What about men? Towards a critical interrogation of sexual violence against men in global politics

Abstract

In recent years, debates around sexual violence against men (SVAM) started to gain momentum in policy and research. Yet, the conceptualization and empirical identification of SVAM became a matter of political contestation, with incidents often being depicted through de-sexualized labels such as ‘inhumane acts’ and ‘cruel treatment’. The fluidity of sexual meanings surrounding these episodes highlights the intricate relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘violence’: Do we always already know what sexual violence is? What does the language of sexual violence obscure, flatten and trivialize? This contribution draws on Marysia Zalewski's interventions to interrogate concepts and framings commonly used to ‘read’ episodes of sexual violence against men. In particular, it follows Zalewski and Runyan's efforts to ‘unthink’ what we ‘know’ and how we ‘know’ sexual violence against men in global politics, while interrogating the relationship between sex and violence in particular performances of bodily violence. The analysis draws on extensive archival research conducted in the files of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Surveyed documents include records and proceedings, such as trial transcripts and statements of victims and witnesses involved in incidents of violence against men during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and Peru.

Marysia Zalewski's interventions—often framed as ‘provocations’—invite us to reflect on how our theoretical and conceptual framings inform our seeing and acting upon the world.¹ In recent years, Zalewski's contributions have been particularly concerned with the massive global outcry over conflict-related sexual violence and its spectacularized gaze, particularly in relation to conflict zones in the global South.² Her writings have grappled with the dominant narratives that steer our understanding of what sexual violence is, raising concerns over the problematic ways in which ‘sex’ and ‘violence’ are portrayed in efforts to end sexual violence in conflict.³

As the issue of sexual violence against men started to gain momentum in policy and research, Zalewski devoted further attention to the ‘complexities shrouded in simplicity’ guiding these debates.⁴ Research and policy initiatives seeking to increase public awareness of male survivors and make visible the prevalence of these abuses have led her to question ‘what’ sexual violence is and ‘how we can think about sexual violence against men’.⁵ In raising these questions, Zalewski sought to destabilize some of the assumptions spawned and repeated time and again by the emerging literature on the topic. With the growing proliferation of data and images of conflict-related sexual violence, her theoretical moves encourage us to think more deeply about the authoritative use of ‘facts’, and about the narratives they convey and conceal about sexual violence and gender hierarchies.⁶

My contribution draws on Zalewski's interventions to interrogate concepts and framings commonly used to ‘read’ episodes of sexual violence against men (SVAM). Are all performances of violence involving bodily parts associated with sex and reproduction always already sexualized? What does the language of sexual violence obscure, flatten and trivialize?⁷ Through these questions, I follow Zalewski's efforts to ‘unthink’ what we ‘know’ about and how we ‘know’ sexual violence against men in global politics.⁸ Seeking to animate discussions on the ‘borders’ of sexual violence, Zalewski and Runyan have called on us to critically engage with ‘the work of “sex” in its relation to violence as … an interpellative site of ordering and disordering, categorising and positioning both bodies and thinking’.⁹ This call has inspired me to critically interrogate the grammars of interaction underpinning performances of bodily violence against men. In particular, I focus on assaults falling under the broad label of ‘genital violence’—that is, the use of physical force to injure, disfigure and/or damage the genital organs of an individual. These include acts as varied as genital beatings, electroshock to the genital area, and burning with cigarettes or pouring of corrosive chemical substances on the genitals.

Questions of genital violence seem to be particularly relevant in debates around male victimization not only because their sexualized dimension is often open to contestation (as further illustrated below), but also because these incidents appear as one of the most, if not the most, commonly reported forms of sexual violence against men in various surveys on the topic.¹⁰ Research conducted in organizations assisting male survivors of conflict-related violence, for example, found that ‘sexual torture of men was a regular, unexceptional component of violence in wartime Croatia’.¹¹ During a survey of 60 male survivors from Bosnia and Croatia, Loncar and colleagues found that about 68 per cent of the surveyed individuals were victims of physical torture on the genitals, most often severe beating to the testicles or penis.¹² Similar findings are reported by Leiby in the case of Peru.¹³

In offering a critique of how SVAM is ‘thought’/theorized, this article interrogates whether and how sex and violence manifest and coalesce during these performances. Through this exploration, it begins to unpack the phenomenon of conflict-related sexual violence against men with a view to challenging (and, perhaps, raising further provocations on) some of the prevailing assumptions related to the uses, displays and framings of sexual violence in warfare. In a Zalewskian spirit, instead of interpreting sexual violence through sex-centred models or static typologies, I ask whether and how certain practices contextually enact and mobilize that which is constructed as sexual. This provocative endeavour does not seek to provide definitive answers on what sexual violence ‘is’, or on how and by whom the term should be employed. Rather, in challenging the ways we ‘look’ at these episodes, I seek to illuminate the mobility and contingency of sexual meanings and repertoires. In this regard, the article sheds light on how, in concentrating their attention onto biological sex organs, existing scholarly and policy works might be both under- and over-applying the ‘sexual’ vocabulary. These inadequacies result from treating the ‘sexual’ as a ‘thing’,¹⁴ or as a static descriptor, rather than as a grammar that needs to be contextually grounded and situated.

Questions around the intricate relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘violence’ have attracted attention from feminist scholarship.¹⁵ Puar and Franke, for example, express reservations about the semiotic weight ascribed to the ‘sexual’ and its potential implications for our understandings around sex and violence, both together and separately.¹⁶ According to Franke, the ‘sexual’ label might say ‘too much and not enough about the meaning of a practice so named’ and obscure other relevant identitarian dimensions—such as race and ethnicity, for example—that are also constitutive of landscapes of violence.¹⁷ More recently, Baaz and Stern have observed how feminist thinking has almost completely effaced the ‘sexual’ from theorizations on wartime rape. They contend that terms such as sex and sexuality ‘often appear so firmly established and stable in discussions about sexual violence … that we, as scholars of global politics, forget to probe how they are being imparted with meaning and to what effect’.¹⁸

The article proceeds as follows. The first section presents methodological considerations guiding data collection and analysis. The second section situates debates around SVAM and introduces Zalewski's main provocations on the matter. The subsequent sections draw on what I consider to be the main preoccupations that emerge from her contributions: the uncritical mobilization of data and descriptions of SVAM as pristine reflections of reality, and therefore as detached from more complex debates on gender hierarchies and discrimination; and the false promises of ‘gender inclusivity’ as a neutral and unbiased tool to address sexual violence.

