Conflict, Intimacy, and Military Wives: A Lively Geopolitics

在近20年的部署期之后，退伍军人和现役军人的恢复已成为英国政府的一个核心问题。2018年的一份政府报告显示，多达10%的英国退伍军人可能患有心理健康问题，部署和战斗暴露是公认的触发因素（下议院国防委员会2018）。临床服务与非临床服务一起发展，并为退伍军人提供支持，目的是帮助退役军人和妇女适当地重新融入社会，近年来，参与性戏剧越来越多地被动员起来，作为帮助退伍军人从创伤和伤害中“恢复”的一种方式。除了简单的恢复机制之外，这类军事表演项目，像其他文化形式一样，已经成为向接受的公众传播战争故事的流行形式。人们只需要看看军事戏剧项目的成功，如皇家英国退伍军人协会的《查理F的两个世界》，它赢得了著名的大赦国际表达自由奖，以及萝拉阿里亚斯的《雷区》，它在第三年继续在世界各地巡回演出，看到公众对战争和冲突的生活经历有很大的兴趣。探索这些生活经历的创造性和戏剧性的方法在帮助公众批判性地思考战争对社区和个人的各种影响方面具有很大的潜力。然而，我们在这些项目和表演中继续看到的是对男性英雄士兵叙事和空间上“遥远”的战争图像的重复。在这些叙述中，军事伙伴和家庭的生活经历很少被给予一个平台，更不用说集中，这意味着冲突可能发生的家庭和亲密场所在对话中缺席。这种对军嫂的排挤进一步反映在《武装部队盟约》的修辞中对军人家庭的“口头服务”上，尽管长期以来人们都承认家庭在维护军事惯例和价值观方面发挥着不可或缺的作用。它不仅在遥远的战场上上演，也在亲密的家庭空间和个人关系中上演。它将使用来自被压迫者剧院，论坛剧院和欲望彩虹的戏剧技巧，这些技巧专注于动员戏剧来探索冲突和解决方案，以帮助我们以不同的方式思考冲突和部署对军人家庭的真实的生活影响。研究表明，创造性的表演团体和项目对于增强军嫂和退伍军人的权能并让她们发表意见具有重大价值。该项目将扩展这一研究，并探讨如何参与社区戏剧不仅可以授权军人配偶，但也改变了我们如何处理“冲突”的政治geographic.The研究问题为这个项目如下：1）戏剧如何可以帮助中心的机构和意义的军人妻子在武装冲突的生活影响的研究？2)对军人妻子的创造性研究如何帮助我们理解“冲突”是一种渗透在亲密和家庭空间中的暴力的流动复合体？3)在批判性军事研究中，论坛剧场方法能做什么而其他方法做不到？该项目的长期目标是通过戏剧表演和问答来帮助塑造关于“战争”的空间和后果的公众辩论，并帮助塑造国防部对军人家庭的支持。

In the aftermath of a period of deployment that has span across nearly two decades, the recovery of veterans and serving members of the armed forces has become a central concern for the British state. A 2018 Government report indicated that as many as 10% of British veterans could suffer from mental health conditions, with deployment and combat exposure being recognized triggers (House of Commons Defence Committee 2018). Clinical services have been developed alongside non-clinical services and support for veterans, with the aim of helping ex-servicemen and women to properly reintegrate into society, and in recent years participatory theatre has been increasingly mobilised as a way of helping veterans to 'recover' from trauma and injury. Beyond simply mechanisms of recovery, these kinds of military performance projects have, like other cultural forms, become a popular form of communicating war stories to a receptive public audience. One only has to look to the success of military theatre projects such as the Royal British Legion's The Two Worlds of Charlie F, which won the prestigious Amnesty International Award for Freedom of Expression, and Lola Arias' Minefield which continues to tour across the world in its third year, to see that there is a great deal of public interest in the lived experiences of war and conflict.Creative and theatrical approaches to exploring these lived experiences have a great deal of potential for helping the public think critically about the diverse effects of war on communities and individuals. And yet, what we continue to see in these projects and performances is a privileging of masculine heroic soldier narratives and images of spatially 'far away' wars. In these narratives, the lived experiences of military partners and families are rarely given a platform, let alone centered, meaning that the domestic and intimate sites in which conflict can play out are absent from the conversation. This sidelining of military wives is further reflected in the 'lip-service' paid to military families in the rhetoric of the Armed Forces Covenant, despite long standing recognition that families play an integral role in upholding military practices and values.In a departure from these masculinized narratives regarding the nature and sites of war, this research will explore 'conflict' from the perspective of military wives, as something which plays out not only in far-away battle sites but also in intimate domestic spaces and personal relationships. It will use theatre techniques from Theatre of the Oppressed, forum theatre, and Rainbow of Desires, which focus on mobilising drama to explore conflict and resolution, to help us think differently about what the real lived impacts of conflict and deployment are for military families. Research has shown that creative performance groups and projects have great value for empowering and giving a voice to military wives and female veterans. The proposed project will extend this research, and explore how participatory community theatre can not only empower military spouses, but also change how we approach 'conflict' in political geography.The research questions for this project are as follows:1) How can theatre help to centre the agency and significance of military wives in the study of the lived impacts of armed conflict?2) How might creative research with military wives help us to understand 'conflict' as a fluid complex of violence that permeates intimate and domestic spaces?3) What can forum theatre-as-method do that other methods cannot in critical military studies?The long term ambitions of the project are to help shape public debate on the spaces and consequences of 'war' through the theatre performance and Q&A, and to help shape MoD provision of support for military families.