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.

I move from the outside to the inside and hope nobody notices how I am crossing a border. “I might as well talk”, I think to myself, and ask him something about his day so far. He tells me that he is not yet certain of his place in the group.

Marching through the city, I soon realise that I am not simply walking but I am part of what looks like a military parade. A crowd subject to a blatant gaze, photographed as if it were a tourist sight. I suddenly feel like I do not belong among these bodies, to those photographs, under that gaze. I am supposed to be an invisible body, my body does not provide security. I am a body from a different fantasy. At the same time, I feel a little special.

In patriarchy, we are constantly told men are the providers of security. I have been told that, and that I should have no say about the military, when my body is not on the line. But my body was always on the line.

The warrior and the warrior aesthetics are not only exceptional, but sexy. Yet, even if soldiers are objectified and hyper-sexualised (Crane-Seeber 2016), they are still protecting bodies, and civilian women are protected bodies. Needy bodies. These roles remain, and the feminised (woman, queer, non-normative) soldier is caught somewhere in-between. Cynthia Enloe (2014, 88–89) writes:

Women have served as symbols of the nation violated, the nation suffering, the nation reproducing itself, the nation at its purest. [...] Moreover, because a nation is framed as an “us,” it puts a premium on belonging. It has a strong potential to be exclusivist, even xenophobic.

Women are needed in war, they rebuild and have children after war, yet they are excluded from preparing for war. Having a few women in the military does not change that (six women out of 163 cadets at the march). In fact, the (Finnish) military is an example of how to perpetuate a patriarchal system by turning "what used to be a site of masculinized privilege into a site of feminized marginalization" (Enloe 2017, 22). That means, you bring some women into an exclusively male site, but you do not give women real power and you do not allow the space to become 'feminised'.

We arrive at the Hietaniemi beach, and I begin to feel increasingly anxious and awkward. When the cadets have lunch and rest, I sit among them, but separate and alone. I stare but avoid eye contact. I walk and sit down again. I do not want to interrupt the eating or chatting – that would be rude. But I feel stupid, and it occurs to me that even though the cadets were informed of my arrival, they certainly were not expecting a timid female figure walking around them like a shadow. I feel small and shrinking. I am in shame. I forget who the members of my group are.

After what feels like an eternity, but is likely less than an hour, I see the commander, and I rush towards him, confessing that I lack the courage to talk to anyone. I trust him with my vulnerability. With ease and kindness, with no sign of judgement, he guides me to some of the cadets, telling them I would like to interview them. He solves my problem and does not make me a problem. There, a reparation. Movement across another kind of border. When care and command solve my insecurity, the relief is immense. I recover my dignity. I return to presence. I am not a failure.

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