ABSTRACT
There is no more obvious intersection of gender and insecurity than war rape. It is for many the most extreme emblem of male dominance, a wretched scene of women’s collective subordination and disposability, best summed up in Susan Brownmiller’s now infamous declaration that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (1975: 15). Writing in the mid-1970s, Brownmiller’s concern was the persistence of rape across recorded human history, against which wartime rape stands out only as the most vivid case study. It is as if war provides an environment in which misogynistic violence, otherwise at least partly restrained by social convention, is unleashed under the justification of an existential struggle between nations. In a more limited version of this thesis, war rape is not an exceptional act of barbarity, but can only be understood by reference to the gender relations existing before war (and, in turn, shaping the post-war order) (Cockburn 2004; Moser 2001; Reardon 1996).
