The Multiple Speeds of Infrastructural Violence, or Putting Flesh on the Boneyard

In recent years, museums have been acknowledged as powerful geopolitical sites. In this article, we explore the military museums of southern Arizona, primarily the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, as a unique kind of infrastructure where the museum and the military meet. Drawing on participant observation, we explore how the museum experience provides crucial affective and emotional dimensions to the ideological production the military is involved in. This article also uses geographic information systems to begin charting connections between these museums and their immediate surroundings in the city and region, as well as the wider territories that the military museums help to maintain. As military infrastructure morphs into museum experiences, we consider the epistemic violence that results and consider how it might also be a form of slow infrastructural violence, insofar as it helps maintain unequal relations of power and ongoing violence around the world and in the city itself.