Spectacles and Sexualities: The 'Mise-en-Scène' of the 'Tirailleur Senegalais' on the Western Front, 1914-1920

This book chapter in the edited volume Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 explores the public discourse in Europe on the 'Tirailleur Senegalais,'  Black West African soldiers of the French army that were fighting on the Western Front during World War I and their perception. They were, especially by the German enemy, sexualized and presented as danger for German women, whom they supposedly wanted to rape, and thus a "shameful" indicator of the missing honor and manliness of the French army.