Feminist Thought

Genocide’s Sexuality

Based on MacKinnon, Chpt. 22, in Are Women Human?

Kate Holt’s photography

Examples of Sexual Atrocities in Genocide

Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Rwanda

Help for Bosnian Women

Foundation Rwanda

What is sex DOING in the genocide?

i.e., what is its genocidal purpose, function?

How does it work to destroy a people?

Under law, genocidal acts must:

“be undertaken with the intent to destroy a racial, ethnic, religious or national group ‘as such’ (210).”

Further, individual perpetrators NEED NOT know why sexual means are being employed

Important why?

Generally, INTENT is a crucial component of committing a crime

Bosnian atrocities

CONTEXT is important

“exposed after a historical period in which rape had been publicly reframed as a political outrage to women, supporting disclosure. One could say the world came to comprehend that the Serbian campaign was genocidal (as opposed to civil war) through understanding that the rapes in it were real and were being systematically directed against non-Serbian women. Most distinctively, sexuality, including forced sex and forced pregnancy, became conscious, organized weapons of a genocidal policy” (211-212).

Contrast with Nazism

Officiall, regime “anti-sex”

Puritanical

But obsession with racial purity

“Aryan” stock

Lebensborn

Actually rape WAS an integral part of Hitler’s Europe/occupation

Jewish women kept/used as sexual slaves

Polish/Russian/French/Norwegian women captured/impregnated

Children allowed to live if deemed racially pure

Why don’t we know this?

Difference between genocidal rape and other rapes that occur in war, e.g. the rape of Nanking, or rapes of German women by invading Russian soldiers at end of WWII

Not the intent to destroy

See p. 221

“every woman pregnant with the child of an attacking group is prevented from conceiving a child of other biological heritage”

basis of the Akeysu decision on Rwanda

Women as a group

MacKinnon argues that sexual abuse/violence

Both constitutes and destroys women

AS A GROUP (224-229)

Rape, sexual harassment, pornography, prostitution: hate crimes

They happen to women

**because they are women

Yet not legally acknowledged “as such”

Note differences in language/tone of

CERD vs. CEDAW (in Intro, 10-11)

Despite these differences,

MacKinnon is optimistic about international law, globalization creating new possibilities for gender justice

New stance on gender equality:

substantive equality; recognition of women’s position as a group

Sexism/misogyny as global (232)