Appendix III: Aleppo under Siege

In her autobiography Silent Star (1968), American silent and early sound film actress Colleen Moore reminisces about her earliest experiences and aspirations of learning to act for the screen. She writes

This story of fan magazine engagement is one echoed by many actresses. Clara Bow reportedly spent her weekends ‘surrounded by movie magazines … fantasizing about how someday she would appear in them’ (Stenn 2000, 13). Similarly, Norma Shearer was said to have been an ‘avid reader of movie magazines’ from a young age, devouring ‘the Cinderella stories of girls who were picture stars … [imagining] herself in their place’ (Ramsey 1931, 111). As such, we might connect them to the ‘movie struck’ or ‘screen struck girls’ written about by Shelley Stamp (2000) and Diana Anselmo Sequeira (2015), as well as those addressed by American fan magazines in the early teens (Fuller 1996). However, Moore's particular reference to the magazine's emphasis on developing screen acting skills, especially the practice of crying, challenges the pejorative framing of young women engaging with movie fandom as purely ‘vapid’ consumers. Throughout her autobiography, Moore frequently references the ways in which she trained herself and worked hard to continue improving her skills, by observing, and taking advice from other actresses – particularly in relation to emotional expression. Indeed, her memoir returns to the matter of crying, asking ‘I could cry now whenever I had to, but what about technique?’ (1968, 27).

This chapter incorporates a performance studies perspective with fan magazine analysis to explore how fan magazines readers, such as Moore, were presented with visually engaging and instructional texts through which they could learn about their favourite stars, while simultaneously developing a knowledge of screen acting styles and appreciation of specific performances. It is possible to identify a feedback loop whereby fan magazines were teaching aspiring (and even established) performers how to perform.

The rapprochement process between Greece and Turkey began with a letter that broke the orthodoxy of the securitised discourse about Greece in Turkish foreign policy. Hence, the letter by Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs İsmail Cem to his Greek counterpart, George Papandreou, on 24 May 1999 in order to discuss terrorism constitutes a milestone in the relationship between Turkey and Greece. Cem's letter triggered a change in discourse which was followed by political engagement between the two countries. Accordingly, this chapter will focus on the instance of a slow but sure rapprochement process, which lasted until 2016; it will analyse the period based on different forms of desecuritsation. The rapid changes from securitisation to desecuritisation, or vice versa, in Turkish foreign policy towards Greece reveal the constructed nature of security and shed light on the overarching politics of securitisation and desecuritisation, in line with the various objectives of the ruling governments (Baysal and Dizdaroğlu, 2022).

Several days after the exchange of letters between the two foreign ministers, İsmail Cem and George Papandreou met at Kosovo's Friends meeting in New York, under the auspices of the UN Secretary-General, on 3 July 1999. They agreed on an action plan, which paved the way for establishing five working groups in the areas of ‘organised crime, drug trafficking, illegal migration and terrorism’, ‘tourism’, ‘environment’ and ‘culture’ and ‘trade’. Upon his return from the meetings in New York, Cem evaluated the negotiations with his Greek counterpart as follows: ‘Turkey has agreements with various countries on the fight against terrorism. Therefore, dealing with an agreement with Turkey on the very same issue would be the first step for Greece to get over the shadow of terrorism’ (The Directorate General of Press and Information, 1 July 1999). Moreover, he pointed out the importance of the action plan by saying that an effort was being made ‘without raising high expectations, without being too assertive’ (Turkish Daily News, 4 July 1999).

Following the two foreign ministers’ consensus on the establishment of working groups during their meeting in New York, the first working group met in Athens on 5–6 July 1999, to initiate cooperation in the proposed fields (Evin, 2005, 397).

Despite the presence of numerous suffrage societies, suffrage shops, newspaper-sellers and activists on the streets of London in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there are few traces that remain as physical memorials to acknowledge the legacy, variety and impact of the Votes for Women movement. This is of course a problem not exclusive to suffrage histories, but for women's history more broadly, with urban spaces dominated by monuments, statues and plaques that honour men and male histories. Urban feminist geographer Leslie Kern describes this as ‘patriarchy written in stone’ and twenty-first-century feminist activists like Caroline Criado-Perez are working to make the past and present lack of visibility explicitly visible across their research and writing, not only inviting but demanding a reassessment of who is celebrated through public monuments as well as in popular culture, educational curricula and public histories. Similar attempts to claim more space for women writers and theatre-makers of the past and present are taking place in the theatre industry, in which generations of predominantly male producers and critics have, as Jill Dolan has noted, been ‘unconcerned with not just women's work in the theatre, but with women's place in the world’.

