English Professor Sally Bachner is this Monday’s Russell House speaker:

“Rape Trauma, Combat Trauma, and the Making of PTSD: Feminist Fiction in the 1970s”

Throughout the 1970s veterans, activists, and psychiatrists were hard at work getting the disorder that came to be called PTSD included in the upcoming edition of the DSM-III. During the same period, feminists were building a successful anti-rape movement that crucially insisted that rape is a form of violence. Professor Bachner will propose that while both of
these groups sought to bring suffering – of combat veterans and rape victims, respectively – into speech, many feminist novelists of this period instead turn to the figure of the soldier to figure rape as unspeakable. PTSD functions in these texts as a technology for figuring what was initially conceived of as suppressed speech about violence against women as a putatively “unspeakable” trauma.

Date: Monday, February 15
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Place: Russell House