Gender and Genocide

Gender and Genocide
Oxford Handbooks Online

Gender and Genocide
Elisa von Joeden‐Forgey
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies
Edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses
Print Publication Date: Apr 2010

Subject: History, Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, Gender and Sexuality
Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199232116.013.0004
Abstract and Keywords
This article aims to shows that a consideration of gender is crucial to the understanding
of the crime of genocide, because genocide is an historical process that is, at its core,
about group reproduction. The perpetrators must either annul reproduction within the
group or appropriate the progeny in order to destroy the group in the long run. While the
perpetrators' ultimate aim is the material destruction of the target group, the means used
to achieve this end tend to target men and women according to their perceived and actu
al positions within the reproductive process. As part of the killing, then, one finds in all
genocides a shared set of tortures involving generative symbols and institutions (repro
ductive organs, infants and small children, and the bonds that promote family coherence).
Keywords: rape, sexual exploitation, group reproduction, torture, family coherence, gender issues
THE subject of gender in genocide is a relatively new research interest and still remains
peripheral to the field of genocide studies as a whole. While most comprehensive treat
ments of genocide do not take gender seriously into consideration, significant new contri
butions by scholars such as Adam Jones and R. Charli Carpenter are changing this state
of affairs.1 Because genocide is a crime against groups, in which individuals are targeted
due to their group membership, the assumption has long been that sex differentiation
among the victims is of minor importance to the process as a whole. The genocides in
Bosnia‐Herzegovina and in Rwanda in the early 1990s, however, made clear the impor
tance of gender constructs in genocide. Here the widespread and systematic rape of
women and sexual exploitation of men, as well as the obvious use of gendered patterns of
attack, were explicit parts of the perpetrators' genocidal strategies. Thus began a new
moment in the study of genocide, one that has the potential to offer powerful tools for the
prediction, prevention, and prosecution of genocide.
(p. 62)
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Gender and Genocide
In this chapter I set out to demonstrate that a consideration of gender is crucial to our un
derstanding of the crime, because genocide is an historical process that is, at its core,
about group reproduction. As Helen Fein pointed out in a seminal essay on the subject,
‘[r]eproduction serves to continue the group; genocide to destroy it. Thus, perpetrators
must either annul reproduction within the group or appropriate the progeny in order to
destroy the group in the long run.’2 While the perpetrators' ultimate aim is the material
destruction of the target group, the means used to achieve this end tend to target men
and women according to their perceived and actual positions within the reproductive
process. Genocides are therefore characterized by highly symbolic and ritualized dramati
zations of the perpetrator's obsession with demonstrating his or her destructive power
over the target group's very life force. As part of the killing, then, one finds in all geno
cides a shared set of tortures involving generative symbols and institutions (reproductive
organs, infants and small children, and the bonds that promote family coherence). In
many cases, these symbols can be destroyed in ways that do not require the wholesale
physical killing of all members of a group. In fact, it appears that the ‘total’ genocides,
such as the Holocaust and Rwanda, are the exceptions; the norm is rather the sex‐selec
tive killing of specific members of a group combined with a host of strategies aimed at de
stroying the group's ability to survive into the future.
I will engage ‘gender’ as both a marker of biological sex and as a set of cultural practices
and beliefs aimed at organizing relations of power between the sexes. Accordingly, I will
treat gender as both ‘a constitutive element of social relationships based on the perceived
differences between the sexes’ and ‘a primary way of signifying relationships of power’.3
Considering the experiences of men and women simultaneously can help us see genocide
as a process that combines many different means of destruction in order permanently to
undermine the future of a group. Although direct killing is a central part of the genocidal
process, it is not the whole story. Studying gender in genocide can help identify frequent
ly overlooked long‐term causes of genocide as well as key problems faced by societies as
they seek to rebuild in the wake of genocide.
