Militarizing Marriage : West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire

Authors

Sarah J. Zimmerman

Files

Series

War and Militarism in African History

Description

Following tirailleurs sénégalais’ deployments in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, and Algeria from the 1880s to 1962, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how African servicemen advanced conjugal strategies with women at home and abroad. Sarah J. Zimmerman examines the evolution of women’s conjugal relationships with West African colonial soldiers to show how the sexuality, gender, and exploitation of women were fundamental to the violent colonial expansion and the everyday operation of colonial rule in modern French Empire.

These conjugal behaviors became military marital traditions that normalized the intimate manifestation of colonial power in social reproduction across the empire. Soldiers’ cross-colonial and interracial households formed at the intersection of race and sexuality outside the colonizer/colonized binary. Militarizing Marriage uses contemporary feminist scholarship on militarism and violence to portray how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule.

Copyright Statement

Militarizing Marriage © 2020 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821440674

Publication Date

7-24-2020

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

African history, Military history, French colonial history, West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, Algeria, Women, Feminism, Race, Sexuality, Colonialism

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Military History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Women's History | Women's Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Zimmerman, Sarah J., "Militarizing Marriage : West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire" (2020). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 91.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/91