Walking with Soldiers: How I learned to stop worrying and love cadets

Susanna Hast

“Walking with Soldiers” examines an auto-ethnographic moment of marching across the city of Helsinki with first-year cadets of the Finnish National Defence University. In a reparative reading, the walk dismantles boundaries of bodies, critiques, and affects. Through a walking methodology and autoethnography, the present exposition demonstrates how the author began orienteering within military structures through an affective investment. The exposition is a researcher’s journey across subjectivities and difference in a female civilian body. Epistemologically, it brings theory closer to the skin; and empirically, it offers insight into the affective world of belonging. “Walking with Soldiers” is multimodal and polyphonic: it consists of a text for reading, three audio tracks for listening and co-walking, as well as illustrations created by Julia Järvelä based on photographs taken by the author. The provided materials can be selectively attended to. The artistic technique used in the exposition is seduction: the reader/listener is invited into an experience. The exposition is a conversation between critical military studies and artistic research: it gives artistic attention to a military march and places importance on the acoustic and vibrating qualities of academic research. The writing itself subverts the practice of authoritative scholarly writing by presenting descriptive work as theoretical work, and by using citations as companions from the outside.

These residual traces in the body are not so easy to recognise. For me, the crucial moment was when I followed the ceremony at the grave, and noticed my body changing. I felt shivers. I felt connected. That is when I knew that military rituals were already inscribed in my body.

— sweaty queer orienteering

More specifically, a sweaty concept is one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world (Ahmed 2017, 13).

[...] the question of orientation is not only about how we ‘find our way’ but how we come to ‘feel at home’ (Ahmed 2006, 7).

In the following pages, I will demonstrate how my autoethnographic moment is entangled in the socio-political context of gender and militarisation. I am an orienteering body simply because I am gendered as a woman. Because my body is trying, it begins sweating. As I will later testify, I came to feel at home through what felt like ‘the end of gender’. I did not come home as a woman, emerging differentiated from military masculinity, but the queering of bodies, my own, in particular.

— getting lost

The word 'lost' comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. (Solnit 2014, 6-7).

Orienteering means that someone is potentially lost, that there is an unknown territory where people are finding their way. With being lost comes finding, but not always. Being lost can be a good starting point for a search. Loss and being lost are a venture into the unknown, into a world which has no militaries. It is a utopia of course, but we do not know what it would be like.

— not a call for a major shift or a conclusive theory, instead

attention to affective assemblages, to the ways things, people, affects and places, with different trajectories, may come together, albeit in often tentative, inconclusive or evolving ways (Wright 2014, 392).

Walking with soldiers is a speculation, an experimentation, a proposition which does not stabilise experience into an explanation. It promotes an orientation to research and to the world that is more attentive, more in tune with vibrations, thresholds and madness.

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