Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen Heft 32
Belinda Davis: The Gender of War and Peace
Rhetoric in the West German Peace Movementof the Early 1980s
This article attempts to trace some of the gendered sources in drawing great numbers of feminists
alongside other groups of West Germans into the unprecedentedly large peace movement
of the early 1980s. It examines some of the tensions and paradoxes of these sources, including
concerning the relation between “everyday violence” and war, and regarding the relation
between “feminine” characteristics and pacifism, and whether these characteristics could
apply to both men and women. Finally the piece looks at the ways in which a gendered rhetoric
became mapped onto the question of “rearmarment alongside disarmament” in a fashion
simultaneously extremely effective and potentially problematic, in setting up more and less
useful visions of “self” (as “women” and as “West Germans”) and “other,” and the relationship
between them.