Special Issue:
Everyday Militarism

As the Cold War was deepening, Dwight Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial complex” in his farewell presidential address of January 1961, warning of its “grave implications” and “unwarranted influence.” The term may have a longer history, and militarism, the force driving its formation, is certainly not unique to that period or to any one part of the globe. Yet the United States remains the world’s largest arms supplier and is directly or indirectly linked to many of the world’s unresolved conflicts. In this issue about the effects of militarism on people’s everyday lives across multiple countries, the shadow cast by US militarism is long: You-me Park refers to the legacy of US military bases in South Korea, including sexual abuse cases against US military personnel, while Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian details how ongoing US military support to Israel has enabled the long catastrophe for Palestinians. In a like vein, the Turkish state, whose secularist military Mahiye Secil Dagtas analyzes, expects the United States to ignore its bloody crackdowns in its southeastern region in exchange for use of the military base there. Harriet Gray and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes track the fallout from US-led military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan; Elizabeth Mesok critiques the gendered personnel practices of US militaries; Alicia C. Decker, Summer Forester, and Eliot Blackburn comment on the transfer of US military values and equipment to college campuses; Ericka Huggins reflects on the legacy of the Black Panther resistance; Patricia Joan Saunders describes art that emerges in response to US-inspired military operations in Jamaica; Janet Norman Knox riffs on the gendered logics of the Cold War; and Lisa Parks analyzes US propagation of new drone technology. In effect, this issue of Feminist Studies challenges US exceptionalism even as it explores how militarism undergirds it.

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You-me Park
The Crucible of Sexual Violence: Militarized Masculinities and the Abjection of Life in Post-Crisis, Neoliberal South Korea
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Elizabeth Mesok
Sexual Violence and the US Military: Feminism, US Empire, and the Failure of Liberal Equality
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Mahiye Secil Dagtas
The Personal in the Collective: Rethinking the Secular Subject in Relation to the Military, Wifehood, and Islam in Turkey
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Patricia Joan Saunders
Gardening in the Garrisons, You Never Know What You Will Find: (Un)Visibility in the Works of Ebony G. Patterson (Art Essay)
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Harriet Gray
The Geopolitics of Intimacy and the Intimacies of Geopolitics: Combat Deployment, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Domestic Abuse in the British Military
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Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Infiltrated Intimacies: The Case of Palestinian Returnees
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Alicia C. Decker, Summer Forester, and Eliot Blackburn
Rethinking Everyday Militarism on Campus: Feminist Reflections on the Fatal Shooting at Purdue University
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Lisa Parks
Drones, Vertical Mediation, and the Targeted Class (News and Views)
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Lisa Rofel and Jeremy Tai
A Conversation with Ericka Huggins (Interview)
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Creative Work

Order the creative work from 42.1 (2 pdfs)

• Janet Norman Knox
  Coursework in Cross-Cultural Relations: 9 Gs and the Red Telephone (Play)
  
• Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes
  Helix/Womb/House (Poetry)
  

Cover Art

Front cover (coffins, lower third):
Ebony G. Patterson, 9 of 219 Project, (Alice Yard, Act 5), installed in Yard, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 2011. Image courtesy Alice Yard. Photograph by Rodell Warner.