Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective ed. by Philip E. Muehlenbeck (review)

In order to make the most of our understanding of the past, we must take steps to fully comprehend the challenges and nuances of history. Philip Muehlenbeck’s edited collection Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War,¹ recognizes the importance of this and makes the effort to analyze the Cold War era from a gender and sexuality perspective. The Cold War was an event and time period that shaped cultures, and decisions made during that era were also influenced by and in reaction to, culture at that time. To this point, Meuhlenbeck and the authors understand that “we cannot effectively analyze decision making at the very top without taking into account the cultural assumptions of the decision makers.”² Additionally, it is imperative to delve into specific cultural values and systems such as gender and sexuality, because “feminist scholarship has observed that wars occur because power hierarchies grounded in constructions of gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity require them. Warring parties deploy difference to justify domination and, in the process, seek to sustain the hierarchies that imbue the system with meaning.”³ The assertion being made is that the Cold War was more than just a military standoff between nuclear powers; it was a battle between warring cultures and ideologies rooted, in part, in gender and sexuality hierarchies. While not arguing that the Cold War was necessarily caused by power hierarchies, Meuhlenbeck asserts that “[t]he Cold War fits well into this paradigm, since the maintenance of differences of all kinds remained fundamental to both the superpowers and their allies.”⁴ The following chapters reveal and explain how existing hierarchies influenced policy, were reinforced by the politics of the Cold War, and were used to “justify domination.” Such a discussion enables readers to better understand the context and motivations of the actions that were taken and the decisions that were made during the Cold War.

The book consists of three thematic sections: sexuality, femininities, and masculinities. With these foci, the chapters demonstrate that the Cold War was truly a global event, and they highlight how, while the hegemonic powers of the East and West were building up both borders and competing ideologies, the “politics of gender and sexuality”⁵ around the world was being shaped and...