Methodological considerations

For the purposes of this analysis, this article puts Zalewski's provocations in conversation with evidences commonly used to make sense of sexual violence against men. The documentation presented below derives from archival research conducted in the files of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación: CVR). The documents surveyed include trial transcripts and statements by victims and witnesses involved in incidents of violence against men during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (1991–5) and Peru (1980–2000). Both cases have drawn attention in the literature on sexual violence against men, as indicated by Zalewski's latest co-edited volume.¹⁹

The ICTY database contains all public court records of cases opened by the court since 1994. These documents are readily available online for public access.²⁰ The CVR archives are hosted by the Centro de Información para la Memoria Colectiva y los Derechos Humanos, a documentation centre that has compiled more than 16,000 written testimonies of victims and perpetrators, from which the final CVR report was constructed.²¹ To gain access to these testimonies, I conducted fieldwork in Lima in August 2014.

In view of the large amount of documentation hosted in these archives, a keyword search was conducted to identify relevant information for analysis. The keyword search scheme included nouns and verbs that are semantically related to sexual violence against men, including among others: sex⋆; anus; anal; penis; genital; castrat⋆; mutilat⋆; erect⋆; penetrat⋆; ejaculate⋆; naked; undress; testicle; rape. A wildcard search was employed to guarantee the search covered all variations of the selected keywords (e.g. sex/sexual/sexuality). For documents in Spanish, these keywords were translated and adapted.

The rationale behind this search was to identify a sample of performances that could be characterized as SVAM according to the growing literature on the topic. Such works often adopt, either directly or indirectly, the understanding of sexual violence as ‘any violence, physical or psychological, carried out through sexual means or by targeting sexuality’.²² This comprehensive definition allows for the identification of other forms of sexual violence in addition to those explicitly listed by the International Criminal Court (ICC), namely: rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy and enforced sterilization.²³ In drawing on this definition, a wide range of acts are added to this list by scholars and practitioners documenting male victimization, including sexual humiliation, genital violence, genital mutilation, forced nudity, and being forced to commit or to watch sexual intercourse.

In surveying the ICTY court records on Bosnia and Croatia, I found that 20 cases opened by the tribunal include testimonies and references to a total of 95 incidents that would fit into the definition provided above. In the case of Peru, 230 testimonies of victims and witnesses were identified. These figures are surprisingly high considering the reluctance of the victims to report these crimes and the stigmas surrounding the topic. At first sight, they corroborate previous research indicating that stories of sexual violence against men might be glossed over or miscoded under broad non-sexual labels, as previously indicated by Sivakumaran, Leiby, Charman and others.²⁴ Yet Zalewski's provocations encourage us to take a step back and ask: ‘What is to be counted in the frame of “sexual violence” anyway?’²⁵ If, on the one hand, ‘the corporeal experiences of sex [are] typically understated’, on the other, she argues, they are ‘at the same time often assumed’.²⁶ In disturbing the ‘sexual value’ automatically attributed to particular instances of violence, the following sections show how the conceptualization of sexual violence should perhaps be more attentive to how sex and violence interweave and meld together in particular interactions.

Interrogating SVAM in global politics

Sexual violence against men is a salient feature of the social structure of warfare, and history is filled with glaring examples of this phenomenon. Particularly since the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, scholars and practitioners alike have made efforts to challenge traditional understandings of sexual violence and make visible how male victimization has been overshadowed by legal and policy mechanisms. Authors such as Sivakumaran, Stemple and Lewis have pioneered research around the limits of legal investigation and prosecution mechanisms concerning the recognition of potential episodes of SVAM.²⁷ The concealment of these episodes, they argue, can be attributed to a legal focus on female victimization, which provokes dissimilar classifications and double standards based on the biological sex of the victim.

As a matter of fact, the conceptualization and empirical identification of SVAM are often subject to controversy, with incidents of male victimization usually being depicted using desexualized labels such as ‘torture’ and ‘cruel treatment’.²⁸ Leiby, for example, suggests that miscoding and misrepresentation of male victims' testimonies by investigators working for the truth commissions in Peru and El Salvador led to an overall underestimation of the phenomenon in both conflicts. The final reports of these commissions have officially indicated that men comprised only 1 per cent and 2 per cent of victims of sexual violence in El Salvador and Peru, respectively. Yet, by recoding the original testimonies provided by victims and witnesses to these commissions, Leiby suggests a very different picture: that men comprised 29 per cent of victims in Peru and up to 53 per cent in El Salvador.²⁹

Epidemiological and population based-surveys have also sought to bring the ‘real’ dimensions of SVAM to the surface. Johnson and colleagues, for example, suggest that approximately 760,000 men are survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.³⁰ Cross-sectional research conducted in post-conflict Liberia found that about 32 per cent of male combatants were victimized by some form of sexual abuse.³¹ On the basis of mounting evidence on the vulnerability of the male body in conflict situations, Chris Dolan, a practitioner and activist in the field of SVAM, argued:

While the existing statistics on sexual violence tend to confirm that in a global aggregate there are more reported cases of sexual violence against women than against men, to deduce from this that in every specific situation women and girls are the primary targets is problematic … Any statistics on sexual violence, therefore, should be treated with caution … no serious social scientist, no donor and no committed humanitarian should allow so much action to be premised on such shaky empirical foundations.³²

To give visibility to the issue, a burgeoning body of research, as well as NGO and media reports, is increasingly circulating evidence and stories to unveil the so-called ‘darkest secret of war’,³³ drawing international attention to ‘the “truth” of male victimhood’.³⁴ These efforts have also invigorated calls for revision of policy and research framings towards a ‘gender-inclusive’ agenda, capable of replacing women and girls ‘as the default at-risk group’.³⁵

