Uniform to Pulp: Performance of Transformation, Critique, and Community-Building for Veteran Soldiers

摘要

Veteran soldiers who choose to confront a culture of militarism occupy a challenging subject position. They cannot rely on the institutional and public respect generally reserved for veterans who do not question their military service. The Combat Paper Project, a workshop that allows veterans to create paper artwork out of their pulped combat uniforms, is a unique medium of identity renegotiation for veterans. This essay analyzes how Combat Paper, as performance rhetoric, offers veterans a multilayered and open-ended script to enact and transform their complex relationships to the military and the war experiences they embody. The essay illuminates the tactical nature of the Combat Paper performance, highlighting the performance of metaphor and metonymy as rhetorical devices. Overall, the essay identifies three rhetorical functions of the Combat Paper performance, namely its transformative, critical, and community-building functions, and demonstrates how a performance oriented approach can animate a rhetorical text and enrich rhetorical criticism.