Gender, Globalization, and Violence

Postcolonial Conflict Zones

Sandra Ponzanesi, Sandra Ponzanesi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136655654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

This wide-ranging collection of essays elaborates on some of the most pressing issues in contemporary postcolonial society in their transition from conflict and contestation to dialogue and resolution. It explores from new angles questions of violent conflict, forced migration, trafficking and deportation, human rights, citizenship, transitional justice and cosmopolitanism. The volume focuses more specifically on the gendering of violence from a postcolonial perspective as it analyses unique cases that disrupt traditional visions of violence by including the history of empire and colony, and its legacies that continue to influence present-day configurations of gender, race, nationality, class and sexuality. Part One maps out the gendered and racialized contours of conflict zones, from war zones, prisons and refugee camps to peacekeeping missions and humanitarian aid, reframing the field and establishing connections between colonial legacies and postcolonial dynamics. Part Two explores how these conflict zones are played out not just outside but also within Europe, demonstrating that multicultural Europe is fraught with different legacies of violence and postcolonial melancholia. Part Three gives an idea of the kind of future that can be offered to post-conflict societies, defined as contact zones, by exploring opportunities for dialogue, restoration and reconciliation that can be envisaged from a gendered and postcolonial perspective through alternative feminist practices and the work of art and their redemptive power in mobilizing social change or increasing national healing processes. Though strongly anchored in postcolonial critique, the chapters draw from a range of traditions and expertise, including conflict studies, gender theory, visual studies, (new) media theory, sociology, race theory, international security studies and religion studies.

Part I

Conflict Zones

Colonial Haunting and Contested Sovereignties

1 Neoliberal Discourses on Violence

Monstrosity and Rape in Borderland War

Jolle Demmers

All war is terrible. It makes no sense to call one kind of war “barbaric” when all that is meant is that it is cheap.

—Paul Richards (1996) Fighting for the Rainforest, p. xx

The icon of the raped female body has gained eminence in Western media and in policy representations of postcolonial conflict. Juxtaposed against the vandalized female is the evil black male: a ruthless, oversexed, primitive savage. Especially in what was once, and now again, is deemed the dark continent. News reports classically spend their opening sections with explicit and intimate descriptions of these masculine transgressions, often accompanied by mystic references to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. To accommodate these caliginous fantasies, the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for one, has served as hospitable gratifier. Upon listening to women’s rape stories in Goma in 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton termed sexual violence ‘evil in its basest form’ (The Guardian 2009). Wartime rape is categorized as ‘the monstrosity of the century,’¹ and the rapists as ‘savage beasts’ (New York Times 2007). A UN official called the DRC the ‘rape capital of the world’ and ‘the most dangerous place on earth to be a woman’ (BBC News 2010).

There is nothing new about the representation of borderland war as monstrous. Today’s media portrayals contribute to the recycling of familiar colonial fantasies of the African male as a barbaric, brutal, and vengeful killer and rapist who mutilates and even eats his victims, or simply as an ‘animal’ (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2010: 12). Authors such as Césaire (1955/1972), Fanon (1963), Mudimbe (1994), Mama (1997), and Cooper (2002) have all addressed the long history in Western writing of the “ethnologizing” and racializing of African bodies as violent and in need of discipline and rescue. Nonetheless, it is exactly the revival of colonial fantasies in the twenty-first century that calls for scrutiny. As is argued in this chapter, this iconic reanimation is exemplary of a larger and fundamental shift in policy and media discourses on conflict zones. During the Cold War, violent intrastate conflicts in the “non-Western” world were mostly seen as “proxy wars” and explained in terms of ideological divides and superpower strategy, at times combined with political turmoil connected to processes of postindependence state building. After the Cold War, these conflicts have been coded as “ethnic” and ancient hatreds and primordialist identities were identified as root causes. Increasingly since the late 1990s, conflicts are framed as evil, driven by greed and terror. Particularly after 9/11, this has become the dominant policy framework through which wars are understood and dealt with. Organized violence in the DRC, Nigeria, Mali, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Iraq, and Afghanistan is depicted as evil, greed motivated, and dangerous. Rather than understanding such forms of violence as interconnected to the international system, they are portrayed as endemic and inherently “local.”