As this debate starts to make waves in policy circles, Zalewski's theoretical moves encourage us to interrogate how the unreflective reproduction and dissemination of these narratives might be implicated in the ‘cauterisation of critical thought’ about sexual violence.³⁶ As Zalewski and Runyan put it:

In what might be perceived as a painful contradiction … there is an abundance of information … which has produced people/subjects who think they/we know (or that the information which will help us ‘know’ is all ‘out there’ at the touch of a keyboard, or the finger skimming of a plasma screen). Yet, recalling the Platonic sense that acute/critical thinking teaches how little one knows … we perhaps know less and less each day and each moment.³⁷

The contested meanings and narratives surrounding conflict-related sexual violence do indeed raise important concerns about the theoretical and empirical contours of the phenomenon. The following section puts Zalewski's provocations on SVAM in conversation with evidence on genital violence to interrogate the relationship between sex and violence in these interactions.

Do we know sexual violence when we see it? On the facticity of data and descriptions

Drawing on the concept of sexual violence as any harm inflicted ‘through sexual means or by targeting sexuality’,³⁸ one might argue that genital violence constitutes sexual violence because it implicates the biological sex of the victim. Accordingly, any injury to the penis or testicles would suffice to indicate the sexual nature of these assaults. But, paraphrasing Zalewski, isn't this assumption reifying and circling us back to the ‘biological “truth” of sex organs’?³⁹ And what are the consequences ‘of being so deeply in the thrall of conventionally and contemporarily defined sexual parts and acts’? ⁴⁰ At least two major implications can be drawn from these provocations. First, the analytical confinement to sex organs as the exclusive site of sexual violation can obscure how ‘sexual value’ might be attached to other bodily parts in different contexts, as Zalewski has noted in the case of the penetration of ears in nineteenth-century Europe.⁴¹ Second, considering that sex and violence ‘are rather fluid and mobile, taking on different meanings and formations in the particular context of use’,⁴² the automatic transplantation of the ‘sexual’ label to some violent scripts can muddle more complex experiences and stories about conflict-related sexual violence, in general, and conflict-related sexual violence against men, in particular.

Wary of invisibilities provoked by the uses and abuses of sexual violence as a static and fixed concept, Zalewski and Runyan have called for a shift towards more ‘expansive and mobile’ frames that allow us to critically engage with sex as a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘thing’.⁴³ The unravelling of performances of bodily violence, giving adequate attention to their context and the logics of interaction in place, can contribute to challenging the essentialization of certain categories as ‘sexual’ while providing a more nuanced understanding of these abuses. Therefore, a closer examination of how scripts of genital violence contextually unfold can assist us in casting a more critical gaze on whether and how sex and violence amalgamate in particular interactions.

Contrast, for instance, the three excerpts below reporting incidents of violence against men during the conflict in Peru:

Excerpt A:

The policemen forced him to sit on a chair, and argued between them what kind of punishment they were going to use against him. One of them said that they should start by raping him, because he was a ‘chibolo’ [kid, young]. Another proposed that the best was ‘la pita’, ‘to hang him like a spider,’ he said. At this moment, a black woman entered and asked, what is happening? ‘We are having fun,’ the policemen answered. Then, the woman approached him and began to fondle the genitals of J.A.M.U. with her legs. The declarant [J.A.M.U.] presented an erection and the woman struck him on his penis. ‘Look at this terruco! [terrorist]’ she said, while the rest mocked.⁴⁴

Excerpt B:

Around midnight, the captain together with other police officers again entered the cell … and said ‘now you can talk.’ He replied ‘I know nothing about the death of the police officer,’ as he did not reply as they expected, they forced a needle into his toes, testicles and penis …, they did it again and again [while] asking about the weapons and the death of a policeman.⁴⁵

Excerpt C:

They were all there for the same reason, for the questions the commander had about a series of assaults. The same afternoon they took them one by one. They were tortured on the second floor of the Command. They were beaten and received electroshocks to their tongues, testicles and penis. They were also put in a cylinder with water. Meanwhile they were asked the same questions.⁴⁶

All of these incidents could be equally categorized as ‘genital violence’ and perhaps mobilized to make sexual violence against men visible and recognizable as such. In Leiby's dataset, for instance, these acts could be equally classified as ‘sexual torture’.⁴⁷ This conceptual expansion, however, poses certain ambiguities if we qualitatively flesh out whether and how ‘sex’ works in relation to violence in these diverse enactments.

In excerpt A, the weakness and fragility associated with the victim's image as a chibolo positioned his body as penetrable in the gender order. He was sexually harassed, threatened with rape for not being regarded as man enough, abused until he had an erection and then beaten on his genitals as a result. The performance of violence mobilized sex and sexuality as a grammar for communicating power and domination through interactions in which the genitalia of the victim play a central role. Tropes of eroticism and pleasure, mobilized in the groping of the victim's genitals and the forced masturbation preceding his genital beating, place the sexual subjectivity of the victim at the centre of the violent interaction. Similar tropes can be found in the testimony below provided to the CVR by a male detainee accused of being a terrorist and a member of the Shining Path: ‘The declarant affirms that one night a woman entered his cell and said “I'll teach you how to make love”; the declarant was tied; she came closed to him and squeezed his testicles in such a way that caused him an inflammation …’⁴⁸

The statement depicts an episode of violence in which a parodic enactment of sexual grammars underpins the interaction between the victim and the perpetrator. A close examination of the contextual verbal and non-verbal dimensions of the performance reveals allusions to a potential sexual encounter mobilized through a satirical utterance (‘I'll teach you how to make love’) and the touching of the genital area. What follows then is the deliberate attack to the victim's genitalia, entailing his symbolic subordination vis-à-vis the offender through the mobilization of a particular sexual repertoire. In this interaction, the genital harm inflicted on the victim thus becomes sexualized through behaviours and allusions to sexual and erotic tropes. The victim's sexual organ, beyond being physically attacked, plays a central role in the grammar of torture, shaping and constituting the violent enactment through violent sexualized scripts that injure the male body in its sexual subjectivity.

