Gender and Civilian Victimization in War by Jessica L Peet

Author:Jessica L Peet [Peet, Jessica L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, General, Political Science, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781315265957
Google: 6BTADwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52889141
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Gender, rape, and signification to the Soviet Union

What it meant to have German women raped was not lost on the Soviet Union, nor was the importance of the gender significations of the ‘Rape of Berlin’ back home. This subsection addresses both briefly.

First, the Soviet Union was aware of the gendered significations that the sexual violence toward German civilian women would have. The Soviet leadership was aware in two ways. It was aware of a general nexus between gender/state/nation, which attaches the reproduction of the state to its female/feminine citizens and links nationalism to the protection and propagation of the female population. We discussed this general relationship in Chapter 2 and demonstrated that it has played a role in many wars and conflicts across time and place. It was in this context that the Soviet Union engaged in acts “of violent sexual domination intended to devalue and humiliate the victim,” where the victim was both the individual German woman and what she meant to German men about themselves and about their nation/state (Messerschmidt 2006: 708). It is because of these meanings that “the impact on the conquered of the rape of conquered women was two-fold: it dishonored the women and by implication served as a symbolic castration of their men” (Naimark 1995: 114). The Soviet Union was also aware of the intensification of gender roles in Nazi doctrine and the hypermasculinity of Nazi war propaganda. As such, “women then were also targets of sexual violence because they were viewed as possessions of German men” (Messerschmidt 2006: 709).

Second, the Soviet Union’s perpetration of the ‘Rape of Berlin’ was relational – it had a lot to do with how the Soviet Union related to Nazi Germany, the war, and the future that the Soviet Union saw after the war. But the ‘Rape of Berlin’ was not entirely relational. As Messerschmidt (2006: 708) explains, “the massive rape in Berlin grew out of the newly emerged relationship among nationalism, militarism, and patriarchal masculinity in Stalinist Soviet society.” This patriarchal masculinity, Messerschmidt (2006) details, positioned the masculine Soviet state in a way that not only permitted the feminization of other states/nations but necessitated it for the validation of Soviet masculinity (and therefore statehood). It is for this reason that Messerschmidt (2006: 707) characterizes the “massive Berlin rape” as “a masculine strategy” both generally and “in the context of that war.” In this way, the ‘Rape of Berlin’ not only attacked Nazi Germany in a gendered way but also bolstered the Soviet Union in mirror image.

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