Malich, L. (2018). Wounds and Dirt: Gendered Metaphors in the Cultural History of Trauma. In A. Maercker, E. Heim, & L. J. Kirmayer (Eds.), Cultural Clinical Psychology and PTSD (p. 109-124). Göttingen, Boston: Hogrefe. 1 Wounds and Dirt: Gendered Metaphors in the Cultural History of Trauma Lisa Malich In this chapter, I will discuss gendered dimensions of metaphors of trauma in Western cultures. For this purpose, the text will start with a historical analysis of the Western concept of trauma and of the dominant metaphor of the wound. Drawing on popular, medical and psychological discourses, I will argue that metaphors of trauma have always been gendered. While at the beginning of the 20th century, most of the people diagnosed with traumatic symptoms were male and the notion of trauma was situated in a masculine context, many of the affected patients were stigmatized and symbolically feminized. This changed in the 1980s, when a normalization of trauma took place. Trauma has now become a more gender-neutral diagnosis and persons affected by traumatic experiences are occasionally even symbolically masculinized. The final section of the article will complicate this gendered history. While it is true that trauma has become a more neutral category, there is a specific gendered dimension to it: events such as sexual violence, rape and child abuse are still coded as feminine. In this context, the notion of “the wound” is not the only powerful metaphor for catastrophic experiences, but the notion of “contamination” and “dirt” is also prevalent. Introduction Responses to tragic life events are influenced by the culture in which a person lives. This is especially the case in regard to experiences and suffering that we call “trauma” today. Cultures provide a rich array of expressions, terms, symbols and metaphors that interact with personal experiences. In Western societies, the response to catastrophic experiences often entails a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the common understanding as “trauma”. Originating from the Greek word for “wound”, the term “trauma” also contains the metaphor of an “invisible wound”. But cultures differ not only among each other, but also within each other: They form heterogeneous subgroups, they engage in negotiations over cultural hegemony and they distinguish people within social categories, such as race, class or gender. Moreover, cultures change and are shaped by historical processes. Focusing only on the Western culture (Europe and North America), I will trace the historical transformations of trauma-concepts in regard to gender as one of the most powerful social categories. This is because a richer view of the gendered history of trauma promises not only to help us better understand our own modern notion of trauma, but also to open up new perspectives in the cultural clinical psychology of PTSD. For this purpose, I suggest to combine the new approach to culturally sensitive PTSD research proposed by Maercker and Heim (2016) with perspectives from cultural history and gender studies. Despite many conceptual differences, these approaches share at least three common aspects: 1) Referring to the social-interpersonal framework model of PTSD (Maercker & Horn, 2013), Maercker and Heim stress culture and society as the major mediators of responses to traumatic stressors both on the individual and relational level. This