Why it’s time to apply queer perspectives to wartime sexual violence against men
Philipp Schulz and Heleen Touquet
Editor’s note: This blogpost contains descriptions of sexual violence which some readers may find upsetting.
In April 2019, UN Security Council Resolution 2467 — forming part of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda — repeatedly emphasized that men and boys are frequently targeted by sexual and gender-based violence in contexts of violence, conflict and displacement. Whilst this type of violence had, for a long time, remained hidden in the shadows of debates about gender, peace and security, important inroads have been made into recognizing its often widespread perpetration.
Abu Ghraib and the Omarska camp in Bosnia are relatively well-known places where sexual violence against men is known to have occurred. In both cases, men were sexually abused in full view of others, with perpetrators seemingly seeking to dominate their victims and perform notions of hegemonic masculinity in front of an audience. The public nature of these abuses clearly served to send a message to the wider society: we dominate and these men cannot protect you. As Anette Bringedal Houge articulates, ‘the offence is… intended to humiliate the victims and ridicule their masculinity by forcing them to take part in a public, homosexual performance’. This analysis chimes in with the general, popular view of sexual abuse of men in conflict as primarily a strategic weapon of war. Men are raped or sexually assaulted as part of a wider strategy of tearing apart the social fabric of a community, and not because individual perpetrators might see an opportunity for sexual gratification. While the sexual aspect of sexual assault is often centralized in explanations for sexual violence against women, one hardly ever encounters it in explanations for sexual violence against men. The common perception seems to be that this just doesn’t seem to happen to men. Or does it? In our article in International Affairs we argue that framing conflict related sexual violence against men as purely strategic obscures the lived experiences of survivors and limits scholars’ and policy-makers’ ability to respond to it effectively.
Survivor testimonies and the limits of strategic explanation
Our year-long work with Acholi male survivors in northern Uganda and Tamil survivors from Sri Lanka in the UK paints a much more complex picture. While some survivors confirmed the idea that the sexual violence perpetrated against them was strategic, many others did not. Some male survivors instead told us how they felt that perpetrators experienced sexual pleasure in abusing them. For instance, one Tamil survivor narrated: ‘I think they did this for their own pleasure as they did not link the sexual abuse to any interrogation.’ Other survivors also resorted to biological/opportunistic explanations for the abuse they suffered, for instance by suspecting that ‘these were soldiers who were so long in the bush without sex so I think this is why they decided to rape me.’ These explanations clearly point to opportunistic elements, and fundamentally differ from how wartime sexual violence against men is typically framed in the literature as exclusively strategic.
We do not wish to argue here that these instances constitute a separate category of opportunistic rape, to be seen as different from so-called strategic rape. Rather, we think our examples highlight the messiness and complexity of sexual assault: one instance can contain both opportunistic and strategic elements. Binaries are not very useful when explaining wartime rape and ultimately can obscure these complex lived realities. While some of the survivors we worked with seemed to categorize their rape as opportunistic, the overall framework wherein the rape occurred was clearly strategic: the sexual violence was part of a wider campaign against the minority they belonged to. Strategic and opportunistic elements can combine in the story of one single survivor. For example, a Tamil survivor talked about the sexual violence he underwent during interrogations and also in secret at night, when a guard came into his cell.
Queering: Moving beyond hetero-normative and monocausal explanations
By applying monocausal explanatory frameworks that focus only on one side of the strategy-opportunism binary, scholarship on male-directed sexual violence has failed to unearth these complexities and multiple causalities of gendered violence against men. We likewise argue that the neglect of factors related to opportunism and sexualities in seeking to understand the dynamics of male-directed sexual violence is based on unexamined — and often homophobic — assumptions. According to such (latent) heteronormative premises, same-sex violations cannot be assumed to be ‘opportunistic’, but must instead serve a strategic objective, and male combatants cannot possibly be expected to rape other men for sexual gratification. As researchers it is vital that we recognize how the analytical categories we use are often predetermined by our positionalities and unexamined gendered assumptions. In this context, these same categories we use to make sense of the messy lived realities of war have profoundly political consequences in terms of the experiences they foreground and obscure. As Jelke Boesten argues ‘in order to understand the gendered nature of war, we need to listen to the complex experiences of women [and men] beyond any prewritten assumptions and scripts’.
It is therefore crucial for us as researchers to be aware of heteronormative assumptions and binaries that we unconsciously adopt and that color our view of the complex realities we encounter. Our article thus calls for a queering of explanations for sexual violence against men. We believe queer analyses uncover a wider spectrum of factors otherwise obfuscated by binary categorizations and allow us to understand sexualities and sex in conversation with gender. By queering, we draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition referring to ‘the open mesh of possibilities, lapses and dissonances’ where gender and sexualities intersect as analytical categories beyond monolithic heteronormativities. Queering therefore disrupts heteronormative frameworks based on strict dichotomous conceptions of sex and gender. In doing this, queering opens up spaces for more nuanced understandings of the underlying dynamics of wartime sexual violence, perpetrated against all genders, as well as of survivors’ experiences and interpretations of these crimes. This, we argue, refutes crude binary categorizations, more accurately depicts the complexities of gendered violence during times of war and thus better reflects the lived experiences of survivors.
Philipp Schulz is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the University of Bremen.
Heleen Touquet is the Chair in European Values at the University of Antwerp Belgium, and also principal investigator on a project on male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence at the University of Leuven.
Their article ‘Queering explanatory frameworks for wartime sexual violence against men’ was published in the September 2020 issue of International Affairs.