Performances of genital violence entailing an attack on the sexual subjectivity of the male body can also be found in testimonies of violence from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Evidence derived from the ICTY archives indicates that, in this particular context, most incidents of genital violence were anchored in a reproductivist sexual logic. A witness statement in the case against Dusko Tadić, for example, details the following incident:

The man with the beard came back over and told [witness G] to take Hari's testicle out. G finally managed to get Hari's testicles in his hands. … The man with the beard was yelling ‘harder, harder, harder.’ G then was successful and bit one off … and the man with the beard then cursed Hari's mother and said to him ‘make a Turk son now!’ ⁴⁹

Similar accounts emerge in the case against Bjagoje Simić:

He ordered us to spread our legs, and then he would hit us with his knee … and he said to all of us, ‘You won't have any more children.’ … these words were harder for me than the actual beating … He hit me in the genital area … All of you present here, all of you who are males, can imagine this kind of pain …⁵⁰

References to the procreative continuation of the victim gear violence towards imageries of male sexuality as construed and regulated in sexual reproductive arrangements. Beyond the extreme pelvic pain inflicted, the symbolic representation of male sexuality emerges not only as a point of reference for the grammar of the performance, but as an organizing force of the interaction. In a patrilineal context, where sexual reproduction is regarded ‘as a property of masculine agency’ that depends on the integrity of the male sexed apparatus,⁵¹ these genitally orientated performances directly target and confront the sexual subjectivity of the male body, which is injured in its procreative capacity.

Indeed, in different cultures and contexts, the genitalia emerge as ‘markers of desire, eroticism, libido, dominance or submission’.⁵² Yet, although some sex-related acts and performances may appear to be strikingly similar in appearance, their meanings and identification as sexual can vary substantially depending on a range of factors, including the contexts in which violence occurs.⁵³ Understanding and recognizing male sexual vulnerability thus requires more than assuming a straightforward connection between the targeting of sexed parts of the body and sexual violence.

Let us turn back to excerpts B and C transcribed above. Could we say that sex and sexuality are doing the same work in these performances? A careful contextual look at how these incidents were played out reveal that the targeting of the genitals was paired with and integral to other forms of torture, aimed at breaking the victim's resistance and inducing confessions (‘they did it again and again [while] asking about the weapons and the death of a policeman’; ‘They … received electroshocks to their tongues, testicles and penis … Meanwhile they were asked the same questions’). When harmed, the sex organs of the victim did not seem to hold a privileged position in these particular performances, nor is a sexual grammar deployed in the interaction between victims and perpetrators. Similar repertoires can be found in other testimonies of violence against men. For example, a Peruvian political prisoner recalled how, during an interrogation session, the soldiers punched and kicked him in different parts of his body, while saying: ‘shitty terrucos, motherfuckers, where are the weapons, where is comrade x or y.’ The soldiers, the testimony continues, ‘kicked us, hung us, sometimes they lifted us by grabbing our testicles and penis’.⁵⁴ A similar testimony recalls: ‘They kicked me in the stomach area, first, then they beat me, they knocked me to the floor, they stepped on me … they connected electric current to my feet, my penis and my ear … they wanted me to self-incriminate.’⁵⁵

In these testimonies, the episodes of bodily violence are situated in a steady chain of pain-inducing scripts of violence. In addition to the apparent absence of erotic meanings and stimuli, the sexual subjectivity of these actors does not seem to be mobilized or directly implicated in the dynamics of violence. In both cases, the genitals of the victims were attacked along with other sensitive parts of the body. The words, deeds and gestures displayed in the scene seem to be exclusively focused on crude torture, inflicted by multiple stressors, such as concurrent electroshock and beatings to a multitude of other bodily parts. Juxtaposing this performance with those above, should these performances be similarly characterized and quantified as sexual? Is the beating of the genitals in fact different in ‘nature’, or intent, from the beating that the victim suffered on other parts of the body during this interaction? Is there something inherently sexual about this performance? Should we privilege the ‘sexual’ meaning in these interactions? How can we know? And how do we ‘know’?

Indeed, as previously observed by Myrttinen, ‘assessing the “meanings” that these forms of violence take is not straightforward’, and perhaps the only way to ‘really know’ is to ask perpetrators about what meanings they sought to convey when targeting the genitals or to ask the victims how they experienced these episodes.⁵⁶ But making visible the ‘grammar’ of interaction through which victims, perpetrators and audience make sense of and give meaning to these acts can contribute to a more grounded understanding of these harms.⁵⁷ Or, at least, it reveals the complexity behind straightforward presuppositions around the sexual ‘nature’ of given categories of violence. If, on the one hand, it could be argued that one cannot assume that these repertoires are being used ‘just’ to maximize pain, on the other, neither can the sexual ramification of this sort of torture, solely in view of the targeting of the genitalia, simply be inferred without further considering the dynamics of violence in place, how the victims experience such acts and/or how the perpetrator frames the interaction. In other words, enactments of violence, as a social performance, cannot be abstracted from the context, meanings and logics of the interaction at hand.⁵⁸

By putting Zalewski's provocative posture on SVAM in conversation with the testimonies above, we may be able to understand why inferring a sexual dimension of ‘genital violence’ through static and universal categories can be problematic. First, while preoccupied with the ‘sexual’ label, these debates tend to maintain a strict focus on sexed bodies and, consequently, on rigid binary categories attached to ‘corporeally fixated definitions and frames’,⁵⁹ such as ‘sexual violence against women’ or ‘sexual violence against men’. ‘Where can other (genders/sexes) be placed in the conceptual vortex of the gender binary?’⁶⁰ This is a question that confronts us in Zalewski's writings. Sex-centred frames often mute the suffering and vulnerability of gender non-conforming individuals, leading to what she refers to as a ‘persistent othering’ of queered bodies and positionalities.⁶¹ The invisibility of race as a relevant dimension in debates around sexual violence also concerns Zalewski in her most recent contributions. The conventional conceptualization of sexual violence, she argues, often distracts us from understanding how differently sexed and raced subjects can be effaced from dominant policy and scholarly thinking on sexual violence.⁶² The intimate imbrication of race (or, in the case of the former Yugoslavia, ethnicity) with sexuality produces important insights for policy-making: not all men are similarly vulnerable to sexual violence, and men are not necessarily targeted because they are men. Sexual violence against men, as Ward suggests, ‘is not about men being targeted because of broad-based discrimination against them for being men; it is about men in particular social groups being targeted in order for their opponents to win wars’.⁶³

