Tough Talk: Embodied Language and Military Necropolitics in the USA

FAIN: FEL-282343-22

Janet Susan McIntosh
Brandeis University (Waltham, MA 02453-2728)

Research and writing leading to a book that studies the use of aggressive language in U.S. military training and how it contributes to desensitization and loss of empathy in the larger context of the armed forces.

I seek NEH funding to write a monograph about language, militarization, and demilitarization among servicemembers in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic work and interviews with veterans of the Marine Corps and Army, I examine the way language is used to train recruits and service members to take up military masculinity, dull their personal sensitivities, and curtail their empathy. I develop a concept I call “semiotic callousing,” in which Drill Instructors believe that aggressive language during military training can toughen bodies and minds. I examine how service members use distinctive language during combat to facilitate and cope with violence. And I explore how some veterans use creative symbolism in the aftermath of war to help address their “moral injuries,” a recently recognized phenomenon adjacent to yet distinct from PTSD, loosely defined by psychologists in terms of “soul wounds” resultant from acts of perceived moral transgression.