Joanna Bourke
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 265805 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Joanna Bourke |
| NOMBRES | Joanna |
| APELLIDO | Bourke |
| FIRMA | BOURKE J |
| AFILIACIONES | Birkbeck, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7603-4421 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 66 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 147 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 65 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1987 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Challenging persistent rape myths
Joanna Bourke is a prize-winning social and cultural historian, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a public intellectual. Her books, which have been translated into multiple languages, have explored the history of gender, working-class culture, emotions, war, and the relationships between animals and humans. Her most recent books are Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Disgrace: Global …
Sexual violence, deviance, and the paraphilias in American psychiatry, 1952-2013
This article explores arguments within American psychiatry from the 1950s around whether rapists were mentally ill. It analyses debates in the lead-up to the various editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) from 1952 to the latest version in 2013, focussing particularly on a diagnostic category called ‘Paraphilic Coercive Disorder’ (PCD). Since the first DSM, American p…
Resilience
A Deed of the Darkest Violence”
This article uses the sadist murder in 1937 of Dorothy May Everett in Newcastle (NSW) to reflect on sexual violence and psychiatry in Australia between the 1920s and the 1950s. Everett’s murder incited debates about Australian masculinity, class, racial degeneration and sex crimes. It led to an unprecedented popular interest in the psychiatric diagnosis of “sadism”. What do these sadistic rape-murders reveal about everyday constructions of the se…
Resilience
Military Sexual Trauma
Sexual violence is a serious problem within armed services. This article explores intra-service rape in branches of the U.S. military from the 1990s to the present. The article begins by establishing the parameters of the crisis of sexual abuse within the U.S. armed services. Second, it explores systematic failures to recognize forms of suffering. Victim-survivors in the military are vulnerable to military-specific obstacles to reporting their ab…
Conceptualising Gender and Pain in Modern History
Pain is a defining feature of the human experience. We have all, at some point in our lives, felt physical or emotional discomfort that fits under the broad umbrella of 'pain'. Though the phenomenon of pain is universal, the ways it is experienced, perceived and conceptualised are shaped by the wider social, cultural and political milieu. The characterisation and articulation of pain is profoundly influenced by gender. In some historical and cont…
Animal instincts
Girls and women with learning difficulties have one of the highest risks of being sexually assaulted and raped. This article looks at the sexual abuse of girls and women in Britain between the 1830s and the 1910s. I will be arguing that, during the course of the nineteenth century, attitudes to girls and women with learning disabilities who claimed to have been raped became significantly harsher. Rather than needing to be protected from rapacious…
Becoming the 'Natural' Mother in Britain and North America
A doctor appeared for only a few seconds, leaving her with the nurse who told her that 'I wouldn't have this natural childbirth stuff [if they gave it to me] on a silver platter'. 1 This wasn't the natural event that Mrs A. had been anticipating. The start of her mothering life was supposed to be intuitive and empowering. Stories like hers became part of a concerted campaign for a different way of bringing forth children -a natural way. But what …
Why does politics turn to violence?
Violence is a complex and highly diverse phenomenon, including the corporal punishment of children, cruelty to animals, boxing, rape, and individual acts of indiscriminative mass murder. What is labelled ‘violence’ is itself highly normative: it has changed over time and the definition that becomes dominant is often the one favoured by powerful institutions and elites. Governmentally authorised killing and gratuitous violence are no grotesque acc…
Bestiality, Zoophilia and Human-Animal Sexual Interactions
From the earliest human cultures, nonhuman animals have been central to the sexual imaginary of humans. This article traces the modern history of bestiality from the nineteenth century, culminating in 'zoo' communities today. It explores the changing ideas about the 'wrongness' of such acts. It asks: what do human-animal sexual relations tell us about gender, sexuality, violence, psychiatry and concepts of consent? What are the possibilities for …
The Technoscientific Witness of Rape
Reviewed by: The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Scienceby Andrea Quinlan Joanna Bourke (bio) The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science. By Andrea Quinlan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. 272. Paperback $25.95. In the United States, thirty-three Americans over the age of twelve are raped and sexually assaulted every hour…
Elaine Scarry, Michael Haneke's Funny Games and the Structure of Cruelty
Haneke's film Funny Games is a reflection on the nature of pain and representation. I argue that the film closely follows Elaine Scarry's arguments about the structure of torture. Further, by refusing to appeal to categories of generalization such as 'sadism' and 'psychopathy', Haneke undermines the process of finding meaning in violence. Haneke positions his audiences as more than just witnesses to torture, but active participants in cruelty
Police Surgeons and Victims of Rape
Between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, police surgeons found themselves under concerted attack for their treatment of victims of rape and sexual assault. This article explores the tensions they faced between the needs of victims and their legal responsibilities. Should they prioritise care or the collection of evidence? How did they respond to criticism and why were reforms inadequate? I show how institutional structures and ideologies help e…
Cultures of Harm in Institutions of Care
In February 2015, the 'Lampard Report' was published following investigations that were carried out in Britain by the Department of Health and three NHS hospitals into the late 'famous, flamboyantly eccentric, narcissitic [sic] and manipulative television personality' Jimmy Savile. 1 During the same year, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was established to consider the growing evidence of institutional failures to protect children …
