War agency in women’s auxiliary military organizations: the case of Lotta Svärd in Finland

Abstract

ABSTRACT Women’s participation in auxiliary military organizations is a little-studied subject in the field of international relations. This article examines women’s war agency – or, rather, agentic capacity – in the Finnish women’s auxiliary organization Lotta Svärd during the Second World War. I discuss how war agency emerges from the embodied capacity to act through the primacy of corporeal, relational, and material practices by which experiences, meaning, and matter create reciprocally agentic capacities. The war agency of these women was not based on particular subject positions within the organization; instead, it came about as a result of the capacity of the material and the relational to enact the world anew. My analysis of the life-story data reveals that the ideological work of participating in an auxiliary military organization played only a minor role in the lives of the members. The finding calls into question the presumed distinction between the political and the apolitical and generates a broader view of what counts as political experience and agency during war.