Making Gender Visible

The study of gender in genocide opens up a new realm for the analytical discussion of
genocide—the so‐called ‘private sphere’, what Zainab Salbi, the founder of (p. 63) Women
for Women International, calls the ‘backline discussion’.4 She points out that war and
peace are usually understood solely according to the largely male ‘frontline discussion’
involving soldiers and politicians. But life is also, and perhaps primarily, lived in the
‘backline discussion’ of feeding families, raising children, and nurturing strong communi
ty bonds—things which, it must be said, are not exclusive to women. Genocide, like war,
cannot be properly addressed without a serious and sustained investigation of the ‘back
line discussion’ and the ways in which it influences the lead‐up to genocide, the perpetra
tion of genocide, and the search for justice and social healing after genocide. Indeed, the
place of ordinary life is the primary focus of genocidal violence.
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Gender and Genocide
The foundation for an investigation of the ‘backline discussion’ was laid by women schol
ars of the Holocaust, who in the 1980s began to research the experiences of women sur
vivors. Until then Holocaust research had reflected the gendered assumptions of histori
cal scholarship wherein the history of men stood in for the history of humankind.
Women's experiences were considered to be derivative of and ancillary to men's, and con
sequently of little importance to history. It was the testimony of male survivors that came
to comprise the literary and historical canon of the Holocaust, despite the fact that
women were a majority in the Jewish population of Europe before World War II.5 Indeed,
women wrote the majority of memoirs and testimonials in the first years after 1945,6
despite having a lower survival rate overall.7
The importance of women to a full understanding of the Holocaust was recognized during
the genocide itself by the noted Polish‐Jewish historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, who stud
ied Jewish women and mothers in the Warsaw ghetto while he too was incarcerated there
with his family.8 But it was not until feminist scholars began to investigate the lives of
women in the Holocaust in the 1980s that gendered differences in experience began to be
recognized.9 Most scholars now accept that, in (p. 64) Raul Hilberg's words, ‘the road to
annihilation was marked by events that specifically affected men as men and women as
women.’10
The pioneering first two decades of work on women and the Holocaust focused on the
ways that gender affected Jewish experiences under Nazi domination, and was strongly
informed by the cultural feminist framework of the time. Cultural feminism tended to es
sentialize gender difference, celebrating women's ‘special sphere’ rather than investigat
ing how gender categories and norms intersect with race, nationality, class to form identi
ty and experience, as more recent treatments have begun to do. The cultural feminist
analysis of the Holocaust was criticized for appearing to argue that women were more
victimized than men because of their ‘double burden’ as Jews and as women (the assump
tion being that men carried ‘merely’ a single burden). It could also appear to ignore the
sufferings of men by casting them as aggressors. And, in celebrating women's supposedly
unique abilities to find coping mechanisms in times of crisis, an assertion that many
women Holocaust survivors themselves made, cultural feminism at times suggested that
women somehow transcended the horrors of the camp experience.11
Critics of the cultural feminist model worried further that the focus on sexism was over
shadowing the core element of Nazi policy, which was its racist anti‐Semitism. Cynthia
Ozick remarked in a letter to Joan Ringelheim, ‘[t]he Holocaust happened to victims who
were not seen as men, women, or children, but as Jews.’12 Other scholars, such as Anna
Hardman and Zoë Waxman, protested that cultural feminism ignored the variety and di
versity of women's lives as well as the moments of antagonism and division between fe
male victims.13 Pascale Rachel Bos has argued that many of the gender differences that
have been attributed to people's actual experiences are in fact differences in the way men
and women construct memory.14 Finally, Lawrence Langer has voiced scepticism about
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Gender and Genocide
gender as an important variable in the context of the unspeakable suffering brought

about by the Holocaust.15
What is clear from the research is that gender directly influenced people's experience of
Nazi persecution at various moments within the overall pattern of destruction. Gender
norms shaped how Jews in Germany and elsewhere responded to the Nazi threat.16
Gender also shaped the specific nature of people's (p. 65) vulnerabilities, which were, in
significant respects, different for Jewish men and women. For example, rape and sexual
exploitation are major themes in the memoirs written by women survivors but are barely
mentioned by men. Myrna Goldenberg has well documented how women and girls faced
the threat of sexual exploitation at every step of the process of destruction.17 Although
the Nazis imposed strict laws against ‘race mixing’, Jewish women were sometimes raped
by German soldiers and SS men. They were raped in the camps by guards and sometimes
by other inmates as well.18 Girls who were placed into hiding also faced possible exploita
tion from their care givers.19 The historian Nechama Tec found cases of Jewish women
partisans who were sexually exploited and also raped by their comrades.20 After libera
tion, women faced the additional threat of being raped by Soviet soldiers.21 The very real
threat of sexual exploitation that Jewish women faced from a variety of men alters the
dominant image of the Holocaust as a ‘closed’ historical event by demonstrating the mul
tiple trajectories of violence that coalesce in genocide and later feed back into post‐geno
cide societies.
