Abstract
As the Washington Post headlined several years ago, “women are more than twice as likely as men to suffer from PTSD. Studies are underway to find out why” (Cimons, 2019). Should this be news? This new book suggests that, unfortunately, these studies are indeed newsworthy, not because we know so little about the discrepancy between female and male experiences of trauma, but because, on the contrary, our struggle to understand the difference is so profoundly overdetermined by conventional gender norms that we are blinded to the effects of trauma itself.
Our effort to grasp the painful reality of this overdetermination may, however, be gaining some traction. Specifically, data from 11 well-developed case studies of nationalist violence against marginalized groups in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are applied to reframe the traditional “gender and violence” paradigm into a broader research question: How does marginalization add to —or detract from—the construction of gender? Has our silence on the subject of gendered trauma become the instrument for silencing groups already impaired by class and gender disparities? The co-editors Paula Michaels and Christina Twomey, both professors of history, have brought together an international team of academics whose original essays analyze the evolution and possibilities of reframing gendered trauma. Their work draws on trauma narratives of the Global North to the Global South, from Italy, Spain, and Great Britain, to Australia, the Soviet Union, and the USA, to Kampala (Uganda), Viet Nam, and East Timor-Leste.
Exposed to the gruesome results of warfare on the front lines, Italian veterans of World War I found their return to civilian life harshly upended when some psychiatrists equated their psychological trauma with deviant behavior, the desire to subvert authority, and ultimately, evidence of marginal social class. Martina Salvante's portrayal of this gendered betrayal, essentially the soldiers’ sense of emasculation as a humiliating feminization, becomes a central theme in the book's exploration of trauma narratives. The Spanish civil war brought the humanitarian Esme Odgers “a desire to numb herself to the never-ending grief” (p. 48) as she fought to rescue child victims. Delving into Odgers’ epistolary narratives, Joy Damousi explores the emotional costs of vicarious traumatization. Other women, such as the Jewish “refugee domestics” in Britain, saw their survival guilt compounded by class-based shame, exposure to sexual harassment, and an overall trauma of powerlessness.
Like all powerful diagnoses, the term “psychoneurosis” is double-edged. Distressed veterans returning to the U.S. from World War II were seen both ways: families often reacted to their troubled members as individuals impaired by symptoms akin to PTSD; from the more “public” perspective, these were men demeaned by the risk of losing their traditional gender roles. Rebecca Jo Plant's sophisticated research shows how an engaged leadership in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the military proactively reshaped the nomenclature of war traumatization from a stigmatizing “psycho” term to an arguably more agreeable “combat exhaustion.” Meanwhile, in post-World War II Britain, the need to help prisoners of war with “barbed-wire syndrome” re-adapt to civilian life raised similar concerns. The solutions were unsurprisingly gendered: work programs emphasized individual responsibility and citizenship while, backed by the Tavistock Clinic, families were to promote the prisoners of war masculinity and sexual potency in marriage.
Challenged by a range of early motherhood narratives, some governmental and some personal, Paula Michaels asks if we “can speak about psychologically traumatic birth in the postwar USSR [though] it was never described as such?” (p. 126). Michaels contrasts the state's pro-natalist policies to its failure to act on women's fear of pain and fetal injury. Narratives of psychological suffering and traumatic birth do exist, she finds, but they are relegated to the margins, to works of fiction, journalism, and patient reports. In contrast, awareness of the “broader invisibility of psychological trauma,” as Lisa Featherstone describes it, began to enter Australia's official narratives of the 1980s. In a conceptual and pragmatic shift from the 1970s, and influenced by feminist discourse, court hearings in cases of violent sexual abuse (child and adult) saw the silence around women's narratives of psychological trauma gradually replaced by newfound understanding.
For readers from the West, the essays about Uganda, Viet Nam, and East Timor-Leste make this a truly transnational collection. We know that gendered trauma is global and violent, yet each country's history and culture powerfully localizes its enactment. Perhaps this is why Benjamin Twagira, Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, and Hannah Loney, the authors of these chapters, chose oral history as their main research methodology. With one woman's use of spirit imagery to cope with her fear of the soldiers’ sexual assaults, Twagira depicts the trauma of gender violence in Uganda's postcolonial decades of hyper-militarization. In a devastating parallel, a Vietnamese woman living with loss of family members among the “boat people,” testified to a legacy of trauma. “I don’t seem to get angry,” one survivor said, “and when good things happen, I don’t react much either” (p. 192). And in East Timor, where Indonesia's violent occupation of the 1970s left a vast swath of suffering, Loney observed the survivors coping with their legacy of trauma in the language of collectivity.
Misunderstandings of Freud (p. 7) aside, Michaels and Twomey should seriously influence our understanding of gender and trauma. With its creative uses of primary sources and resolute regard for indigenous voices, this edited volume shows us just why new trauma studies are indeed newsworthy.
