Un/Canning the Victims: Embodied Research Practice and Ethnodrama in Response to War-Rape Legacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
In this article, we draw on feminist trauma studies with the aim of deconstructing the theoretical and methodological binary between individual and collective trauma. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that trauma studies work often unintentionally reifies. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei call rhizomatic and trace readings in the threshold. Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links be...
Women's Cinema of Trauma: Affect, Movement, Time
European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2016
This article analyses several notable examples of what the author calls the post-Yugoslav women’s cinema of trauma. These films made by women filmmakers challenge the standard tropes of war, as well as normative approaches to war cinema, by highlighting the intimate affective domain of experience, rather than large-scale narratives and collective emotions. The author focuses on the near-silent short and experimental works of Una Gunjak and Šejla Kamerić (both from Bosnia-Herzegovina), and suggests that they offer insightful formal and narrative ways of rethinking the question of what makes a war film, as well as what constitutes a woman’s experience of war. By arguing for a continued, strategic and locally specific use of the term women’s cinema, the author deploys feminist analytics towards inscribing these filmmakers’ work into the transnational flows of knowledge production about marginalized groups and non-Western geographies.
Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, 2020
This article discusses the personal narratives (both published and personal interviews collected for the purpose of this study) of female survivors of wartime rape in post–World War II Germany and postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. The authors examine how the women succeed in finding their words both for and beyond the rupture caused by the rapes through examples of life writing that challenge the dominant masculinist historical narrative of war created for ideological reasons and for the benefit of the nation-state. Using theories of trauma and insights by feminist scholars and historians, the authors argue that a transnational reading of survivors’ accounts from these very different geopolitical and historical contexts not only shows multiple points of mutual influence, but also how these narratives can make a significant contribution, both locally and globally, when it comes to revisiting how wartime rape is memorialized, and how lessons learned from the two contexts can be relevant and applicable in other situations of armed conflict as well.
Victim or Survivor? Choosing Identity after wartime sexual violence
Healing and Peacebuilding After War. Transforming Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2020
Through reading Bosnia and Herzegovina women's narratives, I explore how the ethno-national victimhood discourse silenced many women and alienated them from survivors of other ethnic groups. Coupled with a neoliberal understanding and the expectations of victim/survivor identities, ethno-national victimhood discourse further alienates women from the sam e ethnic group, because many of them refuse the politicisation o1'their experience and the inscription of ethnic narratives on their bodies. One of 'the solutions for the imposed positioning and labeling might be to claim the right to self'-identification, as Rebecca Stringer (2014) and Alyson Cole (2006) suggest in their work, or to enable a "liberatory epistemology" with a woman's body as the locus of meaning and experience, as Tamy Spry (1995,27) proposes in her oral history work.
Feminist Media Studies, 18(2), 2018
Women’s organisations and feminist journalists and scholars, enhanced global understanding of wartime sexual violence, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina where, between 1992 and 1995, an estimated 20,000-50,000 Muslim Bosniak and non-Serbian women and girls were raped, tortured, and subjected to enforced impregnation by Serbian paramilitary. Although wartime sexual violence gained a level of legitimately through these efforts, local and global memorialisations of the atrocities of the 1990s are few, fleeting, and actively erased from public memory. Thus, 25 years later, it continues to be imperative to highlight feminist mediated enactments of memorialisation and memory work about wartime rape, sexual violence, torture, and trauma. Such enactments of filmic, mediated, and performative resistant remembering are survival mechanisms for feminist media and creative practitioners and artists, and, more importantly, for the survivors of wartime sexual violence.
" Documenting Tragedy " : Ethnography and the (Hidden) Costs of Bearing Witness
Anthropology and Education Quarterly , 2018
This article examines the affective registers of conducting research with vulnerable populations. We examine the challenges of conducting ethnographies with peoples that are living in conditions of chronic poverty, oppression, and political upheaval. Reversing the ethnographic lens from the participant onto the researcher, we investigate the humanity and the vulnerability of the anthropologist to highlight the emotional journey that accompanies such work.
'Giving Memory a Future': Confronting the Legacy of Mass Rape in Post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina
Journal of International Women's Studies, 2011
Responses to the prevalence of wartime rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s civil war has been characterised by a conflicting paradox between the international legal attempts by the ICTY to prosecute perpetrators, and Bosnian society"s silence, marginalisation of individual victims, and the pronounced desire to "forget" about certain aspects of wartime victimisation. Given that the contemporary prospects of retributive justice and inter-ethnic reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina remain a distant prospect, the question of what can be done to reassert the ethical value of the victims of mass rape and violence continues to be of great importance. Minow"s response to this question is that even "if the rigor of prosecution and punishment are not pursued, some other form of public acknowledgement, overcoming communal denial, is the very least that can be done to restore dignity to victims" (1998: 17). Pertaining to this, women"s testimonies of wartime violation have resulted in the conception of critical and reflective cultural texts such as the two analysed in this paper. As if I Am Not There (Drakilić, 1999) and Esma's Secret (Žbanić, 2006) attempt to confront Bosnian society about its neglect of the women who suffered wartime rape. The texts further broach the subject of the social significance of the children who were born as a result of these rapes. The underlying focus of these texts is an attempt to propose and work towards a vision of post-conflict Bosnian society based on a future of reconciliation and the refusal to differentiate along ethnic lines.