UC Riverside

Dance and military arts, though seemingly divergent as disciplines, both have traditions of theorizing and training individual bodies, as well as corps of bodies, to respond to, resist, and interpret instructional tactics and techniques and to express meaning through practiced, choreographed, and improvised motion. This dissertation proposes that a history of U.S warfare--often focused on the study of strategies, technologies, and geopolitics--may be considered as a history of the use of force by and against bodies of war. By reorienting attention towards embodiment it is possible to consider how training for, engineering, employing, and enduring the force of war primarily, not incidentally, impacts bodies in theaters of war.

This dissertation considers the historic use of embodied force by 17th-century French militaries, from which the American military derived a set of 18th- and 19th-century tactical and training methodologies, and proceeds to examine the deployment of embodied force by the 21st-century U.S. Military as applied through the use of corporeal technologies--those that are physically, physiologically, or prosthetically integrated into soldiers' defense and weapons systems. In 17th-century France, historical convergences in instructional pedagogies and performance strategies meant that both dance and military arts designated moving bodies as performative agents to display individual, state, and sovereign force. Dance studies' theorization of performance, choreography, and performativity is thus mobilized in this dissertation to theorize the training and techniques of soldiering bodies during this period.

The embodiment of soldiering in late 20th- and early 21st-century theaters of war, particularly for the world's largest military force, the U.S. Military, has been transfigured as military practices have shifted from deploying choreographed infantry to deploying technologies that augment or even augur the replacement of human soldiers. Dance studies, concerned as a discipline for the subjectivity and agency of bodies, generally in motion, may thus also be mobilized to theorize how 21st-century U.S. Military training, bodily techniques, and corporeal technologies perform individual and state representations of force. War, across centuries that differ remarkably in geopolitical, territorial, sovereign, and technological milieus, maintains one irrefutable, ontological characteristic: war remains, even amidst tenuous claims that 21st-century technologies have "anesthetized" killing, resolutely embodied. This dissertation thus proposes that bodies of war should not only be counted, but also accounted for in analyses of U.S. Military operations in the early 21st century.