Feminist Geopolitics and Memory in Conflict Narratives

Feminist geopolitics and memory studies converge to examine how gender, power and space shape the ways societies remember and narrate conflict. This field foregrounds the experiences of women, marginalised genders and communities whose voices have been overlooked in official accounts of war, occupation and political violence. By attending to sites of memory—ranging from soundscapes and museum exhibitions to grassroots memorials and everyday landscapes—scholars reveal how gendered violence and inequality persist in the aftermath of conflict. Intersectional analyses trace how class, race, sexuality and ability intersect with gender to influence who is remembered, how narratives are constructed and which forms of resistance emerge. Practical applications of this work include the redesign of commemorative sites to foster inclusive dialogues, the incorporation of survivor testimony into peacebuilding processes and the development of counter-narratives that challenge national myths. This global perspective spans Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, demonstrating both the universal importance of gender-sensitive memory work and the particularity of local practices of remembrance.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have explored the intersection of feminist reflection and the sensory dimensions of warfare. One analysis of a prominent modernist writer’s diaries and essays reveals how the aural shock of military weapons during two world wars produced collective trauma, particularly among women and non-combatants. This work argues that attentiveness to soundscapes enriches our understanding of how gendered subjects experience and memorialise violence, and it shows how feminist critiques can inform practices of healing and peace advocacy by exposing the lingering psychological effects of wartime noise.

Feminist Geopolitics and Memory in Conflict Narratives publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in feminist geopolitics and memory in conflict narratives across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Feminist geopolitics: An approach that examines how global power relations and spatial practices are shaped by gender, emphasising embodied and everyday experiences of political processes.

Collective memory: The shared pool of knowledge, images and narratives through which a community or society remembers its past, often institutionalised in monuments and commemorations.

Memoryscape: The spatial and material configuration of sites, objects and practices through which memories are organised, experienced and contested in public and private domains.

Conflict narrative: The structured account of violence, resistance and suffering that communities construct to make sense of political and military confrontations, often embedded in cultural texts and commemorative rituals.

References

1. “Listening to the zoom of a hornet”: Virginia Woolf’s feminist reflections on the sounds of military weapons and war violence. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2024).
2. Gendering the military past: Understanding heritage and security from a feminist perspective. Cooperation and Conflict (2021).
3. The People's Paving Stones: The Material Politics of International Human Rights in the Baldosas por la Memoria of Buenos Aires. International Political Sociology (2021).
4. War without Pain? Representing Death and Injury in the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) in Chilean Museums. Bulletin of Latin American Research (2024).