The Rise and Rise of Sexual Violence
This article explores Pinker’s analysis of sexual violence in modern history. It argues that his analysis is flawed because of a selective choice of data, a minimization of certain harms, the application of an evolutionary psychology approach, the failure to interrogate new forms of aggression, and a refusal to acknowledge the political underpinnings of his research. By failing to acknowledge and then control for his own ideological bias, Pinker …
Psychiatry, Hate Training, and the Second World War
During the Second World War, the role of psychiatrists in military training was crucial. The part played by psychiatrists in training young men for combat was of intense interest to the family and friends of service personnel, as well as to men preparing for combat. Fearing that British men would be unable to cope with the rigors of the modern battlefield and heeding the advice of behaviorist psychologists, the military established battle schools…
Theorizing Ballistics
What is violence? This article explores conceptions of violence from the perspective of scientists engaged in weapons research. Ballistics scientists are routinely excluded from the "violent" label on grounds of class, status, education, and emotional comportment. The article analyzes the science of ballistics through the lenses of ethics and emotions. How do scientists justify experiments in ballistics, or the science of designing weapons and ot…
Cytomegalovirus
Reviewed by: Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary by Hervé Guibert Joanna Bourke (bio) Hervé Guibert. Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary. Intro. David Caron, afterword Todd Meyers, trans. Clara Orban. New York: Fordham UP, 2016. 85 pp. ISBN 978-0823268573, $19.95. Two days after Christmas 1991, Hervé Guibert died of complications resulting from an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He was thirty-six years of age. Three years earlier, this pr…
Love and Limblessness
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 women's gendered role…
Exhibition Reviews
We Are the Dead Men: Albert Tuckers War Kendrah Morgan, curator Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Victoria, 15 March 7 September 2014. Entry: free with general museum admission
Stephanie Olsen. Juvenile Nation
The History of Emotions
On 11 September 2001, two planes flew into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center, another plane flew into the Pentagon, while a fourth crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvan
Fear
The Cambridge History of the First World War
Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of the First World War explores the social and cultural history of the war and considers the role of civil society throughout the conflict; that is to say those institutions and practices outside the state through which the war effort was waged. Drawing on 25 years of historical scholarship, it sheds new light on culturally significant issues such as how families and medical authorities adapted to the challenges …
The History of Emotions
On 11 September 2001, two planes flew into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center, another plane flew into the Pentagon, while a fourth crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvan
Fear and Anxiety
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 and the social. By examining the distinction frequently made between ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’, we can see…
Sexual Violence, Bodily Pain, and Trauma
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 centur…
Remembering’ War
Housewifery in Working-Class England 1860-1914
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 many of the writings are core texts for essay reading lists. The commentary will put the chapters i…
An Intimate History of Killing
War and Rape
Gender and Development 19 (2011) DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2011.592654 Henry, Nicola War and Rape: Law, Memory and Justice London and New York: Routledge, ISBN: 978-0-415-56473-1, 169 pp. Writing about
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 int…
Police Surgeons and Victims of Rape
Between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, police surgeons found themselves under concerted attack for their treatment of victims of rape and sexual assault. This article explores the tensions they faced between the needs of victims and their legal responsibilities. Should they prioritise care or the collection of evidence? How did they respond to criticism and why were reforms inadequate? I show how institutional structures and ideologies help e…
Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma
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 perso…
The battle of the limbs
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 r…
Cultures of Harm in Institutions of Care
In February 2015, the 'Lampard Report' was published following investigations that were carried out in Britain by the Department of Health and three NHS hospitals into the late 'famous, flamboyantly eccentric, narcissitic [sic] and manipulative television personality' Jimmy Savile. 1 During the same year, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was established to consider the growing evidence of institutional failures to protect children …
Love and Limblessness
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 women's gendered role…
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 typ…
Pain, sympathy and the medical encounter between the mid eighteenth and the mid twentieth centuries
Journal Article Pain, sympathy and the medical encounter between the mid eighteenth and the mid twentieth centuries Get access Joanna Bourke Joanna Bourke Birkbeck, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Historical Research, Volume 85, Issue 229, August 2012, Pages 430-452, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.2011.00593.x Published: 05 July 2012
Sexual Violence, Marital Guidance, and Victorian Bodies
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 husbands, marital rape drawing particular attention from early feminists, psychologists, physicians,…
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 …
The Best of All Home Rulers’
Book synopsis: The Irish Women's History Reader is an exciting collection of essays revealing the tremendous diversity of women's experiences in Ireland's past. For the first time this unique book draws together key articles published in the fields of Irish women's history and women's studies over the past two decades, including contributions from Ireland, North and South, England, USA, Canada and Australia. The Irish Women's History Reader explo…
Military Sexual Trauma
