Colonial and Transnational Intimacies: Medical Humanitarianism in the French external Resistance, 1940-1945.

This project offers the first intimate history of international medical cooperation during the Second World War, through an examination of close bodily encounters between medical staff and patients in various sites across the world. It transcends institutional and state-centred approaches that currently dominate the historiography of Allied medicine and international health cooperation to assess how intimate care relations between medical staff and patients reshaped existing colonial and inter-allied relationships.

The Second World War elicited important new physical, cultural and bodily encounters between individuals of diverse gender, ethnic, national, class, age and religious backgrounds. These forms of interactions have yet to be addressed in a transnational context and on a grass-roots level. This project interrogates how these interactions transformed individual and collective group identities, shaped international cooperation and, in some cases, fuelled anti-colonial dynamics.

Drawing on the methodologies associated with the global micro-history turn, it focuses on different medical spaces set up by the French external Resistance in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. These include the international Hadfield Spears Hospital (case study 1), the dispensaries, field and base hospitals in Free French Africa (case study 2) and the Mobile Surgical Units that followed the French Army in Italy and France (case study 3).

These international medical spaces, which were both sites of bodily and intimate desires and high political tensions, offer a valuable lens through which to reassess the ways in which staff and patients enacted and contested ideas about race, religion, sexuality, pain and the body within the setting of a global war.

By placing colonial and transnational intimacies centre stage, this project has three central aims. The first is to evaluate the role of cultural ideas about the sexed, gendered, racialised, othered and wounded body in shaping foreign policy and military operations. The second is to uncover how military and medical authorities and voluntary organisations politicized intimate care and drew moral and sexual boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable forms of corporeal intimacy.

The third is to reconsider the experiences of patients themselves, insisting on their agency in negotiating the treatment that was provided to them and exploring the affective consequences of medical categorisations on their individual identities. The medical spaces of the French Resistance provide a paradigmatic case to study the ways in which contests over political authority amongst French and Allied military elites took place at the level of individual bodies.

French resisters were considered as 'pariahs' on the international stage and were highly dependent on their Allies and colonies for resources and legitimacy. Their medical spaces were thus remarkably heterogeneous, both in terms of the origins of its staff and patients, and in relation to the broad spectrum of medical traditions and practices that co-existed within them.

An examination of these diverse spaces therefore offers a fascinating insight into complex social, gender, religious, professional and ethnic identities, belief systems and subjectivities.

Recent spotlights on the #AidToo movement have raised public awareness on the centrality of gender to understanding the current humanitarian system. By offering historical insights onto intimate bodily encounters, this project will contribute to current debates on gender inequalities and lay stronger foundations for future histories and studies of humanitarianism.

Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival documents, personal testimonies and photographs, it will alter our understanding of international medical cooperation and provide a crucial reassessment of the relationships between medical practices, bodily interactions, emotional ideals and individual behaviours of interest to a wide range of audiences.