Second-and third-wave feminist theatre-makers and organisations such as Sphinx Theatre Company, Tonic Theatre and Bechdel Theatre are among those attempting to tackle systemic sexist discrimination through exposing how this casual dismissal of women's writing has affected perceptions of its artistic worth and commercial appeal, frequently working with scholars, archivists and practitioners to show how the reticence of mainstream commercial theatre producers, directors and critics to engage with femalecentred stories and to commission and develop women playwrights has resulted in the under-representation of women's work within the canon of nineteenth-and twentiethcentury UK theatre. Feminist theatre historians and historians of feminist theatre are engaged not only in processes of rediscovery and reassessment, but also in critiquing and dismantling dominant histories of theatre that have ignored structures and biases that excluded women from training and working to their full potential in what Tracy C. Davis has called the ‘truly uneven’ playing field of the male-dominated industry.

Canadian playwright Linda Griffiths's Age of Arousal (2007) is recognisably based on George Gissing's novel The Odd Women (1893), yet she described her play as ‘wildly inspired’ by Gissing's text rather than an adaptation of it. Griffiths's resistance to categorising Age of Arousal as an adaptation may be explained in part by her ambivalence about the Merchant Ivory production company's popular movie adaptations of classic British and American novels. Recalling her research process for Age of Arousal, she wrote of ‘dreaming [her] way through many hours of perfectly produced costume drama’ while ‘[feeling] guilty at the same time’:

To recapture something of the original newness of Gissing's novel about the emergence of modern gender roles and related ideas about female sexuality in the late nineteenth century, Griffiths chose to foreground sex in a more explicit way than was possible for Gissing as a writer bound by the social and literary conventions of his time. She also wanted to correct some residual misogyny that she perceived in Gissing's text, despite his extraordinary accomplishment in portraying so many central female characters together in a single work. In Griffiths's note at the start of the published text of Age of Arousal, she describes her approach to Gissing's novel as taking ‘his basic characters and situation and leap[ing] off a cliff’ that she was ‘dying to leap off’. Her writing of Age of Arousal was, in her words, a ‘dance of thievery and creativity […] danced with Gissing floating above, patron saint or appalled spectre’.

In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon notes a critical tendency to view popular adaptations of canonical literary works as ‘inferior and secondary’ to their source texts.

The French architect Maurice Mantout (1886–1953), after a decade spent with the conservation of monuments in Morocco, played a leading role in the design and construction of the Great Mosque of Paris, which he completed in 1926. The building complex includes courtyards, a garden, a minaret, a prayer hall, a bathhouse and other annexes. Most of the structures replicate Moroccan precedents in terms of layout, elevation and even decorative details such as capitals, stuccowork, woodwork and zillīj (‘tile mosaic’), thereby creating a pastiche of historic landmarks. Mantout and his colleagues paid meticulous attention also to the epigraphic features of the mosque. For instance, the entrance to its prayer hall leads through a wooden screen surmounted by a square Kufic inscription that reads barakat Muḥammad, or ‘the blessing of Muḥammad’ [Figure 7.1]. This specific phrase and calligraphic form, as the architect presumably recognised, had been part of the repertoire of Moroccan craftsmen for centuries.

Contrary to their absence in scholarship on Islamic art and epigraphy, such barakat Muḥammad squares are rather widespread in Morocco. In the old cities of Fez, Meknes, Marrakesh and elsewhere, observant visitors may spot them on mosques, shrines, city gates, ramparts, palaces and fountains. The variety of media in which they are executed is also remarkable: brickwork inlaid with zillīj, carved or painted stucco and wood, glazed tiles, embroidered textiles, manuscripts and calligraphic panels. The earliest occurrences of the phrase, alongside other pious inscriptions in square Kufic, can be traced back to the Marinid dynasty (668/1269–869/1465). Ruling from their capital, New Fez, the Marinid sultans commissioned several mosques, madrasas, zāwiyas (‘hospices’), funerary complexes and other buildings throughout their realm in present-day Morocco and part of Algeria. Perhaps most renowned are the architectural landmarks established by Abū’l-Ḥasan (r. 731/1331–752/1351), some of which are indeed relevant to the present discussion.

