Introduction: Militarisation and Pleasure

As power is everywhere, so is pleasure. Though we may be accustomed to understanding military violence and private pleasure as fundamentally separate, or at least as phenomena that seldom interact, this special issue contends that they are in fact deeply interpenetrated in ways that reveal a great deal about contemporary culture, politics, and subjectivity. If one does think of pleasure and militarisation, perhaps readiest to come to mind are the histories of depraved torture via sexual humiliation and the normalisation of sexual abuse in the military, among other instances of the ways that explicit militarised violence is catalysed by pleasure. Rather than attend to pleasure as a weapon of war, however, for this special issue we focus on an under-examined site: the ways that militarisation is normalised, mobilised, felt, and imagined in mundane sites in the civilian sphere. By collecting essays that explore the interaction of militarisation and pleasure in sites as diverse as bunker tourism, cookbooks, video games, and anti-trans rhetoric, this special issue explores a set of thorny central questions: What affective, consumptive, and sensorial regimes enable us to consider ourselves untouched by militarised infrastructures and state forces? How can we nonetheless sense our militarisation through sites of pleasure? How does militarisation function through our enjoyment?