School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
ItemDragging History Through the Gutters War Comic Books, Civic Duty & American Popular Memory, 1952-1993( 2022)The Cold War era (1945-1991) coincided with both the emergence and height of war comic books in the United States. Despite significant social, political, and comic industry shifts during this period, war comics remained a consistent presence in American culture. In this thesis, I examine the reasons for war comics’ continued success despite periods during the Cold War when comics were censored for their excessive violence and when military-themed culture declined. I also examine the ways in which these comics’ memorialisation of war contributed to contemporary debates about national identity and civic duty. From the late 1960s, comic creators and readers increasingly debated key issues about war, civic responsibility, and public protest. During this period, I argue that war comics promoted a populist anti-statist rhetoric that maintained the heroic ideal of the American soldier while at the same time reflecting public distrust of government institutions. In contrast to past studies of American war comics that predominantly portray these media as a form of unofficial government propaganda, I contend that war comics offered a space to contest the traditional American war story and ideas about civic duty. In doing so, war comics opened opportunities for seemingly polarised groups in American society, including Vietnam veterans and draft resisters, to form and share new narratives about war that transcended the conservative-liberal political divide of the post-Vietnam War period.
-
ItemSex, Psychiatry and the Cold War: A Transnational History of Homosexual Aversion Therapy, 1948-1981( 2020)Aversion therapy was a method of ‘treatment’ for sexual ‘deviation’ adopted by some psychiatrists and psychologists in the decades following the Second World War. There were several variations of the procedure, but most involved subjecting a patient to nausea or electric shocks while showing them erotically stimulating images in order to de- and re-condition their sexual behaviours. Aversion therapy enjoyed two short but intense waves of clinical experimentation, first in Czechoslovakia (1950-1962), and then in the British world, including Australia (1962-1975). The Sydney psychiatrist Dr Neil McConaghy, a self-declared ‘Marxist’ and himself bisexual, was directly inspired by the Czechoslovakian experiment led by Dr Kurt Freund and promoted the practice in Australia. McConaghy, Freund and some other practitioners of aversion therapy believed themselves to be sympathetic to sexual minorities, rejected the idea that sexual orientation could be changed and supported decriminalisation. How was this possible? The explanation is to be found in the specific context of its emergence: the geopolitical polarisation of the Cold War and a parallel theoretical polarisation within psychological medicine. A behaviourist paradigm based on the ideas of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov gained popularity in contradistinction to Freudian psychoanalytic theories favoured in the United States, and from 1949 was the unofficial doctrine of the Eastern Bloc. As homosexuality became a crucial area for expert research by intelligence and security organisations, technologies of detection and diagnosis turned to behaviourism through emotional observation, visual surveillance, psychometric testing and physiological measurement. In a therapeutic context, the Pavlovian framework was taken up in Western countries by practitioners who sought a more empirical and scientific – and therefore ‘humane’ – approach to clinical practice. Patients, however, did not view the procedure as ‘humane’. Nor did activists in the new social movements for gay and women’s liberation and in 1972 in Australia Neil McConaghy became their number one target. This thesis draws on intelligence documents, medical and psychiatric literature, gay print and radio media, oral history interviews, and a newly discovered archival collection: Neil McConaghy’s personal papers. My research charts shifting understandings of sexual orientation from endocrinological and psychoanalytic theories that were dominant in the first half of the twentieth century, to more emotional and behavioural theories in the post-war period. This shift was accompanied by the development of new technologies of detection and treatment which tied in with post-war modernity’s promotion of scientific and materially efficient machines and methods. My contention is that the influence of Pavlovian ideas in post-war therapeutic approaches to homosexuality can only be understood as part of the transnational Cold War circulation of sexological knowledge. By focusing on the movement of this knowledge from East to West, I hope to contribute to the project of ‘decentering Western sexualities’ (Mizlielinska & Kulpa, 2011) and to emerging scholarship charting the global histories of sexology.
-
ItemChrist and the Cold War: an exploration of the political activism of the Reverends Frank Hartley, Alfred Dickie and Victor James, 1942-1972( 2007)This thesis argues that previous accounts have oversimplified the lives of the Reverends Alf Dickie, Frank Hartley and Victor James, three prominent, Melbourne-based peace activists during the Cold War. They have been seen as fellow-travellers or apologists for the communist-dominated peace movement, at the expense of any consideration of why they were drawn to such a role. A central aim is to demonstrate that a personally derived understanding of religious duty dominated the political activism of these three men. It begins by exploring how the early political and economic crises experienced by each individual shaped a conviction that radical, progressive politics were a true expression of faith. It goes on to show that such beliefs were at first unremarkable in post-war Australia. With the onset of the Cold War, however, opinion turned away from such optimism and left the three clergymen isolated and embattled. This thesis shows that the religious foundations for their political activism fostered a notion of prophetic duty, so that the political shift produced obduracy on their part. Their interpretation of duty left them no room for political compromise or negotiation. The ensuing conflict served to confirm a sense of righteousness born of suffering and to entrench further their dogmatic approach to political questions. It is suggested that Dickie, Hartley and James increasingly adopted a Manichaean interpretation, rooted in theology, of both international and domestic politics. This dualism significantly influenced their interpretation of Cold War crises, combatants and actors, and its ramifications are examined. By merging politics and theology, all three men came to ignore uncomfortable political facts. As well as exploring the disadvantages of their politico-theological rigidity, this thesis also acknowledges its benefits. Methodist and Presbyterian Church reactions to the Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament, held in 1959, are examined and it is demonstrated that by this time the Churches had begun to return to a position of support for the activism of Dickie and Hartley. This change continued into the 1960s, and I show that at the time of Gough Whitlam's 1972 election victory, the political mood of the Churches and society in general returned to meet that of Dickie and Hartley (though not James), which had remained essentially consistent since the end of the Second World War.