Sexual Violence
Tutor: Anna Hájková
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. 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 (Brownmiller’s Against Our Will) to more recent scholarly re-appraisals of rape as a ‘weapon of war’ and Helliwell's reinterpretation of sexual violence as a social and Western construction of reality. 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 sexual violence an especially challenging topic for historians to grapple with? what are some of the ethical obligations at hand?
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? What is the theoretical intervention that Helliwell brings?
How does Anonymous’ Diary, A Woman in Berlin, challenge preconceptions about sexual violence in wartime?
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’
Christine Helliwell, "It's Only a Penis": Rape, Feminism, and Difference, Signs, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring, 2000), pp. 789-816.
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