Chapter 16: Abstract

Gendered War Mobilization, Culture, and Music in the Age of World Wars

Annegret Fauser (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of Music)

In Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600, ed. by Karen Hagemann et al. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 410-31.

Abstract

In the Age of World Wars, with the increasing spread of media technologies, music and the other audiovisual arts served as tools for propaganda, as means of commemoration, and as escapist entertainment. This chapter explores how art was instrumentalized in propaganda efforts, how gender intersected with musical composition and performance in both wars, how music’s semantic slipperiness made it a fascinating tool for transnational reinterpretation as notions of gender shifted in the interwar years, and how music intersected with technologies such as radio and film to construct gender roles considered appropriate by government in the 1930s and during World War II, especially in the hands of the state apparatus.

Keywords

World War I and II;  Europe; United States; Soviet Union; culture; media; music; propaganda; war mobilization; gender.

´In Part III: "The Age of the World Wars" of the Oxford Handbook of Gender, War  and the Western World since 1600.

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