The following chapter will primarily investigate the emergence of barakat Muḥammad squares in the Marinid period, proposing an interpretation for the meaning of this religious formula at the time. One may note that its use was virtually unparalleled in other parts of the Islamic world, which suggests that it was more than just one of many, routinely recited or inscribed, pious phrases. In other words, it is likely to have borne a local significance, one that cannot be generalised for other regions.

While Chapter 1 considered the narrow vision of negative peace – martial peace – associated with peacekeeping, this chapter takes a closer look at peacekeeping itself and the ways that discourses about peacekeeping have resulted in the peacekeeper myth: the belief that peacekeeping is a moral, softer, more legitimate means of using militarised force in the world. The peacekeeper myth is a powerful one; it has enabled international interventions in the name of peace to become legitimatised and widely practised, a puzzling phenomenon of increased militarised interventions in a political world where sovereignty is presumed to be central (Barnett 2005).

The mythologisation of peacekeeping has contributed to processes of militarisation, such as the demand and purchase of military technologies and the perpetuation of foreign policy strategies that utilise military force to create peace. It has also led to problematic activities adjacent to keeping of ‘peace’ by military personnel, such as sexual exploitation of women and girls by peacekeepers (Notar 2006; Ndulo 2009) that have resulted in ‘UN Babies’ or Peacekeeper-fathered children (Lee and Bartels 2020), the torture of children (Razack 2004), fraud (Lederer 2020), and the failure of peacekeepers to protect civilians from mass atrocities (such as in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995). The peacekeeper myth distracts us from asking what kind of ‘peace’ military occupations uphold, and therefore also obscures the martial politics that peacekeeping missions may reinforce. The peacekeeper myth is distracting, therefore, allowing us to imagine militarised coercion in romanticised ways while avoiding looking closely at the attendant violent practices associated with the deployment of militarised forces.

The peacekeeper myth, however, is also productive. It reproduces ideological militarism as a commonsensical element of international politics. It positions militaries as forces for good (Duncanson 2009, 2013), rather than a ‘destructive form of riot control’ (Greener 2013: 636), potentially lethal tools for political control. The peacekeeper myth reproduces the idea that military force can be used in ethical and justifiable ways. The peacekeeper myth and ideological militarism coconstitute each other. Both militarism and the peacekeeper myth are circulated discursively to reproduce one another, making the myth appear straightforward, commonsensical and apolitical; these meanings transform into ‘just the way things are or the ways things ought to be’ (Weber 2014: 6). This has the effect of obscuring the politics of peacekeeping and of legitimising military activities conducted in the name of peace.

As the house lights go dark, an actor appears in a pool of light on a bare stage with only a projection screen upstage. The projection screen reads ‘Cicely Hamilton (1872–1952)’. A performer enters.

Introduction: Gender-Based Violence in a Terrorist Frame

Terrorism has become a recurring theme in Indian cinema. This development is very much in tune with the world-wide emergence, since the mid-1990s, of a ‘new cinematic terrorism’ responding to global forms of political violence (Shaw 2015, 185–6). But terrorism can also be understood as a characteristically Indian concern. More specifically, the emergence of cinematic terrorism reflects India's increased exposure to terrorist incidents since the 1980s, with the 1993 ‘Bombay bombings’ and the surrounding events leaving an especially deep mark on the national imaginary (198). The surge of representations of terrorism in Indian film might also be symptomatic of a broader cultural tendency to showcase extreme brutality, cinematic terrorism being only one of its mediatised forms (Bannerji 2016, 3–7). The rise of spectacular depictions of violence in Indian visual media can be said to respond specifically to the society from which they emerge. It is unclear, though, if and to what extent such depictions contribute to serious discussions of the deeper causes underlying terrorism, or if they have a distorting effect on society by virtue of misrepresenting complex and often sensitive issues (3).

Among these issues is gender-based violence in India, a problem widely discussed in the country and abroad. These debates intensified in the wake of the death of Jyoti Singh in December 2012. A twenty-three-year-old medical student in New Delhi, Singh was beaten, tortured, and gang-raped on a private bus and died eleven days later. The repeated occurrence of such incidents calls for an investigation of the deeper social reasons for misogyny, structural discrimination, oppression, sexual harassment and violence against women and girls. While the problem is often downplayed as being over-represented by ‘detailed and frequent reporting’, critical commentators insist that the wider issue is evidently patriarchy, deeply anchored in traditional family-oriented social structures and typically safeguarded by corrupt institutions, all closely related to an aggressive neoliberal capitalism (Bannerji 2016, 3–7). More and more people are beginning to realise that respecting women's lives and securing their rights is hardly possible without undergoing a deeper process of societal transformation. However, such change is barely at hand, especially considering the cultural and political dominance of the governing far-right Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is known for undermining democratic institutions and processes as well as cementing traditional models of family and gender (Widmalm 2019).