Apart from defining key differences in the way that men and women experienced persecu
tion, feminist study of the Holocaust has shown that in both ideology and practice Nation
al Socialism was an expression of misogyny as well as racism.22 When the Nazis targeted
Jewish women, they often did so in specific ways based on women's deep symbolic associ
ation with life‐giving powers, a theme that runs through the testimonials written by
women survivors. Killing women, especially pregnant women, was a microcosm of geno
cide for Nazi murderers, since it allowed them to attack directly Jews' spiritual and bio
logical future. Thus, women were killed at much higher rates than men upon arrival in
the death camps.23 In these camps pregnancy was treated with particular cruelty in ac
cord with its potent symbolism. The SS appear to have reserved special tortures for preg
nant women who were—in the case of Auschwitz—beaten ‘with clubs and whips, torn by
dogs, dragged around by the hair and kicked in the stomach with heavy German boots.
Then, when they collapsed, they were thrown into the (p. 66) crematory—alive.’24 Women
who gave birth in the camps were usually murdered immediately along with their infants.
If the pregnancy and birth escaped the attention of the guards, other inmates were forced
to kill the babies if they wished to save the mother.25 Pregnant women caught up in Ein
satzgruppen actions may have elicited particularly sadistic treatment from their killers as
well.26
In addition to demonstrating the importance of misogyny to genocidal ideology, the study

of gender and genocide also sheds light on the ways that perpetrators instrumentalize
gender in the killing process. Even in what have been called ‘gender neutral’ genocides,
such as the Holocaust and Cambodia, perpetrators treat the sexes differently, though not
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in ways that significantly affect overall survival rates.27 In a careful study of gender and
the Holocaust in Veszprém, Hungary, Tim Cole shows that while Jewish men aged 18 to
48 were much more likely to die as forced labourers before deportations to the death
camps began, by 1944 many of them were able to avoid deportations, and almost certain
death, precisely because of their labour power.28 Most of the Jews deported were women,
children, and the elderly. According to Raul Hilberg, men in general died much more
quickly than women in the early phases of the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. This
was largely because gender norms facilitated the treatment of civilian men as enemy
combatants, providing a cover for their detention, forced labour, and massacre.29 Men
died at much higher rates in the ghettos, in part because of the hard labour they were
forced to do.30 Men may also have felt the responsibility to give up rations to their fami
lies or they may have succumbed more quickly to the ravages of malnourishment and
starvation due to their body's faster metabolism in comparison with women.31 Men also
tended to ‘die first’ in the massacres committed by mobile killing squads in Poland, Rus
sia, and Serbia because it was easier for soldiers and police reservists to rationalize and
justify the killing of men, whom they identified as security threats.32 Even Heinrich
Himmler, who clearly had no qualms about killing Jewish men, needed an additional ratio
nalization for killing Jewish women and children.33
(p. 67) Adding Men

The focus on men's gendered experience during genocide is very new. Up until recently,
gender studies were preoccupied primarily with the lives of women, leaving men within
the original framework of universal subjecthood and thereby unintentionally reaffirming
the assumption of the gender‐neutrality of men's lives. Among historians and other geno
cide scholars the initial focus on women can be explained very simply by the fact that
gender studies were embraced by women scholars far earlier than by men. These schol
ars were interested in including women in historical narratives that had largely excluded
them. It is therefore hard to argue, as some have, that men have been discriminatorily ex
cluded from feminist scholarship on genocide.
