Intermediality and the Racial Other in Women's Contemporary Accounts of War

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In recent years, the #MeToo movement has inspired a renewed conversation about gendered harassment and violence. Coined by Tarana Burke, an African American feminist activist, the phrase 'Me Too' was originally used to highlight the experiences of women of colour. The resulting viral movement, however, has been criticised for excluding diverse perspectives. This project examines this unequal dynamic between white voices and non-white experiences in relation to a key context for gendered violence: conflict zones. With war considered a by-product of masculinity, women's war experiences are side-lined within the masculinist archive. My thesis redresses the hypermasculinisation of traditional accounts of war, developing an alternative archive of conflict stories by women, thus serving a path-breaking intersectional and postcolonial analysis of the relationship between gender and race in women's war narratives. Focusing on diverse texts from the twenty-first century which have not yet received sustained (or any) scholarly analysis, and which span conflict zones in Africa, Asia, and Europe, I attend to the asymmetrical representation of the experiences of white women and women of colour, as they are manifest in cross-racial and cross-cultural encounters. I study, in particular, intermedial texts integrating literature, photography, illustration, and film: the combination of prose and photography in memoirs by Alexandra Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood [2002] and Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier [2004]); the fusing of word, illustration, and photography in Nora Krug's graphic memoir Heimat: A German Family Album (2018); the assemblage of footage and audio-visual materials in the documentary films Cameraperson (2017), by Kirsten Johnson, and For Sama (2019), by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts; and the textual representation of photography and film in Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil's memoir, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and what Comes After (2018). These diverse intermedial forms share a preoccupation with the representation of the female self in relation to the racial other, connecting to the in-betweenness essential to intermediality. Medial and generic oscillations thus subtend interpersonal ones; in-betweenness is central to these (auto)biographical narratives, which toggle between the representation of an individual's own conflict experiences and those of a female other defined in racial terms.By paying overdue attention to the intermedial form in women's war narratives, I reveal the dichotomous potentialities of intermediality: as a tool for representing multiple perspectives; and as a mode of textual analysis that supports the recovery of excluded experiences. This reconceptualisation draws on the methodologies of literary, film, and visual culture analysis alongside those of gender studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory. Elaborating on the project's emphasis on points of intercultural contact between women, I will also conduct interviews with the authors and directors of the primary texts, so demanding a self-reflexive engagement with the ethics of relational modes of address, whilst crucially informing the political stakes of the dissertation.The feminist re-evaluation of intermediality, race, and gender within women's accounts of war offers the opportunity to reconsider interracial relations, collaboration, and gaze. This project restores women's absent voices to an archive that excludes them, but which crucially, is applicable beyond the limits of war. Returning to our contemporary, post-#MeToo context, my thesis elucidates-and supports the rebalancing of-the asymmetry of the voices and experiences of white women and women of colour. Most importantly, it stands to complicate and enhance our understanding of the ethics and politics of interracial and intercultural encounter, especially in relation to gender.