“Those Hell-Hounds Called Terrorists” – Then and Now

In their pioneering study Terror and Taboo, the cultural anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass point out a curious paradox in the contemporary preoccupation with terrorism. Whereas the topic of terrorism has been ubiquitous in Western public discourse since the late twentieth century, the voices of terrorists themselves are usually silenced. Zulaika and Douglass suggest that the terrorist is ‘the paradigm of inhuman bestiality, the quintessential proscribed or tabooed figure of our times’ (1996, 6). To say that there is such a thing as a ‘terrorism taboo’ (Jackson 2015a, 320) is not to say that terrorism is not talked about. Quite the opposite is true. Quoting Michel Foucault's well-known phrase (which originally refers to the public repression of sexuality in Victorian times), we may speak of a ‘veritable discursive explosion’ (1978, 17) surrounding the subject of terror, which the events of 11 September 2001 propelled to the forefront of political action and media attention. What is taboo is not the topic of terrorism as such; it is the political subjectivity of the perpetrator of terrorism, whose motives cannot be acknowledged, since ‘the very attempt to “know” how the terrorist thinks or lives can be deemed an abomination’ (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 149). Zulaika and Douglass maintain that what they term ‘terrorism discourse’ is caught up in a self-referential tangle; rather than engaging with the actual circumstances and perpetrators of political violence, counterterrorism experts and the media reiterate the same set of assumptions in a posture of ‘rhetorical circularity’ (ix).

The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature and Visual Culture takes up these ideas within the fields of literary, film, television, and media studies. In what ways, we ask, do media forms such as novels, fiction and nonfiction films, or comic books frame and make sense of the figure of the terrorist? And how do the resulting narratives relate to official, state-led discourses? Do they reinforce the terrorism taboo, or do they find ways of circumventing it? Surprisingly few studies have devoted themselves to narrative representations of terrorists rather than terrorism as a more abstract concept and phenomenon. As the following sections will demonstrate, moreover, the existing research tends to limit itself to one medium and context.

Claire Warden [CW]: Could you briefly explain who you are and what you do?

Jessica Walker [JW]: I’m Dr Jessica Walker. I am a singer and writer. I trained at the Guildhall as an opera singer. I then diversified away into writing, initially for my own performance. I felt strangely unfulfilled creatively and had reached an age when I was confident enough to start creating myself. And I haven't looked back. I then started researching my own work because it struck me that as a classically trained singer I was in a unique position. Generally, classically trained singers are quite passive in their work; they wait to be employed. Given that I was creating my own projects, I wanted to work out what was shifting in terms of my creative autonomy and the agency that lent me in my own career.

I also looked at it in terms of the structures I was working in, how independent artists have become somewhat subservient to arts organisations. So unwittingly I became very politicised in this process. I hadn't anticipated this as an outcome; I was just interested in taking things apart in a practice-as-research process. But I came out the other side completely changed. It changed the work I made but also my attitudes to the nature of work itself: what being an art worker means and how you are uniquely exploitable. It's been a really interesting process for me because everything coalesced in a way I hadn't expected. It made me want to empower the next generation of artists which has led to me working at the Royal Academy of Music in artist development, where the one thing I say to my students is ‘who are you as an artist? That is your starting point.’ They look at me as though I am completely mad, because they just want to go and practise their violin for eight hours, but after a bit of time, they do get what I am talking about. So, I have been on a massive journey over the past ten years from solely being an employed opera singer to doing all these different things.

CW: How have you assimilated the legacy of modernism into your work?

JW: When I started creating work I was looking at why I wanted to sing.

I. Alluvion

The time between signing on to this collection and finalising the chapter has been the time of 2019–22. The unpredictable cascade of changes flooding this interval has rerouted my ideas of life, work, meaning, reading, writing, care again and again. Just like you.

Consequently, my ambivalence towards Interrogating Lesbian Modernism has grown heavier, soggier, deeper than ever. Rather than getting dragged to the bottom, I allow the detritus that floats upon the frangible surface of an uncertain now to flow through this writing.

