This article argues that the imaginary and the experienced body cannot fully be understood without an appreciation of the specific historical context in which they are formed. Offering a case study of military masculinity in Britain in the Second World War, the article examines the significance of the medical examination and subsequent physical classification of potential recruits to the Armed Forces in constructions of the male body. Individual responses, drawn from oral testimonies, are examined to explore the relationship between the discursive and experienced body. These suggest the power of the social body in defining the meaning of the individual body. Nonetheless, despite the dominance of physical classification in the definition of hegemonic masculinity, individual experiences reveal that the concept and meaning of physical grading could be negotiated in ways which introduced less stable and more multiple meanings of the individual body and its relationship to the national body

The Home Guard is well known as a local volunteer force formed to protect Britain against invasion in 1940. Less familiar is the history of the gendering of the organisation. Although the boundary between male combatants and female non-combatants was put under pressure in the Second World War, women's presence in the Home Guard was resisted from within government and the military hierarchy. Participation in home defence would have required women to be armed, a step which the authorities were not prepared to take, in spite of the insistence upon it of women campaigners in and out of Parliament. This article explores the tensions within political discourse that arose as a result, and the eventual official compromise, as well as analysing representations of the gendering of home defence in popular entertainment during the War and since, and the implications of such constructions for the personal reminiscences of women Home Guards.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract