Tutor: Susan Curruthers

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

Seminar questions

What are the main functions of sexual violence?

What is the theoretical intervention that Helliwell brings?

Is sexual violence a topic like any other? Why yes, and why not? what are some of the ethical obligations at hand connected to the topic?

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