Regimented Life - (Advances in Critical Military Studies) by Alexandra Hyde (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explores a new understanding of gender, agency and military power through the lived experiences of army wives, based on unprecedented ethnographic access to a British Army regiment as a unit of social and cultural belonging.

Book Synopsis

Based on unprecedented ethnographic access to a regimental community in Germany during a period of deployment to Afghanistan, this analysis of the ambiguities of gendered agency focuses not on the front-line experience of soldiers, but on that of the wives 'left behind'. Alexandra Hyde explores the mobile and contradictory position of civilian women as they navigate British Army culture and its reified production of social belonging. The book considers wives' exposure to - and implication in - processes of militarisation and, ultimately, war and state-sanctioned violence as they 'live with' rather than 'serve in' the military. Chapters explore multiple circuits of mobility and migration; women's productive and reproductive labour; rank and its relationship to class and ethnicity; and women's pre-emptive management of grief and human vulnerability. What emerges is a critical, feminist exploration of the composite relations of gender, class, sexuality and nation that combine to make and remake military power.

About the Author

Dr Alexandra Hyde is Lecturer in Gender Studies at University College London and Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include gender, militarisation and feminist epistemology and her work appeared in a number of key journals.