The Military-Industrial Body

Abstract

The previous chapters have shown how the Golden Age of Comics was influenced by (and influenced in turn) visions of the posthuman in the form of what was ironically christened the Perfect Body, while the Silver Age was marked instead by a preponderance of Cosmic Bodies. With this in mind, the current chapter journeys through the assemblage this book is calling the Military-Industrial Body. From Captain America’s origin as a military super-soldier through Haraway’s cyborg, the posthuman body has often, if not always, been seen as the “offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism”.¹ Both militarism and capitalism can be said to inscribe themselves upon the body. Indeed, as Gray has pointed out, the “‘incontestable reality of the body’ is still the fundamental ground of war even in these postmodern times…war is based on human bodies killing and dying, yet technology has rendered human bodies in war incredibly vulnerable even as it has integrated them into cyborgian (human-machine) weapon systems”.² In the USA especially it appears to be the case that interest in converging technologies (or Transhumanist technologies) is largely driven by military and defence needs.³ Increasingly, however, military and industrial interests are merging. In order to elaborate further it is first necessary to define what is meant by “military-industrial”.