Too Fat To Fight? Obesity, Bio-Politics and the Militarization of Children’s Bodies

The situation described by this Mission: Readiness report was one in which the consequences of  prevalent  childhood  food  consumption  patterns  constituted  a  national  security threat, something requiring ameliorative action.  It is fair to say that generally, the national security implications  of  food  consumption  have  become  a rhetorical  commonplace  (Billig 1996)  in other recent discussions of health issues in the United States.  For example, they also featured as  part  of  Michelle  Obama’s  ‘Let’s  Move’  campaign –designed  to  ‘raise  a  healthier generation of kids’ (Let’s Move 2011).

Taken together, the campaigning activity of Mission: Readiness and the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, bring into sharp relief a range of issues of interest to social scientists. They mobilise the contemporary politics of the body –including bio-political and governmental concerns –particularly the attention given to a so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ and its focus upon children. Moreover, because of the degree to which Mission: Readiness’ contributions were framed by, and addressed to, a perceived need to ensure that bodies of US children are not ‘Too Fat To Fight’, they are also pertinent to those interested in ongoing processes of the militarization of social life, and the multiple historic connections between food and war. This paper engages with these issues by interrogating the key ‘Too Fat To Fight’ report produced by Mission: Readiness (2010) as part of its campaign for legislative change.

We begin this chapter by discussing work on militarization, and particularly the claim that contemporary Western societies are marked by complex processes of both demilitarization and, in particular domains, re-militarization. We proceed by discussing the influence of the ‘bio-political’ turn in Foucault’s work and his development of specific understandings of governmental strategy which resonate with the logic of multiple aspects of Mission: Readiness’ narrative. The chapter then moves on to discuss the ways in which reference to historical precedent plays a role in the anticipatory justification of federal legislative intervention, before we address the specificity of childhood as a politically legitimate site for such intervention. We conclude by considering the bodily imperatives of Mission: Readiness as an example of what we call, following Billig’s (1995) analysis of banal nationalism, banal militarism

 

Militarization

 

The wider social relations and institutional arrangements of military power changed radically in the final decades of the twentieth century in most nations in the advanced industrial West. Traditional forms of mass military participation such as universal or draft conscription rapidly declined, having been the subject of much political opposition in the 1960s and 1970s. Militaries became much more capital rather than labour intensive, and smaller, all-volunteer and professionalized forces developed, increasingly transformed by technological reconfiguration and, in recent decades, by privatisation.In terms of a lessening of direct disciplinary engagement with civilian bodies then, Western societies arguably underwent a certain demilitarization over the last four decades. However, in other crucial political and economic respects, the preparation, support,and prosecution of war remains undiminished or indeed heightened.

Military spending has been consistently high over the past four decades in the Western world, and has increased significantly in the decade since 9/11 (SIPRI 2011). As Bacevich (2006) notes, the political economy of the US in particular is still heavily militarized, in terms of the political influence of the defence sector; the percentage of the federal discretionary budget (approx. 60%) that goes on military spending; and the unanimity of thinking about war, security and foreign policy that emerges amongst political leaders –a ‘military metaphysics –the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military’, as Mills (1956: 222) put it over 50 years ago. Not only does this ‘military metaphysics’ remain sacrosanct in Washington (Bacevich 2011), Lutz argues that support for the military and the legitimacy of having and deploying vast military force have become key tenets of American political and cultural life more generally,referring to such extensively-held beliefs as the ‘military normal’. There is no institution more widely revered in the US and whose financial and moral support is thought more unquestionable both in the halls of Congress and in wider public life than the military (Lutz 2009, Bacevich 2006).Lutz points to the reproduction of the military normal, the normalization of war making as the American way of life, via multiple means including the work of the Pentagon media and public relations machine, whose $3bn annual budget encourages civilians to support the activities of the troops.

Notwithstanding this support and the increase in vicarious engagement with war and the military via the media, the aforementioned key shift in direct military engagement with citizens’ lives was one of the developments that led some commentators in the 1990s to propose the existence of ‘post-military society’ (Shaw 1991). Most civilian lives in the West had become increasingly insulated from direct war preparation, which had become the exclusive sequestered domain of third-party professionals. The socialisation of the young was increasingly pacific. In post-conscription states with progressively professionalized and privatised militaries then, it was difficult to see direct military service as an integral part of citizenship.

Indeed, debates around the meaning of ‘active citizenship’, an increasingly prominent motif within various, particularly neo-liberal, political discourses in the West in recent decades, invoked numerous figures –from the responsible job-seeker to the sovereign consumer,the engaged public sphere debater to the community stakeholder –but only rarely invoked any form of martial sacrifice within their remit. Citizenship thus increasingly became understood to be, and accepted as, post-military in the contemporary West. For example, in the UK, 2011 saw the introduction of the first formal legislation for a Military Covenant, instituting in law reciprocal relations and obligations between the Nation and those who choose to serve in the Armed Forces. While this development could be read on the surface as an example of re-militarization, establishing the idea of a national debt to a military that had been in continuous active service for the past decade, it also spoke of an attempt to shore up an understanding of duty that had previously been unnecessary to articulate. The subtext to this legislation was that this understanding might otherwise wane in the public consciousness, as it was no longer implicit through any sort of universal experience.