Sexual violence is a serious problem within armed services. This article explores intra-service rape in branches of the U.S. military from the 1990s to the present. The article begins by establishing the parameters of the crisis of sexual abuse within the U.S. armed services. Second, it explores systematic failures to recognize forms of suffering. Victim-survivors in the military are vulnerable to military-specific obstacles to reporting their ab…
Becoming the 'Natural' Mother in Britain and North America
A doctor appeared for only a few seconds, leaving her with the nurse who told her that 'I wouldn't have this natural childbirth stuff [if they gave it to me] on a silver platter'. 1 This wasn't the natural event that Mrs A. had been anticipating. The start of her mothering life was supposed to be intuitive and empowering. Stories like hers became part of a concerted campaign for a different way of bringing forth children -a natural way. But what …
The Rise and Rise of Sexual Violence
This article explores Pinker’s analysis of sexual violence in modern history. It argues that his analysis is flawed because of a selective choice of data, a minimization of certain harms, the application of an evolutionary psychology approach, the failure to interrogate new forms of aggression, and a refusal to acknowledge the political underpinnings of his research. By failing to acknowledge and then control for his own ideological bias, Pinker …
Psychiatry, Hate Training, and the Second World War
During the Second World War, the role of psychiatrists in military training was crucial. The part played by psychiatrists in training young men for combat was of intense interest to the family and friends of service personnel, as well as to men preparing for combat. Fearing that British men would be unable to cope with the rigors of the modern battlefield and heeding the advice of behaviorist psychologists, the military established battle schools…
Theorizing Ballistics
What is violence? This article explores conceptions of violence from the perspective of scientists engaged in weapons research. Ballistics scientists are routinely excluded from the "violent" label on grounds of class, status, education, and emotional comportment. The article analyzes the science of ballistics through the lenses of ethics and emotions. How do scientists justify experiments in ballistics, or the science of designing weapons and ot…
Emotional Lexicons. Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000
The Sensible and Insensible Body
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 towards pain and its role over the long nineteenth century
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 int…
The Best of All Home Rulers’
Book synopsis: The Irish Women's History Reader is an exciting collection of essays revealing the tremendous diversity of women's experiences in Ireland's past. For the first time this unique book draws together key articles published in the fields of Irish women's history and women's studies over the past two decades, including contributions from Ireland, North and South, England, USA, Canada and Australia. The Irish Women's History Reader explo…
Working Women
of Labour Statistics. Board of Trade (Department of Labour Statistics), Sixteenth Abstract of Labour Statistics of the United Kingdom (PP, 1914, LXXX), 453. 28 Robert Andrew Anderson, With Plunkett in Ireland: The Co-Operative Organiser's Story (Dublin, 1983; orig. pub. 1935), 26-27. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.161 on Mon, 23 May 2016 06:19:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WORKING WOMEN IN IRELAND | 495 The labor …
I Was Always Fond of my Pillow’
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 cent were given no occupation in the 1911 census manuscripts and four per cent were given occupation…
Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960
Housewifery in Working-Class England 1860-1914
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 many of the writings are core texts for essay reading lists. The commentary will put the chapters i…
Husbandry to Housewifery
Heroes and Hoaxes
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.)
Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960
Shorter Notices
SHORTER NOTICES JOANNA BOURKE JOANNA BOURKE Birkbeck CollegeLondon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXI, Issue 440, February 1996, Pages 252–253, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/CXI.440.252 Published: 01 February 1996
Fragmentation, Fetishization and men's bodies in Britain, 1890–1939
Shorter Notices
SHORTER NOTICES Get access JOANNA BOURKE JOANNA BOURKE Birkbeck CollegeLondon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXII, Issue 446, April 1997, Pages 509-a–509, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/CXII.446.509-a Published: 01 April 1997
Policing gender, class and family
Shorter Notices
Journal Article SHORTER NOTICES Get access JOANNA BOURKE JOANNA BOURKE Birkbeck CollegeLondon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXIII, Issue 453, September 1998, Pages 1014–1015, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/CXIII.453.1014 Published: 01 September 1998
The battle of the limbs
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 r…
Shorter notice. Medical Charities, Medical Politics. The Irish Dispensary System and the Poor Law, 1836-1872. RD Cassell
Journal Article Shorter notice. Medical Charities, Medical Politics. The Irish Dispensary System and the Poor Law, 1836-1872. RD Cassell Get access J Bourke J Bourke Birkbeck College, London, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 456, April 1999, Pages 474–475, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/114.456.474 Published: 01 April 1999
An Intimate History of Killing
An Intimate History of Killing
Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma
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 perso…
The emotions in war
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 it may cause them to flee. This article examines the proliferation of theories about the nature of th…
The Second World War
Life after Death
This collection of essays offers a novel approach to the cultural and social history of Europe after the Second World War. In a shift of perspective, it does not conceive of the impressive economic and political stability of the postwar era as a quasi-natural return to previous patterns of societal development but approaches it as an attempt to establish 'normality' upon the lingering memories of experiencing violence on a hitherto unprecedented …
Fear and Anxiety
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 and the social. By examining the distinction frequently made between ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’, we can see…
Remembering’ 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 …
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