Abstract
One of the most significant contributions of Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence edited by Ayşe Gül Altinay and Andrea Petö is to shape the contours of a feminist account of war, political violence, and genocide. What does a feminist account of war, political violence and genocide do? What kinds of questions does it ask? What does it offer? The cases analyzed in this volume span the globe and an array of time periods, from the Italian and Spanish civil wars to military regimes in Turkey and Greece, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to contemporary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, the book furthers understanding of the experiences of women, substantiates the complicated influence of gender issues and pressures, and offers insight into the causes and consequences of political instability, violence and genocide. Each of the chapters enriches the historical narrative about specific events. This review will focus on the broader contributions this volume makes and the questions it provokes.
First, this book contributes to the feminist project of unsilencing women’s experiences by considering their roles as victims, agents, and perpetrators of war, genocide, and political violence. Part I of the book focuses on sexual violence. This section draws attention to cases of sexual violence that have often been ignored and silenced, and considers the ways in which gender has shaped strategic and political narratives about these crimes. Many of the cases detail horrific violence experienced by women simply because they were women. For victims of war whose stories have not been heard, this volume can offer something verging on accountability, even if the time for full accountability has passed or never even existed in the first place. These chapters challenge the denials of sexual violence by all sides to a conflict, and explore why this silence has been maintained by courts, historians, and even women’s organizations and human rights groups.
Second, this volume documents the many ways women, including victims of violence, exercise agency. This book highlights the bravery of women facing torture and execution, and the way they remained agents and shapers of their lives, perceptions, and memories. Although stories of male bravery can be found in canonical texts on war, and on street corner after street corner of monuments, silence abounds with respect to female bravery. This book challenges the association of female with weakness, appeasement, and timidity in the face of oppression and political violence. In Katerina Stefatos’s account of the sexual violence of female political dissidents during the Greek military dictatorship (Chapter 3), one female detainee wrote, ‘I am not afraid of the perverted executioners … as long as they come, I am ready’ (p. 79). In another vivid account, after a torturer led the detainee’s mother into the interrogation room, she told him, ‘you’re wrong to think that will coerce me to sign a declaration of repentance’ (p. 79).
Part II of the book, which deals with the gendered memories of women’s active participation in militaries and resistance moments, also counters gendered stereotypes about women’s participation in war. The rich analysis of this section draws upon testimonies and interviews with soldiers and fighters to show how women and men creatively respond to a range of gendered incentives, consequences, and expectations. This section, as well as the discussion of women as perpetrators of political violence and genocide, dispels any doubts about women’s capacity to carry out violent acts, or feel patriotic or nationalist fervor. As one former fascist soldier in the Italian civil war mentioned (in Gianluca Schiavo’s Chapter 6), ‘I have always told my former comrades in arms: we were cowards, we ought to have avenged their deaths, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ (p. 140).
A third contribution of this work is to drive home the point that if there is no story being told, it does not mean that there is no story. Quite the contrary, it means that there are at least two: the story, and the story about why there is no story. This book sees the narrative of war, genocide, and political violence as part of conflict, one that is being fought over in order to control the specification of the winners and losers, the good and the bad, and the brave and the cowardly. Yet as many of these chapters show, the only clear losers from this jockeying for control are truth and ourselves, as we move forward and cultivate new political realities, states, and institutions built on what are (at best) half-truths. Part of the bravery of the book is that by challenging the writings of some of the most horrid events of our past, it disrupts ideas being cultivated in the present. Although many seem to hold fast to the idea that the shaping of a state’s identity and of its national project needs to be built upon unambiguous notions of the past – ones that align with gendered binaries concerning victim and perpetrator, and liberator and oppressor – this book complicates these dichotomies and problematizes this agenda.
The exertion of power that leads to silencing is not oppressive in the way oppression tends to be understood. Although there is some discussion in the book of censorship, and authoritative redacting and erasing, the oppression that leads to silencing is more diffuse and actually more powerful because people often do it to themselves. The notion of self-censorship comes up in many chapters of the book, in different countries and time periods. The book offers insightful explanations for this; I’ll mention two here. First, silence is due to a fairly rational calculation of the costs and benefits of speaking out. Often people choose not to speak their truth because of what will happen to them if they do. In Felicia Yap’s chapter on the violence perpetrated against Asian and European women in Japanese-Occupied Territories, an Indonesian girl asked, ‘Will my father have me back?’ after her ordeal of being a ‘comfort woman’ was over. A doctor explained how very few Chinese victims of violence went for treatment at the hospital because ‘they felt so ashamed and disgraced that most of them would rather have died than to have had it known’ (p. 63).
Self-censorship also happens because of what people are prepared to tell themselves, and others about what happened and why. Our mind does not understand the world as it is; instead, we filter according to our pre-existing ideas, and according to what we are prepared to tell ourselves. Note that this is even before the act of communication, which will have its own distorting vulnerabilities. This book does not claim that all memories are false. However, it does imply that when we are having conversations about the past, and especially about war, genocide, and political violence, that we are not re-telling of events as they unfolded, but rather of what we perceive unfolded, and not only that, but what we are prepared to perceive as unfolded.
