Rape

Citation:

Ramirez, M. Heliana, and Paul R. Sterzing. 2017. “Coming out in Camouflage: A Queer Theory Perspective on the Strength, Resilience, and Resistance of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Service Members and Veterans.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 29 (1): 68–86. 

Authors: M. Heliana Ramirez, Paul R. Sterzing

Abstract:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) service members have made profound contributions to the U. S. military despite serving under anti-LGBT military policies. Little is known about their everyday acts of strength and resistance, which is vital information for developing strengths-based services. This article utilizes a queer theory framework to (a) discuss LGBT military contributions and anti-LGBT military policies, (b) explore three LGBT-specific military minority stressors, and (c) identify four strategies of strength and resistance used to manage an antiLGBT military environment. Clinical suggestions are proposed for integrating military and LGBT identities and designing interventions that blend military and LGBT cultures.

Keywords: LGBT, military, veteran, strengths-based, resilience, queer theory

Topics: Combatants, Gender, Health, HIV/AIDS, Mental Health, PTSD, Trauma, LGBTQ, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Sexual Violence, Rape Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2017

Citation:

Munro, Brenna. 2016. “Locating ‘Queer’ in Contemporary Writing of Love and War in Nigeria.” Research in African Literatures 47 (2): 121–38.

Author: Brenna Munro

Abstract:

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Child Soldiers, Gender, Men, Boys, LGBTQ, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Non-State Armed Groups, Race, Sexual Violence, Male Perpetrators, Rape, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, SV against Men, Terrorism Regions: Africa, West Africa Countries: Nigeria

Year: 2016

Citation:

Ahmad, Lida, and Priscyll Anctil Avoice. 2016. “Misogyny in ‘Post-War’ Afghanistan: the Changing Frames of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence.” Journal of Gender Studies 1-16.

Authors: Lida Ahmad, Priscyll Anctil Avoice

Abstract:

Although the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was ideologically justified under the banner of democracy and women’s rights, the latter issue has been completely forgotten within the public sphere since then. As the war has officially ended in Afghanistan, new forms of misogyny and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) have arisen. The ‘post-war’ Afghan context presents an institutional normalization of violence, favouring a culture of rape and impunity. The changing frames of violence against women are widely related to the political situation of the country: while public attention is focused on peace agreements, women’s issues are relegated to banalities and depicted as ‘everyday’ news. Meanwhile, new frames of SGBV appear as body part mutilation within marriage, forced prostitution, and increasing domestic violence, partly due to the growing consumption of opium but also to the perpetuation of powerful warlords in state structures. This article draws on gender studies to analyse the current misogynist culture in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan, framing the new forms of violence induced by successive armed conflicts. It relies on interviews conducted in 2013 in Afghanistan; and on secondary sources, mostly taken from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch reports.

Keywords: Afghanistan, misogyny, sexual and gender-based violence, violence, politics, post-war, local initiatives

Topics: Armed Conflict, Domestic Violence, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Governance, Post-Conflict Governance, Post-Conflict, Rights, Women's Rights, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Women, Violence Regions: Americas, North America, Asia, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, United States of America

Year: 2016

Citation:

Kihato, Caroline Wanjiku. 2015. “'Go Back and Tell Them Who the Real Men Are!' Gendering Our Understanding of Kibera’s Post-Election Violence.” International Journal of Conflict and Violence 9 (1): 12-24.

Author: Caroline Wanjiku Kihato

Abstract:

Using a gendered analysis, this article examines the post election violence (PEV) in Kibera, Kenya, between December 2007 and February 2008. Through indepth interviews with Kibera residents, the article interrogates how gender influenced violent mobilizations in Kenya’s most notorious slum. Most scholarly analyses have tended to understand the post-election violence as a result of politicized ethnic identities, class, and local socio-economic dynamics. Implicitly or explicitly, these frameworks assume that women are victims of violence while men are its perpetrators, and ignore the ways in which gender, which cuts across these categories, produces and shapes conflict. Kibera’s conflict is often ascribed to the mobilization of disaffected male youths by political “Big Men.” But the research findings show how men, who would ordinarily not go to war, are obliged to fight to “save face” in their communities and how women become integral to the production of violent exclusionary mobilizations. Significantly, notions of masculinity and femininity modified the character of Kibera’s conflict. Acts of gender-based violence, gang rapes, and forced circumcisions became intensely entwined with ethno-political performances to annihilate opposing groups. The battle for political power was also a battle of masculinities.

Keywords: conflict, xenophobia, violence

Topics: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gender Roles, Femininity/ies, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Masculinism, Governance, Elections, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Women Regions: Africa, East Africa Countries: Kenya

Year: 2015

Citation:

Jansson, Maria, and Maud Eduards. 2016. “The Politics of Gender in the UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18 (4): 590–604.

Authors: Maria Jansson, Maud Eduards

Abstract:

Women’s groups have worked diligently to place gender and women’s vulnerability on the transnational security agenda. This article departs from the idea that negotiating and codifying gender and women’s vulnerability in terms of security represent a challenge to mainstream security contexts. By contrasting the UN Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security with feminist theory, this article aims to analyze what is considered to be threatened when women’s vulnerability is negotiated. The article identifies two approaches to the gender/security nexus: gendering security, which involves introducing ideas regarding gender-sensitive policies and equal representation, and securitizing gender, which proceeds by locating rape and sexual violence in the context of war regulations. We demonstrate that, although these measures are encouraged with reference to women’s vulnerability, they serve to legitimize war and the male soldier and both approaches depoliticize gender relations.

