Regimented Life (An Ethnography of Army Wives)

Based on unprecedented ethnographic access to a regimental community in Germany during a period of deployment to Afghanistan, this analysis of the ambiguities of gendered agency focuses not on the front-line experience of soldiers, but on that of the wives 'left behind'. Alexandra Hyde explores the mobile and contradictory position of civilian women as they navigate British Army culture and its reified production of social belonging. The book considers wives' exposure to – and implication in – processes of militarisation and, ultimately, war and state-sanctioned violence as they 'live with' rather than 'serve in' the military. Chapters explore multiple circuits of mobility and migration; women's productive and reproductive labour; rank and its relationship to class and ethnicity; and women's pre-emptive management of grief and human vulnerability. What emerges is a critical, feminist exploration of the composite relations of gender, class, sexuality and nation that combine to make and remake military power.