Cold War casualties

Abstract

Abstract Issues of gender and ethnicity have either been ignored in histories of the “Iron Curtain” or they have been peripheral to military, diplomatic, and masculine concerns. By focusing on the so-called problem of Trieste in the immediate postwar period, I argue that representations of gender and ethnicity were central to the way in which official negotiations took place. The boundaries that were being drawn by 1945 to distinguish the West from the East, democracy from communism, Italian from “Slav,” and civilization from barbarism, in this region were strongly gendered, as were the forms of social order encouraged by the Allied Military Government, which governed Trieste from 1945 to 1954, to bring about the postwar social and cultural normalization of Trieste.