Keywords: gender, UN Security Council Resolution 1325, war, peace, security

Topics: Gendered Power Relations, Security, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Women

Year: 2016

Citation:

Jansson, Maria. 2016. “The Logic of Protection: Narratives of HIV/AIDS in the UN Security Council.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19 (1): 71–85. 

Author: Maria Jansson

Abstract:

When HIV/AIDS was first addressed by the UN Security Council in 2000, it was seen as the culmination of a successful securitization process and a pivotal moment for introducing human security. However, concern for the epidemic was paired with problems in including a nonmilitary issue on the Security Council’s agenda and the fear that peacekeepers were vectors of HIV. Reports of peacekeepers being involved in sexual exploitation and abuse added to these problems. This article aims to understand how gender has informed the efforts to address these issues and to rehabilitate peacekeeping forces and the Security Council from the legitimacy challenges that arose in this context. The article argues that including nonmilitary issues on the Security Council agenda requires adjustment to fit a war/peace logic. Drawing on feminist theories on security and protection, the analysis shows that the security narrative on HIV/AIDS did not form a coherent protection logic until the 2011 reformulation, when HIV/AIDS was constructed as part of the problem of wartime rape. This reformulation is interpreted as an appropriation of gender equality to reproduce a military security doctrine.

Keywords: gender, HIV/AIDS, UN Security Council, peacekeeping, Securitization

Topics: Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Health, HIV/AIDS, International Organizations, Peacekeeping, Security, Human Security, Sexual Violence, Rape

Year: 2016

Citation:

Cerretti, Josh. 2016. “Rape as a Weapon of War(riors): The Militarisation of Sexual Violence in the United States, 1990-2000.” Gender & History 28 (3): 794-812. 

Author: Josh Cerretti

Topics: Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Sexual Violence, Male Perpetrators, Rape, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, SV against Men, Sexuality Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2016

Citation:

Patterson-Markowitz, Rebecca, Elizabeth Oglesby, and Sallie Marston. 2012. “‘ Subjects of Change’: Feminist Geopolitics and Gendered Truth-Telling in Guatemala.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13 (4): 82.

Authors: Rebecca Patterson-Markowitz, Elizabeth Oglesby, Sallie Marston

Abstract:

This paper explores the often-undervalued role of gender in transitional justice mechanisms and the importance of women's struggles and agency in that regard. We focus on the efforts of the women's movement in Guatemala to address questions of justice and healing for survivors of gendered violence during Guatemala's 36-year internal armed conflict. We discuss how the initial transitional justice measures of documenting gendered war crimes in the context of a genocide were subsequently taken up by the women's movement and how their endeavors to further expose sexual violence have resulted in notable interventions. Interviews with key organizational activists as well as testimonies given by victims of sexual violence during the conflict suggest that transitional justice mechanisms, extended by women's movements' efforts, are creating conditions for the emergence of new practices and spaces that support the fragile cultivation of new subjectivities. Sujetas de cambio (subjects of change) are premised not on victimhood but survivorhood. The emergence of these new subjectivities and new claims, including greater personal security and freedom from everyday violence, must be approached with caution, however, as they are not born automatically out of the deeply emotional struggles that play out around historical memory. Still, their emergence suggests new ways for women to cope not only with the sexual violence of the past but also to work against the normative violence that is part of their present.

Keywords: gendered violence, historical memory, transitional justice

Topics: Armed Conflict, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Genocide, Justice, Transitional Justice, Rights, Human Rights, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Women, Violence Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Guatemala

Year: 2012

Citation:

Mitra-Sarkar, Sheila, and P. Partheeban. 2009. “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here: Understanding the Problem of ‘Eve Teasing’ in Chennai, India.” In Women’s Issues in Transportation - Summary of the 4th International Conference. Vol. 2. Irvine, California: Transportation Research Board.

Authors: Sheila Mitra-Sarkar, P. Partheeban

Abstract:

Fear of victimization and crime are important concerns for women in cities around the world, and this fear is provoked through encounters with men in public space because they are “unpredictable, potentially uncontrollable and hence threatening.” The South Asian literature has focused more on the subordinate role of women in Indian society and the workplace than on gender-based crime (referred to as “Eve teasing”) in the public spaces and transportation systems in South Asia. The objective of this paper is to elicit information on sexual harassment faced by women commuters in Chennai, India. The study found 66% of the surveyed respondents had been sexually harassed while commuting. Many of the respondents first encountered sexual harassment during their adolescent years. Very few (5% or less) found any of the modal choices to be best. The largest number of women (more than 40%) rated their worst harassment experiences to be in buses and trains with no separate sections for women. The paper offers other findings on the nature and frequency of sexual harassment and suggestions to address these incidents. (Abstract from original source)

Topics: Gender, Women, Gender Roles, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Infrastructure, Transportation, Sexual Violence, Male Perpetrators, Rape, SV against Women Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 2009

Citation:

Bowden, Charles. 2010. Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. New York: Nation Books.

Author: Charles Bowden

Annotation:

Ciudad Juarez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad. Last year 1,607 people were killed, a number that is on pace to increase in 2009. In Murder City, Charles Bowden, one of the few journalists who has spent extended periods of time in Juarez, has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants, a raped beauty queen, a repentant hitman, a journalist fleeing for his life with a broader meditation on the town's descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juarez's culture of violence will not only worsen, but inevitably spread north. (Summary from WorldCat)

Table of Contents:

Prologue: get in the car

1. Miss Sinaloa

2. Dead reporter driving

3. Murder artist

Afterword

Appendix : The river of blood

Topics: Sexual Violence, Rape, Violence Regions: Americas, North America Countries: Mexico

Year: 2010