Rape and Sexual Violence

Tutor: Susan Carruthers

Trigger warning: in this session, we will discuss sexual and sexualized violence

In this seminar we tackle an especially challenging and distressing topic: sexual violence and rape. In particular, we will study rape in the context of war, and rape as an assertion of male power over women. The readings offer an introduction to the ways in which discourses around sexual violence have evolved from landmark second-wave feminist interventions (cf Brownmiller’s Against Our Will) to more recent scholarly re-appraisals of rape as a ‘weapon of war’. Having considered evolving theorizations of rape, we will analyze excerpts from a diary written by a female Berliner (who wished her identity to be kept anonymous on publication), documenting her own experiences, as well as those of other women in Berlin, as the Red Army laid claim to the city in spring 1945.

Seminar questions:

For what variety of reasons is rape an especially challenging topic for historians to grapple with?
What was Brownmiller’s key contribution to contemporary understandings of rape in the mid-1970s?
How far, in what ways, and why has academic scholarship of rape evolved since the publication of Against Our Will?
How does Anonymous’ Diary, A Woman in Berlin, challenge preconceptions about why mass rape in wartime occurs?

Primary source:

Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Henry Holt, 2006 [1953]), selections

Core reading:

Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Open Road: 2013 [1975]) e-book; section 1: ‘The Mass Psychology of Rape’; skim section 3: ‘War’

Pascale R Bos, ‘Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945: Yugoslavia, 1992-1993’, Signs, 31:4 (Summer 2006): 995-1025

Regina Mühlhäuser, ‘Reframing Sexual Violence as a Weapon and Strategy of War: The Case of the German Wehrmacht during the War and Genocide in the Soviet Union, 1941-1944’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 26:3 (Sept. 2017): 366-401

Further reading:

Joanna Bourke, Rape: Sex, Violence, History (2007) e-book

Jonathan Gotschall, ‘Explaining Wartime Rape’, Journal of Sex Research, 41:2 (May 2004): 129-36

Atina Grossmann, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers’, October, 72 (Spring 1995): 42-63

Elizabeth D Heineman (ed.), Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)

Nicola Henry, War and Rape: Law, Memory, and Justice (2011) e-book

Nicola Henry, ‘Theorizing Wartime Rape: Deconstruction Gender, Sexuality, and Violence’, Gender and Society, 30:1 (Feb. 2016): 44-56

Elisabeth Krimmer, ‘Philomela’s Legacy: Rape, the Second World War, and the Ethics of Reading’, The German Quarterly, 88:1 (Winter 2015): 82-103

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) e-book

Carine M Mardrossian, ‘Toward A New Feminist Theory of Rape’, Signs, 27:3 (2002): 743-75

James W Messerschmidt, ‘The Forgotten Victims of World War II: Masculinities and Rape in Berlin, 1945’, Violence Against Women, 12:7 (2006): 706-12

Madeline Morris, ‘By Force of Arms: Rape, War and Military Culture’, Duke Law Journal, 45:4 (1996): 651-781