Abstract
This chapter considers the socio-spatial dynamics of a military base overseas from the perspective of Army wives. Based on ethnographic research with the spouses of British Army personnel living in Germany, it explores the micropolitics of military power to assess the intricate ways in which it is sensed and understood by subjects in their everyday lives. The chapter explores narratives and practices through which wives’ relationship to the institution might be understood. It questions what these multiple and often contradictory configurations might indicate about women’s agency and their ambiguous status as both subjects and agents of militarisation – sometimes complicit in its circulation through social hierarchies, sometimes active in renegotiating or defusing its effects. The complex and often contradictory power of gender is seen as a catalyst for the conversion and co-optation of institutional control over women’s everyday lives.
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Notes
- 1.
See for example in the UK The Choir – Military Wives, a popular BBC reality television series first broadcast in 2011, about the wives and girlfriends of British soldiers during deployment. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0178gcj, last accessed 23 February 2014.
- 2.
Unlike many of the studies listed above, my focus here is less on the dynamics of base communities and their intersection with local populations or the Status of Forces Agreements that produce ‘centre periphery relations’ (Cooley and Marten 2006, see also in respect of the US military presence and the German state for example, Sandars 1999 and Hawkins 2001). Rather than add to these broader analyses, my focus is very much on how the internal garrison community reconfigures itself around the particular conditions produced by national-institutional borders.
- 3.
My terms of access for this project, conducted under the banner of unfunded PhD research, were expressly informal and negotiated via a family member with a long-standing connection to the Regiment in question. Part of the conditions of this access is that the Regiment and all those who form part of its broader community remain anonymous. Therefore, all names have been changed and individual women are cited without details of their biographical circumstances or details that might indicate their position within the Regiment’s many different social circles or more formal hierarchies (such as, e.g., when women are referred to as the ‘wife of’ particular members or ranks within the Regiment. Indeed, to identify women in this way would be to reproduce some of the proxy-discipline that already determines many of their experiences).
- 4.
The ‘NAAFI’ is the Navy Army Air Force Families Institute, short hand for the large shops or supermarkets set up in garrison towns, now often run by sub-contractors and stocking a range of national supermarket produce (brands such as Tesco and Waitrose in this case), and other goods generally viewed as expensive alternatives to local produce.
- 5.
In the case of the contemporary British Army this includes an allowance for living overseas, support for parents who choose to send their children to boarding schools in the UK, and other benefits such as the tax-free import of British cars. Whenever one approaches an area of the German town where the MOD has built or rented housing to accommodate service personnel, the profusion of bright yellow registration plates with their large, unfussy combination of numbers and letters produces a strong impression that one is entering a kind of British zone. A further effect of this out-dated clause of Britain’s Status of Forces agreement with Germany, however, is the familiarity these cars inscribe as they weave their way around the garrison. For me, wherever I happened to be, seeing a car with a British number plate provoked the secondary response of looking closer at the driver and then, potentially, giving a wave. As well as a national boundary marker therefore, the British cars are productive of practices of internal (e.g., regimental) familiarity and recognition, whereupon one is hailed and hails the other as simultaneously a British and an Army subject.
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Hyde, A. (2017). The Civilian Wives of Military Personnel: Mobile Subjects or Agents of Militarisation?. In: Woodward, R., Duncanson, C. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51677-0_12
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