Description
Between 1966 and 1996, French governments conducted 193 nuclear tests in Mā’ohi Nui/ French Polynesia, altering life there in incommensurable ways. The Center for Experimentation of the Pacific (CEP) was constructed there over years to conduct these military explosions, recruiting both people from Mā’ohi Nui and French soldiers who moved from France. The army’s recruitment campaigns for French soldiers relied on heavily sexualized visual material, drawing on colonial tropes that portrayed Mā’ohi Nui as empty, paradise-like, a ‘place’ where women were eagerly waiting for French soldiers. These campaigns successfully attracted men to participate in nuclear warfare in Mā’ohi Nui. I understand colonization as a system sustained through the management of sexuality, intimacy, and racial difference (Stoler, 2002). French military recruitment campaigns mobilized these sexualized hierarchies to naturalize domination, possession, and nuclear destruction. Drawing on Teresia Teaiwa and other feminist scholars of IR, I highlight the direct link between ‘Isletist’ sexual desires (Maurer, 2023) and the development of French nuclear weapons, built through the nuclear contamination of Mā’ohi Nui and its people. I conduct a critical discourse analysis of military recruitment campaigns for the CEP, drawing on archives. Through this analysis, I show how erotic/exotic and colonial imaginaries are foundational to French militarism.
