Bibliographical Essay

When Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Harmondsworth: Penguin) in 1977, there were very few historical analyses of sexual violence. Today, there is a sophisticated historical literature on rape and other forms of sexualised violence.

It is impossible in a short bibliographical essay to convey the depth and breadth of this literature. Many of the best works are published in journals rather than as monographs. For a historical analysis of perpetrators of sexual violence in Britain and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Joanna Bourke's Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (London: Virago, 2007). In the USA, it is published as Rape: Sex, Violence, History (New York: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). In the context of France, the best overview is Georges Vigarello's A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to the20th Century, trans. Jean Birrell (Malden, PA: Polity Press, 2001). The literature on rape in wartime is particularly rich. The best way to access this is through the website of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts (SVAC: www.warandgender.net/), which has a comprehensive bibliography of the literature as well as extremely robust critiques of it. For insightful series of edited essays, see Raphaelle Branche and Fabrice Virgili's Rape in Wartime (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Dagmar Herzog's Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2009). For supreme examples of the way wartime rape is memorialised during and after conflicts, see James Mark's ‘Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red Army in Hungary, 1944-1945', Past & Present 188 (August 2005), 133-61, and Gina Marie Weaver's Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: SUNY Press,

2010). There is a vast historical, philosophical, legal and political literature focusing on the sexual violence during the war in the former Yugoslavia.

For two useful analyses, see Kirsten Campbell, ‘Legal Memories: Sexual Assault, Memory, and International Humanitarian Law', Signs 28.1 (2002), 149-76, and Karen Engle, ‘Feminism and its (Dis) contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina', American Journal of International Law 99.4 (2005), 778-816. Philosophical discussions of rape can be extremely helpful for historians: examples include Keith Burgess-Jackson's Rape: A Philosophical Investigation, (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996), Ann J. Cahill's Rethinking Rape (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) and Moira Gatens's Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996). Pamela Haag usefully problematises and historicises the concept of ‘consent' in her Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Finally, the following journals publish extensively on sexual violence from historical and contemporary perspectives: African Studies Review, Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Genocide Research and Signs.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Bibliographical Essay

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