Joanna Bourke

University of London · History

Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre’s surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars. Covering conflicts fr...

Military hazing, or the imposition of painful and/or humiliating practices on recruits, is a common form of bullying. It has a long and contested history but, unlike other forms of bullying, proponents within the armed forces defend it, often with great passion. This article explores some reasons for its longevity. In the U.S. Marines, army, navy,...

Tens of thousands of British men were permanently wounded as a result of war service. Their return home sparked debates about the wounded male body, female accountability for war-injuries, and the ideology, performance, and practice of masculinity. Other historians have shown how ‘broken heroes’ from the First World War were constituted into ‘men’...

Book synopsis: Wars are frequently justified 'in our name'. Militarist values and practices co-opt us, permeating our language, invading our dream space, entertaining us at the movies or in front of game consoles. Our taxes pay for those war machines. Our loved ones are killed and maimed. With killing now an integral part of the entertainment indu...

This article explores the relationship between metaphorical languages, body, and culture, and suggests that such an analysis can reveal a great deal about the meaning and experience of pain in Anglo-American societies between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. It uses concepts within embodied cognition to speculate on how historians can write...

The story of pain and suffering since the eighteenth century Addresses the big questions about the experience and nature of suffering - and how to respond to it Charts how our understanding of pain has changed completely over the last three centuries - from positive function to ultimate evil A fascinating investigation for the 21st century reader i...

Who was truly capable of experiencing pain? In this article, I explore ideas about the distribution of bodily sensitivity in patients from the early nineteenth century to 1965 in Anglo-American societies. While certain patients were regarded as "truly hurting," other patients' distress could be disparaged or not even registered as being "real pain....

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...

This article analyses the languages of wartime pain as seen in British and American memoirs from the American Civil War to the present. How did the rhetoric of wounding in these war memoirs change over time? One of the central shifts lies in the way that wounded men presented themselves as stoic in spite of severe wounding. From 1939, and in an eve...

Book synopsis: To celebrate our 40th birthday, we asked forty of our writers to write something for us inspired by the number 40. The result is Virago is 40 – A Celebration, a very special and surprising collection as our writers continue to engage us, challenge us, tease us and confound us, as they have done from the very beginning.

Translating pain into tangible images brings it into the public consciousness, raising the spectre of bodily suffering as virtually intrinsic to the human condition. Beginning with Descartes, who famously advanced mind-body theories in the late seventeenth century, this essay explores the effects of his influence together with shifting attitudes to...

Witnessing people in pain inevitably elicits anxiety in physicians and other caregivers. Physicians are often required to inflict certain types of discomforts in order to alleviate other, more destructive, pains. Accusations that physicians lacked sympathy can be heard throughout the centuries. This article explores the diverse medical responses to...

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, p...

In 1872, a woman known only as 'An Earnest Englishwoman', published an open letter entitled 'Are women animals?' She protested that women were not treated as fully human; their status was worse than that of animals. What does it mean to be 'human' rather than 'animal'? If the Earnest Englishwoman had turned her gaze to the previous century, her cri...

Trauma has become the central motif of modernity. The two world wars reduced enlightenment beliefs in the glorious possibilities of humanity to rubble; the holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation stripped even that rubble of any meaning. For many Europeans and Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, the dark world of suffering that had been forg...

In her inaugural lecture, Prof. Bourke will explore the language of pain in Anglo-American societies from the 1760s. Although the communication of pain presents difficulties, she will be arguing that painful worlds are expressed through a rich language of metaphor, simile, metonym, and analogy. Furthermore, these metaphors are based on embodied exp...

Trauma is not a universal way of speaking about the effects of “bad events” but is socially constructed. In the case of rape, psychological trauma is a relatively recent way of conceptualising the aftermath of violence. This article examines the development within psychiatric, legal, and forensic textbooks of the notion of “trauma” in reference to...

Art cinema has always had an aura of the erotic, with the term being at times a euphemism for European films that were more explicit than their American counterparts. This focus on sexuality, whether buried or explicit, has meant a recurrence of the theme of rape, nearly as ubiquitous as in mainstream film. This anthology explores the representati...

Book synopsis: This work makes available historical and anthropological research on a region comparatively little known to the English-language academic readership interested in the lively field of crime and violence history. The volume challenges the largely evolutionary current conceptualizations (in terms of both chronology and geography) which...

The term ‘War on Terror’ (WOT) covers a mass of interlinked topics. Here an outstanding group of authors and academics dissect them from ethical, political, legal, economic and historical perspectives. Drawn from the world-famous Oxford Amnesty Lectures, the essays are substantial contributions to their fields and of abiding relevance. Here it is...

