Open lecture: Making a military heritage – gender and nation in Sweden’s Cold War history

Welcome to an open lecture with Cecilia Wendt, associate professor and senior lecturer at the Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, and Cecilia Åse, professor of gender studies and associate professor of political science at Stockholm University.

The presentation highlights results from the multidisciplinary research project “Making a military heritage – gender and nation in Sweden’s Cold War history”.

The project investigates the turning of the Cold War military past to a national military heritage, with a focus on how gender and sexuality is fundamental in these processes. More specifically, the focus in the presentation is on the production of secrecy and territoriality in military heritagization, and on what political “work” these gendered narratives perform.

Maria Wendt is Associate Professor at the Department of Economic History and International relations at Stockholm University. Her work is mainly within the field of feminist international relations. Lately she has done research on military violence and sacrificial deaths as well as on the gendered underpinnings of the memory/security-nexus. Her publications can be found in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Cooperation and Conflict and Journal of War and Culture Studies. Together with Cecilia Åse, she has published Gendering Military Sacrifice. A feminist comparative analysis (Routledge 2019).

Cecilia Åse is Professor of Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies at Stockholm University. Her work on gender and nationalism, war-making and crisis narratives and gendered protection appears in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Critical Military Studies and Journal of Cold War Studies. A recent article is “Gendering the military past: Understanding heritage and security from a feminist perspective”, published in Cooperation and Conflict (2022).