Gender and Trauma since 1900

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.

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.