The exclusion of male victims from international humanitarian attention is a different sto
ry. Rather than a product of feminism, however, this exclusion is the result of those patri
archal norms in international affairs that treat the term civilian as coterminous with
‘women and children’.34 These same patriarchal norms have ascribed to women a more
peaceful nature, a theory that has had a measurable impact on scholarship on gender and
violence. These two related beliefs—that women are by nature peaceful and that male vic
tims are combatants—has exercised a direct, though often subtle, influence on the ways
that observers measure atrocities. Attacks on women and children frequently appear to
generate greater outrage than attacks on men, largely because attacks on men can be so
easily explained away with reference to their supposed ‘battle age’. Although public out
rage at atrocities against women and children is usually short‐lived (it has rarely translat
ed itself into gender‐sensitive priorities in war crimes tribunals or gender‐sensitive eco
nomic development efforts in postgenocidal societies), it is nevertheless significant inas
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Gender and Genocide
much as it can serve to bring a particular conflict to the forefront of international media
attention. Alternately, génocidaires can use patriarchal traditions in international law se
mantically to hide their crimes behind putative counterinsurgency efforts, as the Govern
ment of Sudan has done in Darfur. The role played by gender constructs in genocide de
nial strategies is a subject that has yet to be researched.
Recognition that civilian men are primary targets of genocide is therefore crucial to any
attempt to fashion an early warning system and end the impunity with which géno
cidaires have committed mass murder up to the present day. Adam Jones has shown that
a policy of killing men first constitutes a ‘tripwire or harbinger of fuller‐scale root‐and‐
branch genocides’, an insight that should be (p. 68) very useful to an early warning sys
tem.35 We have already discussed this pattern in the Holocaust. Jones notes that this pat
tern is also evident to varying degrees in the Armenian genocide, the genocides in Bosnia
and Rwanda, in Kosovo, and in East Timor. In these cases men were killed first to radical
ize the killers and habituate them to attacks on women and children. Sex‐selective mas
sacre may also be a means of ‘decapitating’ the family basis of the religious and social
structure, much as the targeting of intellectuals is aimed at decapitating the institutional
basis of the public life of a group. The massacre of ‘battle‐aged’ men can be used to ex
pose and render vulnerable the rest of the population.
For Jones, these sex‐selective massacres, in addition to being harbingers of root‐and‐

branch genocides, are also instances of ‘gendercide’. Expanding upon the works of femi
nist writers, Jones defines gendercide as ‘gender‐selective mass killing’ and argues that
gendercide in and of itself is a form of genocide.36 The term gendercide was first used by
Mary Ann Warren, whose 1985 book of the same title examined instances in which
women and girls were the targets.37 Jones' work on gendercide seeks to bring to our at
tention the myriad ways in which men and boys are also vulnerable to sex‐selective vio
lence. His interventions have been a necessary reminder of the extent to which civilian
men have been victims of mass murder throughout history.
There has been substantial debate about whether gendercide is itself a genocidal process.
In Jones' edited volume Gendercide and Genocide, Stuart Stein and R. Charli Carpenter
argue that gendercide is not genocide because it is not committed with the intent to de
stroy in whole or in part all members of a sex, as such.38 The central question seems to be
about the claims one would make about gendercide—is it a specific act within an ongoing
genocide or is it a specific sort of violence unto itself that can be at times either genocidal
in nature or used as a tool for genocide? Whatever one decides about gendercide as geno
cide, it seems clear that sex‐selective killing can be an early warning sign of genocide as
well as an act punishable by the Genocide Convention.