Second, the presupposition that certain acts or bodily parts are always sexual risks ‘over-sexualizing’ certain performances of violence and might consequently say both ‘too much and not enough about the meaning of a practice so named’.⁶⁴ Jasbir Puar, for example, reflecting on events in Abu Ghraib, interrogates the purported innate sexual dimensions of certain episodes of violence and how these assumptions can deflect our attention from the ways in which the sexual/erotic operates in certain enactments to ‘signify sex’.⁶⁵ Sexual violence differs from other kinds of violence in that it deploys sexuality as an instrument of power, humiliation and intimidation through sexual tropes, connotation and sexed/gendered positionings. Focusing on static cartographies of the body, rather than on content and meaning, flattens our understanding of what sexual violence is and how it manifests itself in different contexts. There are particular understandings of bodies and articulations of sexuality that inform and give meaning to sexual violence, and those should be taken into consideration according to the context.⁶⁶ Sexual meanings are also produced in terms of a particular bodily imaginary that differently marks male- and female-identified bodies. ‘In certain social contexts,’ Campbell notes, ‘forcing a female victim to remove her shirt is sexual, whereas forcing a male victim to do the same is not.’⁶⁷

Third—a point related to the second—the automatic sexualization of all instances of genital violence without properly interrogating the connections between sex and violence, as Zalewski encourages us to do, might potentially produce a reality in which sexual violence against men becomes more frequent as more acts start to be coded, interpreted and automatically treated as such. The urge to frame these acts as ‘sexual’ has led to what Zalewski terms as ‘the empirical levelling of the incidence of sexual violence across the traditional gender-binary’.⁶⁸ Such propositions can significantly influence how the international community understands and responds to these crimes. Considering the lack of attention to male victims and the historical obfuscation of SVAM in policy and research, acknowledging how men too can be victims of these abuses is indeed crucial to raise awareness and more effectively address stigmatization and under-reporting issues. Yet the automatic treatment of these categories of abuse as ‘sexual’ also raises the question of the productive force of ‘macronarratives’ of SVAM circulated by NGOs, scholars and the media and their potential impacts on policies and programmes responding to conflict-related sexual violence. Here a distinction needs to be drawn between what Campbell identifies as ‘macronarratives’ stemming from ‘observer-interpreters’, i.e. NGOs, media and scholars, and the ‘micronarratives’ and perceptions coming from ‘participant-interpreters’, i.e. those directly implicated in the interaction.⁶⁹ The ‘macronarratives’ about the empirical facticity of SVAM should be taken with a grain of salt as they may or may not coincide with ‘micronarratives’ of participants. They can provide critical insights into the ways in which male victimization might be glossed over in policy and research; but they might also contribute to authoritative narratives that stabilize particular representations and understandings of events that fail to take into consideration perspectives stemming from ‘participant-interpreters’.

The contemporary policy appetite to make us ‘see’ sexual violence against men might easily fall into traps of oversimplification, unreflectively naturalizing and expanding the set of bodily harms labelled as sexual without further interrogating their nuances, variations and complexities. Beyond the potential skewing in figures of SVAM—and, consequently, in our understandings of the phenomenon of conflict-related sexual violence in general—this unreflective expansion can also deflect our attention from how sexual politics and practices silently and intrinsically permeate warfare practices and gendered programming, as further discussed below.

This is in no way to suggest that these enactments are less serious or traumatic (or that they cannot become sexual). Rather, the relevance of this debate—and therefore of Zalewski's provocative posture on the matter—is to open up the possibility for thinking through existing categories and the narratives they circulate about the relationship between sex and violence. As other examples above illustrate, the categorization of some performances of violence as ‘just’ torture can indeed flatten our understanding of how sex and violence come together in particular circumstances. Yet, as Kelly suggests, there is a difference between expanding the definition of sexual violence to ‘reflect the complexity of experiences’ of sexed bodies and simply ‘collapsing a number of forms of violence into one category’.⁷⁰

Interrogating the ‘additive endeavours’: on the pitfalls of gender inclusivity

The shroud of silence cast over sexual violence against men during war is quite frequently attributed to a ‘general failure of feminist scholarship and activism to incorporate this issue’ in the international agenda.⁷¹ By highlighting violence against women, some argue, feminist approaches continue to taint scholarly and policy circles with myopic narratives which men inhabit only as perpetrators.⁷² As a result, investigation, prosecution mechanisms and policy efforts to respond to conflict-related sexual violence remain ineffective or even harmful to male victims owing to a deeply ingrained gender bias towards female victimization. Some authors even suggest that UN documents on sexual and gender-based violence have been co-opted by a patriarchal perspective disguised in ‘feminist clothing’.⁷³ As this perception gained traction in the literature on sexual violence against men, so did calls for more inclusive approaches to bring the ‘other side’ of gender into policies and analyses divorced from feminist normative concerns.

