The Privatized Meaning of Wartime Deployments: Examining the Narratives of Norwegian Military Spouses

This study examines the narratives of eight female spouses of Norwegian veterans of the war in Afghanistan. The narratives are approached as rich cultural texts that arise in the interface between their individual experiences and the sociocultural milieu. The analysis focuses on the use of “normalization” and “agency” as narrative resources used by the women to organize experience and transform it into meaning. In their accounts, the deployment was not framed as a negative and interruptive event. Nor was it connected to a national narrative of collective meaning. Instead, the spouses conveyed a normalized interpretation in which the meaning of their husbands’ deployment was constructed in close reference to the personal realm of family life. This article argues that the experience of contemporary warfare has become a marginalized and unsettled experience in Norwegian society. In the absence of a settled repertoire of cultural scripts to portray the experience of having a spouse deployed abroad, the Norwegian military spouses used a privatized framework to interpret their wartime experience.