MULT10018 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Nudity, Condom, Gynaecology
19 Jun 2018
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Lecture 8: Wartime rape (2)
March 22nd, 2018
Overview: Reviewing
(I) Firstly gender relations and social roles in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH)
before the war and the manipulation of these roles in the lead-up to the
break-up of Yugoslavia and the beginning of the Bosnian war in particular;
then
(II) Look at the ways in which the particular socio-cultural aspects of these
roles contributed to the way in which/the character of rape as a military
strategy and a tool of war in BiH because rape in war, as we’ve seen, is in
every war both contemporary and ancient, but the character, the way that
that rape is used against its victims has differed from context to context
and this is because of the social construction of masculinity and femininity,
male roles and female roles in particular areas around the world; and
(III) Contrasting BiH case study with a couple of other brief examples like
Rwanda in the Holocaust understand how and why rape differs from
context to context and how ideas about the body contribute to that.
When talking about wartime rape, women and girls in particular have a really distinct
place in this logic of destruction. As a 2002 report from UNIFEM (now UN Women):
‘Men and boys as well as women and girls are the victims of this targeting but
women, much more than men, suffer gender-based violence. Their bodies become
a battleground over which opposing forces struggle. Women are raped as a way to
humiliate the men they are related to, who are often forced to watch the assault. In
societies where ethnicity is inherited through the male line, ‘enemy’ women are
forced to miscarry through violent attacks. Women are kidnapped and used as
sexual slaves to service troops ...’ – UNIFEM, 2002
The power associated with mass rape, and its capacity to devastate both the
individual and the collective lies in the symbolic value that’s attached to its primary
victims (women and girls). Within most cultures, to varying degree, women and their
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honor are at the very core of social organization. Much ethnic culture is organized
around the norms and practices related to sexuality, marriage and family, in which
women are centrally positioned as mothers, wives, and daughters. Nira Yuval-Davis
and Floya Anthias in their important work ‘Gender and the Nation’ identified 5 main
ways in which women are engaged in the development of culture and ethnic and
national identities:
• Biological reproducers of ethnic & national groups
• Agents for transmitting national culture & ideology: women, mothers are the
ones who import cultures onto their children, much more so than their fathers
because mothers are the primary caregivers
• Cultural symbols of the ethnic groups & nations: demarcating the
boundaries between us and them, and especially as carriers of the nation or
the ethnic groups’ honour
• National housekeepers: especially in times of war. Women are told to
remain home and to produce the next generation of fighters and to care for
the homefront while men fight at the forefront
• Participants in national economic, political & military struggles
Whereas men’s roles are:
• Workers and actors in the public sphere
• Role models for cultural ideals & national histories
• Protectors of the ethnic/cultural symbols of honour
• Warriors defending the national hearth & home
• Leaders in national economic, political & military struggles
Think back to the second lecture on social construction of gender. These are
necessarily biologically determined roles. They’re not roles that are innately
determined by our DNA because we are born female or because we are born male --
these are ideas about what are men’s and women’s appropriate roles. Within all of
this, the figure of the mother occupies a really important symbolic function, not only
as the bearer of the collective future generation – not only producing children to
ensure that the collective continues, but also as emblem of the national heart and
home. As wives and daughters, women are also perceived as embodying this
familial and cultural honor, so the purity of the family and the community is, in this
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sense, theirs to preserve or theirs to lose. Women shame is the family shame, the
collective disgrace and the nation dishonor. In this sense, women bodies become the
site on which these ethnonational or ethnoreligious honor is either maintained or
transgressed. The woman is an icon of purity, or she’s a symbol of pollution of
communal identity, particularly in time of war. The nation as well, has very often
been likened to the metaphor of a family, if led by a masculine household, in which
both men and women have their natural roles to play.
As Yuval-Davis writes, construction of nationhood involves specific and often-times
very conservative concepts of both manhood and womanhood. The patriotic man --
defender of the family and hegemonic male soldier are both national ideals in the
same way that the mother and the daughter are. The childbearing mother,
reproducer of the nation’s culture is also emblematic of the ideals of womanhood.
The child learning tradition at the mother’s knee or seeking safety in the maternal lap
are both familiar images across much nationalist discourse and they often evoke in
times of crisis to symbolize the spirit of the nation. I’m not just talking about Bosnia
here, or other countries that have fallen victim to war – if you look at Australia even,
not necessarily in times leading to potential warfare, these ideas around women and
men natural roles come into play. In 2008, when global financial crisis hit, there were
also discussions around the fact that Australia has an aging population, and this is a
worry to our current government because we’re not reproducing at a rate that will
replace our current generation. As these older groups continue to age, there will be a
much bigger drain in economy because we have more people seeking pension and
more people needing medical care at the expense of the national purse than we
have people who are able to work and provide taxes and contribute to that. When
this became a real problem in 2008, when we started to see a gain in escalation in
increasing racist views around immigration policy, Peter Castello had a famous
tagline that said women needed to reproduce, they needed to produce 1 for the
mum, 1 for the dad, and 1 for the nation. So, we needed 3 children per nuclear
family, compared to the 1.5 kids we’re having at the moment. That similar idea points
to the fact that it’s considered women’s national responsibility to produce children, to
become reproducers of our national group. There’s a familiar saying in Bosnia,
particularly among the Muslim population, that women are the 3 pillars, or the 3
corners of the home, when men are only 1. The woman raises the children, she
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Document Summary
Firstly gender relations and social roles in bosnia-herzegovina (bih) before the war and the manipulation of these roles in the lead-up to the break-up of yugoslavia and the beginning of the bosnian war in particular; then (ii) Contrasting bih case study with a couple of other brief examples like. Rwanda in the holocaust understand how and why rape differs from context to context and how ideas about the body contribute to that. When talking about wartime rape, women and girls in particular have a really distinct place in this logic of destruction. As a 2002 report from unifem (now un women): Men and boys as well as women and girls are the victims of this targeting but women, much more than men, suffer gender-based violence. Their bodies become a battleground over which opposing forces struggle. Women are raped as a way to humiliate the men they are related to, who are often forced to watch the assault.