Far from being a novelty, the quest for gender-inclusive frames was initiated more than a decade ago, raising Zalewski's unease over the proposition. In the early 2000s, enthusiasts for this approach sparked off a heated debate in the International Relations (IR) literature between feminists and adherents of the so-called ‘non-feminist gender theory’, which defended the use of gender as a neutral category of analysis.⁷⁴ The persistent efforts to discipline feminism unsettled Zalewski, who has vigorously questioned the methodological and epistemological consequences of doing away with feminism in gender theorizations. In the face of these critiques, she enquired: ‘What might we learn from the persistent anxieties provoked by feminism's interventions into IR that are indicated by the maneuvers to diminish it?’⁷⁵

More recently, Zalewski returned attention to calls for gender inclusivity as a potential way to overcome what Dolan and others perceive as the ‘malfunction of gender as an analytical, practical and political engine’.⁷⁶ In pondering the issue, her provocations intended to challenge how ‘facts’ and narratives about sexual violence against men can so easily be detached from a more holistic and careful gendered thinking in the course of seeking to redress a perceived favouritism towards women. Can gender be deployed as a neutral policy tool? If so, what are the assumptions operating behind the quest for gender neutrality and what (gendered) orders are being created and reproduced through them?

Zalewski cautions against formulations that can so easily spark off an ‘and-men-too’ rhetoric while erasing deep-seated gendered hierarchies embedded in understandings of a social world that is already largely written by and for men.⁷⁷ While being attentive to all forms of oppressive power, feminists are understandably wary of the potential implications of an agenda that uses gender as a purportedly value-neutral analytical tool. In this regard, she notes:

Men are indeed a gender too and their vulnerability to violence associated with gender … surely must be recognised as such. Though this does beg a specific question about gender, which is: are men the same (kind of) gender as women? The answer must be no, as gender, despite its varied appearance and impact across the binary, implies difference—minimally sexual difference … Thus, to make claims about the gender of specific forms of violence named sexual is to invoke, however ephemerally, the workings of gender in their differentially masculinised and feminised shapes.⁷⁸

What becomes evident in her writings is that debates around sexual violence against men should not be reduced to an automatic inclusion of male bodies as victims, ‘siloed’ and segregated from feminist theoretical insights. Instead, in remaining attentive to potential backlashes and coexisting layers of privilege in gendered power relations, feminist critiques can enrich our understanding of SVAM and contribute to more rigorous analyses of this phenomenon. Feminist wariness about so-called gender-neutral frameworks should therefore not be confused with denying the urgent need to integrate male victimization in policies and programmes addressing gender-based violence or, more worrisome, with ‘a manifesto for an exclusive approach to gender programming’.⁷⁹ Psychological, medical and legal services for male victims are indisputably scarce and precarious. Professionals lack adequate training to identify and treat men and boys who have been sexually violated. And even when these services are offered, organizations face enormous obstacles in trying to reach survivors, owing to social stigmatization and even criminalization of the victim in countries where same-sex intercourse is legally proscribed.⁸⁰ In post-conflict settings, efforts to achieve justice and reintegration often reinforce such practices, thus contributing to the marginalization and social exclusion of survivors.⁸¹ These issues and their perverse implications are in no way under dispute here.

The problem, however, is how such conclusions have yielded to overly simplified and straightforward frames and prescriptions without critically engaging with broader gendered social structures, as if sexual violence could be ‘framed as an almost gender-neutral weapon of war’, as previously emphasized by Goetz.⁸² Another important point is that the banner of ‘gender inclusivity’ can be used to sugar-coat anti-feminist, even misogynistic, rhetoric in a palatable way. During a personal exchange, one UN officer confessed her scepticism towards the ‘gender neutrality’ agenda, claiming that the ‘and-men-too’ narrative was commonly used by her co-workers, albeit sometimes unintentionally, to sideline feminist critiques and downplay women's victimization.⁸³ In dismissing the extent to which, and the ways in which, gender remains hierarchically ordered, gender-inclusive frames are, ironically, trying to mend gender analyses with the same broken tools they accuse feminists of using. The failure to consider more complex questions around ‘gendered workings of power’,⁸⁴ and instead simply ‘adding men and stirring’, risks further increasing rather than addressing gender inequalities and injustice and, perhaps, ‘allow[ing] injury to become entitlement’.⁸⁵ As Zalewski so aptly puts it:

There is something curious about claiming the vulnerability of ‘the Other’ as might be seen when ‘white people’ claim racist injury. Though it is credible to claim women have traditionally been presented as the ‘weaker sex’ in need of protection … it is also the case that the male subject is classically the privileged site of anxiety … We might continue to ask questions about sexual politics here as the latter can reveal the ways in which gender remains structured by hierarchical power, which conventionally reserves/preserves ‘special’ places for those positioned along gender binaries.⁸⁶

A particular anecdote, from an interview with a service provider, can illustrate the pitfalls of what Zalewski terms the ‘additive endeavour’ to gender.⁸⁷ While recounting his experience working with survivors of sexual violence, my interviewee told me the story of a woman who had been raped and became HIV positive as a result. Out of fear of her husband, she had decided not to disclose the incident. The woman was receiving antiretroviral treatment, but still having regular unprotected sexual encounters with her uninformed husband. In doing so, she was transmitting the virus to him while also recontaminating herself every time they slept together. ‘She fears he will cut her into pieces if he finds out,’ my interviewee explained to me while trying to illustrate how men can be impaired by their own privilege. ‘In this scenario … the man is becoming the victim!’ he argued.⁸⁸

This anecdote illustrates the need for caution in applying approaches and theorizations that remain exclusively articulated through narratives of sexed bodies as either agents or victims of violence. Zalewski's reminder about the ‘cauterization of thought’ produced by spectacularized images of sexual violence could also be applied here to ‘unthink’ the theorizations of sexual violence against men as something detached from the broader sexual politics within which these violent practices emerge. The urge to reveal who is affected rather than delving into how gender, sex and violence are mingling in these interactions swiftly shifts attention away from the convoluted gendered power relations that coexist in this profoundly complex story. As a consequence, the everyday oppression that pushes the woman into acting as a vector of contamination are completely obscured, giving way to over-simplistic narratives in which she—rather than the toxic masculinity that keeps her as a permanent hostage to her own rape—becomes the sole problem.

