gender

Wu’s seminar on “From ‘Fallen Blossoms’ to ‘Army Latrines’

In this seminar, I highlighted some of the discourses at hand surrounding the issue of sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflict situation, and the influence they have upon aid agencies:

1. The continuum of sexual- and gender-based violence during both non-conflict and conflict periods has often been overlooked, where there is now a common perception perpetuated by popular media that SGBV in conflict situation is predominantly rape by military and military-like agents. At the same time, socio-political context – the status of women, gender norms and identities, to gender differences between income, political participation, literacy level, mortality and so on – during the so-called peacetime and their direct linkage to how sexual- and gender-based violence is perpetrated in wartime has been ignored.

2. It is useful to look at the plurality of masculinities and femininities and how they serve to keep patriarchal structure in operation, especially in an institution such as the military, where power and dominance is dependent upon the rigid enforcement and enactment of norms and behaviours.

3. Because the politics of representation have significant effects on the way we understand and respond, we need to maintain our feminist curiosity (following the footsteps of feminist international relations theorist, Cynthia Enloe) – and question how and why issues are represented and interpreted in a certain way and not the other.

In particular, I wanted to explore how the prevailing understanding and distinction of the private vs. public understanding about violence against women during the so-called peacetime is carried into discussions about violence against women in conflict and post-conflict situation. This distinction is played out in the prioritisation of different forms of sexual violence, where military-perpetrated forms of sexual violence takes precedence, as demonstrated in wider media attention as well as the rhetoric of aid agencies and donors.

However, to do so is to ignore the continuum of violence against women where women experience violence (both physical and non-physical such as emotional and economic abuse) at different levels by different groups of people.  This is the pre-condition upon which military-based SGBV is so effective in damaging a community, and which is why SGBV has been – whether clearly stated or as part of unspoken institutional culture – used as a military strategy.

Distinctions are useful in the sense that they construct differences for a specific political agenda and as result, alienate and compartmentalise the issues. However, if we understand the issue from a radical feminist perspective, we can see oppression as a continuum, in which variations of gender dominance underpin the power structure of patriarchy. In this sense, seeing gender on a spectrum enables us to identify commonality and opportunity for mobilisation and social change.

Joyce Wu can be contacted at joyce.wu (at) anu.edu.au.

© 2009 People and Development.