Description
Book SynopsisIs 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 perpetrat
Trade ReviewThis 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 *
Table of ContentsList 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
