Strategic re-membering: The boundary politics of mourning in post-Great War France

This study begins by contesting what some historians have viewed as a politically innocent space in mourning practice and argues for the inescapably political nature of representations of loss whether in the historian's theorization of mourning or in mourning practice itself. The First World War, which is understood here as a moment of historical trauma, was followed by a period in which identity was reconfigured in the service of national unity and gender differentiation. In the mourning-work of France's 1919 Festival of Victory, national identity was re-individuated through narrative appropriations of the symbolic body as understood by Jacques Lacan's well-known 'Mirror Stage' essay. By mobilizing the symbolics of the wounded body, normative restorations of wholeness in the post-war era worked to re-member fragmented identity. 'Wholeness' is understood in this context in the terms of feminist theory as gendered, as a justification for an asymmetrical, patriarchal deployment of power. While the fragmentation signified by the wound was actively repressed in the post-war era in the interest of perpetuating the mythic unity of the subject, this article hopes to recuperate the symbolic potential of the wound as a means of discrediting the asymmetries of power in nationalism and in gender distinctions. © Routledge 1997.