Zoë Wool
Biographic Data
| ID | 185697 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zoë Wool |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zoë |
| FAMILY NAME | Wool |
| SIGNATURE | WOOL Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9534-2633 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
All that is Solid Burns into Smoke
Focusing on US military burn pits in Iraq, this paper traces entanglements between the materials of US war-making, the logistics of global capitalism, and the racialized displacement of toxicity and chemical kinship. In interviews about their experiences of burn pits at Joint Base Balad, a city-sized US military base located in Yathrib, Iraq, US veterans living along the US Gulf Coast linked their exposures to the toxicity of burn pits in Iraq wi…
Waste is Not a Metaphor for Racist Dispossession
There is a particular kind of treasure our fellow thinkers sometimes give us, a little gem of brilliance so well cut that it refracts the world for us in a way that snaps everything into place, a gem both dense with the materialities of history and also so lightly worn it you could put it on a t-shirt (though more often it appears as a book title).Marisa Solomon's work on urban trash is full of such treasures.Drawing on black feminism and black g…
Disability, straight time, and the American Dream
In the lives of injured US veterans of the post-9/11 wars, rehabilitation and heteronormativity are intertwined.Straight timenames the ways these imperatives come together in fantasies of the heteronormative life course. This life course is central to the middle-class, white-coded American Dream, in which disability appears only at life's end. Chasing this dream brings many into the US military, but military service often imperils, rather than se…
Discussing Empathy and Critique in the Ethnography of Things Military
Whenever we discuss fieldwork experiences with fellow anthropologists working on 'things military', concerns over ethics, politics, and critique pop up as a matter of course.Though important in any field, these matters seem particularly conspicous and insistent in the military field.Meanwhile, anthropology of the military is garnering increasing attention in response to a changing global security landscape.This motivated us to organize this speci…
Mourning, Affect, Sociality
This essay examines mourning and the possibilities for open grief among veterans, asking how the traces of what has been lost persist into the present in ways that find no easy resolution. It questions the normative value of an end to mourning, proposing instead that grief-and indeed our anthropological formulations of the meaning of such affects and events-might be held open, trace and memory maintained, imagining recognition as something open-e…
Veteran Therapeutics
This article draws on a decade of ethnographic work with injured U.S. soldiers and veterans to show the collateral effects of military medicine's salvific promise. In tracing these effects through recent changes in amputation protocols and less spectacular conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder, I show that the prevalent model of "veteran therapeutics," which posits cure as the aim of post-war, has perverse and cruel effects. Drawing on…
In-Durable Sociality
This article considers the essential and unenduring attachments among grievously war-injured US soldiers remaking their lives at a military hospital. Their sense of being in common makes life bearable, but they do not constitute a community or even a cohort. Their profound attachments are especially brittle, breaking off cleanly as the contingencies of their unstable bodies intervene. Here, the enduring temporality of the social is secondary to p…
Collateral Afterworlds
After war
In the United States - as in other places in the ambit of biomedicine - the efforts exerted on and by injured soldiers' bodies in the aftermath of war are generally understood under the familiar medical rubric of 'rehabilitation'. This reflection troubles that term by moving away from the medical logic of rehabilitation and its telos of injury and healing, and the logics that see injured soldiers as promising bodies. Instead, the think piece expl…
After War
Critical military studies, queer theory, and the possibilities of critique
This paper explores the expansive possibilities for a critical military studies that approaches the mechanisms of war-making as coextensive with broader arrangements of social life, rather than as intersecting or overlapping with distinguishable social spheres, like gender. The potential here is both analytical and theoretical: analytical in that it opens up productive avenues of critique through which to explore, but not resolve, the contradicti…
War sick
Finley, Erin. 2011. Fields of combat: Understanding PTSD among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 240 pages.Kilshaw, Susie. 2009. Impotent warriors: Gulf War syndrome, vulnerability and masculinity. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 282 pages
On Movement
Using ethnographic vignettes of three American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, this article proposes an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone. I juxtapose a range of experiences of movement to explore the subjective experience of certain kinds of bodies as they move, see, and are seen to move in certain kinds of spaces…
Labors of Love
