The Politics Of Trauma And Integrity

The Politics of Trauma and Integrity uses the lenses of gender and trauma to tell the stories of narratives testified by two contrasting Japanese "comfort women" survivors. Through an innovative interdisciplinary study of the politics of gendered memory and trauma in historical context, with numerous primary sources for analysis including diaries, interviews, letters and oral testimonies, this book uncovers the life-or-death struggles of Japanese survivors in pursuit of public recognition as the victims of state violence against women. It is set within a gender history of modern Japan, supplemented by feminist activist methodology premised upon political agency that seeks social justice. The author’s analysis draws upon three key concepts: trauma, coherence of the self, and integrity. Focusing upon the role of gender and trauma as the nexus between memory construction and identity formation in modern Japan, the author reveals these women’s relentless quest for their recovery and creation of new identities. This book provides a better understanding of the victims of sexual violence and encourages readers to listen to the voice of trauma, as well as making a significant contribution to the existing research on the ongoing history of sexual violence against women in Japan, the rest of Asia and beyond. It will be of interest to scholars, researchers, activists and all who are interested in the issue of women’s human rights. It provides supplementary reading and research material for history and politics courses relating to Japan and East Asia, memory, identity, trauma, gender, war and feminist activism. This book will also be beneficial to victims of sexual violence as well as the counsellors/psychologists engaging with them.

An essential tool for healers, therapists, activists, and trauma survivors who are interested in a justice-centered approach to somatic transformation The Politics of Trauma offers somatics with a social analysis. This book is for therapists and social activists who understand that trauma healing is not just for individuals—and that social change is not just for movement builders. Just as health practitioners need to consider the societal factors underlying trauma, so too must activists understand the physical and mental impacts of trauma on their own lives and the lives of the communities with whom they organize. Trauma healing and social change are, at their best, interdependent. Somatics has proven to be particularly effective in addressing trauma, but in practice it typically focuses solely on the individual, failing to integrate the social conditions that create trauma in the first place. Staci K. Haines, somatic innovator and cofounder of generative somatics, invites readers to look beyond individual experiences of body and mind to examine the social, political, and economic roots of trauma—including racism, environmental degradation, sexism, and poverty. Haines helps readers identify, understand, and address these sources of trauma to help us bridge individual healing with social transformation.

The Politics of Silence, Voice and the In-Between: Exploring Gender, Race and Insecurity from the Margins seeks to dismantle the deficit discourses generated through research about people as agency-less and, by extension, objects of study. The book argues that, regardless of marginalisation, people create spaces of liminality where they seek control over their lives by navigating the structures that exclude them. Challenging the false binary of silence as violence and voice as power, the book introduces the idea of an in-between ‘liminal space’ which is created by people to navigate conditions of oppression and move towards a politically stable and inclusive world. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of gender studies, international development, peace and conflict studies, politics and international relations, sociology and media studies. It will be an important resource for courses incorporating gender, feminist and postcolonial perspectives.

In marked contrast to literary, historical and cultural studies, there has been a limited engagement with the concepts and politics of trauma by political science and peacebuilding research. This book explores the debate on trauma and peacebuilding and presents the challenges for democratization that the politics of trauma present in transitional periods. It demonstrates how ideas about reconciliation are filtered through ideological lenses and become new ways of articulating communal and ethno-nationalist sentiments. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Iris Marion Young and with specific reference to the Northern Irish transition, it argues for a shift in focus from the representation of trauma towards its reception and calls for a more substantive approach to the study of democracy and post-conflict peacebuilding. This text will be of interest to scholars and students of peace and conflict studies, ethnic and nationalism studies, transitional justice studies, gender studies, Irish politics, nationalism and ethnicity.

Drawing vibrant connections between the colonization of whole nations, the health of the mountainsides and the abuse of individual women, children and men, Medicine Stories offers the paradigm of integrity as a political model to people who hunger for a world of justice, health and love.

This study compares the policies and attitudes toward the health consequences of World War II in eleven European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, East Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and West Germany. It shows the remarkably asynchronous development in these countries of health care financing and treatment for war survivors, and of the patients’ perception of their own health. Using an innovative and multidisciplinary approach, Withuis and Mooij analyze postwar health care in the context of the European political climate at that time.

Colin Palmer, one of the foremost chroniclers of twentieth-century British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, here tells the story of British Guiana's struggle for independence. At the center of the story is Cheddi Jagan, who was the colony's first premier following the institution of universal adult suffrage in 1953. Informed by the first use of many British, U.S., and Guyanese archival sources, Palmer's work details Jagan's rise and fall, from his initial electoral victory in the spring of 1953 to the aftermath of the British-orchestrated coup d'etat that led to the suspension of the constitution and the removal of Jagan's independence-minded administration. Jagan's political odyssey continued--he was reelected to the premiership in 1957--but in 1964 he fell out of power again under pressure from Guianese, British, and U.S. officials suspicious of Marxist influences on the People's Progressive Party, founded in 1950 by Jagan and his activist wife, Janet Rosenberg. But Jagan's political life was not over--after decades in the opposition, he became Guyana's president in 1992. Subtly analyzing the actual role of Marxism in Caribbean anticolonial struggles and bringing the larger story of Caribbean colonialism into view, Palmer examines the often malevolent roles played by leaders at home and abroad and shows how violence, police corruption, political chicanery, racial politics, and poor leadership delayed Guyana's independence until 1966, scarring the body politic in the process.