The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory » (New Edition)

Lori Amy is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Linguistics and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgia Southern University.

By combining personal memoir and critical analysis, Lori Amy links the violence we live in our homes to the violence that structures our larger culture. The Wars We Inherit brings insights from memory and trauma studies to the story of violence in the author's own family.

In this brave, fascinating, and compelling book, Amy confronts the brutality associated with the military. She explores how this institution of public, cultural violence with its hypermasculinity spills over, imbuing society with physical, verbal, emotional, and sexual aggression. Her portrait of her war-veteran father conveys the chaotic and dehumanizing impact of war, illustrating how families experience and remember violence.

Amy contends that "if we can begin, in our own lives, to transform the destructive ways that we have been shaped by violence, then we might begin to transform, the cultural conditions that breed violence".

Publishers Weekly

In 1982, when she was 18, Amy's father, a former career army man, left their family for his niece, after years of physical and verbal violence and sexualizing his daughters. Amy now breaks her silence to scrutinize family violence and teach methods for dealing with it. Drawing on sociology and neuroscience as well as anecdotal evidence, Amy, director of Georgia State University's Women's and Gender Studies Program, creates a memoir centered on her family's dysfunction, evolving into a detailed study of military "hypermasculinity," which builds soldiers by stripping away humanity. This learned violence, she says, migrates from the adrenaline-soaked battlefield to the home, recreating the military cycle of control and abuse. Further, it pervades our culture, forming an "ego-ideal for ordinary boys" (though her statement that domestic violence is three times higher in military than civilian families seems to contradict this). Equally damaging is this system's encouraging silence from women trying to remain loyal to their men and country. Not everyone will buy Amy's theories, but she helps expose abuse she says is often hidden by the careful performances of both victims and abusers. (July)

Acknowledgments ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Frank and Sally 11

3 The Hole Things Fall Into 27

4 Forgetting and Re-membering 35

Interlude I On the Event without a Witness 45

5 Re-membering II 51

Interlude II On Bearing Witness 61

6 If I Should Die before I Wake 71

Interlude III On Bearing Witness to the Process of Witnessing 83

7 The Pasts We Repeat I: Margaret 87

Interlude IV The Uncanny Return 93

8 The Pasts We Repeat II: Jenny 95

9 If Our First Language Is the Silence of Complicity, How Do We Learn to Speak? 105

10 The Work of War 119

Interlude V On the Violence of Nations in the Violence of Homes 141

11 Toward Re-membering a Future 155

12 The Work of Love 169

13 Conclusion 179

References 191

Web Sites 195

Index 197