Free online workshop tells women warriors’ stories
On 4 September 2020 a group of historians, writers and educators from across the world will meet online to talk about some of the most inspirational women warriors of the last few centuries – and the stories we tell about them – in a free online workshop open to the public.
Meeting a female cavalry officer among the ranks of his army was a bit of a surprise for Napoleon, one sunny day in 1806. ‘What!’ he is reported to have exclaimed, ‘You are a woman?’ Today, more than two hundred years later, it shouldn’t be such a surprise: women now serve in combat roles in many armies and female superhero-warriors top the billing in blockbuster Hollywood films, though the battle for acceptance and equal representation carries on.
The online event, ‘Wonder Women & Rebel Girls: Women Warriors in the Media, 1800 to today’, is organised by Dr Matilda Greig from University College Dublin, and opens with a talk by Dr Emma Butcher, recently featured on BBC 2’s ‘Being the Brontës’, BBC Radio 3, and Dan Snow’s History Hit.
The videos of conference papers are now available to watch on History Hub’s Youtube channel. Topics include everything from Furiosa to the French Resistance, Indigenous histories and heavy metal bands. Register for the live Q&A on Friday 4th September to join in the fun.
Keynote
War is an Ecstasy, Risk is Wild’: Girls Writing War in the Nineteenth Century
Dr Emma Butcher (Edge Hill University)
Panel 1: Gender and Sexuality
‘Female’ military masculinities: gender non-conforming women warriors and beyond
Dr Catherine Baker (University of Hull)
Joans and Pearls, Furiosas and Guerrillères: Queer Women, War, and the Apocalypse
Héloïse Thomas (Bordeaux Montaigne University)
Building the Warrior Women Project: Digital Humanities and a Broadside Ballad Archive
Panel discussion with: Erika Carbonara (Wayne State University); Robert Chapman-Morales (Wayne State University); Professor Simone Chess (Wayne State University); Kelly Plante (Wayne State University); Lindsay Ragle-Miller (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)
Panel 2: Nationalism and Propaganda
French Invasion Heroines and their Afterlives
Professor Alison Fell (University of Leeds)
Beautiful Warriors or Chaste Patriots: Representation of Women Soldiers in Turkish Media
Dr Senem Kaptan (Rutgers University)
From Magical to Martial: The Evolution of the Representations of the Red Lanterns in Twentieth-Century Chinese Visual Culture
Karen Wang (Yale University)
Panel 3: Activism and Exclusion
Guerrilla Girls, Wonder Women, and Menstruating Mothers: Iconographies of IRA Women in Armagh Gaol, 1970-1980
Samantha Haddad (New York University)
Indigenous Women Warriors of the Americas, 19th Century
Dr Suzanne McLeod (University of New Mexico)
“Unlikely heroes” and “badass women in bomber planes”: representations of the female warrior in Heavy Metal
Julia Ribeiro S C Thomaz (Université Paris Nanterre/EHESS)
Full details at: wonderwomenworkshop.wordpress.com