This chapter aims to critically review representations of contemporary war (often coined as “new wars”) through describing the shifts in framing and the construction of new dichotomies, as well as conceptualizing their political functionality. Drawing on frame analysis, I will examine why it is that gendered discourses on rape have gained prominence and how they are used, appropriated, and abused for a complexity of reasons. What is offered is not an in-depth analysis of mass rape, the complexity of war in the DRC, or its media representations. In line with Turcotte (2011: 201), this chapter first and foremost aims to ‘re-politicize the stakes involved in what Gayatri Spivak calls “epistemic violence”’: the violence of knowledge and the role of the academic in the production of knowledge. Combining insights from the fields of conflict studies, critical transnational feminism, and sexual politics with recent ethnographic studies of violence in the DRC (Autesserre 2012; Douma and Hilhorst 2012; Dunn 2003; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 2010), this chapter will take the case of mass rape in the DRC to explore the confusing ways in which sexual violence is singularized, decontextualized, and depoliticized. The core argument outlined holds that discourses on monstrosity and rape figure as powerful metaphors. First, by invoking the image of the “evil local,” they work to enforce a neoliberal logic of blame and accountability. Second, by reimagining parts of the global south from a series of “strategic states” into a “dangerous social body,” they legitimize new technologies of containment. Third, discourses on rape serve as income-generating strategies for both the “aid industry” and its “consumers.”² Working from a structurationist approach, this chapter not only examines the ways in which violence is framed, but also intends to gain insight in the politics of portrayal, emphasizing the need to examine the discursive and institutional continuities that enhance or constrain certain framings of the world.

APPROACH: THE POLITICS OF PORTRAYAL

Discussions on why rape has gained prominence in media and policy representations of postcolonial conflict easily get stuck in abstract dualism. Through the lens of cosmopolitan humanism, the efforts of Western advocacy campaigns on wartime rape, such as the Enough Project, Save Darfur, or Invisible Children, are seen as forms of meaningful (feminist) solidarity, with Kantian foundations. Conversely, those who are skeptical of such claims to universal validity argue, in the lines of Carl Schmitt (1932/1996), that every argument about values is in actuality an attempt to exercise power. Although this chapter shares more with the latter position, it aims to look beyond dualistic formulas and rather to try and unravel the complex dialectics between grand design and people acting appropriately. That is, to study the interaction between power, knowledge, and subjectivity and the ways in which people, often unintentionally, reproduce certain regimes of truth. Empirically, we need to explore the conditions under which discourses of rape are produced and distributed and the ways they translate into institutional practices and examine how these practices play out in local settings. Such an interpretive epistemological stance implies placing the subject in systems of knowledge and directs our attention to, as will be outlined below, a discursive framing of the world.

Central to the analysis of war and violent conflict is the politics of portrayal: how discourses, frames, and images are used to represent the reality of war and the use of violence. Our understandings of violent conflicts are influenced by ideological and social-scientific paradigms and interpretative frames. Framing implies claiming. By framing one not only ‘simplifies and condenses the “world out there” by selectively encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present or past environment,’ as Benford and Snow (2000: 614) define, but one also puts moral claims on, for instance, the (il)legitimacy of an act of violence. As stated by Brass (1996), the selection of a form and level of explanation for contemporary violent conflict is a serious political act. Representations have political implications. Frames shape our views on what violence counts as barbaric (sexual violence in Africa) and what does not (the use of drones in Afghanistan). Frames also influence which events will be singled out (sexual violence against women) and which will not (nonsexual atrocities, sexual violence against men). They also affect the ways in which we, often unintentionally, cast blame and responsibility (focusing on the “savage beasts” and not on “systemic failures”). Framing, here, is understood as an active, processual phenomenon and the outcome of ‘negotiated shared meaning’ (Gamson 1992). As an analytical tool, frame analysis forms part of the larger field of discourse analysis, where discourses are understood as ‘social relations represented in texts where the language contained within these texts is used to construct meaning and representation.… The underlying assumption of discourse analysis is that social texts do not merely reflect or mirror objects, events and categories pre-existing in the social and natural world. Rather, they actively construct a version of those things. They do not describe things, they do things. And being active they have social and political implications’ (Jabri 1996: 94–95).

Discourses always are exercises in power. Evidently, some actors have greater “powers to define” than others, allowing for hegemonic groups to mobilize structures of signification in order to legitimate their sectional interests (Giddens 1984). At the same time, it is not the case that those in power can construct discourses out of whole cloth: discourses are constructed dialectically; they need to be both socially meaningful and politically functional. Drawing on Fairclough, I argue that we have to consider the conditions of possibility for, and the constraints on, the ‘dialectics of discourse in particular cases,’ taking into account the circumstances ‘which condition whether and to what degree social entities are receptive of or resistant to certain discourses’ (Fairclough 2003: 209). Concretely, this can be done by asking whether the social order, in a sense, “needs” a certain problem (e.g., an “evil invader,” an “ethnic other,” or “barbaric rapist”), and whether ‘those who benefit most from the way social life is now organized have an interest in the problem not being solved’ (Fairclough 2003: 210). Importantly, such a discursive understanding of the world by no means underestimates the materiality of social systems. Global neoliberalism, for instance, has produced consequences that are not simply a product of interpretation or even of discursive construction. As emphasized by Jabri (2010: 4): ‘To suggest otherwise would in effect be to deny the possibility of a critical social science and its capacity to reveal the workings of power in socio-political and economic relations.’ It is because of this aim for critical reflection that this chapter offers an analysis of how the “spectacularization” of violence against women in conflict zones works to obscure underlying systemic causes of violence. What I intend to show in the second section of this chapter is how in multilayered, sometimes even contradictory and unintentional, ways narratives of monstrosity and rape help to sustain a neoliberal hegemony. In outlining the argument, I will address the literature on frame resonance (why do certain stories “cling”?) and relate it to the notion of neoliberal governmentality to see why it is that the aid industry increasingly taps into spectacular and simplistic narratives of suffering and rescue.

