councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 99/06/15/10:09 |
| Hi Katha: While I hate to question the voices of the women interviewed by Ms. Dominique Serrano, her report contains passages such as this: "In Berlenitz, women told of soldiers separating the men from the others. Soldiers wearing masks encircled the young boys and women. The young boys had their throats slit one at a time, but only after their ears and sometimes theirs noses had been cut off. The torturers sharpened their knives in front of the women and terrorized children. They then cut open the stomachs of many pregnant women and skewered the fetus on their blades." (emphasis mine) Are we to take the above without a grain of salt? I attach Ms. Serrano's report here, so that listers may examine it for themselves. In my view, the report is striking in its absence of any information (e.g. the number of the women interviewed, the number of the women raped, medical reports that corroborate the women's testimonies, etc.) other than Ms. Serrano's "synthesis" of tales of rape, abduction, torture, etc. While I do not doubt that rape and other forms of sexual abuse have been used against women during the times of war (as well as 'peace') throughout history, I think it is important for us to remember that tales of rape and sexual torture have been also stuff of war propaganda and racist or chauvinist sensationalism. Good examples include how "Indian captivity narratives" were used to disseminate the racist images of Indian "savagery" and how stories of black rapists were used to whip up lynch-mob hysteria. Throughout the wars in and against Yugoslavia, the mass media and human rights orgs have always concentrated on only one kind of story, as far as rape is concerned: "Serbs are using rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing" and variations thereof, mostly with little evidence. It's as though rape were _only_ committed by Serbian men against non-Serbian women! It's as though no Serbian women were ever raped! It's as though no man ever raped a woman of his own putative ethnic group! Don't feminist theory and activism militate against this 'ethnicization' of rape and erasure of sexism as the cause of rape? Rape has become a legally and internationally recognized _war crime_, only in the sense that _losers alone_ can be accused of it. This, however, doesn't look like a gain for women and feminism, though some feminists probably disagree with me for saying so. Yoshie Hi Katha: Louis Proyect |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho