2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Of all the difficult conversations about war, the most charged are those featuring participants and perpetrators. The ‘victim-perpetrator’ split is imagined as gendered, with heterosexual cis-gendered women positioned as passive victims, and men as active participants. It is also understood in national terms. This panel troubles these tropes by taking seriously the intersectional nature of interpersonal wartime encounters, and questioning their reminiscences and (re-)constructions after the end of combat.

The panel focuses on World War Two encounters in Asia and the Pacific between people of differing race, gender, sexual orientation and class position and examines how they are conveyed. From Japanese-occupied territories to internment camps in Australia, the interracial marriages, queer experiences, and frontier romances analysed in these papers produced a range of post-war memory texts. While these texts have contributed to national collective memories, the stories are fundamentally transnational and transcultural. Our focus on interpersonal encounters helps to tease out the relationships between the interpersonal, the intersectional and the transnational.

Each paper pairs two life histories to analyse the gendered, sexual and racialized strategies in individual lives during wartime, and in the ways those lives are represented. This approach is original in method and aim; while extant historical scholarship tends to focus on the life of a single individual or large group, pairing two actors brings into sharp focus the strategies which inform individual decisions and actions in the context of war and highlights the fundamentally intersectional nature of identity construction and deployment.