Women at the front: remediating gendered notions of WWII heroism in historical re-enactment

Abstract

Historical re-enactments have become an increasingly popular topic in academic debate, as some scholars argue that re-enactments allow participants to critically investigate history and its representations. As a pastime dominated by men, most literature on war re-enactment and gender, however, has emphasized the subordinate position of women and the reproduction of conventional gender roles. This paper focuses on two European women re-enactment groups that challenge this understanding: Die Flakhelferinnen in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany and the Army Nurse Corps of the United States. Based on a visual ethnography of their Instagram combined with fieldwork in the Czech Republic and Belgium, I analyse the strategies these reenactors use in the remediation of the ‘invisible’ histories of women in the armed forces during WWII. The analysis demonstrates a complex negotiation between historical notions of ‘femininity’, contemporary identities, and Instagram’s affordances in the remediation of gendered pasts.