ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a discursive analysis of how battle-induced urotrauma becomes sexualised. It utilises the phrase ‘becomes sexualised’ to gesture towards performativity in which notions and practices of flesh, physiology, gender, and sex interact to determine what genitalia mean and how genitalia matter. The chapter demonstrates that the discursive context of urotrauma offers little space to understand battle-induced genital injuries as moments of rupture in which a reimagining of men, genitals, and violence can be iterated. It examines into further detail on how many American servicemen were injured in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well describing how urotrauma becomes a combat injury and describes an analysis of how American servicemen become sexualised. The chapter presents the broad sexual and militarised contexts through which the sexualising of urotrauma comes to matter and concentrates on how articulations of lost potential, reproductive capacities, and conjugal intimacy sexualise urotrauma through heteronormal, phallic, and able-bodied discourses.
