FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) 'Other Spaces': toward an application of Foucault's heterotopias as alternate spaces of social ordering
This article applies the principles of Foucault's (1986) concept of heterotopia to the spatial imaginaries and material realities of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an elite organisation of British women volunteers who served on the Western Front during World War I. First, the
FANY created crisis heterotopia shaped by the history and politics of the period and linked to gendered cultural anxieties at this slice in time; second, FANY space was ordered and made accessible through the interplay of class privilege and patriotic national identity; third, it involved
possibilities for transgression through the heterotopic juxtaposition of material practices of domesticity within and against sites of combat; and finally, FANY space both involved an utopian element that contrasted with other real spaces available to women and helped reveal the gendered politics
of those traditional sites.
Keywords: First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY); Foucault; World War I; domesticity; gender; heterotopia
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Women Studies, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA
Publication date: 01 December 2009
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