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The Spanish Civil War is typically presented as a military narrative of the ideological battle between socialism and fascism, foreshadowing World War II. Yet the Spanish war continued trends begun during World War I, notably the use of propaganda posters and the movement of women into visible roles within the public sphere. Employing cultural studies methods to read propaganda poster art from the Spanish war as texts, this thesis analyzes the ways in which this persuasive medium represented extremes of gender discourse within the context of letters, memoirs, and other experiential accounts. This thesis analyzes symbols present in propaganda art and considers how their meanings interacted with the changing gendered identities of Republic and nation. Even within the relatively egalitarian Republic, political factions constructed conflicting representations of femininity in propaganda art, and women’s accounts indicate that despite ideological differences, both sides still shared a patriarchal worldview.

Post-modern feminist security studies explore how our discourse about gender and war affects the construction of security as a concept. Military narratives valorizing the masculine over the feminine have long marginalized women warriors. In recent years, images of the torture and abuse of detainees have appropriated the representation of women interrogators during the Global War on Terrorism in particular. This research applied interpretative phenomenological analysis to the narratives of women interrogators in order to challenge the silence concerning their lived experiences by addressing how women interrogators understand their experiences both as woman and as interrogators, and how they negotiated socially constructed contradictions between these identities. Based on an analysis of semi-structured interviews with eight participants, the findings produced seven, interrelated themes. First, the findings explored the integration of gender with other markers of identity. Next, the findings demonstrated women interrogators recognize gender as a context-dependent role negotiated within the military institution through the development and demonstration of technical prowess. Then, the findings described interrogation as a complex adaptive system in which women interrogators harnessed to achieve their goals. Finally, the findings determined that the intersection of women interrogators’ identities and their interactions in the context of interrogation operations generated the perception of women interrogators as non-threatening. Women interrogators learned to exploit the meaning of this emergent phenomenon through introspection and the development of self-awareness.