatening violence are enfolded within the routines and potentialities of everyday life.
Within this ethnographic context, this paper explores intense examples of soldierly solitude—from almost dying while alone at night, to willful social withdrawal for the sake of one’s own life or the lives of loved ones, to the mandated imposition of isolation on the locked psychiatric ward. Like much that happens at Walter Reed, these moments amplify motifs of soldierly living, and the stories told about it. Here, they address pathological forms of solitude and sociality that are a special focus in current thinking about the precariousness of U.S. veterans’ lives and the many ways that life annihilating violence is seen to stick to them. Against this background, this paper suggests counterintuitive alignments between sociality and solitude, life and death. It ethnographically illustrates the complex ways that being alone articulates with suicide and homicide, but also with the preservation and protection of life and the many ways being with others can also be deadly.
"
This paper is a close reading of a single encounter from my fieldwork with American soldiers whose lives and bodies have been marked by combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While these soldiers’ experiences are often discussed in languages of patriotism or trauma, neither narrative is up to the task of apprehending these experiences. For example, though a framework of trauma can be helpful in certain contexts, enabling soldiers to make certain kinds of claims, it does little to convey the literal and figurative earth shattering which they are in the midst of.
The simple acts and facts of life and living—walking and being seen to walk, moving through a crowded subway platform—unfold though the rubble of past ordinaries, each resting on another like an archeological record of worldings ruined. In these little moments soldiers haphazardly reshape the world and are pushed and pulled by its realigned forces.
In place of the closeness of narrative orientations like trauma, I suggest the openness and focus on emergence that comes from being attuned to experience in the happening. Specifically, I suggest that through attending to moments of movement as ontogenetic practices (Manning 2006: xxi), we can become attuned to soldiers’ vertiginous worldings which echo with the booming resonances of 50 cals and IEDs. Such an approach disrupts the easy invocation of ready made tropes of patriotism and PTSD that comprise a neat surface, often obscuring the ramifying experiences of war.
I end by reflecting on the implications of such worldings for the possibilities of being in common, but also of being alone in common, which derive a particular urgency amid sky rocketing rates of suicide in the military.
Work cited:
Manning, Erin
2006. The Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
But among severely injured soldiers then rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in place of the encompassing wholeness of the “war on terror” were—among other small things—fragments of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Talk of war, when it did occur, hardly ever coalesced into even the small narrative form of a war story. Instead, there were bodily feelings or sense-memories, like the color and heat of the Iraqi sky or the swarm of flies around an MRE. There were the intricate details of hot metal and sweating skin, the sound of gravel blown up in a mortar attack hitting the tin roof under which soldiers had slept, the bits of shrapnel visible beneath the skin, or the hunk of copper recently excised from ones own body and kept like a souvenir, which could be presented without recourse to narrative or nationalism.
In this paper, I explore this smallness of war at Walter Reed; its literal and figurative presence in fragments. I suggest that by recollecting and sharing these fragments, injured soldiers at Walter Reed created a certain sociality, a mode in which they might sense their way through a profoundly precarious moment of life, together making sensible a miniscule war that passed below the radar of totalizing narratives which threatened to subsume them at every turn.
Papers by Zoe Wool
Susie Kilshaw " Impotent warriors: Gulf War syndrome, vulnerability and masculinity" (2009).
This chapter explores how injured soldiers’ carnal attachments become biosocial anchor points for a kind of life worthy of living after having killed and almost died in war.
As a special form of exceptional citizen, American soldiers are configured within liberal displacements of sovereign violence, economies of sacrifice, and the anxious heteronational reproduction of valued lives in a historical moment characterized by spectacular war death as well as endemic decay (Berlant 2007; Povinelli 2011). The enfleshed, exposed lives of American soldiers are thus addressed not only to the destruction of bodies, but to the gendered reproduction of life in nationally meaningful forms (MacLeish Forthcoming; Linker 2011; see also Mosse 1998; 1990).
When soldiers are injured, their bodies, and the special worth and iconic value invested in them, compel attention and care. Turning to the heteronormative forms of life cultivated at the U.S. military’s flagship medical facility as well as public talk of male soldiers’ genital injury death pacts, this chapter will consider the intimate attachments of masculinity and conjugal couplehood (Povinelli 2006) through which injured soldiers lives are reconfigured. These attachments are carnal, simultaneously fleshy and ethical. The young male soldier’s limbs, genitals and supplements—from prosthetic limbs to Viagra—constitute the sufficiency of his personhood, always in relation to significant others and gendered material arraignments of domesticity and dependence.
