Andrew Orr Livres

The book explores the significant yet often overlooked contributions of French women to the military efforts during the World Wars. Historian Andrew Orr highlights how women initially supported the military as civilians during WWI, only to face mass layoffs after the war. Despite administrative needs leading to their rehiring, the army's acceptance of women fluctuated, with resistance against their enlistment as soldiers. By 1938, as war preparations intensified, women’s roles expanded, revealing their essential support behind the lines despite systemic opposition.

In June 2011 journalists discovered that Amina Arraf, whose blog A Gay Girl in Damascus was a major voice in Western coverage of the Arab Spring, was not a lesbian Muslim woman living in Damascus but Tom MacMaster, an American activist and graduate student in Scotland. The fraud rested on a form of Progressive Orientalism that reveals the vulnerability of progressive ideas to the very forms of Western domination they seek to oppose. Andrew Orr is Associate Professor of Military History and Associate Director of Security Studies at Kansas State University.