Theorizing Gender and Ethnicity in War
There are a few assumptions about femininity and ethnicity, and their relationships, underpinning feminist activism during the war in former Yugoslavia. Obviously,
nationalist feminists collapsed femininity and ethnicity, and assumed that woman is of her nation only. Anti-nationalist feminists sometimes separated the two completely, in other times placed themselves within the national terms of reference, but basically adopted what Supek (1994, p. 9) called an internationalist, universalistic and individualistic stance. However, a close reading of the documents of various anti-nationalist women's groups and feminist texts suggests that these assumptions of relationships between femininity and ethnicity rest on one rather crucial assumption - of a woman-victim.
Imagining women exclusively as victims of (sexual) violence informed both the practices and the discourses of nationalism. But it also informed practices and discourses of feminism in Yugoslavia. While mending the effects of the violent gendered practices of nationalism and war, many feminists in Serbia and Croatia have adopted the ultimate gendered discourse of the woman (rape) victim, assuming rather same and fatal link between femininity and victimhood.
Few were those who actually theorized and challenged the association of femininity to victimization, or investigated its function in both feminist and nationalist discourses. In Serbia, Nikolic-Ristanovic et al (1995) start their research by problematizing the notion of a victim and using multiple and diversified definitions of victimization given by the refugee women themselves. In Croatia, Jambresic Kirin & Povrzanovic (1996) use critical approach in their ethnographic study of everyday life of refugees and exiles in Croatia. In their recent work these authors offer sharp criticism of academic and literary representations of the victimization of women. Nikolic-Ristanovic (2000, p. 153) criticizes "trafficing in women's suffering" in academic writing. Jambresic-Kirin (2000) offers a poignant study of the seductive power of the victim status, and the slippery realm of empathy with the victim in three well-known feminist writers from Croatia (Ivekovic, Drakulic and Ugresic):
Skillful sliding of autobiographical discourse instances between first person singular and plural makes it possible to establish an empathic identification with the people who suffered most […] What anthropologists take issue with in this kind of emphatic reflection is the neglect of the fact that clearly separates the writer in temporary exile from the masses of anonymous, unfortunate people who […] do not have the opportunity to choose (Jambresic-Kirin, 2000, p. 311).
Spasic (2000) exposes the links between the analyses of the victim status in Yugoslav feminism and moral arguments. She asserts that the rape victims and other victims of war are perceived as good because they are victims. Thus victimization defines the "quality of the victim" (Spasic, 2000, p. 352). This would mean that women (who are perceived as the ultimate victims) are somehow better than men (who are perceived as ultimate aggressors), or that some women (who are granted victim-status) are better than other women (who are not granted victim-status). Spasic seeks to assert that "the `quality' of the victim remains what it is, even if she/he is victimized" (p. 352). In other words, violence is never justified, and collapsing victimhood with morality inevitably results in an oppositional imagination, be it gendered (good women/bad men) or ethnic (good Croats/bad Serbs). The same oppostional logic works in separating ethnicity and feminism, by morally disregarding the former and uplifting the latter.
Yugoslav war of disintegration was infamous for the use of sexual violence and rape against women as one of its most systematic gendered weapon of war. Thus, the fact that feminists (Yugoslav and international) largely defined women as victims, and especially as victims of rape, may be seen as simply corresponding to the actual situation. Nevertheless, many women refugees have become feminist activists in their new places of residence. Some women rape-camp survivors have been among those most active in collecting and giving testimonies for the tribunals. And, obviously, many women, feminists included, have been outspoken nationalist activist. Thus, seeing women simply as victims is not just a matter of reflecting the empirical situation. Furthermore, feminist theory has given us the concepts of agency and subjectivity, not only that of victimization, precisely because in the gravest of times women, not only feminists, have had the stamina to act. Still, woman-victim seems to have been not only the most visible of all women in Yugoslav wars, but the very base of feminist activism and conceptualization.
