Joanna Bourke

Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of 'Shell-shocked' Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914-39

Enforced passivity in the midst of life-threatening danger caused many men in wartime to suffer psychological collapse. This article examines some aspects of this experience including the ways in which men who were repelled by combat violence were regarded as ‘abnormal’ and needed to be ‘cured’ of this repulsion and made to embrace their aggressive urges. During the first world war, certain types of men were regarded by military and medical personnel as more susceptible to this weakness. One crucial indicator was ethnicity. For instance, despite their reputation for being a ‘martial race’, Irishmen were said to be pre-disposed to insanity. This article, therefore, examines the ways in which this prejudice developed, and its implications for Irish sufferers of ‘shell-shock’ during and after the war.

War and Violence

The brutalities of the past century have taken place in the milieu of Enlightenment values. At present, even the ideals of human rights have been used to (at the very least) tolerate and (and at its worst) justify barbaric acts, such as torture. This article interrogates the diverse ways British, American, and Australian individuals engaged in extremes of violence during three major conflicts of the 20th century. Like servicemen and servicewomen today, these combatants struggled to find a language capable of making sense of their violent deeds. Constraining their excesses of violence proved a formidable task. In particular, I examine the ways in which sexual violence was normalized. Finally, on returning home after the war, these individuals and civilian society more broadly struggled with the problem of ‘remembering’ wartime violence in the post-war world. The act of ‘framing’ extremes of violence was integral to the process of enabling perpetrators of violence to assimilate his or her acts into a peacetime self.

Women and poultry in Ireland, 1891–1914

Historical comment upon the years between the death of Parnell and the outbreak of the First World War ranges widely. The historian’s vision focusses on conflict and change — nationalism, unionism, home rule, urban disruption, rural disorder, land reform and incessant social debate. This paper looks at one series of arguments partially obscured amidst the turmoil of those years. For rural-dwellers, state and private institutional intervention into the rural economy during this period radically affected power-relations and work-relations within their community. The attempts to reform the poultry industry provides one example of these changes. Rearing poultry for sale rather than for household consumption was one of the most important occupations of the farm woman. Indeed, despite the impassioned debates and controversial decisions concerning the poultry industry from the 1890s, one thing was agreed: for better or (more commonly) for worse, the poultry industry was dominated by women.

New military history

The term ‘new military history’ is a misnomer. Judged by its chronological birth during the social, political and intellectual upheavals of the 1960s, it is distinctly middle-aged. Nevertheless, new military history remains dynamic and innovative, inciting youthful exuberance amongst its proponents. Indeed, new military history is arguably the most popular brand of military history in the academy today. However, new military history also arouses keen irritation amongst opponents, provoked (perhaps) by the implicit assumption that they are writing ‘old’ military history. Despite these tensions between different schools of war writing, all share a dedication to accurately describing and convincingly explaining historical problems arising out of armed conflicts in the past.

Sexual Violence, Bodily Pain, and Trauma: A History

Psychological trauma is a favoured trope of modernity. It has become commonplace to assume that all ‘bad events’ – and particularly those which involve violence – have a pathological effect on the sufferer’s psyche, as well as that of the perpetrators. This essay explores the ways victims of rape and sexual assault were understood in psychiatric, psychological, forensic, and legal texts in Britain and America from the 19th to the late 20th century. It argues that, unlike most other ‘bad events’, which were incorporated within trauma narratives from the 1860s, the ascription of psychological trauma was only applied to rape victims a century later. Why and what were the consequences?

The Second World War : a people's history

Book synopsis: The Second World War surpassed all previous wars in the sheer cost of many millions of lives, most of them civilian. It left a world reeling from physical destruction on a scale never experienced till then, and from the psychological traumas of loss, of imprisonment and genocide, and permanent exile from home. In this short, uncompromising book, Joanna Bourke turns an unblinking eye on the events and outcomes in the vast number of places in which the War was fought: throughout Western and Central Europe, on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, in the Pacific, in Africa, in Asia. She shows where the strategic decisions came from and how they were implemented, but she also shows, through diary entries and recorded oral history, how ordinary people felt when they witnessed or heard of events, from the declaration of war on the radio to the mass murders carried out by Nazi soldiers in Russian villages.

The best of all home rulers: the economic power of women in Ireland, 1880-1914

Book synopsis: The Irish Womens History Reader is an exciting collection of essays revealing the tremendous diversity of womens experiences in Irelands past. For the first time this unique book draws together key articles published in the fields of Irish womens history and womens studies over the past two decades, including contributions from Ireland, North and South, England, USA, Canada and Australia. The Irish Womens History Reader explores the lives of ordinary Irish women since 1800, looking at the key themes of: * historiography and the development of, and writing of, womens history in Ireland * politics and the variety of political activities undertaken by women including suffrage, nationalism and unionism * health and sexuality revealing hidden histories of sexual activity, mental illness and attempts to control fertility * religion and the experiences of catholic nuns, protestant evangelicals and salvationists * emigration and the pattern of female migration to USA, Britain and Australia * work including both paid and unpaid employ inside and outside the home.

The battle of the limbs: Amputation, artificial limbs and the great war in Australia

The expectation or experience of physical suffering was shared by 330,000 Australian men who saw active service during the first world war. Of these men, one in five was killed and tens of thousands returned to Australia ill or wounded. Genital mutilation, facial disfigurement and limblessness were the three fates most feared by soldiers. This article focuses on Australian servicemen in the last category: men whose limbs had been amputated as a result of war service. It examines the surgical and medical services offered to these soldiers and the ways in which they strove to adapt to their injuries. The war radically changed their lives, yet, despite wartime promises, politicians and the larger community rapidly forgot the ‘sacrifice’ so many had made of their arms and legs.

WHAT IS PAIN? A HISTORY THE PROTHERO LECTURE

What is pain? This article argues that it is useful to think of pain as a ‘kind of event’ or a way of being-in-the-world. Pain-events are unstable; they are historically constituted and reconstituted in relation to language systems, social and environmental interactions and bodily comportment. The historical question becomes: how has pain been done and what ideological work do acts of being-in-pain seek to achieve? By what mechanisms do these types of events change? Who decides the content of any particular, historically specific and geographically situated ontology?

Love and limblessness: male heterosexuality, disability, and the Great War

This article explores ideas about male heterosexuality and disability in the context of the Great War. In the early years of the war, there was considerable anxiety about how young men who had been disabled through war service were going to be reintegrated into British society. Heteronormative masculinity required mutilated men to join their non-disabled age-cohort through sexuality within marriage. This would also reinforce womens gendered role as nurturing, empathetic companions. A crucial problem was how the marriage and reproduction of these young men was going to be facilitated. The League for the Marrying of Broken Heroes was one attempt to match respectable women with disabled men.