‘An uglier duckling than before’: Reclaiming agency and visibility amongst facially-wounded ex-servicemen in Britain after the First World War

In total, 60,500 British soldiers were wounded in the head or eyes during the First World War. Despite these numbers facially-wounded ex-servicemen, in particular their post-war experiences, are largely overlooked in the social history of the conflict. Whilst part of a wider constituency of war-wounded veterans, owing to the value ascribed to the face in terms of personal identity and socio-economic values, disfigured veterans were excluded from the discourse of masculine heroism in which other war wounds were framed. Narratives of facial injury emphasised despairing passivity, which acted to emasculate and ‘other’ the facially-wounded. How accurately though does this reflect their lived experiences? Using first-hand testimony from facially-injured ex-servicemen this article challenges the representation of the disfigured veteran as passive, arguing that men exercised agency through their self-representations and behavioural responses. Drawing on normative conceptions of masculinity, and on idealised images of war-wounded veterans, facially-wounded ex-servicemen constructed counter-narratives of their emotional response to facial injury which emphasised conformity to these ideals. The conceptualisation of disfigurements as war wounds, and the high cultural status of the war-disabled, allowed facially-wounded ex-servicemen to reclaim the masculine status which they were denied in popular representations, and to assert their right to social visibility in post-war Britain

Love and limblessness: male heterosexuality, disability, and the Great War

Tens of thousands of British men were permanently wounded as a result of war service. Their return home sparked debates about the wounded male body, female accountability for war-injuries, and the ideology, performance, and practice of masculinity. Other historians have shown how ‘broken heroes’ from the First World War were constituted into ‘men’ in four contexts: physical appearance, occupation, sport, and Britishness. This article explores a fifth dimension: sexuality. It explores debates about the need for war-disabled men to establish stable marital relationships and investigates some attempts to encourage this, including encouraging women to take the initiative in proposing marriage and the establishment of The League for the Marrying of Broken Heroes

Medicos, poultice wallahs and comrades in service: masculinity and military medicine in Britain during the First World War

The subject of British military medicine during the First World War has long been a fruitful one for historians of gender. From the bodily inspection of recruits and conscripts through the expanding roles of women as medical care providers to the physical and emotional aftermath of conflict experienced by men suffering from war-related wounds and illness, the medical history of the war has shed important light on how the war shaped British masculinities and femininities as cultural, subjective and embodied identities. Much of this literature has, however, focused on the gendered identities of female nurses and sick and wounded servicemen. Increasingly, however, more complex understandings of the ways in which medical caregiving in wartime shaped the gender identities of male caregivers are starting to emerge. This article explores some of these emerging understandings of the masculinity of male medical caregivers, and their relationship to the wider literature around the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between warfare and medicine. It examines the ways in which the masculine identity of male medical caregivers from the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps, namely stretcher bearers and medical orderlies, was perceived and represented both by the men themselves and those they cared for. In doing so it argues that total war played a crucial role in shaping social and cultural perceptions of caregiving as a gendered practice. It also identifies particular tensions between continuity and change in social understandings of medical care as a gendered practice which would continue to shape twentieth-century British society in the war’s aftermath

Masculinity and the Wounds of the First World War: A Centenary Reflection

In the year of the centenary of the First World War, it is timely to reflect upon the rise of masculinity studies and its impact on the historiography of Britain’s military culture and the changing landscape of focused studies of the war. To be sure, many historians now regard gender and war as ‘inevitably intertwined’, as Alison Fell recently argued. In this essay, I will examine the historiography of the First World War, as it relates to the study of military masculinities, the rising schol..