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Doris E. Buss, "Women at the Borders: Rape and Nationalism
in International Law", Feminist Legal Studies VI/2 (1998), forthcoming:
This articles explores gender narratives reflected in, and constructed through,
international humanitarian law. Focusing specifically on the phenomena
of wartime rape in the former Yugoslavia, this paper examines
how humanitarian law and the statute of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal
function to construct troubling and sometimes contradictory images of women
and rape. Wartime rape, it is argued, is portrayed as a crime against a
nation and not as a crime against women. In the case of Yugoslavia, gendered
narratives of nation, violence, and war converge to portray the mass rape
of women as an act of genocide or as a crime against humanity. This discussion
of humanitarian law and the Yugoslav Tribunal is placed in the context of
a gendered reading of war and women within Western European and North American
culture. The paper attempts to examine some of the Western narratives of
war which appear to have shaped the international intervention in Yugoslavia.
The final section of the paper examines the characterisation of the Yugoslav
conflict as one of ethnic hatred and virulent nationalism.
This focus, it is argued, serves to construct Yugoslavians as East European
and the racial other. In the context of rape, this reinforces the view of
rape as a crime against communities and nations and not as gender violence.
e-mail: laa24@keele.ac.uk
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