May you be reading this in a now that can hold you.

II. Lesbian Modernism?: It's Complicated

I have been contemplating a break-up with Lesbian Modernism for a long time.

She's my first love. And yet, we all know, that's rarely enough.

Years ago, I was ready to abandon our relationship – How to define it? How to understand it? How, even, to understand her?

(I was, frankly, not that interested in her identity crises: no terms, no definitions can capture her complexity, her inconstancy, her caprice. Lesbian Modernism, Sapphic Modernism, Queer Feminist Modernism – it is not a matter of any importance. Let us choose LM as a convenient term for something that has no real being.)

I was fed up.

And yet. How to let her go? She was all I had. And even as our affair dwindled, I still wanted it to be known. Published. Then, I could end it.

My ambivalence and publishers’ indifference stalled us. My attentions wandered, straying into other flirtations.

Time passed.

She gained more recognition. The gatekeepers nodded and I went public with a warmed-over account of our beleaguered histoire d’amour.

Now, I thought, time to let her go, start over with someone else, something else.

And yet. As my way in, she was now in my way: What I knew. How I knew. All I knew. Still holding her appeal and my loyal heart.

And yet. Life and loving beyond the page divaricated along unexpected pathways, attracting suspicion from her more categorically possessive devotees.

(My FtM transpartner in life, the parent of my kids, would gladly wear the T-shirt declaring, ‘I’m not a lesbian, but my girlfriend is.’)

Disfiguring the Terrorist: Tropes, Figures and the Intimacy of Violence

In a post-war story about the intimacy of two amputated legs, an investigative team of inspectors descends upon a battle zone to collect evidence. ‘28 legs in all’, cries out an inspector, ‘19 military personnel and 9 militants’. ‘No, our boss won't accept that’, responds the officer, ‘we can't have odd numbers, we need two legs per person’. Even if we assume that one of the military personnel was an amputee from a previous battle, we still have one militant leg to account for. So, the investigative team either needs to wait until one of the insurgents steps on a mine, or chase some of the local villagers from the militant-controlled areas in the direction of a mine field and hope that they will get an odd number of blasts to even the number of legs. But there will be a problem if one of the military personnel steps on a mine accidentally. That is exactly what happens in Mitali Perkins’ novel Bamboo People (2010), in which a fifteen-year-old foot soldier of the Burmese junta, forcefully recruited, loses his leg in a landmine explosion. Left to die, with a missing leg, he is eventually rescued by another teenager from the enemy's camp, a Karenni insurgent, who takes pity on him and gifts him a prosthetic leg which was meant for the teenage amputees of his own camp.

The boy goes home to Rangoon, proudly displaying his ‘Karenni leg’ (Perkins 2010, 60) to his Burmese friends, in an overt gesture of political bonhomie that allegorically reinforces the notion that Burma the nation needs two legs to trundle along, one organic and one inorganic, one aesthetic and one prosthetic, the Burman and the Karenni, which stand side by side, as it were, but never even on ground or in life. The Burmese teenager can walk only at the expense of a Karenni amputee. The conflict that holds the two legs of the same body together and apart is therefore binding and intimate at the same time, as Moira Fradinger observes in the context of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo: the violence between ‘the most powerless and most powerful [is] part of a structure of enmity whose two polar opposites alternatively embody figures inimical to the fantasized unity of the nation’ (2010, 188).

In the opening chapter of her autobiography What Is Remembered (1963), Alice B. Toklas recalls the unwelcome arrival of her baby brother, born when she was ten years old. ‘I wanted to kiss my mother and confide my horror to her,’ writes Toklas. ‘He is red like a lobster, I said, are you going to love him? Taking me in her arms she said, Not like you, darling, you will always come first. And I was satisfied.’

