Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men by Élise Féron

Author:Élise Féron
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786609311
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2018-09-14T12:37:21+00:00

115Chapter 5

The Elusiveness of Narratives on

Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men

When wartime sexual violence against men is evoked in the media, it is often through a discourse of exceptionality, of novelty, as if it was a new problem that had just been discovered. It also frequently builds on a narrative of endless horror, related to some places embodying war’s savagery and backwardness in Western imaginary, such as Eastern Congo, for instance: “Another growing problem: men raping men” (Gettleman 2009; see also Vandecasteele 2011). As we have seen, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists have long documented this practice, with examples from all around the world, from ancient times to contemporary warfare. So why do we seem to rediscover it each time a related story is published in a major newspaper, or broadcasted on television? A few NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières (2009) also present some male survivors’ stories now and then, but their scattered accounts are in general based on just a few personal testimonies, which contribute to presenting the issue as dramatic, but also as sporadic. In other words, cases of sexual violence against men are most of the time featured like exceptional occurrences that do not really fit in the grand narrative on wartime sexual violence. As such, they are dismissed as anecdotal, and useless for helping us making sense of the greater picture.

Narratives on international politics are woven in such a way that gender issues, and women, are most of the time made invisible, while men’s and masculinities’ omnipresence in international scripts is normalized and almost never critically scrutinized (Sjoberg 2013; Hutchings 2008). But discourses on wartime sexual violence constitute an exception with regards to the general invisibility of women and gender in international politics. In this area of study, femininity works as a common sense, as an implicit explanation, which is mapped against models of hegemonic, dominant, hyper-violent and militarized masculinity that put the stress on power and force as masculine 116traits. Such a script is not, per se, in contradiction with the recognition of the existence of male perpetrators of sexual violence against men, as it is built around associations between femininity and vulnerability, and masculinity and aggression. However, this general narrative leaves no space for acknowledging male vulnerability, especially in military settings, and for recognizing the existence of male survivors and of sexual violence against men in general. This is a major shortcoming that feminist studies have a duty to engage with since, as Detraz (2012, 11) argues, “feminist security studies concentrate on the ways world politics can contribute to the insecurity of individuals, especially individuals who are marginalized and disempowered”. In that perspective, there is no doubt that more attention should be paid to male survivors of wartime sexual violence.

Fortunately, some major cracks have recently begun to appear in the rather simplistic understandings of wartime sexual violence that have been circulating during the past decades. Scholars and experts working on wartime sexual violence have started taking stock of advances in masculinity studies, highlighting diversities and hierarchies

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.