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The Cost of War examines the effects of combat, the emotional and physical scars borne by returned men and women, the impact on their families and friends, and the efforts of Australians to understand the physical, psychological, and cultural wounds of war.

The Cost of War examines the effects of combat, the emotional and physical scars borne by returned men and women, the impact on their families and friends, and the efforts of Australians to understand the physical, psychological, and cultural wounds of war.

This book presents the first assessment of one of the most rapidly expanding fields of research: the history of sexuality. From the early efforts of historians to work out a model for sexual history, to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault, to the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism, to the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history - we now have vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. 'Histories of Sexuality' highlights the key historical moments and is

AbstractThis article explores male popular culture in Australia in the mid‐1940s, particularly men's magazines of the period, to illuminate aspects of the psycho‐sexual dimensions of Australian veterans returning to civil society. The sexual landscape of Australian society had undergone considerable transformation, especially through an increasing sexualisation of popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This provided a context for considerable sexual anxiety and tension, especially in the context of numerous stories of Australian women consorting with American servicemen during the war. Men's popular culture, especially short fiction, where more lurid fantasies could play out, often depicted women as sexually voracious and duplicitous. Many of the short stories involved love triangles where the men were betrayed by women. But the resolution of these rivalries often pathologised women while preserving the male bonds of war. Homosocial bonds were a bulwark in the troubled transition from war to peace.

This article analyses the demobilization of Australian veterans after the First World War, placing this process in the broader transnational context of Britain's settler society dominions more generally. It explores the public challenges posed by demobilization in Australia, and by way of comparison, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and how each of these dominions negotiated reintegration of veterans through the deployment of cultural and political strategies grounded in emergent nationalist discourses. Nationalism became a means of both acknowledging the contribution of veterans in making the nation and tying veterans back into the civil society. While nationalism was the ideological glue that held settler societies together in the immediate postwar years, preventing social and political disintegration, in Australia these nationalist discourses took on a peculiar character, at once proclaiming the virtues of veterans as founders of the nation while adopting a heightened sense of the importance of ties to the Empire. What emerged was a hybrid discourse that interwove nationalism and Empire loyalism, conceptualized here as Empire nationalism. This unusual Australian political discourse was forged by the experience of the Great War and demobilization, grounded in an effort to make soldier citizenship the core foundation for a new nationalism. In Australia Empire nationalism became a framework that both sanctioned particular forms of veteran violence and accommodated that violence into an affirmation of nationalist values, placing the Anzac legend at the centre of the national ethos, one that looked both inward to Australia and backward to Britain.

This paper examines the expert and popular discourses that sought to construct and disseminate the idea that Australia faced a masculinity crisis with the return of servicemen at the end of the Second World War. It explores how these discourses proposed a process of remasculinisation to ensure the successful reintegration of returning servicemen. These discourses were directed primarily at wives, mothers and fiancées, who were seen to bear the responsibility for rebuilding the manhood of returning men. Doctors played an important role in producing this prevailing discourse on the looming post‐war masculinity crisis, identifying its symptoms and proposing solutions. This crisis discourse filtered into popular culture through many means, predominantly, however, advice literature and romance fiction. While some of these expert and popular discourses constructed a backward looking ideal of domesticity for women, romance fiction in particular explored more modern possibilities of companionate marriage. The dissemination of a discourse about an impending masculinity crisis created different possibilities for the reconstruction of relations between men and women. The remasculinisation project could look both backwards (through ideals of women's subservience to damaged men) and forwards (through notions of marriage as a partnership) in imagining post war gender relations.