Short abstract:

This paper examines the diffusion of the psychological science of resilience from the US military into community and immigrant psychological clinics, illuminating its gendered qualities of personhood characterized by the self as shield and battlefield, and ready for action rather than peace.

Long abstract:

Resilience has become a frame for the temporal life of a world in which injury and disaster are anticipated. Closely analyzed as a trope in climate change in “natural” disaster experiences in which the bios and material infrastructures are targets of intervention, its gendered forms and logics are now deeply instantiated in the arsenal of psychological brain science and clinical intervention. Resilience practice and science create imaginaries of personhood in which instability and future harm are expected. This paper first examines the rise of the psychology of resilience in the US military in the 1980s, tracing it to the military’s new focus on repairing combat soldiers so they can return to battle. Undergirded by a scientific conception of soldiers that conceptualized them in strongly cognitive and material ways, soldier bodies and minds were understood to be flexible, such that they could train for and withstand repeated injury. In part two, I trace the genderraced conceptions of the self in resilience science in two laboratory clinics in New York and Massachusetts, one serving low-income communities and the other immigrants, illuminating three qualities of resilient personhood: the body and mind as shields; life as a battlefield; and the disallowance of the broken, permanently debilitated, and hope-less, the latter of which are arrays of living that both co-exist with resilient thriving, and which draw attention to the causes of injury and harm, not just forms of coping with it. The paper contributes to new conceptualizations of technopersonhood situated in militarized and precarious worlds.