Meet Joanna Bourke
In the words of Archdeacon R.H.Charles in 1931, science may have ‘exposed many superstitions of the dark ages and laid bare the falsity of the religious and secular magic of the past and present, yet in their stead it has introduced legions of new alarms that beset our lives from the cradle to the grave.
- Fear: A Cultural History by Professor Joanna Bourke [pg 5]
In 1862 Duchenne de Boulogne, a pioneering French neurophysiologist, published a book, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. A remarkable study, where he took the face of an old man, anaesthetised, and through electrocution sought to reproduce various emotions. With various muscles contracted, the emotional portrait of fear that he produced and photographed is as striking as it was thought provoking. According to Duchenne the face reflected directly the emotions (thus a wicked face is indicative of a wicked character). At the same time Darwin was putting forth his arguments for evolution and the ‘principles of expression’, and argued that the face of fear had physical attributes beneficial to survival (the eyes open widely with eyebrows raised, enabling the subject to view all around quickly). Professor Joanna Bourke, in her latest book, Fear: A Cultural History, uses this debate as her introduction to a vast subject, pointing out that while the experts could agree on what the face of fear looks like, they didn’t give us any greater understanding of what fear actually is, and what results from it.
One could imagine that the idea for this fascinating study came somehow through an observation of our post 9/11 world, but the inspiration was more historical. “It was supposed to be a history of emotions more generally: fear, anger, hatred, jealously, love, and so on”, explains Bourke, who is a lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, London. “The reason for my interest in the history of emotions grew out of an uneasiness with some of… FULL
Pain is titillating. In the so-called war on terror, it is easy to assume glibly that sexualised violence is so mainstream that it can no longer shock. But Steven Meisel’s fashion photographs, published in the current issue of Italian Vogue, take the pornography of terror to another extreme.
Bloodlust, says historian Joanna Bourke, is a civilized affair.
rootlesscosmo:
“While feminist research generally is one of the most vibrant and sophisticated strands of analysis, and one that informs all of my work, when examining what must be classed as one of the most important fears experienced by women today – rape – it remains dominated by unfounded accusations against ‘men’, either as rapists, rape-fantasists, or beneficiaries of the rape-culture. Even writers who want to distance themselves from essentialist, male-hostile discourses which insist that the male body is inherently primed to rape, still find it necessary to devote substantial space to the arguments of Sheila [sic] Brownmiller or Andrea Dworkin.”
(from Bourke’s book, quoted in the O’Connor article at Three Monkeys.)
28 November 2007, 11:51 amDeAnander:
“Sheila Brownmiller” eh? Now that’s a tribute to poorly-paid research and copy editing peons, and/or (it’s been known to happen) to the author’s lofty disdain for the people she disagrees with and trivialises — so lofty that she doesn’t bother to read them or find out that Sheila Jeffreys and Susan Brownmiller are not only two different people, but two utterly distinct and irreconcilable writers
Kind of an own goal, no?
This sounds like yet another case of what is now practically formalised: no media figure or intellectual is allowed to criticise pornography or acculturated sadistic misogyny, or the male supremacist ideology that lies beneath — unless said critics first perform the ritual denunciation of the Wicked Witches of Radical Feminism: MacKinnon, Dworkin, Jeffreys… and for the somewhat out-of-touch, Brownmiller, I guess (so yesterday). Only after having performed the ritual denunciation are social critics allowed to advance relatively timid and constrained versions of the fully-fledged critique that the Wicked Witches published over the last four decades
Sigh. Any critique of the porn/profit/pimp nexus and its cultural normalisation and embedding is a Good Thing (TM) and rarer than honesty on a politician, so I suppose we must offer a wilting and droopy bouquet to Bourke for at least mentioning that the bedroom is knee deep in elephant dung — even if the word “elephant” is still a bit too much to ask for in plain text. But one does get tired of the ritual of ideological purification and distancing — kind of a de-Dworkinisation Programme for academics…
If women’s lives are polluted by a chronic fear of rape, and that fear of rape is not fantastical but justified, then how are the accusation “rapists are men” and the ensuing goal “male behaviour and privilege need to be examined” unjustified? As I’ve said many a time, rape is not committed by armies of little green creatures from Mars. Nor are all these rapes committed by a handful of “super predator,” raving, priapic psychos. If you run the numbers — the estimated number of rapes per annum — the only possible conclusion is that ordinary men rape, or in other words, it is fairly ordinary for men to rape. Which means that ordinary men are “primed” to rape somehow or other, whether it be by testosterone as the dickhead sociobiologists (a smug little mostly-male club of which neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon is or was a member) claim, or by cultural construction of gender as more than half of radical feminists would claim, or by an inextricable syngergy between biology and culture in which neither element provides a sufficient explanation (as I would claim).
