The War Needed Women: Gender and Militarization in Angola, 1961-2002

This dissertation reconceptualizes war and conflict by exploring Angolan women’s complex and contradictory entanglement with war and peace. Given the gendered ways that Angolan women were mobilized to enter national war projects, this dissertation examines the experiences and pivotal roles women played in the “People’s War” (1961-1975) and the civil war and conflict following the proclamation of independence (1976-2002). How Angolan women participated in national liberation struggles as well as how they respond to violence, gets at the intersection of theories of memory and embodiment and disrupts the popular narrative that all women are inclined toward peacemaking. Taking a feminist theoretical approach and utilizing feminist ethnography as a pertinent tool for making visible the experiences and voices of African women in wartime, this dissertation argues that women are often rendered invisible in the big narrative of nationalism because of the highly masculinist nature of national politics. Nevertheless, their presence as historical agents and patriots is made possible through the symbolic trope of women as mothers of the nation. Paying attention to the centrality of the Angolan female body in the politics of the nation also reveals that despite women’s participation in national freedom struggles, peace and security for them remained elusive, limited, and always precarious. Lastly, this dissertation interrogates gender-specific forms of wartime violence against women in order to demonstrate how the Angolan female body functioned as a screen onto which both Portuguese colonialists and Angolan men could project their patriarchal desires and anxieties around power and masculinity