 Our analysis of Too Fat To Fight is located within this curious, somewhat contradictory context of processes of both demilitarization as well as, often cultural and affective, processes of re-militarization in the West in recent decades. As Geyer notes, militarization–‘the contradictory and tense social process by which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence’ (1989: 79) –is a wide-ranging, multi-faceted and sometimes uneven development rather than a simple, homogenous process. It is also worth thinking about the arguments of Too Fat Too Fight in a context where the dominant modes of destruction employed by Western militaries have been reshaped so radically in recent decades that it is no longer entirely clear that universal standards of physical fitness bearany obvious, direct, and consistently meaningful, relation to these new forms of warfighting and the defence of the nation.

This eponymous concern, of what it might actually mean ‘to fight’, now and in the future, is an issue that receives minimal attention in Too Fat To Fight. However, it is worth noting here that Shaw (2005) claims that the central guiding principle of what he calls the new way of Western warfighting that emerged from the 1990s onwards was the transfer of risk away from the body of the Western soldier. While this often meant relying on others to take bodily risks on the ground, such as local allies or private military contractors, most importantly it meant a heightened role for technology and specifically for air power. Increasingly then, Western warfighting in many recent conflicts has meant bombing from afar, and the physical demands of occupying hostile territory have necessarily receded as and when the prosecution of war followed this virtual/virtuous model (Ignatieff 2001,Der Derian2009).

Clearly, the physical demands of the various manifestations of ‘fighting’ will differ, according to whether they involve, for example, elite aviation, signals operation, frontline combat or drone control. The point we wish to make is simply that some of the many activities that increasingly constitute Western ‘fighting’ may be becoming less obviously and meaningfully defined by a primary and undeniable reliance upon physical fitness and martial prowess. Of course, that Western military cultures nonetheless continue to place great emphasis upon cultivating specific regimes of physicality amongst all recruits should clearly be understood partly in terms of the subjective entrainment of other qualities and values beyond physical prowess –particularly collective traits such as solidarity, teamwork, command, and discipline. The extent to which such inculcation is now becoming the primary function of what is arguably an otherwise zombie idiom of physicality and traditional martial training, potentially unconnected to some contemporary forms of Western war-fighting, is a question that lies beyond the remit of this chapter. However, it is also worth noting here that the heart of muscular physicality beats extremely strongly beyond the official domains of basic training, into the makeshift gyms that soldiers build for themselves in every desert encampment or floating base they occupy –arguably leisure-time arenas for the simulated performance of a muscular military identity that may be increasingly denied in the surveillant working mode. Official and unofficial military cultures are thus partly characterized by forms and modes of embodiment that may be symptomatic and even baroque. In the context of this chapter, however, the issue we wish to flag is simply that, alongside the aforementioned shifts in direct disciplinary engagement with civilian bodies in post-conscription states, any straightforward equation of ‘fighting’ with physical prowess is questionable even for those militarized bodies that are involved in contemporary Western warfare.

 We now turn to further analysis of some of the details of Too Fat To Fight, initially via an engagement with Foucault’s work on governmentality and bio-power.

 

Governmentality and bio-power

 

The relatively recent translation of many of Foucault’s lectures (specifically Foucault2003, 2007,and 2008) has added to the body of material available in which he is concerned with aspects of the rationality of government –usually framed as his work on ‘governmentality’. Work in this area has been developed notably by people such as Dean (1999) and Rose (1999a, 1999b, 1998) in order to make sense of the operation of neoliberalism in particular. Neoliberalism is understood, by such authors, as a mobile political formation, or a form of bio-power, which deals with bodies, the emergence and regulation of life, and the ways in which attempts are made to conduct the conduct of others in particular ways. That is, action is taken upon actions in pursuit of disposing people to do things (Foucault1982: 220). In such work, the term bio-power is used to refer to the ‘the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy’ (Foucault2007: 1).

Recently this work on bio-power, bio-politics, and governmentality has been very influential upon social scientists operating at the intersection betweensociology and geography (Guthman2011,Evans 2010,Guthmanand DuPuis2006) in relation to food security, and the body, as well as upon other sociological studies of nutritional science (Coveney, 2006), television documentaries, and reality TV dealing with obesity/fatness(Rich 2011, Inthorn and Boyce2010,Ouellete and Hay 2008). It has also been central to work exploring the regulation of life in the War on Terror and the wider ‘liberal way of war’ (Reid 2006, Dillon and Reid, 2009) as well as the anticipatory bio-political governance of insurgency (Gregory 2010, Anderson 2010, 2011, 2012).

According to Rose(1999a: 154), one key process under neoliberalism is best understood via the term ‘responsibilization’, whereby people are expected to be ‘active citizens’, and, in effect, govern themselves. They are expected to make their choices responsibly, and negotiate various risks on the basis of the expert knowledge put into circulation (Dean1999: 146). As Rose puts it, health, specifically, is expected to come from ‘the market, expertise and a regulated autonomy’ (Rose