Being "No Less of a Person": Intimacy, Disability, and the Limits of Life After War

This talk addresses the intimate dependencies through which the lives of injured U.S. soldiers are remade and sustained in the aftermath of war violence. Thinking through questions of gendered personhood, sociality, and disability, I suggest that the heteronormative narrowing of the good life after war-and the normative form of the body that ought to live it-narrows the horizon of what counts as life at all. Zoë H. Wool is assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University, and author of After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015).