Abstract
When feminists and activists tackle the gendered dynamics of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and contemporary armed conflict, it seems safe to assume that their analyses and interventions are rooted in solidarity with the victims and survivors, in a desire to understand in order to contribute to the eradication of such violence and suffering. Yet some feminist or women-centered positions have sparked serious anxiety and anger among women war survivors and their advocates, rifts in feminist alliances, as well as disturbing political and material consequences for survivors and for the wider societies in which they live. The very collective nature of genocide and ethnicized violence makes them resistant to feminist critique – to scrutiny of the ways in which (ethno-) national collectivities create, and mask, power hierarchies within purported unity (McClintock, 1993). This has been and continues to be the case for Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) and the rest of what was once Yugoslavia, some examples of which I analyzed in my recent book on women’s activism after the Bosnian war (Helms, 2013). This essay is a reflection on some of the issues and challenges for feminist scholarship and activism that emerge out of critical study of gendered war violence and the politics of collective ethnic and gender victimhood in a postwar setting. In the spirit of this Open Forum, it is meant as a platform for discussion about how to balance feminist critique of the women-as-victims paradigm with support for victims and survivors and acknowledgment of atrocities committed in the name of ethnic collectivities.
Opposition to the masculinist logics of war and nationalism and a concern for how such mechanisms impact women have compelled many researchers, activists, and NGO donors to focus attention and resources on women war victims and projects established to aid women in postwar societies, BiH being no exception. Such efforts are certainly a first step in breaking down the gendered hierarchies upon which contemporary geopolitics and patterns of violence are based. It is a sort of feminist common sense: women victims of war, especially survivors of sexualized violence, expose the cruelty and brutality of patriarchal systems based on violence and conflict. If women are by and large not among those who set wars into motion or carry out atrocities, the fact of their victimization, especially when they are targeted as women in patriarchally organized cultural groups, provides feminists with the firm ground from which to denounce the whole complex of practices and ideologies that harm women, often in devastating ways. Sentiments like these have underlain many well-intentioned and potentially useful recent efforts such as initiatives to decrease sexualized and gender-based violence through UN resolutions, changes in peacekeeping force practices, or the high-profile initiative of former UK foreign minister William Hague and the film star Angelina Jolie aimed at decreasing sexualized violence against women in armed conflict. And of course these developments are much preferable to silence and ignorance. But as some feminist critics have pointed out, such initiatives too often keep intact the simplified and naturalized notion of women as victims and men as perpetrators, even when the clear-cut delineations between war and peace are replaced with more expansive notions of war atrocities as part of a continuum of violence against women (e.g. Cockburn, 2004).
In my research with women’s activists in postwar BiH, I aimed to account for the fact that women also supported and support divisive nationalist ideologies, corrupt politics, and the manipulation of religion to buttress the power of particular social groups; women were also capable of perpetrating or supporting war violence, while many men were the victims of forced mobilization, sex selective killings, detention and torture in camps, as well as sexualized violence as a tool of ethnic cleansing. Ultimately, women and men were caught up in the same patriarchal gender regime that greatly affected their experiences in war as well as its aftermath. They also did not think of themselves as removed from the world of the opposite sex; their lives were understood as deeply intertwined through kinship and community, even as gender difference was all too often naturalized and reified. In other words, I approached gendered realities as a complex system that cuts across class, ethnic, rural/urban, and other divides, rather than look simply at ‘women’ as victims of ‘men.’ This is far from a novel approach in feminist research if we think in terms of intersectionality, but in many ways feminist scholarship and activism around war have been much more resistant to breaking up the all-encompassing dichotomy of ‘men’ and ‘women.’ Feminist accounts of war in the former Yugoslavia have been an exception in the sense that ethnic difference has been a major axis of analysis, but in some incarnations this has threatened to overtake gender optics altogether (see accounts in Benderly, 1997; Miškovska Kajevska, 2014). Here I refer to arguments for ‘genocidal rape’ and forced pregnancy which some feminists have insisted be classified and prosecuted as a separate category of war atrocity. These classifications privilege ethnic specificity, taking patriarchal gender and sexuality regimes for granted (for critique see e.g. Buss, 2009; Helms, 2013; Kesić, 1994; Žarkov, 2007). Even outside this specifically nation-centered approach, however, most women’s activism in the region, like the mainstream political discourses it nominally opposes, has operated within clear dichotomies of victims and perpetrators designated by both ethnicity and sex: in relation to BiH, victims have been understood to be Bosniak women and the perpetrators Serb men. 1
I met many women activists during my research – including self-declared feminists in a place where this is often a ‘dirty word’ – with a more sophisticated take on gender relations than a blanket ‘men’ oppressing ‘women’ or even particular (ethnicized) ‘men’ oppressing particular (ethnicized) ‘women.’ Yet when it came to the strategic representations they deployed in public fora, I found a strong reliance on discourses of collective female victimhood and non-complicity in arenas like nationalism, war, and politics – the mechanisms of power that have caused such suffering and frustration in recent years. And while it is easy to recognize the utility for activism of such positions and the moral claims they enable, it is more difficult to deal with the flip-side of this kind of stance, that it is men as a collective who are the perpetrators, oppressors, and criminals. Of course no one would argue that particular disenfranchised males – the war wounded, unemployed workers, war orphans, and the like – are responsible for the miserable condition of many women in postwar BiH, but neither are such men typically depicted as being disadvantaged as men the way women as a group are frequently represented. The complexities of life during and after the Bosnian war clearly show that we need to approach the war violence, nationalist politics, and the bleak postwar economic landscape through the lens of gendered power that poses different opportunities and constraints for men and women in different social positions.
