Suchergebnisse

This article explores the interrelationship of masculine identity and corporate domesticity through the example of Royal Naval officers and the quarters they occupied on board ship during the 1920s and 1930s. Through a case study of a surviving warship, it establishes the linkages of this environment to a wider upper‐middle‐class world of public school common rooms, gentlemen's clubs and family homes. It analyses the role of this shipboard domesticity in defining the idealised and class‐specific persona of the naval officer: constructed through foregrounding approved qualities (such as dutifulness, restraint and self‐discipline), and suppressing characteristics considered problematic (for instance, introspection, individualism and intellectualism). The article also evaluates the tensions generated by these impersonal and unreachable standards, and the simultaneous ability of the naval home to support corporate and individual behaviours at odds with the officer ideal. The final section explores the gendered nature of these spaces. It argues that while the shipboard home was essentially a male one, the dynamic it engineered between rival 'male' and 'female' domesticities was invariably relational. Officers' communal quarters were routinely used to support and intensify oppositional understandings of masculinity and femininity. Nonetheless, attempts to dispute these boundaries and to internalise feminised qualities of sentiment, attachment and dependency can be detected in the privatised domesticity of the cabin.

A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this field is researched and understood and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines - through the prism of naval affairs - issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the socio-cultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity. --