Even women who are by every possible criteria activists - nationalist feminists/women - are described as "manipulated" and "trapped" (Boric, 1997, p. 41), as "succumbing to nationalism" (Milic 1993) or the word activism is placed under inverted commas when referring to them (Korac 1993, p. 109). Thus, they are basically seen as non-agents. There are few feminists who, like Dobnikar (2000, p. 361), insist that women's "collaboration with the aggressor" and "involvemnt […] in armed conflict" needs urgent investigation. In general, nationalist actions of women received very limited feminist academic attention (Zarkov 2000). The same happened to women voluntary soldiers. They are simply invisible. So is the suffering of men. Seeing men (all of them or only men of specific ethnicity) as the ultimate villains of the war is certainly one strong feature of feminist activism and analysis of war in Yugoslavia (Jones, 1994). Few are those who even mention, in passing, that men do not appear in wars - and certainly not in Balkan wars - only as aggressors and soldiers, and that even when soldiering, they may be still exposed to victimization (Korac, 1993, p.110, and Boric 1997, p. 47; see also Zarkov 2001). This is not incidental. This is a direct consequence of granting the woman-victim the central place in feminist theoretical and political strategies.
This centrality of women's victimization has consequences for feminist conceptualization of war violence, of gender and ethnicity, as well as of their relationship. By imagining women almost exclusively as victims of violence Yugoslav feminists (and for that matter, many others who analysed wars in former Yugoslavia) largely continued to assume powerlessness of women and omnipotence of men. Theoretically this meant that theycontinued to define masculinity through power and femininity through violability, and thus to reproduce the gendered narrative of war that they strive to subvert. Empirically it meant that they remained blind for the powers of women - including powers to perpetrate and condone violence - and powerlessness and suffering of men.
Such a conceptualization of femininity affected conceptualization of ethnicity. Instead of asking why and how all the politics in the region was reduced to the identity politics (in this case - nationalism), and how ethnicity gained the privileged place therein, many feminists simply surrendered ethnicity to nationalism. Consequently, ethnicity and femininity were either collapsed into each other or totally separated. This further meant that ethnicity was granted meaning only in the context of hatred and violence, and only as a collective identity, (which is in many ways surprising considering feminist general concern with personal experiences). All the very profound personal meanings of ethnicity were lost (Hidovic Harper, 1993). All the everyday-life manifestations of ethnic identities past and present, and the "trauma of change" (Devic, 2000, p. 202) brought about by the war, were erased. This loss and erasure further meant that feminists were losing an opportunity to understand that nation, ethnicity and womanhood are not mutually exclusive realms in women's experiences and that women - feminists or not - do claim not only an ethnic identity but also nationalism as their own project. They do so not as manipulated victims, but as informed agents.
Finally, when a woman is seen only as a victim - or as the victim - of nationalism and war, violence against a woman (and in this case specifically sexual violence and rape) is given power to produce woman's relationship to ethnicity, nation and the state, empirically and conceptually. This is potentially the most damaging consequence of feminist conceptualizations of gender, ethnicity and war in the region. During the war, violence has already been granted power to produce so much - the `Serb rapist' and the `Muslim victim', `good' and `bad' feminists, `sissies' and `heroes' , `mothers' and `witches' … This power was not only discursive. It was mortal. The `ethnic war' in the Balkans should not even be conceptualized as a war between ethnic groups, but rather as a war that produced ethnic groups. This was the war in which violence was granted power to define women and men as much as villages and cities, histories and traditions, in exclusively ethnic terms. Should the violence still have this power now? Is it possible to deconstruct this productive power of violence, without jeopardising the plight and the rights of those whose lives it once altered?
Acknowledgements:
This text is a result of a doctoral study conducted between 1994 and 1999, at the Centre for Women’s Studies of the Nijmegen University (The Netherlands) sponsored by Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I kindly thank Mieke Verloo and the staff of the GO ADMIRA from Utrecht (The Netherlands) for providing me with the most of documentation about women's groups in ex-Yugoslavia, and especially documentation from women's groups from Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia) - annual reports, public statements, programs and pamphlets - which I reviewed for this article. I am also grateful to Rada Drezgic and Anissa Helie on comments on an earlier version of the paper, and to Mary Ellen Kondrat for editorial suggestions and for polishing my English.
