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

Published date01 September 2021
DOI10.1177/00108367211007871
Date01 September 2021
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211007871
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(3) 286 –308
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367211007871
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Gendering the military past:
Understanding heritage and
security from a feminist
perspective
Cecilia Åse and Maria Wendt
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.
Keywords
Gender, heritage, military history, security
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 contempo-
rary understandings of security and national protection (Basham, 2016; Danilova, 2015;
Corresponding author:
Maria Wendt, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: maria.wendt@statsvet.su.se
1007871CAC0010.1177/00108367211007871Cooperation and ConflictÅse and Wendt
research-article2021
Article
Åse and Wendt 287
Gustafsson, 2014; Heath-Kelly, 2020; Reeves, 2018a, 2018b). International relations
(IR) research on the nexus of memory-making and national security points to how the
privileged versions of historical pasts make certain security choices justifiable or even
self-explanatory (Åse and Wendt, 2019b; Bell, 2006; Zehfuss, 2006).
The present article develops this literature by demonstrating the merit of a feminist
analysis in elucidating the relations between the making of military history/heritage and
national security politics. The purpose is to gain new insight into these relations by
examining the ways sexed and gendered bodies, emotions and materialities are constitu-
tive of military heritage. In addition, this analysis reveals how gender and sexuality are
key dimensions supporting common sense notions and national security assumptions.
The ‘naturalness’ of the gender binary and heterosexuality defines what can be under-
stood as security and restricts the range of acceptable national protection policies. Hence,
we claim that a feminist perspective provides increased scope for critiquing and contest-
ing privileged national security narratives.
Feminist IR research has shown how ideas and conceptualizations of national security
and territorial protection are both shaped by and (re)shape gender norms and relations.
Military institutions perform gendered practices, and presumptions about masculinity
and femininity justify military activities (Cohn, 1987; Hearn, 2012; Tickner, 2001;
Wibben, 2018). This research field has also highlighted the contextual and variable
incorporation of intersectional hierarchies and (hetero)sexualities into understandings of
security and protection (Ackerly et al., 2006; Khalid, 2015; Tickner and Sjoberg, 2011).
Although feminist research that deals explicitly with the nexus of memory-making and
security is rare (Altinay and Pető, 2016: 7), a new and burgeoning body of IR literature
relates military heritage and remembrance initiatives to the gender norms, racial tropes
and colonialism inherent in security politics (Åse, 2020; Basham, 2016; Heath-Kelly,
2020; Tidy and Turner, 2020; Ware, 2019; Welland, 2017). The memorialization of mili-
tary activities and topics privileges the masculine military protagonist, while disregard-
ing women’s agency and war memories (Danilova and Purnell, 2020; Mannergren
Selimovic, 2017; Repo, 2008; Szitanyi, 2015; Taber, 2020). Remembrance of military
conflict tends to represent women allegorically and to convey established gender tropes,
the most prominent being those of tragic motherhood and of women as innocent and
‘pure’ (Graff-McRae, 2017; Reeves, 2020).
Inspired by this feminist literature, we combine a gender analysis with a critical herit-
age studies (CHS) approach to heritage as objects and ideas constructed in and constitut-
ing a resource for the present (Graham and Howard, 2008; Harrison, 2013; Smith, 2006).
The key concept, heritagization, captures the power-laden process of turning competing
pasts into ‘the Past’ (Macdonald, 2013: 18) and unsettles the idea of any self-evident
preservation of historical realities. A uniting idea in this research field is that contempo-
rary social and political conditions impact which and whose memories are saved, repre-
sented and made tangible (Gentry and Smith, 2019). In relation to the contingency
characterizing the heritage of war, Gegner and Ziino (2012) underline how the making of
heritage involves different actors actively producing identities. Accordingly, heritagiza-
tion is considered a construction with material consequences and a process that often
reinforces identities and hierarchical relations connected to, for example, gender, ethnic-
ity and class (Smith, 2008). While discursive perspectives have been important in CHS

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