FRAME RESONANCE AND NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY

As Turcotte (2011: 202) argues for the case of US mainstream narratives of gender violence in the Niger Delta, such a representational politics is confined not only to the parameters of political economy. To come to fruition, a constant exchange between the state and the social imaginary is also necessary. Images of borderland conflicts resonate among Western audiences because they tap into deeply embedded discourses of race, masculinity, and threat. As stated by Turcotte:

The state mobilizes the language of threatening black men as a mnemonic practice to conjure up the images and imaginations of racial threat with the US public, which is then reproduced and projected onto African societies. These ethnologized, racialized, and masculinised discourses historically generate public support for the hegemonic project of whiteness, which necessitates the criminalization of communities of colour in order to secure US citizenships. (2011: 202)

The notion that certain frames resonate because of historically and culturally embedded violent imaginaries is given evidence-based support by Benford and Snow’s (2000) study of framing processes and social movements. One of the factors accounting for variation in the degree of frame resonance is “empirical credibility.” This refers to the perceived fit between certain framings and events in the world. The issue is not whether frames are actually factual or valid, but whether their empirical referents lend themselves to being read as “real.” ‘The more culturally believable the claimed evidence, and the greater the number of slices of such evidence, the more credible the framing and the broader its appeal’ (Benford and Snow 2000: 620). While acknowledging that indeed ‘empirical credibility is in the eyes of the beholder,’ Benford and Snow also emphasize that the difficulties some movements experience in expanding their ranks is due in part to the empirical incredibility of their framings (2000: 620). In addition to issues of credibility, the resonance of a frame is affected by its salience to the target audience. Benford and Snow found convincing evidence that what they named ‘experiential commensurability’ constitutes an important factor to this salience. Are the framings congruent or resonant with the personal, everyday experiences of the targets? Or are the framings too abstract and distant from their lives and experiences? Not surprisingly, evidence suggests that the more experientially commensurate the framings, the greater the salience and the greater the probability of mobilization (Benford and Snow 2000: 619–22). Stories of mass rape in the DRC resonate with audiences worldwide, as sexual abuse takes place everywhere. The image of the “feminine” as stereotypically associated with a need for protection, life-giving, and peacefulness, builds on sexist discourses at play in society more generally. By implication, these stories serve as the necessary counterpart to militarized mythologies of the “masculine” as warrior and protector (Enloe 1990; Goldstein 2001). It is the exceptional bodily violations and the explicit and detailed descriptions of mass rape, but also the reassuring distancing to “other places,” that draws Western public attention. As the literature on postcolonialism and sexual politics points out, the consequent “rescue narratives” demand that victimized “third world women” must be saved from “evil” perpetrators. These stories are both commensurate and political. Uncritical representations of gendered violence in distant geopolitical locales help to garner support for the wars and interventions of the state (e.g., invading Afghanistan to free Afghani women) (Turcotte 2011). These findings provide insight into why certain “frames of violence” resonate among an audience. In many ways, they reflect what Autesserre (2012) refers to as the aspect of ‘simplicity.’ In her analysis of representations of the Congo, she shows that certain stories resonate more when they assign the cause of the problems to the ‘deliberate actions of identifiable individuals’; when they include ‘bodily harm to vulnerable individuals, especially when there is a short and clear causal chain assigning responsibility’; and when ‘they suggest a simple solution’ and ‘can latch on to pre-existing narratives’ (2012: 207). Narratives of mass rape and advocacy projects aiming at the rescue and protection of rape victims neatly fit the above requirements.

The widespread public fascination with images of wartime rape undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that depictions of warfare offer “viscerally exiting” and “voyeuristic glimpses” into theaters of violence that, for most viewers, are alien to everyday experience. As Griffin comments (2010: 8): ‘For many, portrayals of violence or threat seem to excite an estranged, fearful and yet persistent curiosity.’ The tendency of people to give heightened attention to visual indicators of potential threat or danger is not lost on those who make a living out of attracting viewer attention. From the first European picture magazines of the 1920s and 1930s to today’s corporate-media-dominated 24/7 news cycle, and from the Spanish War to the Iraq War, “high-impact images” of violence, death, and destruction is what grabs viewer attention. But that aid organizations, advocacy networks, NGOs, and foreign policy desk officers also abide by the logic of the spectacle is a more recent phenomenon that is intricately connected with neoliberalism as a global political project, and it has repercussions for the way sexual violence is portrayed. Neoliberal governmentality provides the backdrop against which to understand the ways in which aid organizations advertise (“brand” and “market”) their projects. As a new modality of government, it not only relocates activities from the public realm to the market by means of direct privatization, public–private partnerships, or outsourcing, but also extends the logic of the market to the operation of public functions. As scholars of institutional isomorphism...