Rape Sex, Violence, History

Joanna Bourke takes the issue of rape out from the academic ghettos and distills the truth so often exploited to sell newspapers. Neither prurient nor overly sympathetic, she investigates rape from a historical standpoint examining the history of sexual aggression, the idea of rape as a social construct, and the often–ignored idea of embodiment, and analyzes the physical response of rapists as well as the often–cited "rape is about power" theories.

Indebted to a growing body of sophisticated feminist analyses about rape victims, Bourke here shifts the emphasis from the victims to the perpetrators in order to place rapists in their historical context. An invaluable study, this book delivers the hard truth that if we are to imagine a world free of unwanted sexual violence, then we must consider the issue of rape from every angle.

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, where she has taught since 1992. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books range from the social and economic history of Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to social histories of the British working classes between 1860 and 1960s, to cultural histories of military conflict between the Anglo-Boer war and the present. She explores history through the lens of gender, ivtersectionalities, and subjectivities. She has worked on the history of the emotions, particularly fear and hatred, and the history of sexual violence. In the past few years, her research has focused on questions of humanity, militarisation, and pain. She wrote a book entitled What It Means to Be Human. In 2014, she published two books: Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War Games Invade Our World and The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers.