Remembering the Unthinkable: War, Food, Women’s Bodies and the Art of gendered Memory

This panel brings together three papers that explore some of the lived experiences of women during WWI, the Spanish Civil War and WWII. The panel discusses the racialized and gendered food policies of authoritarian regimes as well as the way those policies impacted on women’s bodies, professional identities and their art. Together, these papers suggest that women’s experiences of war can be used as a lens to view the gender policies of authoritarian regimes as well as the way women used the resources they had to cope with the memories of hunger, death and dying. While Dunai’s paper focuses on the plight of married women with children, both Chappine and Miller assess the impact of war and memory on the lives of the unmarried woman to demonstrate the need to move away from homogenous histories of “women” and women’s experiences of war.