Rape as a Weapon

Dr Paul Kirby, LSE

Bio
Paul Kirby is currently Research Fellow at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics, and Lecturer in International Security at the University of Sussex. His research is predominantly on the politics of sexual violence, and on their relation to the Women, Peace and Security agenda as currently pursued. He is the author of a number of articles on these themes in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, Men and Masculinities and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Paul blogs at The Disorder Of Things ( http://thedisorderofthings.com ) and tweets as @ProfPCK https://twitter.com/ProfPCK

Chair : Dr Gina Heathcote

Abstract
Wartime sexual violence, once neglected, is now a major topic of academic, media and governmental concern. After some decades of political education, we have become attuned to its traces, and recognise its bloody fingerprints. One result has been a proliferation of works on sexual violence not only as might be expected in feminist and gender studies, but in the domains of political science, anthropology, psychology and law. The primary conceptual vehicle for this awareness is the phrase 'rape is a weapon of war', which occurs with regularity in dispatches from conflict zones, and has become a shorthand for saying that sexual violence is properly political in character and deserving of efforts to eradicate it. The phrase implies a whole theory, or series of theories. In this paper, I focus on the question of what it is to conceptualise a body, or a body part, as a weapon of war. What notions of corporeality, identity and motive are at stake? Which mechanisms, agents and sites made most salient? I concur with other critics that the narrow, economistic understanding of sexual violence - in which it is just one tactic among others selected by militaries - is deficient in key respects. I go further in accounting for the dispute over weapon talk and bodily weaponry by proposing a different conceptual basis from which to think about sexual violence as it occurs within or without 'war' (itself an importantly contested term). Considering debates about the materiality of the body, the phenomenology of violence, and the social coordinates afforded by armed groups, I seek to both unsettle and reconstitute the idea of wartime sexual violence as a kind of intimate aggression.

Contact email: cgs@soas.ac.uk