Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)

Terry examines the treatment of war-generated polytrauma, post-injury 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. At the same time the US military rationalizes violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge and saving lives. 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.. In Attachments to War Jennifer Terry traces how biomedical logics entangle Americans in a perpetual state of war. She also outlines the ways in which military-sponsored biomedicine relies on racialized logics that devalue the lives of Afghan and Iraqi citizens and US veterans of color. 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 compl

"This brilliant book is a thoughtful and profoundly original study of how war becomes an object of attachment and support in the United States. Jennifer Terry's discussion of wounding, injury, trauma, and prosthetics is one of the most fascinating, moving, and intensely generative studies I have read about how war is normalized, made everyday, embedded in practices and beliefs and affect(ion)s of ordinary folks."