Eye in the sky: visual geographies and emotional topographies of First World War airmen

Abstract

Although the First World War highlighted human vulnerability through the terrors of a mechanised warfare ravaging the male body in new ways, it also fostered moments of intimacy and tenderness that privileged commonality, mutuality, and generosity, and encouraged friendship and comradeship as cornerstones of martial masculinities. This article explores such intimacies through analysis of letters and diaries written by British Royal Flying Corps airmen during combat on the Western Front. Informed by history of emotions approaches, I discuss the ways the sensual geographies of aerial combat and their promise of mastery and expanded vision shaped the emotional topographies of airmen’s combat lives. Following Santanu Das’s scholarship on the claustrophobic haptic geographies of trench warfare, this article addresses the following question: If the claustrophobia of the trenches and the impoverishment of visual experience facilitated certain geographies of senses that shaped male intimacies, what might similar emotional terrains look like for airmen exposed to more expansive visual practices?

Keywords:

• First World War
• visual geographies
• royal flying corps
• airmen
• history of emotion
• comradeship
• masculinities

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank colleagues at the Center for the Humanities, Oregon State University, for their support and feedback on this paper during my Center Fellowship. I am also grateful to Laura Doan and other participants at the Berkshires’ ‘Queering History’ workshop, especially in terms of theorising homosociality in the context of war. Finally, I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer who suggested the impoverishment of visual experience associated with the trenches might be better understood as transference of visual acuity from the landscape to fellow humans. Such insight informs future considerations on relationships between emotions and physical and human topographies.