The chemical subject: phenomenology and German encounters with the gas mask in the World War I

Employing phenomenological theory, this paper argues that German World War I soldiers’ introduction to the gas mask represents a salient historical moment in the human relationship to modern chemical technology. As a protective device, the gas mask was intended to save soldiers from a horrible death by asphyxiation. In doing so, it forced soldiers to directly confront the new technological landscape of the modern World War I battlefield. While the mask proved genuinely effective in its ability to filter poison gases, it required constant vigilance from gas-weary soldiers. This so-called ‘gas discipline’ would allow men to survive and even thrive in a newly dangerous modern world. However, the physical and mental stress of this existence, often led to breakdowns in soldier discipline and failures in gas protection. Thus, the soldiers’ relationship to the gas mask revealed the limits of technological trust for the earliest ‘chemical subjects’ of the twentieth century.     

Drawing (on) women’s military experiences and narratives – Israeli women soldiers’ challenges in the military environment

This article utilizes arts-based methods as a feminist methodology for understanding women’s experiences in military service, according to theories of feminist security studies. It explores how non-combatant women in the army retrospectively narrate stressful situations that happened during their military service. Using arts-based methods, we examine how they derive meaning from their experiences in a masculine, military environment, affected by ongoing conflict. This article analyzes twenty images drawn by Israeli women who served in the army in the previous 2–4 years. The women drew a stressful event from their military service, explained the image, and elaborated on how they coped with the situation. A content analysis of the pictures and the narratives produced three themes: the responsibility for others in life threatening situations, the military as a first professional work experience and the interaction between military and gender hierarchies. In general, women soldiers experienced the army as complex as they encountered their first adult work space in which they learned responsibility and skills of the ‘adults’ world’. However, they were also exposed to a rigid hierarchy and to stressful security situations typical of army contexts. While non-combat women soldiers were allegedly protected from the violence of the army, they are also indirectly exposed to the danger inherent in an army context. This analysis goes beyond the hero narrative, and moves into taboo territories of young women’s narratives and experiences in the military.     

Reimagined communities: Union veterans and the reconstruction of American nationalism

ABSTRACT. American commemoration of the Union dead and the role this played in the development of post‐war American nationalism is a topic of growing interest. Those who survived, however, are too often left out of the discussion: unsettling reminders of the sectional conflict at the time, the veterans' role in the reconstruction of American nationalism was rather more ambiguous than historians have made it seem. To trace the lineaments of American national identity after the Civil War requires some assessment of the ways in which the veteran was incorporated into or detached from the home front during the war itself and, later, from post‐war society. The evidence suggests that, in contrast to the ambiguity surrounding the veteran, the dead could, in many ways, be more easily accommodated by the new nationalist discourse emerging from the war. Positioning the veteran at the centre of the debate on war and nationalism, indeed, challenges the very concept of an imagined community emerging from or through civil conflict.     

南北战争期间的黑人士兵心态研究

黑人战士在南北战争中的心态及心路历程经历了一系列变化。作为黑人的代表,他们在战争中体验了加剧的痛苦、伤心、愤怒、绝望、兴奋和成就感,而他们的总体心态是委曲求全,并且使得美国种族歧视在这一历史巨变时刻达到悲剧性高潮和根本转变时刻。     

GIs and “Jeep girls”: sex and American soldiers in wartime China

ABSTRACT

This article examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino–US alliance during World War II. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence, but just one issue sparked a violent backlash: sexual relations between American soldiers (GIs) and Chinese women. Two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged that spring. Starting in March, government-backed newspapers began criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the Chinese women who consorted with American servicemen. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, turning Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military presence intersected and converged. With Japan on the ropes, China’s allied friends now stood in the way of irreversibly consigning foreign imperialism to the past. Sexual relations were not the Sino–US alliance’s seedy underside, but the core site of its tensions.