Kirsten Adkins

The title alludes to the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man, where the subject becomes smaller and smaller and eventually disappears. Combining promotional films and reportage from contemporary wars with dance performance, the film examines the ethical and political implications surrounding the framing of the subject in the mediation of state-controlled violence. Military masculinity is envisioned as an external biopolitical force, rather than an internalised embodied sense of being, belonging to the individual subject. Crucially, the soldier subject cannot be harmed or killed because they are not really there. The paper introduces the concept of 'blur' to facilitate questions surrounding an undecidability of the image, subjectivity and war.