Rape revisited: Joanna Bourke reflects on historicizing sexual violence, in conversation with Ruth Beecher for Women’s History Review
The full text of this interview is available at Women’s History Review. The video is available as open-access supplementary material.
SHaME Director Ruth Beecher sits down with Principal Investigator Joanna Bourke to reflect on two of her groundbreaking works on sexual violence, Rape (2007) and Disgrace (2022), for Women’s History Review.
Joanna speaks about topics ranging from the complexities of medicalisation of sexual violence, to the place of rage and optimism in activism and scholarship, to the centrality of intersectionality in her work.
You can watch a recording of this interview here.
This interview is part of a special issue for Women’s History Review co-edited by Dr Ruth Beecher and Dr Stephanie Wright.
Ruth Beecher is in charge of the day-to-day running of SHaME. She is also a postdoctoral research fellow on the SHaME project. She is a social and cultural historian with interests in the history of race, gender, children and families, and popular culture in the US and UK in the twentieth century. She is trained in both applied and historical research (University of Sheffield and Birkbeck). Prior to the project, she managed a range of family support services in London.
Joanna Bourke is the Principal Investigator for the SHaME Project. Joanna has recently retired as a Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the prize-winning author of fifteen books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, what it means to be human, pain, and rape, as well as over 120 articles in academic journals. In 2022, Reaktion Books published Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek. Disgrace is also an audio book. Joanna is a frequent contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular correspondent for newspapers.