For a woman who has been remembered not as a writer but as a writer's wife, whose fame has rested on her willingness to come second to ‘genius’ Gertrude Stein, Toklas's decision to foreground her own primacy is both compelling and telling. Where photographic portraits of the couple show Toklas positioned firmly behind Stein, with Cecil Beaton's 1937 portrait placing Stein's ‘wife’ so far in the background that she appears to be in miniature, What Is Remembered brings Toklas into focus. At the time of Stein's death in July 1946, Stein's typist, editor, general secretary and devoted supporter had long been seen to live in her partner's shadow – a position and perspective that Toklas may publicly have welcomed. While biographer Linda Simon observes that ‘at the side of the gregarious Gertrude, Alice believed there was little in her own personality that acquaintances would find interesting,’ the couple's friend Donald Sutherland points out that the ‘self-effacement which Alice seems to have cultivated […] became a form of publicity in itself.’ For Sylvia Beach, Toklas was the more sophisticated of the two: ‘Obviously they saw things from the same angle, [but] Alice had a great deal more finesse than Gertrude.’ Stein's tricksy The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) might present Toklas as its subject, but the narrator ensures that ‘Gertrude Stein,’ a name repeated so often that it gains the hypnotic power and seductive pull of a marketing slogan or trademark, is the text's main attraction.

Two years before the publication of What Is Remembered, another lesbian ‘widow’ had at last published her biography of her writer-partner. In The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (1961), Una, Lady Troubridge, narrates the life of her beloved John ‘both before and since I shared it,’ claiming to provide ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ about the author of The Well of Loneliness (1928).

(Un)Setting the Stage

In the small, proscenium-arch theatre of Attis in central Athens a geometric installation of fourteen white doors occupies the entire length of the stage for Theodoros Terzopoulos's Nora (2019).1 This architectural construction, designed by the director, is placed in intimate proximity to the auditorium, leaving only a small corridor in front of it for the actors to perform. The pre-recorded sound of a ticking clock fills the acoustic field for several minutes while the audience sits in silent anticipation of onstage action. Such soundless waiting and sensory honing-in of attention – presupposing ‘physical restraint, “engaged” listening, [and] limited vocalization from the audience’ – is, as Adrian Curtin reminds us, historically situated and only became part and parcel of a by-now-familiar ‘behavioral etiquette’ that emerged alongside modern European drama.2 In this instance, such silence is not (exclusively) a strategic mechanism for facilitating a zooming-in towards the stage. Forceful, warm light refracts against this visual backdrop of whiteness and reflects its brightness back to the spectators’ seats, making audience members watch each other fall silent and listen, individually and collectively, to the acousmatised clock: we hear its sound but cannot affix it to any visible source. This long moment of focused attentiveness to the ticking – a ‘symbol of time passing, but […] also a cipher of silence’, as Ross Brown posits in relation to modernist sonic dramaturgy – undermines the separation of stage and proscenium and its conventional sonic ‘detachedness’. As audience members, we are, on the one hand, obliged by the end-on architecture to turn towards the slightly elevated stage, but at the same time, the unexpected proximity of the scenographic installation, the brightness that seems to spotlight both the doors and ourselves, and the ostinato of sound that surrounds us without any pretension that it emanates from a visible onstage object make us look and listen to ourselves and experience an uncanny ‘sharedness’ with the stage. We are rendered markedly aware of our ingrained modernist theatre-going etiquette and, although operating within the confines of a given architectural context that demarcates stage and auditorium, this durational beginning works to undercut division and seed the potential of unification, or at least of a more fluid rapport, between scenic and spectatorial space.

As I showed in Chapter 4, Canada's peacekeeping myth has sustained a romanticised and, in many instances, falsified account of what the Canadian military has done overseas in the name of peace. Yet the peacekeeper myth also relates to romanticised accounts of Canada's violent history of Indigenous–settler relations and facilitates political legitimisation of martial politics (Howell 2018) within the so-called peaceful Canadian state. Canada's peacekeeping myth has explicit neo-colonialist overtones, reproduced in romanticised accounts of the formation of the Canadian state with civil, just and orderly treaty-making processes with Indigenous nations. This account has been myth-busted by scholars who take aim at the ‘myth of the peaceable kingdom’ (Choquette 2019) or ‘peace-making myth’ (Regan 2011) as a problematic representation of Indigenous–settler relations in Canada that impede modern-day efforts for reconciliation. This chapter asks: What happens when Canada engages in violent ‘peace-keeping’ at home?

