Disabled Masculinity after Afghanistan

• In Event: Militarized Masculinity and Soviet-Afghan War Veterans in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Disability is often thought of as inherently emasculating but disabled men relate to both disability and masculinity in more complex ways. This paper explores the various ways that disabled veterans of the Soviet Afghan War sought to inhabit, establish, and reassert a militarized masculinity based around disability, after becoming disabled in Afghanistan. They looked to various examples and models, from Alexei Maresev to Rambo, to reconceptualize their disability as a source of masculine identity. Some of these veterans, especially those involved in the buying and selling of violence in 1990s Russia, developed a vision of disability as not just masculine, but hypermasculine, due to its potential relationship to violence. By transforming missing limbs and PTSD symptoms into visible and invisible markers of the experience of violence, disability could become a symbol of a violent hypermasculinity—which in the 1990s, could also be an advertisement for the ability to perform violence as a service.

Author

• Emily Hoge, Clemson U