Photography, war and gender: Redefining women’s militancy during and after conflict in Ireland and Spain

Abstract

Bringing together the comparative case studies of revolutionary Ireland (1916-1923) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), this thesis provides an innovative social history of militant women’s photographic practices during conflict and in its aftermath. In particular, this study draws on material and feminist approaches to photography as it focuses on women’s roles as producers, editors, and collectors of photography across public and private networks, as it traces the complex lives and afterlives of these photographs as they circulate during and after war. Historicising and rereading militant women’s photography uncovers alternative narratives of war that enrich scholarly knowledge of gender and conflict. This research reveals that militant women used photography to articulate their own militant identities, to legitimise and negotiate their participation during war, and to contest their erasure from public narratives of conflict. Despite facing violent repression, militant women’s photographic practices subverted the institutional attempts to erase them by building counter-narratives of defiant remembrance. This thesis calls on us to recognise these narratives and bring them to the forefront of our understanding of gender and war in Ireland and Spain.
In addition, reconceptualising our approach to militant women’s photographic practices enables us to move beyond linear narratives of forgetting and rediscovery, and interrogate the role of photographic visibility within patriarchal narratives of war. Within contemporary cultural discourses, visibility is framed as a means of recovery for women; however, the case studies in this thesis reveal that this renewed visibility is still formed in negotiation with patriarchal frameworks of war. Within this representation of women’s militancy, active participation is visualised within a masculinist framework that erases those who do not fit within this limited definition. This thesis argues that the alternative gazes on war seen in militant women’s photographic practices hold the potential to disrupt and dismantle patriarchal narratives of war.

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