The implications of such an approach, however, seem to be particularly difficult for some of the very people that feminist critics like myself would want to support. Victims and survivors of the war violence, for example, are often unnerved by criticism that exposes how narratives of collective victimhood adhere to similar gender ideologies as those that drove the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide. From the perspective of both the perpetrators and the victim groups, women and their sexuality are viewed through their relationship to the nation’s men and, symbolically, to the (male-defined) nation itself. An attack, especially the rape, of a nation’s women is thus not seen as ‘merely’ one of physical torture but as an attack on the virtue and integrity of the nation, following the logic that feminist critiques have made abundantly clear (e.g. Peterson, 1999; Yuval-Davis, 1997; Žarkov, 2007). Sexualized violence against men in war – of which a consistent pattern was also documented in the Bosnian war – does not tend to serve the same function as a symbol of national suffering (see Žarkov, 2001). Likewise, it is the surviving family members, under the collective designation as the women or mothers of Srebrenica, rather than the thousands of Bosniak men who were killed during the fall of the wartime enclave, that stand as the symbols of genocide there. But to point to these gendered differences for many people disturbs set narratives of victims and perpetrators, of ethno-national essence, and of the collective righteousness of victim groups, whether in this case we refer to Bosniaks or Bosnians as supporters of a multi-ethnic Bosnian state (which was also opposed by Serb and Croat nationalists). Paying attention to gender and gendered power means dismantling the conventional assumptions about who are the actors – the fighters and legitimate targets – and who are the acted upon civilians and ‘innocent victims.’ Why does it matter whether the men murdered at Srebrenica were soldiers or civilians? Were the men detained in camps, some of them sexually tortured, somehow less worthy of being seen as heroes of the nation than the men who fought on the front lines? It also means acknowledging power differentials among groups in whose name militaries attack as well as groups that are attacked. But since classifications of victims more readily divide the disenfranchised into more and less deserving according to sex and ethnic categories than by objective need, the resources and social recognition will be different for, for example, a survivor of sexualized violence, depending on whether that person is male or female, Bosniak or Serb, of urban or rural background, and so on.
In this way, the fairly straightforward feminist logic of cultural inquiry can lead not only to the kind of complexity that allows us to see the particular gendered suffering of women and to advocate on their behalf, but also to an analysis that exposes the victimization of men as gendered beings. It can also lead to complications in the very process of war crimes classification. For example, the legal judgment that established the designation of the Srebrenica killings as genocide, for example, was argued on the basis of specific, ethnicized gender practices of the victimized community – their ‘patriarchal society’ – rather than through the sheer numbers of the dead and the manner of their execution (see Helms, 2012; 2013: 71–72). In the notorious ‘Foča’ case where sexualized violence made up the core of the prosecutions for the first time in an international war crimes tribunal, due to the total subjugation of the Bosniak population there by Serb forces, a Bosniak female in sexual contact with a Bosnian Serb man was by definition classified as rape. However, as Karen Engle points out (2008: 954–956), the trial also revealed a considerable area of murkiness as the prosecution and defense drew different conclusions from the fact that there had clearly also been consensual sexual relations between one Bosniak woman and a Serb man in this context. That this was a point of contention reveals the extent to which female (sexual) agency is often assumed to be incompatible with women’s status as victims (see also Buss, 2009; Engle, 2005).
