Article ID: CBB325265833

Victory, Defeat, Gender, and Disability: Blind War Veterans in Interwar Czechoslovakia (2020)

unapi

This article examines the intersection between disability, gender, victory, and defeat in interwar Czechoslovakia. We look at a small but prominent group of disabled veterans: men who lost their sight fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. These veterans, unlike men who had fought in the pro-Entente Legionary divisions, were not celebrated in official and patriotic discourse in the First Republic. They had to find alternative outlets to express their place in society as disabled men. Through analysis of the most important associations for blind veterans, interwoven with a series of case studies, we consider how disability weakened, but did not completely remove, the social and cultural barriers that existed in interwar Czechoslovakia between “victorious” and “defeated” war veterans. We also analyze a series of literary and professional responses to blindness that show how blind veterans’ masculinity was renegotiated in the wake of their disability. Blind war veterans were considered throughout Czechoslovak society as the embodiment and the epitome of the disabled subject; their experiences thus speak more generally to the manner in which disability was experienced as a socially enforced category in Czechoslovakia.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB325265833/

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Authors & Contributors
Ortmann, Bernhard
Michael Robinson
Fitzpatrick, K. Meghan
Peter Yule
Sarah Handley-Cousins
Bate, Jason
Concepts
Disabilities; disability; accessibility
Medicine and the military; medicine in war
Veterans
Blindness
World War I
Masculinity
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Edo period (Japan, 1603-1868)
Places
United States
Great Britain
Japan
Germany
Commonwealth countries
Hong Kong
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