Canada's peacekeeper myth, and its implied political values of benevolent paternalism, innocence, altruism and non-violence, is contiguous with discourse about Canada's formation as a modern nation state and the history of ‘peaceful’ Indigenous–settler relations in this political project. Canada's peacekeeper myth has stood to legitimise foreign martial violence (as shown in Chapter 4 during the war in Afghanistan), but also stands to legitimise ongoing domestic deployments of militarised force against Indigenous populations. Martial violence and colonial violence have been mutually reinforcing in the state-making of contemporary Canada. Not unlike the mobilisation of the peacekeeper myth in gendered and racialised ways in the representation of the CAF in Afghanistan, mediated representations and accounts of martial force used against Indigenous nations also legitimise violence within the state, where violence has been justified because of a stated intent to produce peace and order. The relationship between martial violence and colonial violence becomes evident as the enforcement of ‘peace’ in Canada requires martial violence to enforce. Martial peace in Canada, therefore, involves repression of meaningful opportunities for justice that might address long-standing colonial violence. In the ‘domestic’ accounts of martial force, the state-led police force is positioned as legitimate, while grassroots and Indigenous-led resistance efforts have been positioned as threating, risky or uncivilised: antithetical to the presumed intrinsic peace and order of Canada.

James Joyce was enabled by lesbians. In 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was initially serialised in The Egoist, a radical little magazine first founded as The Freewoman by Dora Marsden, then sustained as The New Freewoman by her intimate friend Harriet Shaw Weaver. Joyce acknowledged his debut and debt by reviving the former feminist title in Finnegans Wake: ‘I’m so keen on that New Free Woman with novel inside.’ ‘Dear Miss Weaver’ was Joyce's champion and financier for the rest of his life, although censorship constraints meant that Ulysses was first issued by two other lesbian couples. In New York, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson serialised two-thirds in their avant-garde The Little Review, until the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice suppressed it. In Paris, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier ushered Ulysses through their new Shakespeare and Company publishing house, before passing the plates to Weaver for her own Egoist Press imprint. Joyce's indebtedness to these Sapphic midwives of modernism was anticipated and obliquely repaid through sympathetic interest. His sense of the possibilities of queer attractions eddies through and disturbs the ostensibly heterosexual dynamics of Dubliners and Ulysses. Although his treatment of the women who facilitated his writing was not always gracious, Joyce's sensitivity to tenderness, intimacy and love between women nonetheless stands as tribute to lesbian comrades and friends.

On 15 February 1912, Kathlyn Oliver disrupted the letters column of The Freewoman by contending that ‘the abstinence of many single women’ was ‘not injurious,’ since they were ‘sexually anaesthetic.’ Her disclosure was characteristic of The Freewoman's boldly confessional mode. Launched in November 1911 by renegade suffragists Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe, it debated ‘free love,’ birth control, sex work, and ‘Uranianism,’ by which it meant sex between men. It prided itself, as contributor Rebecca West later put it, on ‘its unblushingness—The Freewoman mentioned sex loudly and clearly and repeatedly and in the worst possible taste.’ The journal was committed to promoting possibilities for women beyond heterosexual reproductive marriage, most strenuously through the contributions of the socialist feminist Stella Browne.

In November 2021, dancer, singer and war spy Josephine Baker was interred at the Pantheon mausoleum in Paris. The lack of those of African descent within the Pantheon has been notable; moreover, the honour was clearly a male preserve, with just five women having been previously included. Josephine is the first black woman to receive this accolade, and it is particularly significant given that she is non-French. Ongoing arguments concerning her role as the ‘good migrant’ who can mediate difference within republican assimilationism must not take away from her achievements and stature as a European feminist icon. Black women artistes in the West have always been integral to the formation of worldviews that we would broadly define as modern and progressive in terms of how we understand female identity. However, many have not received due recognition, or they have fallen into anonymity with the passing of time and their histories are yet to be examined and explored. For example, the emergence of the feminist movement in 1920s France cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the impact and influence of black women performers in the West during the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, women had dropped their corsets and had begun to discuss what we can term as their sexual revolution, which included debates concerning the place of women in the rapidly changing world. Many early-twentieth-century black women artistes can be thought of as sexual modernists and radicals who defiantly reconceived what it meant to be a woman. They share the key trait that they generally occupied an outsider space. Perhaps for this reason, they were freer to be creative and daring, ushering in exciting societal and cultural changes. They defiantly redefined notions of modern womanhood through sexual expression, sociability, and creative and intellectual experimentation.

From the 1920s through to the 1940s, transnational black and mixed-race women performers staged modernist representations of black female subjectivity. These bordercrossing cosmopolitans embodied the various contours of an avant-garde zeitgeist that connected Europe and the Americas, bringing together art, intellectualism and politics in order to propose ways of being that were distinctly modern. Josephine Baker is perhaps the most well-known black woman modernist of that era. The African American performer lived in Paris from 1925.