Overview

Is Trauma a transhistorical, transnational phenomenon? Gender and Trauma challenges the standard history that has led to our contemporary understanding of psychological trauma to answer this question, and to explore the impact of gender in the experience and understanding of emotional distress. Bringing together eleven case studies from all over the world, it draws on methods from history, gender and communication studies to consider how trauma has been understood over the 20th and 21st centuries. Encompassing histories from Australia, Britain, Indonesia, Italy, the Soviet Union, Timor Leste, the United States and Vietnam, these examples demonstrate how gender and trauma are inextricably linked, and how the term ‘trauma’ has evolved over time. With chapters on war, political repression, displacement, rape and childbirth, the cases showcased in this volume highlight two pivotal transformations across the 20th century. First, the transformation of the trauma sufferer from perpetrator to victim, and second, the increased understanding of psychological consequences of sexual assault and domestic violence. Together, these diverse stories yield a more nuanced picture of what trauma is, how we have understood it alongside gender in the past, and how this affects our understanding of it in the present.

Full Product Details

Author:   Paula A. Michaels ,  Christina Twomey (Monash University, Clayton, Australia)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Weight:   0.450kg
ISBN:  

9781350145351

ISBN 10:   1350145351
Pages:   296
Publication Date:   08 April 2021
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements 1. Gender and Trauma since 1900. Paula A. Michaels and Christina Twomey, 2. Trauma in Post-WWI Italy: Experiences, Erasures, and Denials. Martina Salvante 3. Trauma, child refugees, and humanitarians in the Spanish Civil War and World War II: A Case Study of Esme Odgers. Joy Damousi 4. Servitude, Displacement, and Trauma: Jewish Refugee Domestics in Great Britain 1938-45. Jennifer Craig-Norton 5. ‘Combat Exhaustion’ vs. ‘Psychoneurosis’: American Psychiatrists and the Terminology of War Trauma during World War II. Rebecca Jo Plant 6. POWs into Citizens: Repatriation, Gender and the Civilian Resettlement Units in Great Britain. Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen 7. Soviet Maternity Care and Competing Narratives of Trauma. Paula A. Michaels 8. Trauma and sexual violence: narratives and cases in late-twentieth century Australia. Lisa Featherstone 9. Psychological, Embodied and Gendered Trauma in Militarized Kampala (Uganda). Benjamin Twagira 10. ‘The Missing Ones’: Vietnamese Diasporic Memory and Women’s Narratives of Loss. Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen 11. Refiguring ‘Trauma’: Women’s Narratives of Suffering in Post-Conflict Timor-Leste. Hannah Loney 12. Changing the Story: women and trauma in Australian narratives of mental illness. Katie Holmes Consolidated Bibliography Index

Reviews

This book transforms our understanding of the history of psychological trauma. By placing gender at the centre of its inquiry, this powerful study probes the traumatic dimensions of war, survival, displacement, sexual violence, childbirth, and mental illness. Tracking the gender lines of trauma and its socio-cultural history, the essays in this volume offer some of the most innovative considerations of emotional and mental distress, traumatic memory and the long term, devastating, impacts of war and sexual violence. In doing so, these scholars collectively disrupt the dominant and linear master narrative, which has considered trauma as a masculine journey travelled through war, from the shell shock of World War I through the neurosis of World War II, to the discovery of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder post the Vietnam War. In this book, trauma is neither linear, gender normative, nor geographically contingent, rather it is a complex fluid phenomenon with collective and personal dimensions that intersect with gender, power, place and time * Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Chair in Irish Gender History at University College Cork, Ireland *

'This is a provocative and exciting work - I look forward to assigning it in my classes someday soon.' * Tricia Starks, Professor of History, University of Arkansas, USA * '[This is] an expert and comparative overview of the gendered experience of trauma in the contemporary world. The work will definitely appeal to teachers for use in both undergraduate and graduate studies in a range of fields mentioned by the authors: sociology, psychology, women's and gender studies, contemporary history, the medical humanities, and others. Both undergraduates and graduates can use the book as the essays (seen so far) contain new research and are engaging.' * Bonnie G. Smith, Professor of History, Rutgers University USA * 'This is a much needed survey and engagement with a topic of increasing interest to academics and the wider public.' * Pamela Scully, Professor of History, Emory University, USA *

Author Information

Paula A. Michaels is Associate Professor of History at Monash University, Australia. Her work bridges the histories of Eastern and Western Europe, integrating the USSR into a pan-European and global narrative through the study of social and cultural history. She is especially interested in the ways that medicine is mobilised to further political and social objectives. Christina Twomey is Professor of History and current Head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on histories of humanitarianism and the cultural history of war, with a particular interest in imprisonment and internment, and the photography of atrocity.

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