PPT Presentation by Katherine Ellis, “Deconstructing Masculine (Will)power through French Medical Models of Trauma (1914-1919)”, ((LSL Session: (In)Visibility: Language, Ideology, and Power)
ABSTRACT
Since the Enlightenment, willpower in dominant Western societies has emblematized consciousness, civilization, and masculinity, opposite which marginalized identities, like femininity and indigeneity, are conceptualized as emotional, impulsive–animalistic. Prevailing 21st-century social narratives continue to teach Western masculine exceptionalism in terms of self-control discursively denied to female and colonized bodies. Still, willpower is not yet widely recognized, informally or academically, as a racialized, gendered concept that is as prejudicial as it is socially constructed. In this paper, I contribute to the destabilization of colonial, patriarchal ways of knowing through a deep-dive into a case study on the modern medicalization of willpower: I interrogate French medical models of male health and psychological trauma during World War I, a seminal period in the history of Western science that continues to shape the
trajectory of disciplines like psychiatry today. Despite this far-reaching legacy, scholars have not yet explored how World War I experts’ foundational work consolidated masculinist values into an established scientific knowledge base without explicit reference to sex or gender. In this intervention, I employ close reading to trace linguistic themes in influential World War I French medical journal publications, which constituted an international forum through which experts could share findings and educate colleagues and students on recent discoveries. I excavate the language of a gendered dichotomy between la volonté (willpower) and l’automatisme, demonstrating the centrality of the former to notions of identity, control, and rationality in dominant models of psychological health. I show that, in contrast, French experts conceptualized trauma as pathological automatisme, or the ‘unnatural’ over-empowerment of emotions, bodily functions like muscular reflexes, and the ‘irrational’ imagination, historically associated with non-human animals and femaleness. This novel linguistic analysis establishes historical frameworks to facilitate the interrogation of interrelated dominant Western knowledge systems in modern science, medicine, and education.