Fight to Live, Live to Fight: Mapping Veteran Narratives of Violence in Peace

Abstract

This dissertation is an examination of military veterans who have come home to become social justice activists. I proceed by staging encounters between their lives, stories, activism, experiences in war, with a number of theoretical concepts. These concepts include: geocorporeal actors, parrhēsia, organic intellectual, masculinity, hypermasculinity, state violence, citizenship, war imaginaries, and healing. These encounters between these veterans and concepts tell us many interesting things about war, militarism, US democracy, and US society. At times these encounters help to unravel the messiness of understanding some of these concepts; at other times it makes that which seems clear-­‐cut more complicated. Finally, this dissertation shows the wars at home that these veterans are currently fighting. They are fighting wars that are often tied to the wars they left while in the military, and they are fighting to make sense of it all, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.