Two recent international court rulings on the Srebrenica massacre, where in July 1995
over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces under the
command of the indicted Gen. Radko Mladic, support the notion of gendercide as geno
cide, though only in the limited sense that the gendercidal massacre at Srebrenica was
embedded in a wider ethnic conflict. The International (p. 69) Criminal Tribunal for the
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Gender and Genocide
Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled in 2004 that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide, a
ruling upheld by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2007.39 The presiding judge of
the ICTY reasoned that Serb actions in Srebrenica constituted genocide for the following
reasons: there was ample evidence of intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslim group in Sre
brenica, the men and boys constituted a ‘substantial part’ of the group, and they were
‘emblematic’ of the group as a whole.40 Significant in this finding is the concept of em
blematic victims, which raises the importance of understanding gender constructs when
making determinations of genocide. The judgment noted:
In addition to the numeric size of the targeted portion [of the group], its promi
nence within the group can be a useful consideration. If a specific part of the
group is emblematic of the overall group, or is essential to its survival, that may
support a finding that the part qualifies as substantial within the meaning of Arti
cle 4 [of the ICTY Statute].41
The court found that in a patriarchal society, the loss of 8,000 men within an immediate
population of 40,000 would seriously hinder the future procreation of the group, poten
tially leading to its destruction.42
Genocidal Rape
When Serbia started its war with Bosnia in 1992 one of the major news stories coming
out of the region was the systematic use of rape by the Serb forces to enforce a policy of
‘ethnic cleansing’, as it was then routinely called. The journalist Roy Gutman's articles in
Newsday brought international attention to the mass rape of women during the war.43
This was not the first time that newspapers focused on the brutality of rape during
wartime, but it was the first time that women around the world were successful in orga
nizing an international movement to have rape explicitly recognized and prosecuted as a
war crime, a crime against humanity, and a crime of genocide.44 The massive internation
al effort to bring this about began (p. 70) with a ground‐breaking article by Catherine
MacKinnon, who argued early on in the war that rape was being used by Serb forces as a
tool of genocide.45 Her article was followed by books by Alexandra Sitglmayer (1994) and
Beverly Allen (1996), each of which called attention to the particularly genocidal role that
rape was playing in the violence.
It is estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 women and girls were raped during the
wars in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995. ‘While all sides in the Bosnian
conflict have committed rapes,’ notes Joana Daniel‐Wrabetz, ‘Serbian forces appear to
have used rape on the largest scale, principally against Muslim women.’46 Usually rape
was accompanied by various tortures, including branding with the Serbian cross, burn
ing, slashing, beating, and threats of death against the women and their family members,
especially their children. Rape frequently was used as a means of murder, but also served
a policy of forced maternity to create more ‘Serbian’ children. Women's bodies were used
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to humiliate families and communities as the perpetrators raped girls in front of their par
ents or forced family members to rape each other.
