5 - Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Feeling Secure

Summary

In previous chapters, I drew upon postcolonial and cultural feminist scholarship to examine how affect sticks to certain security bodies, and how Gurkhas and their families become saturated with colonial histories of martial race. I explored how these affects then materialise in how these individuals are understood as subaltern military subjects and the ways in which they come to understand their own positionalities. I also looked at how friendship and expressions of a colonial military familial love materialise from these imperial histories in ways that further reinforce the unequal relationship between Gurkhas and British Gurkha officers. The book then moved to a discussion of the politics of happiness. As a future-orientated affect, happiness was examined in Chapter 4 to illuminate how this affect draws Gurkha wives and husbands into military life and militarised pathways in the hopes of being happy in the future. I traced how repeated phrases like ‘we will be happy’ co-exist with stories of pain and trauma from the past, rendered meaningful within the broader context of extreme poverty, and how all of this works to explain away and obscure the visceral pain and trauma that run parallel to the celebratory joyful experiences that being a Gurkha, and being married to one, can bring. Overall, Chapters 2–4 focused on how affect sustains us in particular life patterns and practices – even when they prove toxic and traumatic, and our dreams are impossible to achieve.

This chapter explores the feminist political economy and postcolonial scholarship on how affect is taken up in the everyday within these gendered and raced market relations, and how it has shaped and is shaping global racial and gendered logics. I extend the emotional and reproductive labour analysis from Chapter 4 by focusing on the political economy of affect that goes into reproducing a secure life for security company clients in Kabul. This includes the affective labour that works to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the out-ward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild 1985, 7), and the metabolising of unwanted affects and affective byproducts, including how we absorb and stuff down affects of shame and anger in managing a collective atmosphere as well as other people’s emotions (Whitney 2017, 643).