Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Jennifer Terry

In Attachments to War Jennifer Terry traces how biomedical logics entangle Americans in a perpetual state of war. Focusing on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2014, Terry identifies the presence of a biomedicine-war nexus in which new forms of wounding provoke the continual development of complex treatment, rehabilitation, and prosthetic technologies. At the same time, the U.S. military rationalizes violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge and saving lives. Terry examines the treatment of war-generated polytrauma, postinjury bionic prosthetics design, and the development of defenses against infectious pathogens, showing how the interdependence between war and biomedicine is interwoven with neoliberal ideals of freedom, democracy, and prosperity. She also outlines the ways in which military-sponsored biomedicine relies on racialized logics that devalue the lives of Afghan and Iraqi citizens and U.S. veterans of color. Uncovering the mechanisms that attach all Americans to war and highlighting their embeddedness and institutionalization in everyday life via the government, media, biotechnology, finance, and higher education, Terry helps lay the foundation for a more meaningful opposition to war.

Genres: War, Nonfiction, Science, Research

264 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2017

About the author

Jennifer Terry is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine, the author of An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society, and coeditor of Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life and Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture.

Reviews

[Jay Jolles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of the most interesting academic monographs I've ever read. Terry's analyses are prescient and increasingly relevant given the current COVID-19 pandemic. Her lucid argumentation is only enhanced by her sprawling and innovative method(s).

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Terry challenges our understanding of biomedicine's rhetoric around advancements made on behalf of our injured military troops, and shows the pernicious connections between the military industrial complex and military research funding into biomedical advancement. Although these advancements are touted as helping "everyone" the reality is much different: poor people in Black and brown American communities never benefit from high-end treatments or prosthetics because the costs remain too high, and the technologies never make their way to the innocent women and children harmed by our weapons. Yet, the logics of these advances requires more injured soldiers to supply the medical experimentation pipeline. Thus, more war. More war, more research dollars. A grotesque cycle.