WEAPONS OF SEX, WEAPONS OF WAR

Abstract

Recent international attention has focused on designations of rape and sexual violence in conflict zones. The most formative debates on this issue centre on the 1990s-era conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which also involved heated debates amongst feminists over designations of rape as genocide. While the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda case, the Prosecutor v. Akayesu, resulted in the first formal charge of wartime rape as genocide within international criminal law, the first case to charge wartime rape as genocidal occurred in US federal court. This project looks for the overarching social and political meaning of the contemporary international legal focus on rape and sexual violence. It examines why, how, and to what extent US and transnational feminist legal academics and activists transmitted and secured their understandings of the relationships between sex, violence and ethno-religious difference within the international legal arena. In doing so, I argue that their participation in the contemporary recognition and narration of sexual injury in a global context both retreads and reconfigures the heated 1980s-era US Sex Wars debates on the workings of gender, sex, race and power.

Keywords:

• rape
• U.S. feminism
• race
• genocide
• Sex Wars
• armed conflict

Acknowledgements

I thank the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and the Center for Gender Excellence at Linköping University for fostering this work.

Notes

1. The US Sex Wars was a series of bitter political and culture battles over issues of sexuality that often touched on the relationship between sex, gender, and violence. Controversies raged within feminist and broader US culture over the regulation of pornography, the scope of legal protections for gay people, the funding of allegedly obscene art, the contents of safe-sex education, and more (Duggan and Hunter 1995, p. 1).

2. UN Doc. S/RES/827 (25 May 1993).

3. UN Doc. S/RES/955 (8 November 1994).

4. For an account of the institutionalization of NGOs within international law and policy, see Buss and Herman (2003).

5. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnic, racial or religious group’. Genocidal acts as enumerated include ‘killing members of the group’; ‘causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members’; and ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. The convention also defines genocide as a form of reproductive violence, including acts that ‘impos[e] measures intended to prevent births within the group’ and the ‘forcib[le] transfe[r] of children of the group to another group’.