20 Theoretical Framework – The Social and Political Context to the Impact War on Women
To explain the social and political contexts of the impact war has on the lives of women and to further look into the topics brought up in Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women, I will be giving an overview of theoretical frameworks.
Christina Lamb, the author of the literature being analyzed, defines rape through the lens of the influential book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape by Susan Brownmiller, that contextualized rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” which was a revolutionary explanation from the one widely accepted at the time of rape being “an individual crime of passion” (Lamb 2020). The traditional feminist theory narrative on rape, similar to Brownmiller’s, has been to view it as “‘not about sex, [but] about violence or power/control,’” but McPhail’s concept of Feminist Framework Plus challenged this outlook to reframing the rape etiology as being more complex with “multiple motivations [including,] but are not limited to, sexual gratification, revenge, recreation, power/control, and attempts to achieve or perform masculinity’” (McPhail 2016: 6). The Feminist Framework Plus noted thinking of rape as violence can result to the act of rape being equated and compared to forms of physical assault and deny the complexity in rape etiology as being beyond an act of assault and sexual violence. Instead to think of rape etiology as “‘a sexually specific act that destroys (if only temporarily) the intersubjectivity, embodied agency and therefore personhood of a woman’” (McPhail 2016: 13). Lamb highlights the complexities of rape trauma during war by noting that “it affects the mental, physical, and intimate health” (Lamb 2020: 154).
Weaponizing Sexual Violence: Conflict Theory, Power Elite, & Sociological Imagination
The prevalence of male-dominated institutions provides a basis for patriarchal systems of power and masculinized environments to thrive in facilitating rape culture and the weaponization of sexual violence as an instrument of war. Max and Engel’s conflict theory discusses society as being centered around “a struggle for dominance among social groups that compete for scarce resources” (Boundless, 2016). Feminist theory uses conflict theory’s approach to examine “[the] stratification and hierarchic organization as key to explaining all sociological phenomena…” and applying it to observations of gender’s influence in relation to power of gender roles and inequalities (Collins 1990: 72). Gendering systems of power allowed for the historical gain and accumulation of capital, but “capital [has the power to be] not only personal; it is a social power,” it gave women a disproportionate social position (Marx & Engels, 1967). This dispersion of power and struggle for dominance lays the groundwork that makes sexual violence such an impactful weapon.
Hierarchical organizations of power can also be contextualized through C. Wright Mills’ power elite explained as “firmly interlocked prongs of power [being in the hands of] the military, corporate, and political elite,” which are institutions that are often masculinized through a patriarchal dominated state (Mills 1956). Therefore because institutionalized power is gendered, it puts into perspective how the environment of militarized masculinity can result in weaponizing that power in forms of sexual violence in the contexts of war.
Due to the nature of sexual violence being so geographically widespread and historically present, it brings into question the interplay between how individual instances of rape during war can be reflective of patterns in society. The individual and society interplay with one another in a way that “the life of an individual [and] the history of a society [cannot] be understood without understanding both” of their contexts in relation to each other or isolated from each other (Mills 2006 [1959]: 3). This is C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination “enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career of a variety of individuals” (Mills 2006 [1959]: 8). Larger social issues can be acknowledged as being connected to what happens to the individual as a personal challenge and larger social forces; Mills refers to these as “personal troubles” and “public issues” (Mills 2006 [1959]). The sociological imagination uncovers how personal experiences can be larger social troubles that limit an individual’s control as it is rooted in society and beyond the individual. These frameworks can be used to explain how patriarchal structures facilitate and promote rape culture and gendered systems of power that weaponize sexual violence.
Understanding Contexts: The Gendered Self & Intersecting Identities
By presenting a comparison between fraternities and militarized contexts, it can bring insight as to the role these environments play in the normalization and prevalence of rape because of societal attitudes based on gender and sexuality. The gendered self can be used to explain the social basis that leads to a “performance based on their sex category and the cultural context” where “both men and women create and recreate masculine and feminine identities” (McPhail 2016: 6, Boswell & Spade 1996: 134). This concept is brought up in the conversation of how social contexts fostered cultures and environments linked to the pervasiveness of rape incidents, specifically in Boswell & Spade’s “Fraternities and Collegiate Rape Culture” that investigated the social situations of fraternities. Through developing ranking systems of the conventional attractiveness of women who attended fraternity parties, “men made a display of assessing women’s bodies” subjecting them to the male gaze, the cisgender heterosexual masculine perspective of viewing women as sexual objects for the pleasure of male viewer that empowers men and objectifies women (Boswell and Spade 1996: 137). Understanding the role of a patriarchal social basis facilitating and rewarding environments in which rape most occurs, we can begin to recognize the depth and breadth of the etiology of rape in the context where rape is used as a weapon of war/conflict and genocide.
The intersecting identities of being a racial or ethnic minority as well as being women in a patriarchal society affected the reasons behind why rape was being weaponized. Intersectionality, a concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, explores how due to the structural and systemic inequalities, “people experience discrimination differently depending on their overlapping identities” as the intersections of social identity create a crossroads of disadvantageous positions (Crash Course 2017, Coaston 2019). Due to the convergence in the road of these identities, “structured inequalities as class, race, and ethnicity” play a role in “the interplay between gender violence and… various constructions of militarized masculinity” that affect women’s role in living through war (Sharoni 2017). Thus, the added intersection of their identities along with being women contributed to an added complexity of political or ideological motivation that results in the direct targeting of sexual violence during wartime.
Collective Healing: Solidarity Networks & Mothering
The universal wartime sexual violence led to the creation of solidarity networks as a form of collective healing spaces and empowerment for survivors. The effects are felt at both levels of individual and communal because of its impact on individuals, families, and entire communities. In Afro-Cuban Cyberfeminism, Sierra-Rivera writes on how “an articulation of the black woman’s body as an ideal in itself, employing narratives that include a documentation of black women’s political actions in both the past and the present” and the formation of communities that demand their full political inclusion in society (Sierra-Rivera 2018). Solidarity networks are vital to reshaping their communities and fighting for social justice that reframes the narrative to see these women as survivors and not just victims whether it be in the context of Black Cuban women or survivors of wartime sexual violence. Sierra-Rivera’s notion of mothering was a way for “black women can ‘establish authority over [their] own definition’ and grow a new (renewed) self” thus redefining their own spaces through newly formed communities of resistance, similar to those formed by survivors of wartime sexual violence after being ostracized from their own communities (Sierra-Rivera 2018).