Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War by Laura Doan (review)

The study of gender as an analytical category has become a major concern of social and cultural historians of the First World War in recent decades, with numerous volumes on the subject published in the lead-up to the 2014 centenary. Sexuality, however, has received far less attention from historians of Great Britain, who have focused on subjects such as “khaki fever” and the military medical response to venereal disease. Historians have been reluctant to analyze sexuality as a system of knowledge; few truly engage with the range of ideas emanating from queer studies, trans studies, and critical theory.

Laura Doan is clearly on a mission in her extraordinary book, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. By shining a glaring light on the assumptions, projections, and pitfalls of most historical approaches to gender, she wants to demonstrate a new way of thinking about sexuality as an analytical category and a system of knowledge in a period of history when it was far less organized and less omnipotent than has been realized. The book demands that historians familiarize themselves with critical theory’s language and concepts. By addressing the period of the First World War on its own terms, Doan aims to pull historians into a new historical understanding of the multifaceted interdynamic of gender and sexuality in wartime. She turns a sharp eye onto the way that present-day categories of sexual identities have been inappropriately and uncritically projected onto women and sex in the early twentieth century. This approach also insists upon the incongruity of the past, warning scholars against faulty practices of extrapolating current identities from historical agents or seeking a lineage in them that derives from a presentist view of our own heritage. In short, Doan is trying to “disturb” the practice of history, and she skillfully traverses the divergent worlds of history and critical theory. It is an approach that perhaps risks alienating both: the historians who cannot grapple with the gauntlet being laid down and the critical/queer theorists she is challenging with historical evidence and methods.

Disturbing Practices should be compulsory reading for anyone working on the social and cultural history of the First World War. Doan wisely divides her account into two parts. The first, entitled “The Practice of Sexual History,” critiques the historiography and draws clear lines of interchange with critical and queer theories. The second part, “Practicing Sexual History,” brilliantly tests her own theory and demonstrates it by providing case studies on female ambulance drivers. For historians, these case studies demonstrate the strength of her approach, providing tangible examples and a body of evidence for the reader to assimilate the arguments presented in the first part.

Providing a historically sensitive account of the fluid “topsy-turvy” character of gender constructs in the period of the world war, Doan assesses the situation of female ambulance drivers and the famous nursing renegades Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisolm. These case studies are used, as the book boldly claims in the title, to “disturb” the assumptions about and conflations of gender and sexuality in the way we practice history. Doan argues that current practices of historicizing gender and sexuality are based upon a genealogical project to retrieve gay and lesbian ancestors. Doan provides a fascinating account of the relationship between the women and, in a second intriguing case, interrogates an unknown smear campaign against Violet Douglas-Pennant, the head of the Women’s Royal Air Force. Retrieving this history from obscurity, Doan demonstrates her capacity for meticulous historical research, and her book should be incorporated into undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. However, the way that her stories about individuals drives home her more ambitious theoretical intervention should be marked down as a game changer in academic circles.

The female ambulance drivers reveal the “topsy-turvy” gender and sexual culture of the First World War. They...