Conflict, Intimacy, and Military Wives: A Lively Geopolitics

在经历了长达近20年的部署之后，退伍军人和现役军人的康复已成为英国政府的核心关切。2018年的一份政府报告指出，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和对退伍军人的支持一起发展，目的是帮助退伍军人适当地重新融入社会，近年来，参与式剧院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，这些类型的军事表演项目和其他文化形式一样，已经成为向乐于接受的公众观众传达战争故事的一种流行形式。人们只需看看军事戏剧项目的成功，比如英国皇家军团的《查理·F的两个世界》，它获得了享有盛誉的大赦国际言论自由奖，以及萝拉·阿里亚斯的《雷区》，它在第三个年头继续在世界各地巡回演出，就会看到战争和冲突的真实经历具有巨大的公共利益。探索这些真实经历的创造性和戏剧性方法具有巨大的潜力，可以帮助公众批判性地思考战争对社区和个人的不同影响。然而，在这些项目和表演中，我们继续看到的是男性英雄般的士兵叙事和空间上“遥远”的战争图像的特权。在这些叙事中，军事伙伴和家属的亲身经历很少被提供一个平台，更不用说以此为中心了，这意味着可能发生冲突的国内和亲密地点没有出现在对话中。这种对军人妻子的忽视进一步反映在《武装力量公约》的修辞中对军人家属的口惠而实不至，尽管长期以来人们一直承认，家庭在维护军事实践和价值观方面发挥着不可或缺的作用。与这些关于战争性质和战争地点的男性化叙述不同，这项研究将从军人妻子的角度来探索冲突，这种冲突不仅发生在遥远的战场，也发生在亲密的家庭空间和个人关系中。它将使用被压迫戏剧、论坛戏剧和欲望彩虹的戏剧技巧，这些戏剧专注于动员戏剧来探索冲突和解决方案，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生活影响。研究表明，创造性的表演团体和项目对于赋予军嫂和女退伍军人权力和发声具有重要价值。拟议的项目将扩展这项研究，并探索参与式社区剧院如何不仅赋予军人配偶权力，这个项目的研究问题如下：1)剧院如何帮助军嫂在研究武装冲突的生活影响中发挥作用和意义？2)对军嫂的创造性研究如何帮助我们理解“冲突”是一个渗透到私人和家庭空间的流动的暴力复合体？3)在关键的军事研究中，作为剧院方法的论坛有什么其他方法做不到的？该项目的长期雄心是通过戏剧表演和问答来帮助塑造关于‘战争’的空间和后果的公共辩论。并帮助形成国防部对军人家属的支持。

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.