Conclusion

The urge to eradicate sexual violence during war has tended to produce ‘unthinking’ actions in global politics. How violence is framed, conveyed, concealed and theorized has certainly been a persisting concern in Zalewski's contributions. In shifting the focus from sexed bodies to sexed processes of violence, her provocations point to the need to consider more nuanced and multilayered understandings of sexual and gender-based violence. In offering a critique of how sexual violence against men is ‘thought’/theorized, this article has proposed an understanding that distils whether and how sex and violence manifest and coalesce during these performances. Drawing on Zalewski, this article reveals sexual violence as an inherently fluid and complex dynamic that needs to be contextually situated. Instead of interpreting sexual violence through sex-centred models or static typologies, it is crucial to scrutinize whether and how certain practices contextually enact and mobilize that which is constructed as sexual.

The insights gained through Zalewski's provocations must be taken into consideration in current debates around reshaping policies and programmes responding to sexual and gender-based violence in conflict settings. The temptation to unreflectively ‘add’ sexed bodies into purported inclusive frameworks might offer an apparently straightforward quick-fix solution to the necessary acknowledgement of male victimization. Still, the inclusion of men as victims cannot stand apart from how sexual politics and gender relations organize in society and circulate in war-making practices. Policy responses and funding efforts that aim to address conflict-related sexual violence against all individuals must do so through an in-depth gender analysis that carefully situates them in existing power relations. As it stands, ‘gender inclusivity’ is more likely to be part of the problem than of the solution.

Footnotes

1

Marysia Zalewski, ‘“All these theories yet the bodies keep piling up”: theorists, theories and theorizing’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski, eds, International Relations: positivism and beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 340–53.

2

Marysia Zalewski and Anne Sisson Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence in a neoliberal era of spectacular terror’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 8: 3, 2015, pp. 439–55; Marysia Zalewski, Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prügl and Maria Stern, eds, Sexual violence against men in global politics (London: Routledge, 2018).

3

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, pp. 439–55.

4

Marysia Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, in Zalewski et al., eds, Sexual violence against men, p. 25.

5

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, pp. 25–39.

6

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, pp. 27–30.

7

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, pp. 439–55.

8

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, pp. 439–55.

9

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, p. 441.

10

See Pauline Oosterhoff, Prisca Zwanikken and Evert Ketting, ‘Sexual torture of men in Croatia and other conflict situations: an open secret’, Reproductive Health Matters 12: 23, 2004, pp. 68–77; Michele Leiby, ‘Uncovering men's narratives of conflict-related sexual violence’, in Zalewski et al., eds, Sexual violence against men, p. 147; Paula Drumond, ‘Sex, violence and heteronormativity: revisiting performances of sexual violence against men in former Yugoslavia’, in Zalewski et al., eds, Sexual violence against men, pp. 154–5; Philipp Schulz, ‘Displacement from gendered personhood: sexual violence and masculinities in northern Uganda’, International Affairs 94: 5, Sept. 2018, pp. 1101–20; Jessica Auchter, ‘Forced male circumcision: gender-based violence in Kenya’, International Affairs 93: 6, Nov. 2017, pp. 1339–56; Jasmine-Kim Westerndorf and Louise Searle, ‘Sexual exploitation and abuse in peace operations: trends, policy responses and future directions’, International Affairs 93: 2, March 2017, pp. 365–88; Heleen Touquet, Unsilenced: male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Sri Lanka speak (Johannesburg: International Truth and Justice Project, Sept. 2018).

11

Oosterhoff at al., ‘Sexual torture of men in Croatia’, p. 76.

12

Mladen Loncar, Neven Henigsberg and Pedro Hrabrac, ‘Mental health consequences in men exposed to sexual abuse during the war in Croatia and Bosnia’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 25: 2, 2010, p. 196.

13

Leiby, ‘Uncovering men's narratives’, pp. 143–7.

14

Maria Stern and Marysia Zalewski, ‘Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarization’, Review of International Studies 35: 3, 2009, p. 619.

15

Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, ‘Curious erasures: the sexual in wartime sexual violence’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 20: 3, 2018, pp. 295–314; Paula Drumond, Embodied battlefields: uncovering sexual violence against men in war theaters (Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2017).

16

Jasbir Puar, Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Katherine M. Franke, ‘Putting sex to work’, Denver University Law Review 75: 4, 1997, pp. 1139–80.

17

Franke, ‘Putting sex to work’, p. 1140.

18

Baaz and Stern, ‘Curious erasures’, pp. 297–8.

19

Leiby, ‘Uncovering men's narratives’, pp. 137–51; Drumond, ‘Sex, violence and heteronormativity’, pp. 152–66.

20

The ICTY court records can be accessed at http://icr.icty.org/. (Unless otherwise indicated at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 5 Aug. 2019.)

21

Michele Leiby, ‘The promise and peril of primary documents: documenting wartime sexual silence in El Salvador and Peru’, in Morten Bergsmo, Alf Butenschon Skre and Elisabeth J. Wood, eds, Proving international sex crimes (Beijing: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2012), pp. 315–66.

22

UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Contemporary forms of slavery: systematic rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices during armed conflict: final report submitted by Ms Gay J McDougall, Special Rapporteur, E/CN.4/Sub.2/1998/13 (Geneva, 22 June 1998), paras 21–2.

23

UN General Assembly, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 17 July 1998.

24

Sandesh Sivakumaran, ‘Sexual violence against men in armed conflict’, European Journal of International Law 18: 2, 2007, p. 254; Leiby, ‘The promise and peril of primary documents’, p. 344; Thomas Charman, ‘Sexual violence or torture? The framing of sexual violence against men in Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch’, in Zalewski et al., eds, Sexual violence against men, pp. 198–210.

25

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 28

26

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 25.

27

Sivakumaran, ‘Sexual violence against men’; Lara Stemple, ‘Male rape and human rights’, Hastings Law Journal 60: 3, 2009, pp. 605–47; Dustin Lewis, ‘Unrecognized victims: sexual violence against men in conflict settings under international law’, Wisconsin International Law Journal 27: 1, 2009, pp. 1–49.

