Biography

Gender is an inescapable aspect of war. According to intellectual and critic Susan Sontag, “men make war”; yet, throughout history, people have complicated prescribed or fixed gender roles during wartime. In this class, we will challenge ourselves to consider how war has shaped and transformed these roles and how the sexual histories of war and genocide have been documented and remembered. This course will ask students to interrogate the binary roles women and men have played during times of conflict throughout World War I and World War II. How have women’s and men’s participation in war been represented historically? In what historical contexts did women become part of resistance or act as perpetrators? How does queerness intersect with gender in the history and scholarship of war? How do gendered bodies and sexuality figure into the history of war’s violence? This history seminar will draw on a number of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, international relations and women’s/gender studies, to evaluate scholarly discourse on cross-cultural topics dealing with gender and the history of militarism in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Note: Honors option available to juniors and seniors.

Prerequisites: Open to seniors and juniors, and sophomores if space is available.