Contested Crimes: Race, Gender, and Nation in Histories of GI Sexual Violence, World War II

This essay considers several recent publications on the history of sexual violence and World War II with a view to working through some of the issues currently shaping the field, including difficulties in using fragmentary sources, quantitative approaches to understanding sexual violence in war, and the inclusion of marginalized voices. Blending analysis of secondary works with insights from research conducted in national and regional archives across Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, it reflects on themes of race, gender, and nation, and concludes by offering some thoughts on the direction future scholarship on this subject may take.