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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Sounds of the Cold War: gendered submarine narratives

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description

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...