Anthropological Quarterly

ABSTRACT:

My focus in this article is on the connections between masculinity, “will,” ideology, and biomedical and pharmacological enhancements designed to make soldiers—either the New Man of modernity or the emergent pharmacological “supersoldier” of the current era in the United States—more effective and resilient on (and off) the battlefield. The body is, as we know, a site for expressing political ideals; for fascism and communism, the armored body of the New Man was to be the ultima Thule of commitment and love of the party, and all the party represented. For the emergent US pharmacological supersoldier, the body is the site for expressing the goals of neoliberalism: the military body is a site of protection, salvation, and enhancement, as well as a site of ever-expanding research and production. But all conceptions of the New Man deal with the ideas of internal armor and steel. I examine the tension between the “belief” or “will” armor of fascism and the embedded biomedical armor of US military performance enhancement research programs. As points of comparison, I examine the similarities between German and Italian fascist and Soviet discourses and aesthetic representations of the internally-armored, “mechanical” body and US military discourses, conceptions and research projects concerned with the development of pharmaceutical interventions designed to protect and enhance US soldiers in combat. All of these conceptions of the soldier’s body focus on the internal armoring of the soldier, and the ways in which biomedicine and “will” or “belief armor” can be manipulated to produce reliable, resilient, combat-ready, and combat-willing soldiers.