Abstract
Through a study of the USS Midway Museum as well as a veterans' ceremony on the deck of the former aircraft carrier, the chapter investigates military narratives on commemoration and death that are consumed by visitors at military sites of remembrance. Through the use of semiotics, the chapter illuminates gendered dimensions of public memory at these sites. Semiotics offer a unique means to excavate structures of meaning within military cemeteries, museums, and memorials—spaces created to communicate certain meanings. By excluding women’s military service from exhibits and remembrance ceremonies, war museums erase decades of women’s participation in war and reify national defense as a thoroughly masculine domain. Structuring public memory in ways "that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what end” (Gillis, Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship. In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 3), narratives of valor contribute to understandings of national belonging, linking membership to service in wars and subtly encoding citizenship as a male privilege.
A version of this chapter was published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics. See Szitanyi, S. 2015. “Semiotic Readings of the USS Midway Museum,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17 (2): 253–270.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “living history” refers to a teaching/learning approach which promotes conveying knowledge about previous periods in history through the reenactment of those spaces and historical periods. Instead of reenacting specific moments in history, living history sites invite museum visitors, as an example, to survey what an aircraft carrier may have looked like during the period in which it was commissioned and in service. Exhibits are built with the intention of recreating the daily lives of sailors who may have served on that ship through showcasing daily activities they may have engaged in, uniforms they wore, and typical meals they may have eaten in those spaces. In so doing, living history sites require visitors to actively engage in and interact with curated exhibits with the goal of helping the visitor live the experience of serving on the ship in a previous time period.
- 2.
It should be noted that this count includes sites that represent the military institution as a whole, as well as those that represent individual branches or units of the military.
- 3.
This count is based on data from January 2017.
- 4.
The USS Midway Museum’s website actively incorporates and promotes reviews written on Travelocity.com by visitors. See current (as of February 2019) homepage of USS Midway Museum at https://www.midway.org/.
- 5.
In addition to textual changes, the USS Midway Museum website has undergone a complete revamping in design. I estimate that the overall design changes to the site were made sometime between 2016 and 2018.
- 6.
I visited the USS Midway a total of two times between 2012 and 2015. The veterans honoring ceremony took place during my first visit.
- 7.
In an interview completed on March 6, 2013, USS Midway Exhibits and Curatorial Historian Karl Zingheim revealed to me that no women sailors served on the vessel. During sick leave and while stationed in ports, the USS Midway did, however, accommodate “female entertainers” onboard. Women were also onboard in 1975 when the USS Midway transported over 3000 men, women, and children who had been evacuated out of Saigon. As noted here, despite the fact that women did not serve on the ship as sailors, official materials including the 2013 version of the USS Midway Museum’s website proclaimed the purpose of the exhibit as to honor both the men and women who served their country. Following my interview with Karl Zingheim, the language on the website of the USS Midway Museum was changed on March 7, 2013. I was unaware that this change would be made to the website—Karl Zingheim (2013) did not indicate that it would during our interview—but in email correspondence, Exhibits and Curatorial Director Duke Windsor apologized to me for the “typo.” The previous version of the website (before the redesign) thereafter stated “The USS Midway Museum is dedicated to preserving and honoring the 200,000 young men who served aboard the USS Midway—and by extension all those who serve in uniform” (USS Midway Website as of March 7, 2013). As the chapter argues, the stakes in military memorialization are larger than documenting the lives of those who serve on any particular vessel.
- 8.
The phrase, partitioning of the sensible, is borrowed from Jacques Rancière (2010, 140).
- 9.
Mills (2007) suggests that social memory is concretized in everyday products and venues such as textbooks, ceremonies, statues, official holidays, as well as parks and monuments.
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Szitanyi, S. (2020). Military Museums and Memorial Sites: Disappearing Women in the Military. In: Gender Trouble in the U.S. Military. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21225-4_5
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