If a critique of masculinity as socially constructed — a critique of cultural constructions of the male body and psyche, and/or real-world attempts to prevent or at least de-normalise male sexual predation — is inherently “male-hostile”… then we are back to the neocon-style rhetoric of denied accountability. “Only America-haters would criticise the Iraq invasion”: we are allowed to grieve over bad things that just mysteriously “happen,” but not allowed to talk about the people who do the bad things, the people who suffer from the bad things, or the relations of power between those two groups of people. War is bad and rape is terrible, but we are not allowed to talk about who started the war, who funded the war, who committed the rape, who got off on watching a video of the rape, who profited by selling the video of the rape, or who’s going to get the profits from the captured Iraqi oil refineries. If we say “America invaded Iraq and that was wrong,” we are America-haters — and if we say “men rape women and that is wrong,” apparently that makes us, er, “man haters”.
It is difficult to analyse or struggle against an oppressive force that we are not allowed to name. And ain’t that just the point?
28 November 2007, 4:58 pmStan:
I was way quick on the trigger sending this out… after finding comon ground with her on Grossman’s drivel about innate behaviors. I wonder when most academic feminists will regain the courage to confront Dworkin et al on their own terms, instead of repeatedly denouncing these straw women.
My quick readings showed that she called the Abu Ghraib photos pornography… which led me to conclude that she saw the connection between this accurate conclusion and the reality of rape culture.
Pity.
And my bad.
28 November 2007, 5:02 pmjimi 45:
And then there’s this nugget from Amy Goodman:
28 November 2007, 5:15 pmDeAnander:
Lotsa pundits called the AG photos pornography.
The trouble is, 99 pct of them thought they were speaking metaphorically.
28 November 2007, 7:52 pmBarb:
I wasn’t going to leave a comment on this - we’ve already hashed out our disagreements on the subject of rape, pornography, prostitution - but I woke up this morning with the conviction that I should. My worry is about on Bourke says - that she should sweep away a whole body of research in to ‘who rapists are’, responsible for finally getting rape in marriage made a crime in the UK less than 20 years ago, can be put down to the arrogance and ignorance of youth, and the distain of academics for research inspired by the questions and demands of grassroots women. Otherwise it looks like she might be interstesting for some of her research if not her conclusions - the economics of fear and violence don’t seem to exist into her world, despite the name-checking of EP Thompson. So far, so academic.
My worry is that she should be dismissed entirely on missing the party line here about pornography and rape, when she did write something sensible about the glamourising of torture in Vogue. The research into killing also sounded good, but the stuff about fear was just tosh:
“As a consequence, anxiety may have been higher in late-twentieth century America, because of the greater cultural resonance of therapy in that country but also because a much more entrenched class structure in Britain served to dilute some forms of status anxiety.”
People are more fearful for talking about their fears? Or because talking about fears with a stranger is an accepted ritual in American life? And the whole point of a class system is to keep everyone in a perpetual state of status anxiety. At least that’s how it feels around me here in Britain.
My point is that there were other big problems with what she said, and I was disappointed that the dismissal of the real fear women have of rape closed down a possible discussion of other things she talked about.
Anyway, morning spirit finally rested. Otherwise keep up the good work.
4 December 2007, 3:19 pm