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

Cecilia Åse,Maria Wendt

doi:10.1177/00108367211007871

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.

Highlights

This article showcases how a feminist perspective provides novel insights into the relations between military heritage/history and national security politics
In what ways are national security politics reliant on the preservation of memories of geopolitical threats, conflicts and military violence? Following the claim that national security strategies align with narratives of who ‘we’ are (Hansen, 2006), critical scholars show how collective memories and the production of heritage tend to affect contemporary understandings of security and national protection
The bringing together of critical heritage studies (CHS) literature and feminist IR enabled an analysis of how the gendering of emotions and spatial and architectural arrangements supports historical narratives that privilege geopoliticized ways of understanding security and protection and a taken-for-granted nativist community

Summary

Gendered territory

The following section analyses how the heritagization of the military past at Bungenäs and the Air Force Museum incorporate gender and sexuality, thereby promoting understandings of national territory as needing protection and naturalizing the inseparability of security politics from the territory/homeland. The bunker homes are concealed in the landscape but have impressive fields of vision These exclusive homes incorporate the military threats and strategic situation of the time and transform the Cold War line of fire into a spectacular view of the Baltic Sea. In contrast with that at Bungenäs, the military heritagization at the Linköping Air Force Museum does not exclusively prioritize masculine historical experiences. The military remnants incorporate the history of male conscription and the ‘neutral warrior’ protecting the Swedish nation When this massive masculine imprint on the military past is unproblematically reiterated and idealized, it naturalizes the idea that land/territory requires masculine military protection in the form of violence. These analyses demonstrate that the gender binary, conventional gender norms and a masculinized (capacity for) violence are crucial components of what produces the nation as territory

Gendered community

Gendered bodies

Concluding discussion

Author biographies