In this paper, we explore the Non-Medical Attendant program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, which subsidizes the presence of war-injured soldiers' family members as they live for months or even years at Walter Reed during treatment and rehabilitation. We elaborate the ambiguities of the program and draw on ethnographic research to demonstrate how the program's vagaries combine with the context of an overburdened military med…
The US Military and the Social Life of War
Operationalizing Iraqi freedom
Purpose – To understand practices of inscription and description used by the US Government in the production of discourse concerning the war in Iraq as part of the post 9/11 War on Terror and as part of a neo‐liberal project of governance
Critical military studies, queer theory, and the possibilities of critique
This paper explores the expansive possibilities for a critical military studies that approaches the mechanisms of war-making as coextensive with broader arrangements of social life, rather than as intersecting or overlapping with distinguishable social spheres, like gender. The potential here is both analytical and theoretical: analytical in that it opens up productive avenues of critique through which to explore, but not resolve, the contradicti…
Labors of Love
In this paper, we explore the Non-Medical Attendant program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, which subsidizes the presence of war-injured soldiers' family members as they live for months or even years at Walter Reed during treatment and rehabilitation. We elaborate the ambiguities of the program and draw on ethnographic research to demonstrate how the program's vagaries combine with the context of an overburdened military med…
On Movement
Using ethnographic vignettes of three American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, this article proposes an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone. I juxtapose a range of experiences of movement to explore the subjective experience of certain kinds of bodies as they move, see, and are seen to move in certain kinds of spaces…
Collateral Afterworlds
Mourning, Affect, Sociality
This essay examines mourning and the possibilities for open grief among veterans, asking how the traces of what has been lost persist into the present in ways that find no easy resolution. It questions the normative value of an end to mourning, proposing instead that grief-and indeed our anthropological formulations of the meaning of such affects and events-might be held open, trace and memory maintained, imagining recognition as something open-e…
Disability, straight time, and the American Dream
In the lives of injured US veterans of the post-9/11 wars, rehabilitation and heteronormativity are intertwined.Straight timenames the ways these imperatives come together in fantasies of the heteronormative life course. This life course is central to the middle-class, white-coded American Dream, in which disability appears only at life's end. Chasing this dream brings many into the US military, but military service often imperils, rather than se…
Veteran Therapeutics
This article draws on a decade of ethnographic work with injured U.S. soldiers and veterans to show the collateral effects of military medicine's salvific promise. In tracing these effects through recent changes in amputation protocols and less spectacular conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder, I show that the prevalent model of "veteran therapeutics," which posits cure as the aim of post-war, has perverse and cruel effects. Drawing on…
In-Durable Sociality
This article considers the essential and unenduring attachments among grievously war-injured US soldiers remaking their lives at a military hospital. Their sense of being in common makes life bearable, but they do not constitute a community or even a cohort. Their profound attachments are especially brittle, breaking off cleanly as the contingencies of their unstable bodies intervene. Here, the enduring temporality of the social is secondary to p…
War sick
Finley, Erin. 2011. Fields of combat: Understanding PTSD among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 240 pages.Kilshaw, Susie. 2009. Impotent warriors: Gulf War syndrome, vulnerability and masculinity. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 282 pages
After war
In the United States - as in other places in the ambit of biomedicine - the efforts exerted on and by injured soldiers' bodies in the aftermath of war are generally understood under the familiar medical rubric of 'rehabilitation'. This reflection troubles that term by moving away from the medical logic of rehabilitation and its telos of injury and healing, and the logics that see injured soldiers as promising bodies. Instead, the think piece expl…
The US Military and the Social Life of War
Operationalizing Iraqi freedom
Purpose – To understand practices of inscription and description used by the US Government in the production of discourse concerning the war in Iraq as part of the post 9/11 War on Terror and as part of a neo‐liberal project of governance
Operationalizing Iraqi freedom
Purpose – To understand practices of inscription and description used by the US Government in the production of discourse concerning the war in Iraq as part of the post 9/11 War on Terror and as part of a neo‐liberal project of governance
The US Military and the Social Life of War
Labors of Love
