Constructions of 'Home,' 'Front,' and Women's Military Employment in First-World-War Britain: A Spatial Interpretation

TitleConstructions of 'Home,' 'Front,' and Women's Military Employment in First-World-War Britain: A Spatial Interpretation
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsRobert, Krisztina
JournalHistory and Theory
Volume52
Issue3
Pagination319-343
Date Published10/2013
Abstract

 This essay focuses on the public debate in which the female volunteers in WWI Great Britain overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. The author explains the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. The author argues that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. 

URLhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.10672/abstract
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