Body and Mind pays tribute to one of Australia's most outstanding and influential historians, F. B. (Barry) Smith. Barry has made pioneering contributions to the political, social and cultural histories of Britain and Australia, and these essays range across the fields he made his own, especially the interconnected histories of medicine (body) and...

Religious scruples were a major problem within Roman Catholic circles until the late twentieth century. This article traces the shift from the cure of scruples being seen as the responsibility of religious advisers to them being labled an obsessional-compulsive disorder. Whether penitent or patient, the clash between revelationary truths and scient...

This volume presents fresh insights into familiar problems in world history. War and military violence were common features in almost all societies in world history. Attempts to find mechanisms for conflict resolution and to conceptualise peace emerged as well. The contributions to this book approach these big issues with selected case studies. The...

Book synopsis: Global Politics: A New Introduction is an innovative new textbook that provides a completely original way of teaching and learning about world politics. The book engages directly with the issues in global politics that students are most interested in, helping them to understand the key questions and theories and also to develop a cri...

Joanna Bourke, author of the critically-acclaimed Fear, unflinchingly and controversially moves away from looking at victims to look at the rapists. She examines the nature of rape, drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence. Rape - A History looks at the pe...

Popular prejudices estimate about half rape victims are lying, but research shows just 3% of rape allegations are false - yet another myth about sexual violence

Joanna Bourke describes her relief that Harriet Harman, Minister for Women has announced £1 million funding for Rape Crisis centres. She says that Harman's step is important but it must simply be the beginning.

This essay examines some of the emotional rules, encoded in grammars of representation and framed within law and prescriptive marital advice literature, regarding the expression of male sexual aggressivity within the bedroom. Despite the general Victorian idealization of marriage, many wives suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their...

For centuries Europe was a prickly landscape of heavily armed nation states. Now the continent has largely lost its enthusiasm for conflict. How did that happen?

As nations have developed increasingly sophisticated weaponry with which to harm theirs enemies, medicine has had to adapt to cope with the volume and changing nature of the resulting casualties. Many of the lessons learned in wartime have prompted advances in medicine and in social policy away from the battlefield. However, arguments about whether...

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 extr...

Perpetrators of unwanted sexual intimacies assault our histories. Their violence is historically specific and, as such, alters form through time. This article examines the sexual abuser as interpreted in the past. Whether understood as an inheritance from the evolutionary past, evidence of a pathological faultline, or proof of a perverse situationa...

This article examines and appraises some approaches to the analysis of emotional experience in history -‘emotionology’, social constructivism, narrativization, and psycho-historical methods. Using the example of one emotion – fear – it suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to physiology and how emotions mediate between the individual a...

In modern warfare, technological innovations are applied to terrifying effect. On the machine-dominated battlefields of the twentieth century, the ability of individuals to master their emotions is crucial to the whole martial enterprise. Fear has widely been recognized as the most fraught of all emotions: it may stimulate combatants to fight and i...

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 arti...

Modernity was a mixed blessing. In 1929, the Men's Dress Reform Party was established in response to what its founders regarded as the heinous modern age. One of them, John Carl Flugel (a psychologist from University College London), contended that since the end of the eighteenth century men had been progressively ignoring brighter, more elaborate,...

Book synopsis: That notions of femininity were seriously disrupted during the First World War has become obvious in recent years. But what happened to masculinity at the same time? Based on letters, diaries and oral histories, Dismembering the Male explores the impact of the ‘war to end all wars’ on the male body. Joanna Bourke argues convincingly...

The most terrible words in all writing used to be ‘There they crucified Him’, but there is a sadder sentence now—‘I know not where they have laid Him’…Surely ‘missing’ is the cruelest word in the language. (Anonymous, To My Unknown Warrior, 1920.)

Book synopsis: Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical soci...

The extent of the handmade lace industry in the nineteenth century is difficult to estimate. Most lacemakers were not given an occupation in the census. For instance, Belleek (in county Fermanagh) was one of the centres of handmade lace in Ireland. Of the fifty-one women active in the Belleek lace and sprigging class in January 1911, fifty-six per...

Book synopsis: Recent years have seen an outpouring of new research in both gender and women's history. This book brings together in a coherent way the most formative articles in our thinking about women's work in English history for both the early modern and modern periods. The material is presented in an accessible way for seminar discussions and...

Book synopsis: This book examines the lives of women in Ireland between 1890 and 1914, tracing the shift of their labour out of the fields and into the home. It shows how their position within the employment market deteriorated: married women came to be increasingly dependent on their husbands' earnings, while economic opportunities for unmarried a...

Traducción de: The Second World War. A People History

Thesis (M.A.--History)--University of Auckland.

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