Julie M. Powell

Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organizations, technologies, and cultural material aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. When nations mobilised in August 1914, it was thought that casualties would be minimal and the war would be quickly over. Little consideration was given to what ought to be done for those men whose bodies would forever bear the marks of war's destruction. Julie M. Powell charts how rehabilitation emerged as the best means to deal with millions of disabled ex-servicemen. She considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers' rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. Powell sheds light on the ways in which rehabilitation systems became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging.

 <3 I AM TRACY examines the social, cultural, and psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic through Internet memes. It considers how meme culture has been utilized to weather the COVID-19 emergency and how this practice fits within a larger history of mobilizing humor to cope with crisis. By analyzing coronavirus memes shared via Instagram in the spring of 2020, I shed light on the ways in which they contributed to the resilience of those who created and circulated them. I argue that meme culture helped participants to cope with the psychological stress of the crisis—providing a means to defuse anxiety, reassert control, establish a sense of continuity between past, present, and future, and develop and maintain bonds within communities. I establish, moreover, that, despite the novel form, the features and functions of meme culture during the pandemic share important characteristics with the coping strategies—prominently, dark humor—of Lost Generation writers in Britain and the USA. In doing so, the chapter contributes to existing work in the fields of communication studies, literature, anthropology, popular culture and folklore studies, psychology, science and technology studies, and history.

In 1894, Augustin Cabanès founded La Chronique médicale, a one-of-a-kind medical journal that allowed the doctor to indulge his interest in the practise of médecin historique. Historical medicine used modern forensic knowledge to ‘solve’ the mysterious deaths of history. Such retrospective diagnoses were communicated to readers in a familiar literary style, that of crime writing. Developed at the intersection of medical professionalisation and specialisation, the rise of forensic medicine, and the popularisation of crime writing, Cabanès’s work promoted a clear viewpoint on the role of the medical man in fin-de-siècle French society. Through the practise of historical medicine and the medium of crime writing, Cabanès aimed to bolster faith in forensic medicine, to promote the doctor as moral authority, and, relatedly, to establish scientific, and especially medical, practise as critical to the maintenance of the social order during volatile periods of social dislocation and war.

This article examines the role of facially wounded soldiers and prosthetic masks in the post-First WorldWar reconstruction of a gendered French nation. In contextualising the work of Anna Coleman Ladd,who sculpted facial prosthetics to ‘re-humanise’ disfigured French veterans, I aim to shed light on largerpost-war tensions between the accommodation and rejection of social and cultural change. By submittingto Ladd’s efforts and donning her devices, the French mutil´es who sought her help articulated, through theirbodies, a conservative vision for the French nation – highlighting the resonance of the traditional masculineideal in post-war France and a desire to reconstruct an idealised past. The exposure of the ‘surreal’ face,conversely, signalled the futility of a return to the status quo ante and the creation of the Union des Bless´esde la face et de la tˆete allowed veterans to renegotiate the bounds of acceptable masculinity. Collectively,the facially wounded suggest the ways in which the face serves as a site of gender work, a means by whichto challenge or reify masculine norms of behaviour and appearance.

In 1917, physician Arthur F. Hurst began filming the peculiar tics and hysterical gaits of ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers under his care. Editions of Hurst’s films from 1918 and 1940 survive. Cultural products of their time, I argue, the films engaged with contemporary ideas of class, gender and nation. The 1918 version reinforced class-based notions of disease and degeneracy while validating personal and national trauma and bolstering conceptions of masculinity and the nation that were critical to wartime morale and recovery efforts. The 1940 re-edit of the film engaged with the memory of the First World War by constructing a restorative narrative and by erasing the troubled years of gender crisis, ‘shell shock’ culture and class struggle to reassert masculine virtue and martial strength, essential for the prosecution of the Second World War.

Following from Deleuze, Rancière wrote that “there is no such thing as art history or general history: all history is ‘natural history’… [and] the proposed ‘classification’ of film images is in fact the history of the restitution of world-images to themselves.  It is a history of redemption.”  In this sense we find that the film image has the capacity to reconstitute and expose a reality suppressed. By 1937, the release of Jean Renoir’s canonical La Grande Illusion, European society had largely resolved to put the Great War behind them—in essence, to forget.  Yet twenty million men had been severely wounded, eight million permanently disabled. These men, who bore the indelible mark of trauma, problematized social reconstruction and collective “forgetting.” Consequently, they were hidden away in rehabilitative facilities and otherwise marginalized.  Renoir’s film returned images of the war wounded to the collective consciousness and in so doing, became a vessel of—and mediator for—the complex tangle of emotions and gendering impulses that shaped contemporary views on the war and its bodily carnage.

This study examines La Grande Illusion through the lenses of gender and disability.  It situates the work in its historical, cultural context to shed light on the manner in which the film engaged with, and reproduced, contemporary discourse on the war wounded.  During World War I and throughout the postwar period, Europeans exhibited an uneasy, fraught relationship with their injured veterans.  Tensions between pity and reverence were everywhere manifest and attitudes toward the wounded were deeply impacted by contemporary constructions of masculinity. In the film, which takes place largely within the confines of a German POW camp, Renoir engages with multiple instances of injury, from the minor, to the catastrophic and the mortal.  It is my contention that Renoir’s varied treatment of the wounded soldier reflects the very real, very complex responses of European society toward its war wounded.  Moreover, the film demonstrates the extent to which these reactions were deeply rooted in gender ideals of the reconstruction period.  I examine, in turn, Renoir’s use of wounded POWs in the film’s mise-en-scène, Lieutenant Maréchal and Lieutenant Rosenthal’s narrative arc of injury and rehabilitation, and lastly the hierarchical gendering of the wounded Captain de Boeldieu vis-à-vis that of the permanently-disabled Major von Rauffenstein.  Renoir’s camera valorizes and masculinizes his war wounded just as it pities and feminizes them.  These contradictions within the film, I argue, are of a piece with contemporary popular sentiment, which projected the hopes of reconstruction onto the bodies of their wounded soldiers and marginalized them when they could not deliver.

Amid the religious antagonisms of sixteenth-century Paris, the traditional French pastoral song reemerged from the obscurity of the fourteenth century, achieving a renewed popularity in the tumultuous capital. These bawdy pastoral songs—replete with Marian allusions—borrowed from, and engaged with, the Catholic language of body metaphor and could be heard to degrade the Marian body, stripping the image of her power at the same time that Protestant raids on Catholic churches were desecrating likenesses of the Holy Virgin and smashing the symbols of Catholic idolatry. These ostensibly secular songs were not incidental to religious turmoil, but, rather, provided a method of engagement. This examination argues that the sixteenth-century French pastoral song must be understood as a discursive form of iconoclasm, which underwrote, and gave meaning to, acts of iconoclasm in the physical realm. Moreover, it was the performance of such songs that allowed Protestants to temporarily claim space in a Catholic capital that intransigently refused to make room for them.