About-Face: Gender, Disfigurement and the Politics of French Reconstruction, 1918–24
This article examines the role of facially wounded soldiers and prosthetic masks in the post-First World War reconstruction of a gendered French nation. In contextualising the work of Anna Coleman Ladd, who sculpted facial prosthetics to ‘re-humanise’ disfigured French veterans, I aim to shed light on larger post-war tensions between the accommodation and rejection of social and cultural change. By submitting to Ladd's efforts and donning her devices, the French mutilés who sought her help articulated, through their bodies, a conservative vision for the French nation – highlighting the resonance of the traditional masculine ideal in post-war France and a desire to reconstruct an idealised past. The exposure of the ‘surreal’ face, conversely, signalled the futility of a return to the status quo ante and the creation of the Union des Blessés de la face et de la tête allowed veterans to renegotiate the bounds of acceptable masculinity. Collectively, the facially wounded suggest the ways in which the face serves as a site of gender work, a means by which to challenge or reify masculine norms of behaviour and appearance.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12241
‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism, Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24
This article explains the disparity between the United States (US) military government's efforts to defend and empower local women during the first occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24) and its reputation for tolerating sexual assault. It argues that US officials, inspired by a progressive ideology that linked the social, economic and political spheres, set out to reshape Dominican sexual and gender norms as a means to ensure political stability. Yet, these efforts fell victim to both Dominican and US Marines’ conceptions of gender and normative sexuality. Building upon a thriving body of scholarship that addresses the significance of US efforts to redefine Dominican gender norms, this article analyses the military government's policies towards women and provost courts’ responses to sexual assault. It concludes that, combined with an aggressive anti-prostitution campaign, the military government's reforms succeeded only in creating an atmosphere favourable to crimes against women. Moreover, rape and the way it was prosecuted revitalised the patriarchal norms that US officials had set out to transform, thus setting the stage for the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, whose thirty-year dictatorship depended on the conspicuous control of women. Thus, US policies and attitudes not only ensured the failure of progressive reform but also contributed to the ongoing subjugation of the very women the military government had pledged to empower.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12242
‘The Men Have Come’: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966–86
This article explores the gender implications of the militarisation of the Mengo neighbourhood of Kampala. It analyses how the hyper-militarisation under post-colonial regimes, particularly those of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, marked a significant gender reversal. The military presence in Mengo emasculated civilian men, who were attacked and abused by soldiers, and led women to assume the roles of ‘protectors’ who safeguarded men, children and their homes. Women volunteered for the most dangerous tasks at the household and community levels and faced constant dangers, including rape, violence and other forms of abuse. Using oral histories collected from the residents in Mengo in 2014, I examine this reconfiguration of gender roles and its reverberations in contemporary Mengo. Interviews with the women and men from Kampala describe the various ways women protected people and spaces and at the same time stress men's vulnerability. This article therefore challenges popular conceptions of women as weak and vulnerable and in need of men's protection in militarised situations.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12251
‘My Body was Aflame with His Memory’: War, Gender and Colonial Ghosts in Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
This article argues that historicising the iconic 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour reveals a different set of meanings that most scholars have overlooked. As France found itself embroiled in the brutal and bloody Algerian War of Independence, many started reflecting on the meaning and aftereffects of the Second World War. Despite its anti-colonial universalist humanism, Hiroshima remains haunted by colonial ghosts and fantasies of post-war ‘Asia’ where Asian female bodies are passive and Asian male bodies only echo other European male bodies. Ultimately, sexual and racial differences organise the film's narrative of war and canonises a Eurocentric version of ‘history’. The film's melodramatic love story renders invisible the ways gender and sexuality shape understandings of violence, wars, and violated bodies. Against Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's intentions, the love story allows the remembering and forgetting of a (French) national history that only the female character embodies. Only the French woman stands in for subjectivity, memory and trauma, rendering everything else secondary. Once read as a historical text, the film illustrates the limits and ambivalences of post-war anti-colonial humanist political imagination.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12247