This panel is a kind of companion to the one on "Sociality and Deadly Solitude" that I co-organized with Ken MacLeish for the 2012 SCA meetings. Below, you can read the abstract for that panel, and the paper I gave on "Precarious Solitude."
PRECARIOUS SOLITUDE ABSTRACT:
For grievously injured U.S. soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, life is lived in proximity to death. The deadliness of the warzone remains resonant and palpable. Soldiers’ bodily fragility and disintegrity coincide with existential and social disorientations to render life and its future radically uncertain. Amid the simultaneous intensity, pain, uncertainty, and boredom that characterize life in this disorienting space, suicide and other forms of life threatening violence are enfolded within the routines and potentialities of everyday life.
Within this ethnographic context, this paper explores intense examples of soldierly solitude—from almost dying while alone at night, to willful social withdrawal for the sake of one’s own life or the lives of loved ones, to the mandated imposition of isolation on the locked psychiatric ward. Like much that happens at Walter Reed, these moments amplify motifs of soldierly living, and the stories told about it. Here, they address pathological forms of solitude and sociality that are a special focus in current thinking about the precariousness of U.S. veterans’ lives and the many ways that life annihilating violence is seen to stick to them. Against this background, this paper suggests counterintuitive alignments between sociality and solitude, life and death. It ethnographically illustrates the complex ways that being alone articulates with suicide and homicide, but also with the preservation and protection of life and the many ways being with others can also be deadly.
"
This paper is a close reading of a single encounter from my fieldwork with American soldiers whose lives and bodies have been marked by combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While these soldiers’ experiences are often discussed in languages of patriotism or trauma, neither narrative is up to the task of apprehending these experiences. For example, though a framework of trauma can be helpful in certain contexts, enabling soldiers to make certain kinds of claims, it does little to convey the literal and figurative earth shattering which they are in the midst of.
The simple acts and facts of life and living—walking and being seen to walk, moving through a crowded subway platform—unfold though the rubble of past ordinaries, each resting on another like an archeological record of worldings ruined. In these little moments soldiers haphazardly reshape the world and are pushed and pulled by its realigned forces.
In place of the closeness of narrative orientations like trauma, I suggest the openness and focus on emergence that comes from being attuned to experience in the happening. Specifically, I suggest that through attending to moments of movement as ontogenetic practices (Manning 2006: xxi), we can become attuned to soldiers’ vertiginous worldings which echo with the booming resonances of 50 cals and IEDs. Such an approach disrupts the easy invocation of ready made tropes of patriotism and PTSD that comprise a neat surface, often obscuring the ramifying experiences of war.
I end by reflecting on the implications of such worldings for the possibilities of being in common, but also of being alone in common, which derive a particular urgency amid sky rocketing rates of suicide in the military.
Work cited:
Manning, Erin
2006. The Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
But among severely injured soldiers then rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in place of the encompassing wholeness of the “war on terror” were—among other small things—fragments of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Talk of war, when it did occur, hardly ever coalesced into even the small narrative form of a war story. Instead, there were bodily feelings or sense-memories, like the color and heat of the Iraqi sky or the swarm of flies around an MRE. There were the intricate details of hot metal and sweating skin, the sound of gravel blown up in a mortar attack hitting the tin roof under which soldiers had slept, the bits of shrapnel visible beneath the skin, or the hunk of copper recently excised from ones own body and kept like a souvenir, which could be presented without recourse to narrative or nationalism.
In this paper, I explore this smallness of war at Walter Reed; its literal and figurative presence in fragments. I suggest that by recollecting and sharing these fragments, injured soldiers at Walter Reed created a certain sociality, a mode in which they might sense their way through a profoundly precarious moment of life, together making sensible a miniscule war that passed below the radar of totalizing narratives which threatened to subsume them at every turn.
Susie Kilshaw " Impotent warriors: Gulf War syndrome, vulnerability and masculinity" (2009).
Each in their own way, the photographers on this panel respond to these contours, offering tender portraits, graphic compositions, and candid glimpses of soldiers’ lives, dreams, and nightmares that together add up to more than any one flattened image of a conquering hero or traumatized veteran.
In the current moment, each of the 2 million American service members who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan lend an urgency to the enduring questions of what it means to picture soldiers in American public culture today.
Problematizing the iconic soldier image by evoking the complexities of life in war and after, our moderated multi-media discussion will span questions of medium and message, getting at the heart of the “ethics of seeing” that photographs of soldiers entail.