Yet another Armored Bodies abstract, or, Late Post is Late

In Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit explores the culture of fascism, and at its heart finds a fantasy of the male body as a hyper-powered, impervious machine, rigidly contained and invulnerable within an armor or military discipline. Not surprisingly, he also finds a revulsion against human warmth and sensuality, and especially against femininity and emotion. These are identified with the threatening "mass"--whether the working-class masses, or the secret, vulnerable mass of soft flesh, blood, entrails and excrement within the body itself--as objects of loathing, to be repudiated, confined, beaten down, lest they subsume the hard male self. At first glance, it's hard to see what this has to do with Tank Girl, a comic about a "grotty," farting, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, kangaroo-shagging soldier grrl who goes AWOL in the outback with her souped-up tank after an urgent mission (to deliver a shipment of colostomy bags) goes way, way south. If there's a connection, it's that Tank Girl, with her midriff-baring tops and crutty undies, her PMS and her kink for talking mutant kangaroos, is shamelessly and transgressively a body with lusts and hungers. The humor of the comic depends on her being wildly subversive of anything a good soldier, or a nice girl, is supposed to be.

Questions:

"The most urgent task of the man of steel is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines and feelings that calls itself human." In the wake of the Great War, the horror of being reduced to that "horribly disorganized jumble" would be fresh in men's minds, and the fantasy of being invulnerable to it is understandable. Yet the reality of battle would very quickly give the lie to this fantasy, so why did those who subscribed to the fantasy--including veterans of the war, who would have known better--see combat as a supreme good?

Can we really see the body itself as an acting "subject" (Foreword, xviii), constructing the external world in its own image," and why would this act of construction be ascribed to the body and not the mind inhabiting the body?

Is Theweleit's explanation of the origin of the machine-fantasy--from imperfect ego-formation in early childhood--convincing?

What is accomplished by making the protagonist of Tank Girl female?

Terms:

Desiring-machine: a reframing of the concept of desire as a productive force that manufactures itself

Introjection: the opposite of projection--internalizing an exterior object within the self.