Description
This paper enquires into the complex, contested legacies of nuclear bases once they have been dismantled. Drawing on both a wide range of literature on everyday encounters with military and nuclear sites and what they leave behind, and on preliminary fieldwork, we bring into feminist conversation the sites of past US nuclear submarine facilities at La Maddalena in Sardinia, Italy, and Holy Loch in Scotland, UK. We will reflect on our initial findings from archival, oral history and walking strategies about how the remains of military infrastructure in these sites interplay with landscape, gendered community relationships and cultural memory. We will also begin to develop our analysis of the implications of these two cases for the more general process whereby militarism and nuclearism are sustained in particular places in the everyday, long after any physical infrastructure has been shut down - and how this process might be challenged.
