The Affects of Gendered Security Work

Attending to the training of soldiers, this paper will address the inner workings of an institution argued to produce security, namely national militaries. Building on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Danish military, the paper suggests the military sphere to not just be enmeshed in affective flows, but to be highly dependent on these in the ‘making’ of soldiers. As I felt it sweeping through my own body during the participatory part of my fieldwork, continuous flows of pride, ridicule, and anxiety appeared forceful in making most of us want to be good soldiers – even more so than the processes of control and correction that military discipline is typically described in accordance to. In well-established frameworks for how citizens are turned into soldiers and how bodies are enrolled in military ideals, the concept of discipline tends to cast the body as a passive materiality for disciplining mechanisms to work on. Advancing this understanding of discipline, I want to suggest affects as a crucial element to the becoming of soldiers; affects that are highly entangled in the gendering of the military at large.