In this paper, we explore the Non-Medical Attendant program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, which subsidizes the presence of war-injured soldiers' family members as they live for months or even years at Walter Reed during treatment and rehabilitation. We elaborate the ambiguities of the program and draw on ethnographic research to demonstrate how the program's vagaries combine with the context of an overburdened military med…
War sick
Finley, Erin. 2011. Fields of combat: Understanding PTSD among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 240 pages.Kilshaw, Susie. 2009. Impotent warriors: Gulf War syndrome, vulnerability and masculinity. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 282 pages
On Movement
Using ethnographic vignettes of three American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, this article proposes an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone. I juxtapose a range of experiences of movement to explore the subjective experience of certain kinds of bodies as they move, see, and are seen to move in certain kinds of spaces…
After War
Critical military studies, queer theory, and the possibilities of critique
This paper explores the expansive possibilities for a critical military studies that approaches the mechanisms of war-making as coextensive with broader arrangements of social life, rather than as intersecting or overlapping with distinguishable social spheres, like gender. The potential here is both analytical and theoretical: analytical in that it opens up productive avenues of critique through which to explore, but not resolve, the contradicti…
After war
In the United States - as in other places in the ambit of biomedicine - the efforts exerted on and by injured soldiers' bodies in the aftermath of war are generally understood under the familiar medical rubric of 'rehabilitation'. This reflection troubles that term by moving away from the medical logic of rehabilitation and its telos of injury and healing, and the logics that see injured soldiers as promising bodies. Instead, the think piece expl…
In-Durable Sociality
This article considers the essential and unenduring attachments among grievously war-injured US soldiers remaking their lives at a military hospital. Their sense of being in common makes life bearable, but they do not constitute a community or even a cohort. Their profound attachments are especially brittle, breaking off cleanly as the contingencies of their unstable bodies intervene. Here, the enduring temporality of the social is secondary to p…
Collateral Afterworlds
Mourning, Affect, Sociality
This essay examines mourning and the possibilities for open grief among veterans, asking how the traces of what has been lost persist into the present in ways that find no easy resolution. It questions the normative value of an end to mourning, proposing instead that grief-and indeed our anthropological formulations of the meaning of such affects and events-might be held open, trace and memory maintained, imagining recognition as something open-e…
Veteran Therapeutics
This article draws on a decade of ethnographic work with injured U.S. soldiers and veterans to show the collateral effects of military medicine's salvific promise. In tracing these effects through recent changes in amputation protocols and less spectacular conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder, I show that the prevalent model of "veteran therapeutics," which posits cure as the aim of post-war, has perverse and cruel effects. Drawing on…
Waste is Not a Metaphor for Racist Dispossession
There is a particular kind of treasure our fellow thinkers sometimes give us, a little gem of brilliance so well cut that it refracts the world for us in a way that snaps everything into place, a gem both dense with the materialities of history and also so lightly worn it you could put it on a t-shirt (though more often it appears as a book title).Marisa Solomon's work on urban trash is full of such treasures.Drawing on black feminism and black g…
Disability, straight time, and the American Dream
In the lives of injured US veterans of the post-9/11 wars, rehabilitation and heteronormativity are intertwined.Straight timenames the ways these imperatives come together in fantasies of the heteronormative life course. This life course is central to the middle-class, white-coded American Dream, in which disability appears only at life's end. Chasing this dream brings many into the US military, but military service often imperils, rather than se…
Discussing Empathy and Critique in the Ethnography of Things Military
Whenever we discuss fieldwork experiences with fellow anthropologists working on 'things military', concerns over ethics, politics, and critique pop up as a matter of course.Though important in any field, these matters seem particularly conspicous and insistent in the military field.Meanwhile, anthropology of the military is garnering increasing attention in response to a changing global security landscape.This motivated us to organize this speci…
All that is Solid Burns into Smoke
Focusing on US military burn pits in Iraq, this paper traces entanglements between the materials of US war-making, the logistics of global capitalism, and the racialized displacement of toxicity and chemical kinship. In interviews about their experiences of burn pits at Joint Base Balad, a city-sized US military base located in Yathrib, Iraq, US veterans living along the US Gulf Coast linked their exposures to the toxicity of burn pits in Iraq wi…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works)