28

Sivakumaran, ‘Sexual violence against men’, p. 257; Valerie Oosterveld, ‘Sexual violence directed against men and boys in armed conflicts and mass atrocities: addressing a gendered harm in international criminal tribunals’, Journal of International Law and International Relations, vol. 10, 2014, p. 109.

29

Leiby, ‘The promise and peril of primary documents’, p. 343.

30

Kirsten Johnson, Jennifer Scott, Bigy Rughita, Michael Kisielewski, Jana Asher, Ricardo Ong and Lynn Lawry, ‘Association of sexual violence and human rights violations with physical and mental health in territories of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 304: 5, 2010, p. 561.

31

Kirsten Johnson, Jana Asher, Stephanie Rosborough, Amisha Raja, Rajesh Panjabi, Charles Beadling and Lynn Lawry, ‘Association of combatant status and sexual violence with health and mental health outcomes in postconflict Liberia’, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 300: 6, 2008, p. 683.

32

Chris Dolan, ‘Letting go of the gender binary: charting new pathways for humanitarian interventions on gender-based violence’, International Review of the Red Cross 96: 894, 2015, p. 10 (emphasis added).

33

Will Storr, ‘The rape of men: the darkest secret of war’, Guardian, 17 July 2011; Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘Symbol of unhealed Congo: male rape victims’, New York Times, 4 Aug. 2009; ‘Luzolo, “he abused me. The pain was awful”’, The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN News), 2 Aug. 2011, http://www.irinnews.org/report/93400/drc-uganda-luzolo-he-abused-me-pain-was-awful.

34

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 31.

35

Dolan, ‘Letting go of the gender binary’, p. 16.

36

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, pp. 439–55.

37

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, p. 446.

38

UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Contemporary forms of slavery, paras 21–2.

39

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 23.

40

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 37.

41

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 36.

42

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, p. 452.

43

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, p. 452.

44

CVR, CVR Testimony 700448 (emphasis added).

45

CVR, CVR Testimony 204160 (emphasis added).

46

CVR, CVR Testimony 101165 (emphasis added).

47

Leiby, ‘The promise and peril of primary documents’, p. 343.

48

CVR, CVR testimony 700270 (emphasis added).

49

ICTY, Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadić (witness statement), IT-94-1, 9–11 Jan. 1995, p. 6 (emphasis added).

50

ICTY, Prosecutor v. Bjagoje Simić et al. (prosecution's final trial brief), IT-95-9-T, 2 Nov. 2001 (emphasis added).

51

Brian Keith Axel, ‘The diasporic imaginary’, Public Culture 14: 2, 2002, p. 420.

52

Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan, The anthropology of sex (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), p. 10.

53

Drumond, Embodied battlefields; Henri Myrttinen, ‘Languages of castration: male genital mutilation in conflict and its embedded messages’, in Zalewski, Drumond, Prügl and Stern, Sexual violence against men in global politics, pp. 71–88;

54

CVR, CVR testimony 202142 (emphasis added).

55

CVR, CVR testimony 101878.

56

Myrttinen, ‘Languages of castration’, p. 73.

57

Myrttinen, ‘Languages of castration’, p. 73; Drumond, Embodied battlefields.

58

Bettina Schmidt and Ingo Schröder, Anthropology of violence and conflict (London: Routledge, 2001).

59

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, p. 452.

60

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 35.

61

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 35.

62

Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’.

63

Jeanne Ward, ‘It's not about the gender binary, it's about the gender hierarchy: a reply to “Letting go of the gender binary”’, International Review of the Red Cross 98: 1, 2016, p. 293.

64

Franke, ‘Putting sex to work’, p. 1140.

65

Puar, Terrorist assemblages, p. 112.

66

Kirsten Campbell, ‘The gender of transitional justice: law, sexual violence and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 1: 3, 2007, p. 416.

67

Campbell, ‘The gender of transitional justice’.

68

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 28.

69

David Campbell, National deconstruction: violence, identity, and justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 41–3.

70

Liz Kelly, Surviving sexual violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 67.

71

Adam Jones and Augusta Del Zotto, ‘Male-on-male sexual violence in wartime: human rights' last taboo?’, paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, 23–27 March 2002, p. 2.

72

Jones and Del Zotto, ‘Male-on-male sexual violence in wartime’; Stemple, ‘Male rape and human rights’, p. 628.

73

Chris Dolan, ‘Has patriarchy been stealing the feminists' clothes? Conflict-related sexual violence and UN Security Council resolutions’, IDS Bulletin 45: 1, 2014, pp. 80–84.

74

R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Gender theory in world politics: contributions of a nonfeminist standpoint?’, International Studies Review 4: 3, 2002, pp. 153–65.

75

Marysia Zalewski, ‘“Women's troubles” again in IR’, International Studies Review 5: 2, 2003, p. 292.

76

Dolan, ‘Letting go of the gender binary’, p. 16.

77

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, pp. 32–3.

78

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 29.

79

Chris Dolan, ‘Inclusive gender: why tackling gender hierarchies cannot be at the expense of human rights and the humanitarian imperative’, International Review of the Red Cross 98: 2, 2016, p. 627.

80

Chris Dolan, Into the mainstream: addressing sexual violence against men and boys in conflict (London: Overseas Development Institute, 2014), pp. 4–5.

81

Philipp Schulz, ‘The “ethical loneliness” of male sexual violence survivors in northern Uganda: gendered reflections on silencing’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 20: 11, 2018, pp. 1–19.

82

Anne Marie Goetz, ‘Preventing violence against women: a sluggish cascade?’, Open Democracy, 25 Nov. 2014.

83

UN gender officer, personal communication, Geneva, 20 Nov. 2015.

84

Cynthia Enloe, The morning after: sexual politics at the end of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 246.

85

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 32.

86

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 32.

87

Zalewski, ‘Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men’, p. 35.

88

Author's interview with service provider, Kampala, 14 Oct. 2015.

Author notes

This article is part of a special section of the November 2019 issue of International Affairs on ‘“Well, what is the feminist perspective on international affairs?”: theory/practice’, guest-edited by Helen M. Kinsella and Laura J. Shepherd.