Aesthetics, embodiment and militarisation are perhaps never more closely joined than in the aesthetics of the military body disabled by war. The fundamental rationale of war, and the ultimate purpose of the institutions which fight it is, an interdisciplinary literature reminds us, the destruction of bodies. Participants in war, and those who love them, do not just fear their death: they fear what condition war might leave their living bodies in. The mechanised and explosive means of destroying the body in modern warfare make war a matter of horrific injury even beyond what one armed body can inflict on another, or – to use the more sensory language that has come more naturally to cultural historians than disciplinary international relations – a matter of mangling, roasting, poisoning, lacerating, dismembering and tearing limb from limb. Indeed, Jasbir Puar now argues that both war and industrial capitalism require certain bodies to be marked out as ‘preordained for … often targeted maiming’, echoing Joanna Bourke's observation that the male body ‘was intended to be mutilated’ during the Great War.

The disabled, maimed and disfigured body, moreover, looms large over the affective politics and psychodynamics of the body through which processes of militarisation work. Against militarised representations of the health, strength, vigour and glamour military training and service bestows on bodies, experiences and representations of disabled veterans become embodied evidence of the other transformations war inflicts. Anti-war art traditions in painting and photography, indeed, rely on images of horrifically wounded soldiers as much as civilian victims of war. re-militarised, from the sacrificial spectacle that the French gueules cassées (World War I veterans with disfigured faces) represented in victory parades, to the figure of the maimed US male veteran of Iraq/Afghanistan re-masculinised and re-eroticised through the twin technologies of ‘sexually allusive’ photography and ‘techno-militarized’ prosthetic limbs. Physical disability and disfigurement are perhaps where the conjunction between militarisation, aesthetics and embodiment seems to become most uncomfortable: ‘we’ (the community of readers interested in all three things) are contemplating the aesthetics and embodiment, sometimes even the troubling yet seductive aestheticisation, of an activity which ultimately exists to tear bodies apart.