Brianne Gallagher "The Blog Of War"

The Women's Studies Colloquium Series is pleased to present:
The Blog of War: (Re)producing U.S. Soldiers in an Age of Terror
A talk by Brianne Gallagher
(UHM Political Science)
This presentation examines how online military cultures and soldier blogs circulate in the "public" as important popular cultural sites for imagining the U.S. soldier figure in the current U.S. led "war against terror."
It explores how individuals and soldiers create online public and counter publics through blogging practices, with particular attention to how the state is heavily invested in governing the ways in which these online forums shape the "face" of war to the "public."
In which ways do blog cultures interact with the military media information apparatus in post 9/11 worlds? As this presentation illustrates, the U.S. military has made multiple attempts to police soldiers' online public participation in visualizing the "war against terror" to the (imagined) global online community since 9/11.
Crucially, this presentation approaches these convergences between Internet culture and militarism by attending to the ways in which soldier blogs are policed and re imagined in military policy in order to circulate gendered images of nation ness.
It concludes by turning briefly to Deborah Scranton's documentary film The War Tapes (2006) in order to provide a filmic example of how new digital technologies--such as solider blogs, photojournalism, and mini cams-- might be politically wielded to create more unfamiliar "public" perceptions of the "war on terror" and the "honorable, soldier figure" in Iraq.
This event is co sponsored with the UHM Political Science Department.