I have laid out elsewhere how, precisely because suggestions of (sexual) agency are too often taken as evidence that undermines a victim’s very victimhood, attention to gendered behavior in war can and has led to war victims feeling that their sense of legitimacy as innocent victims was being threatened, as illustrated by the controversy over the filming of Angelina Jolie’s feature about wartime rape in the Bosnian war (Helms, 2013: 216–224; 2014). Some years before, in another example, a group of Bosnian activists who had lived through the war and identified as members of the community that had been attacked and victimized by Serb or Croat separatist nationalists, reacted with outrage at the suggestion that the mass rapes committed by Serb forces may not have been ordered from above as a specific war strategy but as the result of a tacit consensus based on shared cultural principles that this would be an effective tool of ethnic cleansing or genocide. The activists declared emotionally that such a suggestion would be to equate the victims with the perpetrators and refused to engage in a debate (Helms, 2013: 155–157).
But it has not been only war survivors who have shown outrage over certain feminist critiques. Olivera Simić has written about the assumptions she has encountered from academic feminists about her as a war (rape) victim based on her being a woman from Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as the discomfort and challenges she got from audiences when she spoke about Bosnian women as sexual agents engaging in consensual sex during wartime (Simić, 2012). When I have presented my research, members of audiences on a few occasions have similarly expressed concern that my critiques would call into question the victimhood status of the women who had survived the war atrocities I was discussing. In one case, a woman in the audience quite angrily reasserted several notions I had been critiquing, including the idea that women were the biggest victims of modern wars, even while listing as part of their suffering the loss of male family members. When I questioned how we determine who are victims or legitimate targets in war and suggested that the male kin she had mentioned were also victims of war if they had been killed, my interlocutor quipped back that those men were dead – ‘what did they care?’ I can only speculate about this audience member’s motivations, but perhaps she had expected to come to a straightforward lecture about how women suffer unjustly in war and what is being done to help them. Perhaps her sense of purpose as an advocate for women war victims or survivors of violence in other forms had been shaken. Maybe she held men collectively responsible for the violence that victimized women. Whatever the reason, she clearly was not willing to move from or complicate the women-as-victims paradigm.
Throughout this research, I have been aware that these are tricky paths to tread. As I have argued, it is precisely because of the moral unassailability of collective victim narratives – whether on the basis of gender or ethnicity – that criticism of their logics gets conflated with dismissal of the facts upon which they are based. I have made careful efforts to situate my critique of the patriarchal assumptions behind victimhood narratives within the same framework of feminist critique of nationalist mobilizations that produce war violence, (re)traditionalization, and the political misuse of religion in profoundly patriarchal ways. I maintain that concern for victims and survivors, campaigns to recognize and right the injustices of violence and political abuses, and attention to the specifically gendered forms of suffering and marginalization of women are not at all incompatible with a critical view of collective identity and victimhood; such critique does not negate the realities of injustice and suffering but instead helps us to understand better how these very gendered processes work and thus how to combat them. I find this crucially important, not only for scholarly understanding but also for initiatives that aim to combat gender-based violence and discrimination in both ‘war’ and ‘peace.’
Given some of the instances recounted above, however, I am frankly somewhat terrified of rejection by the very people whose cause I aim to support with my work. I do not expect war survivors to accept my or others’ scholarly critiques or even engage with them; many of them are understandably preoccupied with immediate issues of survival. Many activists, too, for personal, practical, and even financial reasons (for those dependent on NGO funding), remain invested in approaches that stress exclusively female and often also ethno-national victimhood. And all would-be critics must contend with the real possibility that public critique of such nature would incur harsh denunciations and accusations of undermining the Bosniak or Bosnian cause, disrespecting the victims, or even of denying the atrocities of war and genocide. For these reasons, some colleagues familiar with the context have been skeptical that a dialogue about gendered power hierarchies in both war and the memory practices of its aftermath might be initiated among feminists and war survivor advocates in BiH and the rest of the former Yugoslav space. Indeed, so far there has not been much visible movement in this direction. But there are pockets of such critique among activists and academics in the region (including some of my skeptical colleagues), and there is also the potential for a wide-ranging alternative approach to how we understand the violence of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the example of the feminist Women’s Court initiative, which recently held its first tribunal in Sarajevo. 2 While it is too early to draw conclusions, from my participation in this event I do see potential there for the kind of critique I am advocating but also a sadly familiar reliance across the region’s activists on established narratives of female victimhood. However, it has ‘only’ been 20 years since the end of the Bosnian war. Given the time it has taken for feminist critique and dialogue to emerge after other instances of genocide and ethnicized war violence around the world and the controversies that continue to be worked out in activist, academic, and political circles in relation to those contexts, I will not give up hope yet. Instead, I look forward to following and being part of an unfolding dialogue.