Pearl Harbored: Race, gender and public memories of Pearl Harbor and 9/11/2001

This study explores interactions between race, gender and citizenship focusing on how race and gender ideologies shape "common sense" understandings and public memories of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. In turn, I examine how these public disasters inform and reshape "common sense" notions of race and gender. Through an analysis of newspaper coverage of these events, and interviews with two cohorts of people---those who were young adults in 1941, and 2001 respectively---I analyze how people incorporate and express common sense discourses about race and gender. I uncover the ways past race and gender ideologies intersect with contemporary ones, with attention to the ways legal and social rights of non-whites remain vulnerable. My media analysis illuminates the importance of race, gender, and collective anxiety in constructing 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as national disasters. Members of the WWII generation often shared "revisionist memories" by applying colorblind ideals to the past, depicting more harmonious racial conditions than actually existed. While they deployed colorblind language when talking about most people of color, members of this older age cohort did not when referring to Muslims or Arabs, thus revealing an incomplete internalization of colorblindness. While both generations adhere differently to a colorblind sensibility, both cohorts equally reveal a masculinist orientation, illustrating what little shift has occurred in gender regimes relating to nationalism and foreign policy. After 9/11, members of both age cohorts drew from a frame I call the "civilization paradox," personifying the US as increasingly feminized while "Muslim extremists" were depicted as exemplars of social backwardness and unchecked masculinity. This illuminates how both raced and gendered sensibilities simultaneously reinforce hierarchies and reframe conflicts. Looking at racial and gender formation through an intergenerational life course perspective provides clues about the transformation of ideologies over time, and how definitions of citizenship and belonging respond to major social events. I conceptualize gender and race as mutually-constituting systems of power. By linking these concepts, I add empirically to the theoretical work done on race relations, intersectionality, and critical masculinity studies.