Heterosexuality In The Western Front

Although brothel visits usually involved encounters between a man and a woman, they often divide themselves by whose perspective they focus on. The final category analyzes little of the prostitutes own thoughts or emotions during these liaisons, but rather the men. Many members of the BEF kept their own personal journals in which they recorded their experiences along and behind the Western Front in France. Despite extramarital sex being a hushed topic, some soldiers still felt comfortable enough to write about the brothels they observed or visited, these sources are the main focus of historians who study the male heterosexuality of the BEF. As the WWI broke out, it became abundantly clear that the war would not be won without the aid from the British and French colonies. Begrudgingly the British Army accepted the aid from their supposedly inferior brethren. The first Indian troops were sent to France in 1914 at Marseille. The soldiers sent from India were the only non-white colonial forces which served as combatants along the Western Front, rather than in labor battalions. The racial tension between British and Indian combatants was palpable, and British Command was wary
Levine holds similar beliefs to Greenhut in that the presence of the Indian Corps posed a threat to the image of the British Empire, but extends her argument beyond solely the Indian Expeditionary Force. Levine defines identity as:
The linking of race and gender (too often dubbed as “social” categories) to imperialism - generally regarded as a “political” category - demands attention to the specifics of the historical time frame … The widespread fears around the hopes of controlling sexually transmissible diseases made prostitution a laboratory for medical surveillance; gender and class made the prostitute a vulnerable if not always obedient