2011 - Gender, Sexuality and Violent Conflict

Additional essays are available on the BHS site.

Course participant: Sabine Piccard (Pristina, Kosovo)

Masculinities and Gender-Based Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings: Addressing the Gap in Violence Against Men

1. Introduction

The concept of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) generally refers to “violence that occurs as a result of the normative role expectations associated with each gender, along with the unequal power relationships between the two genders, within the context of a specific society” 1. Although the term is subject to different interpretations, GBV targets women and girls, but also men and boys, and includes different types of sexual violence. 2 As Bloom underlines, men and boys can experience violence and suffer from discrimination if “they are deviating from expectations around masculinity” 3. This leads us to the concept of masculinity, developed and theorized by Connell as “a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and cultures” 4.

Course participant: Daniela Antonovska (Skopje, Macedonia)

Introduction

The films’ script was written by Milcho Manchevski in 1991 after a visit to his birth land, Macedonia. Before the rain shared the Golden Lion of Venice in 1994 and awards from other film festivals, but its highest achievement was an Oscar nomination for best-foreign language film. The events take place in the time when Macedonia was rounded by ethnic conflicts that dominated the life of the bordering countries of Macedonia. This was the result of the war in the former Yugoslavia, whose dissolution led to the former of smaller independent countries. Macedonia was one of them, but its independence and territorial integrity were still disputed. Even though being an independent on the political map of Europe, Macedonia’s population was not homogenous.

Course Participant: Renata Ćuk (Zagreb, Croatia)

Introduction

Many people connect war time sexual violence to the images of the raped Bosnian (Muslim) women that appeared in the news all over the world back in the 1992. Even though sexual violence against women in war times is not a specificity of the armed conflict in ex-Yugoslavia it is exactly this conflict that has brought the issue out in the open. Due to the pressures of the feminists sexual violence against women in wartime became an important issue and more important, it became punishable 1. So, the space for the issue of sexual violence in armed conflicts was definitely created. However, some forms of sexual violence were left invisible, including sexual violence against men. It is interesting to see how little research has been done on this topic.

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