So ultimately memory is a cognitive exercise affected by one’s sense of self and how this fits in the world. A fourth contribution this volume makes is to upend assumptions and biases that cloud how we understand history, even as historians, researchers, and feminists. By having feminist conversations on war, genocide, and political violence, the socialization of history, of heroes, and victims is altered, and inevitably shapes not only new reality but new ‘selves’ – selves that won’t censor in the same way. New stories alter the calculus of self-censorship, and the selves doing it. Indeed, the editors to this volume, Andrea Petö and Ayşe Gül Altinay, have both had experiences (which they refer to in the book) when their work has offended some colleagues, in part because people have needs that they want to be met with new information. For example, Petö explains how her work acknowledging the sexual violence committed by Red Army liberators (or any liberators for that matter) has been thought to negate or invalidate their ‘role in ending the war’ (p. 4). There are also concerns that work which complicates ideas of the heroes opens up the door for revisionist history about the villains (i.e., if the Red Army was not all-good, were the Nazis not all-bad?)
In some respects, this book comes with a warning: ‘uneasy coalitions’ can often ‘underlie new memory work’ (p. 4). When you take the cap off the bottle and let the stories out, as this book does, new narratives catalyze new political activity and opportunity. Political and ideological groups will either revise their historical understandings, or more often perhaps, work to ensure new accounts cohere with or even strengthen existing narratives and political agendas. Referring to her research on female members of the Arrow Cross party in Hungary, Andrea Petö mentions, ‘the visual representation of female perpetrators might contribute to a further questioning of the anti-fascist framework, and this seems to be too high a price for a feminist work to pay’ (p. 216). One striking photo of a convicted war criminal facing execution due to her involvement with the Arrow Cross has shown up on a far-right website. The photo is of an elderly woman with a cardigan and sensible shoes, flanked by young men preparing for her execution. This website exploits gender norms (‘these young men are killing this poor old lady?’) in order to serve their political agenda: to elicit sympathy for the so-called ‘true patriots’ who have been silenced by the dominant anti-fascist discourse.
I would like to close this review by identifying two questions raised by this work, which suggest directions for further study. The authors included in this work certainly recognize the complications of the unsilencing project – whose voice is filling this silence? And whom does it speak for? On these questions, this book is unambiguous, arguing that intersectionality must be ‘taken seriously’ and ‘both silences and projects of unsilencing need to be contextualized, situated, and examined through critical “feminist curious” lenses’ (p. 11). Yet what are the methodological requirements needed to enable rigorous unsilencing and to address intersectionality? The text does well at discussing the thorny and sensitive issues that unsilencing needs to navigate. Are there methodological guidelines that can be used to help with these issues, and to compensate for and address our biases? Whose testimony is heard and whose is not? Are certain narratives assumed to be more legitimate or representative than others? Why? Many of the articles did not discuss how the authors chose which women (generally) to interview, how many, how they found them, and which narratives and testimonies to include.
Second, and related to this, to what extent should feminist objectives be linked with countering militarism and nationalism, or with peace activism? Is this what feminism does or is? In an earlier volume of this journal, Marianne Hirsch argues ‘we need to develop feminist strategies to combat nationalism and militarism, bringing together scholarly analysis, art, and activism’ (European Journal of Women’s Studies, 22(4), November 2015: 384). In the book being reviewed here, Bürge Abiral (Chapter 4) similarly suggests that only ‘a feminism which simultaneously rejects patriarchy, militarism, and nationalism’ and ‘challenges masculinized and militarized constructions … carries the potential to expose and unsilence past and present experiences of gendered political violence’ (p. 103). At the same time, Abiral recognizes that ‘discourses of militarism and nationalism cannot endure without the cooperation of women’ (p. 103); in other words, women either passively or actively uphold discourses that she believes feminists should challenge. This begs the question: How should feminists respond to the narratives from these women? Can one be a nationalist feminist? A ‘masculinized’ feminist? What about women who support militarist or hawkish agendas, or want to be at the forefront of combat operations or weapons procurement? Should feminists support equal opportunity, pay, promotion and leadership opportunities for these women? The commentary included in Part II offers helpful insights into these questions, and recognizes that they are not far afield from issues of intersectionality. Who decides whether a woman is ‘masculinized’ or enlightened? Or what an authentic feminist voice stands for? When feminism is correlated with broader agendas, a feminist project of unsilencing will not necessarily unsilence all women, or more accurately, it may unsilence women but not in the way they would like (which leads to the question – will their voices really have been heard?) Perhaps this is fine, at least in terms of the objectives of some feminist projects and accounts, but it is an issue worthy of further consideration, and careful debate.
If we are to learn from the past, arguably the most important thing to learn about is the manifestation of human evil: who it harms, why, and how. We cannot do this much-needed learning if there is silence. The war, genocide, and political violence found in today’s world demonstrate that just saying and hoping ‘never again’ is not enough. We need a fuller, more robust, and better-articulated typology of political violence, a more fleshed-out understanding of what we are capable of, and the conditions under which monstrosities occur. Books like this are part of this project of understanding.