Sounds of the Cold War: gendered submarine narratives

Abstract

The article discusses different narrative and discursive ways in which American and Soviet submarine narratives of the Cold War period scripted nuclear-age submarine masculinity as a ‘structure’ of experience and a ‘structure’ of feelings different from vision-centred technologies of violence and warfare. The comparative discussion of the selected submarine narratives about Cold War underwater adventures is in no way exhaustive. But it allows looking into narrative constructions of submarine masculinity as articulations of subtle ‘gender’ modifications in the cultural normative ideologies of the competing projects of hegemonic war-related masculinity, otherwise, perceived as coherent and singular in other popular narratives of war, action and violence. A comparative approach to the narratives, structured by the antagonist patriarchal settings and ideologies of normative masculinity allows arguing against viewing masculinity as a linear developmental transformation from the traditional to the modern but as both a condition and process of social hegemony and control.

Keywords:

• Cold War
• geopopular imagination
• narrative and ideology
• international relations
• Soviet and Anglo-American submarine narratives
• hegemonic masculinity and the idea of ‘home’

Notes on contributor

Irina Novikova is Professor and Chair of Culture and Literature Unit at the Faculty of Humanities, the University of Latvia. She has been Director of the UL Centre for Gender Studies since 1998. Her research and teaching interests centre on gender, race and genre in contemporary literature and films, with a focus on the Cold War and post-Cold War tendencies. Her publications also explore the themes of identity, gendered memory and national narrative from a transnational and comparative perspective.

Notes

1. Jules Verne was among the most popular and prolifically re-published foreign authors in the Soviet book market.