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

Children and objects: affection and infection

This paper considers young children’s (aged 3–5 years) relations with objects, and in particular objects that are brought from home to school. We begin by considering the place of objects within early years classrooms and their relationship to children’s education before considering why some objects are often separated from their owners on entry to the classroom. We suggest that the ‘arrest’ of objects is as a consequence of them being understood as ‘infecting’ specific perceptions or constructs of young children. We further suggest that a focus on the dichotomy between affection/infection for and of certain objects may offer new possibilities for seeing and engaging with children, thus expanding the narrow imaginaries of children that are coded in developmental psychology, UK early years education policy and classroom practice

Embodying risk: managing father–child intimacy and the display of nudity in families

This article interrogates how parents manage public–private practices of father–child intimacy and how the dis/embodied male impacts on the display of nudity in families. Drawing on empirical research, it examines some of the tensions which crystallise around intimate fatherhood and the meanings and practices of family photography. Focusing on the visual and how this can shed light on different dimensions of everyday experience, it explores how parents set boundaries around notions of decency and adjudge appropriate behaviour, with particular attention to the (in)significance of children’s age and the impact of class and social context. Notwithstanding cultural changes which prize intimate fatherhood, the management of masculinity and the paternal body remain a source of anxiety. This article interrogates how gender and ideas of ‘risk management’ are shaping embodied interactions between fathers and children and thus what children are learning about men, masculinity and intimacy

Presumed innocent : picturing childhood

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