Disturbing practices: history, sexuality and women’s experience of modern war. (An excerpt)

This article turns to the First World War’s unsettling effects on the lives of women in Britain to argue that our access to the complex terrain of sexuality has been circumscribed by the resilience in lesbian, gay, and queer history of the genealogical project that emerged from 1970s’ liberation politics and, later, the Foucauldian analysis of knowledge and power. As an organizing metaphor genealogy has been useful in broadening the scope of the sexual past, tracking ancestries of both similitude and rupture, yet there is much that it occludes. Despite queer theory’s interrogation of identity, genealogy continues to categorize human experience as normative or deviant. To rethink available pathways in historicizing sexuality in relation to gender, race, nation, and class, this project discovers an ideal site in the communities and desires of Anglo-American women who exploited the social disruptions of World War I. This cultural moment highlights some of the problems that currently vex identity history’s dominant mode of inquiry and allows the envisioning of how sexuality might be studied differently