Violence and the contemporary soldiering body

Abstract This article asks what is the significance of making the soldiering body (hyper)visible in war. In contrast to the techno-fetishistic portrayals of Western warfare in the 1990s, the recent counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan witnessed a re-centring of British soldiering bodies within the visual grammars of war. In the visibility of this body, violences once obscured were rendered viscerally visible on the bodies of British soldiers. Locating the analysis in the War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, the article details two moments of wartime violence experienced and enacted by British soldiers, tracking how violence was mediated in, on and through these hypervisible soldiering bodies and the attending invisibility of ‘other’ bodies. The article argues that during the Afghanistan campaign, soldiers’ bodies became not just enactors of military power but crucial representational figures in the continuance of violent projects abroad and their acceptance back home.