Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories

Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence

Ayşe Gül Altınay, Andrea Pető, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Andrea Pető

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317129660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

The Introductionof this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315584225

The twentieth century has been a century of wars, genocides and violent political conflict; a century of militarization and massive destruction. It has simultaneously been a century of feminist creativity and struggle worldwide, witnessing fundamental changes in the conceptions and everyday practices of gender and sexuality. What are some of the connections between these two seemingly disparate characteristics of the past century? And how do collective memories figure into these connections? Exploring the ways in which wars and their memories are gendered, this book contributes to the feminist search for new words and new methods in understanding the intricacies of war and memory. From the Italian and Spanish Civil Wars to military regimes in Turkey and Greece, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to the wars in Abhazia, East Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, the chapters in this book address a rare selection of contexts and geographies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In recent years, feminist scholarship has fundamentally changed the ways in which pasts, particularly violent pasts, have been conceptualized and narrated. Discussing the participation of women in war, sexual violence in times of conflict, the use of visual and dramatic representations in memory research, and the creative challenges to research and writing posed by feminist scholarship, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories will appeal to scholars working at the intersection of military/war, memory, and gender studies, seeking to chart this emerging territory with 'feminist curiosity'.

Part I: Commentary

Andrea Pető

"Disassemble the unthinkable to the unthought":¹ Sexual Viloence Narrated

1 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/22. Thanks to John Roth who first mentioned this poem at the workshop: “Teaching about Rape as a Weapon of War and Genocide” at Campion Hall, Oxford in March, 2014, which he co-organized with Carol Rittner.

“The wreck is a fact./The worst has happened.” This is how Kay Ryan begins her poem, Salvage, describing the aftermath of violence and war. “The salvage trucks/back in and/the salvage men/begin to sort/and stack,” she continues. For a long time “the salvage men” who were mostly in charge of the narrative as “the self-taught salvagers disassemble/ the unthinkable/ to the unthought.” The differentiation between “unthinkable” and “unthought” is particularly useful when introducing the chapters in this section of the book as they are all related to process of speaking about the “unthinkable,” about sexual violence.

Historical periods and political situations can be characterized on the basis of how sexual violence is talked about by contemporaries. The chapters in this section relate to the manner in which feminism initiated and reflected on the processes of unsilencing. The temptation to discuss sexual violence in dichotomies—silence and voice, victim and perpetrator—is difficult to resist.

The chapters in this section go beyond the existing, sometimes dualistic explanatory frames, and they discuss the factors influencing how sexual violence has been talked about in particular historical contexts, focusing on women’s contribution to this painful process. First I would like to discuss the previous narrative frames, in order to point out how the chapters in this section critically reflect on them. This will be followed by a discussion of the temporality and materiality of narrating sexual violence.

The first frame of speaking about sexual violence is that of its normalization as a part of warfare.² For a long time rape was considered to be a “normal” part of warfare under the slogan: “war is war.” When war became an action controlled by international law, a second framework developed which conceptualized rape and sexual violence as consequences of the lack or partial failure of institutional mechanisms and legal sanctions. As part of the feminist framework, the third explanatory frame labels sexual violence as a conscious policy of actors involved in warfare, one that is used to manifest power, whereby sexual violence is considered to be an offence against the community to which the victim belongs. The fourth frame, elaborated within the human rights framework, categorizes sexual violence as a form of torture. These explanatory frames have developed in parallel with discourses on sexual violence and the punishment (or not) of perpetrators. The four frames have different vocabularies, different agendas and different audiences.

2 Andrea Pető, “Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna.” In Life after Death. Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, eds. Dirk Schumann and Richard Bessel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 129–149.

The visibility of sexual violence depends, of course, on the historical period and on historical contexts. Sexual violence has been a part of a repertoire of violence which is used by different actors during military conflicts for the reaffirmation of their victory and to manifest their power. Silence and the silencing of victims (reinforced by shame) have been built-in elements of sexual violence during war time until, in the twentieth century, it started to be instrumentalized for its own purposes.

Bringing sexual violence into the public discourse also has its own temporality. The occupation of Belgium was announced in French newspapers as the “Rape of Belgium,” heralding a new era in speaking about sexual violence: the era of the appropriation of the vocabulary of rape for national purposes and to differentiate between honorable and dishonorable victims of sexual violence. The differentiation leading to clear dichotomies has continued. The act of sexual violence itself creates clear distinctions: there are those who are raping and those who are being raped, and this is narrated in a dichotomy: the dichotomy of visibility and absence. Such dichotomies as victim/perpetrator and silence/narration continue to haunt the language of scholarship and theorizing about the issue of rape.

The second major wave of events which changed the discourse on sexual violence took place during WWII where in different war theatres rape was used as a weapon. The rape of Nanking 1937–1938, the rapes committed by the German soldiers in occupied Europe, and the rapes committed by the Red Army while liberating Eastern Europe all created different forms of silences and international responses. (see the Introduction to this volume).

The second wave of the women’s movement put this issue at the top of its agenda. The goal was to unveil the silences around rape during war time and define the framework of rape as a conscious policy. Women are the most probable victims of sexual violence following the logic of patriarchy, and this statement already determined that sexual violence against men was talked about even less, some even considering that talking about men as victims of sexual violence was a tool to diminish the importance of women as victims. In the dirty wars following WWII, the wars in Algeria, Guatemala, Indonesia and Uganda among others, sexual violence was present, but following the publication of the path-breaking book by Susan Brownmiller, Against our Will, feminist activists started to fight to make sexual violence visible and an issue of public debate. The activist agenda was informed by the wish that if sexual violence were discussed, then there would be fewer rapes and more humiliation for the perpetrators.

Parallel with and linked to these interventions by feminist activists and scholars, the institutional and legal framework was transformed: after the war crimes committed in former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda and due to the intervention of international women’s movements, rape was acknowledged as a war crime.

The first step, making the fact of sexual violence acknowledged as a war crime, is followed by analyzing and dismantling the mechanisms that create the dichotomy of silence and narration. The language of women’s activism has created the grammar of change, influencing how sexual violence is talked about. The Human rights discourse discussed sexual violence committed against women as “honor” crimes even in the 1970s. Changes in the international and transnational organizations, such as the holding of the world conferences on women (Beijing 1995, etc.), together with massive amount data collected, led to the adoption, by the United Nations’ General Assembly, of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993) and the establishment of a UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. This issue, sexual violence during wartime, helped to forge alliances beyond the national context, but it also created a perpetrator vs. victim paradigm, a dichotomy which frames not only the legal framework: men are considered as torture victims; there is no space for them as victims of sexual violence, but it created another dichotomy of understanding. This also does not give consideration to the fact that not all male soldiers are rapists. Men too can be victims of sexual violence, a phenomenon that is important to study, independently from the numbers. Masculinity studies construct hypermasculinity in opposition to those who are not following the imagined directives in their behavior.

There are different frameworks in which rape has been talked about recently: Human Security, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law and International Criminal Law. The human security discourse reinforced efforts for the successful lobbying of different women’s organizations towards the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1325. This framework defines the women/men, victim and perpetrator binary. The human rights discourse speaks about gender based violence, and the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) regulates the position of women.

The identification and analysis of different layers in the mediatization of rape cases has been a recent development in scholarship. The chapters in Part I contribute to the extensive literature on sexual violence, by bringing in new points of view in this area.

The authors aim to contribute to the process of moving beyond the dichotomy of silence and telling, by examining how silences are coded differently depending on who has the power to determine who is an honorab...