"Foreign Affairs" after World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics

Abstract

“Internationalism” in the twentieth-century United States has carried highly personal, and different, implications for men and women. Particularly when international involvements led to war, large numbers of men and women were separated from each other and took up new roles, prompting widespread preoccupation with postwar readjustments and gender definitions. This essay seeks to explore, for historians of American foreign relations, how a “cultural studies” approach, focusing upon two Hollywood films, might highlight connections between sexual and global politics in the immediate post-World War II era.1 There seems to be a widespread interest in linking cultural analysis to histories of international relations.2 Historians of foreign policy, after all, are keenly aware of cultural variabilities over time and space and the interrelationships between cultural assumptions and international politics. But the methodological perspectives of those writing histories of American foreign relations differ substantially from those writing cultural history or criticism. Although histories of foreign relations frequently deal with the cultural and intellectual assumptions of policymakers, the field’s traditional interpretive frameworks have often anchored such analyses around binary constructions: “realism” and “idealism,” “rhetoric” and “reality,” “public” and “private,” “policymaking elite” and “public opinion.” Cultural analysis has recently moved away from such dualistic schema, which had also characterized the old “myth” versus “reality” school of American studies. Drawing upon a diverse movement called “cultural studies,” historians of American foreign relations may also work to challenge older frameworks.

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