Gendering the military past: Understanding heritage and security from a feminist perspective

Abstract

This article showcases how a feminist perspective provides novel insights into the relations between military heritage/history and national security politics. We argue that analysing how gender and sexualities operate at military heritage sites reveals how these operations dis/encourage particular understandings of security and limit the range of acceptable national protection policies. Two recent initiatives to preserve the military heritage of the Cold War period in Sweden are examined: the Cold War exhibits at Air Force Museum in Linköping and the redevelopment of a formerly sealed off military compound at Bungenäs, where bunkers have been remade into exclusive summer homes. By combining feminist international relations and critical heritage studies, we unpack the material, affective and embodied underpinnings of security produced at military heritage sites. A key conclusion is that the way heritagization incorporates the ‘naturalness’ of the gender binary and heterosexuality makes conceptualizing security without territory, or territory without military protection, inaccessible. The gendering of emotions and architectural and spatial arrangements supports historical narratives that privilege masculine protection and reinforce a taken-for-granted nativist community. A feminist analysis of military heritage highlights how gender and sexualities restrict security imaginaries; that is, understandings of what is conceivable as security.

Museum as geopolitical entity: Toward soft combat

“…The violence, then, is not avoided but is shrouded in masculinist bravado of “superiority” and “shoot downs”. The tour is gendered in this foundational way (also see Åse & Wendt, 2021), reinforced by two of the three guides referring to the pilots as “him”. By turning the air war into something akin to a sporting match, we are coaxed into feeling “ok” about it all, much like Tidy and Turner's (2020) experience.…”

“…Others‐like Reeves (2018a), Tidy and Turner (2020) and have extended similar studies into the politics of affect in this kind of museum space, expanding our understanding of how affect is involved in the “curation of conflict” (Reeves & Heath‐Kelly, 2020) and how tourism activities sometimes intersect with “totalising security discourses” (Reeves, 2018b, p. 219). Furthermore, these performances are often strongly gendered, as narratives around defending the territory/homeland constitutes masculinity, evident in the Air Force Museum in Sweden (Åse and Wendt, 2021), while Tidy and Turner (2020) highlight how the “family friendly” space in the military museum relies on heteronormativity (p. 131).…”

Problematizing norms of heritage and peace: Militia mobilization and violence in Iraq

“…Second, as much recent International Relations scholarship has demonstrated, the ways in which a particular people or nation commemorate the past can affect contemporary global politics and perceptions of both national and international security (Danilova, 2015; Gustafsson, 2014). For example, heritage sites, museums and public rituals that commemorate the wars of the past can shape the foreign policy of the present, making certain security decisions such as to engage (or not to engage) in a specific conflict seem legitimate and natural (Åse and Wendt, 2021; Welland, 2017). In addition, heritage protection and restoration at both home and abroad can serve to further a state’s economic relations and geopolitical influence.…”