How to think about the instrumental politics of mass rape: A critical appraisal of feminist approaches
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19 juillet 2024
- handle: 10670/1.217rfa
- halshs: halshs-04659264
- doi: 10.1080/13642987.2024.2377753
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info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1080/13642987.2024.2377753
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Criminal assault (Rape) Assault, Sexual Assault, Criminal (Rape) Nonconsensual sexual intercourse Sexual assaultCiter ce document
Albert Doja, « How to think about the instrumental politics of mass rape: A critical appraisal of feminist approaches », HAL-SHS : études de genres, ID : 10.1080/13642987.2024.2377753
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Mass rape and other forms of sexual violence in ethnic conflict, as their incidence in Bosnian and Kosovo wars in former Yugoslavia showed in the 1990s, cannot be relativised along some strategy of either ‘victimization’ or ‘everyone is guilty’ within an antiquated framework of ethnic-religious hatred. In this case as in others, the local notions of honour and blood cannot be taken uncritically to be binding cultural traits that ought to determine social behaviour. Incidentally, they cannot either account for a structured ideology of ‘men’s war against women’, or for a postmodern feminist ideology of gender and the moral panic of a ‘patriarchal dream-order’ restored. In this article, I offer a critical appraisal of the stereotyped and relativising accounts of feminist and human rights scholars, a critique very much needed for an anthropological approach attentive to cultural ideology and activism. To understand the effectiveness of mass rape in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing, I suggest local cultural concepts and moral relativist ideas are not culturally given, but instrumental resources deliberately mobilised.