Rape in Rwanda shared with rape in Bosnia these genocidal qualities, though here it was
much more widespread and usually used as a means of murder. The estimates of the num
ber of women raped reaches to 500,000, few of whom were allowed to survive.47 While
perpetrators used rape in this case primarily as part of a terrifying and drawn‐out ritual
of killing, some Tutsi women were also subjected to forced maternity under the logic that
they would bear Hutu children, demonstrating the multiple and self‐contradictory levels
on which perpetrators pursue the destruction of the target group's reproductive
powers.48 Thousands of women survivors were rendered permanently disabled from the
brutality of the rapes, many having been left incapable of bearing children. Furthermore,
many assailants seem to have (p. 71) knowingly infected raped women with HIV, thereby
ensuring their eventual and untimely deaths even if they were to survive the genocide.49
In the face of heavy media attention on the use of rape in both the Bosnian and the Rwan
dan genocides, questions were raised about the best way to characterize these rapes. The
controversy has revolved around the question of whether to conceptualize ‘genocidal
rape’ as a special category of rape. Catherine MacKinnon sparked this debate when she
argued that
rapes in the Serbian war of aggression against Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia

are to everyday rape what the Holocaust was to everyday anti‐Semitism: both like
it and not like it at all, both continuous with it and a whole new departure, a
unique atrocity yet also a pinnacle moment in something that goes on all the
time.50
Several feminists have voiced concern about the high‐profile public attention that has
been focused on ‘genocidal rape’. Rhonda Copelon has argued that ‘[t]he elision of geno
cide and rape in the focus on “genocidal rape” of Muslim women in Bosnia is…danger
ous,’ because ‘to emphasize as unparalleled the horror of genocidal rape is factually dubi
ous and risks rendering the rape invisible once again.’51 Susan Brownmiller also prefers
not to treat rape in Bosnia as a special category of rape, commenting that ‘Serbian land
advances have been accomplished in the age‐old manner of territorial aggression, with
looting, pillage, and gratuitous violence that gets lumped under the rubric of atrocity.’52
In a slightly different vein, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Aryeh
Neier criticized the focus on genocidal rape for elevating the crime of rape in and of itself
to genocidal proportions; in his words, unless the rape is committed with the intent of
forcing pregnancy, it is ‘inappropriate to single out one element, rape, and assert that it,
by itself, constituted genocide.’53
The case for rape as a crime of genocide was made most forcefully in the case of forced
pregnancy and maternity. The international law scholar Siobhan Fisher characterized the
Serbian policy of forced maternity as a genocidal ‘occupation of the womb’.54 Writing on
the Armenian genocide, Donald Bloxham has similarly identified forced marriage and sex
ual slavery as the ‘colonization of the female body’.55 Such policies are genocidal because
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the purpose is to force women to give birth to children from the perpetrator's group,
thereby preventing them from (p. 72) carrying children from their own group.56 Many
rapists in Bosnia and Rwanda plainly stated this intent while committing the rapes. While
such logic confounds modern genetic understanding, it conforms to the highly patriarchal
understanding of reproduction in each society, where fathers determine the ethnic identi
ty of children. Fisher therefore argues that forced maternity conforms to subsection II(b),
(c), and (d) of the Genocide Convention: ‘Causing serious bodily or mental harm to mem
bers of the group’, ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’, and ‘Imposing measures intend
ed to prevent births within the group’.
Decisions by the international tribunals set up for Bosnia and Rwanda, established in
1993 and 1994, respectively, have upheld much of the scholarly work on genocidal rape.
Fisher's interpretation of forced maternity was confirmed by both the International Crimi
nal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Prosecutor v. Akayesu and the ICTY in the Karadzic
and Mladic decisions.57 In Prosecutor v. Akayesu, the ICTR further found that rape and
sexual violence ‘constitute genocide in the same way as any other act as long as they
were committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group,
targeted as such.’58 While the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) does not
list sexual violence or rape as specific elements of the crime of genocide, the ICTY and IC
TR decisions have set important precedents for trying gender‐based violence as
genocide.59
Relational Violence
The debate about the status of rape in genocide and whether it itself is genocidal ne
glects to consider the wider ‘relational’ context of much gender‐based violence.60 Rape in
genocide is frequently part of an elaborate and sustained ritual on the part of perpetra
tors in which they focus not only on killing, raping, and expelling living members of a
group but also on the intensive targeting of symbols of the group's life force.61
Recognizing the wide‐ranging targets of genocidal violence, Dirk Moses (p. 73) has re
cently called genocide ‘a “total social practice” that [affects] all aspects of group life’.62 In
such a context, rape can indeed be a crime of genocide. During genocide, people are usu
ally targeted in terms of their familial roles, that is, the roles the perpetrators perceive
them to play in the reproductive process of the group. So women and girls are tortured
specifically as mothers, daughters, and sisters; similarly men and boys are targeted as fa
thers, sons, and brothers. In such cases, rape usually involves both inversion rituals (forc
ing family members to watch or participate in the torture and murder of loved ones) and
ritual desecrations of sacred symbols of the group's generative force (such as sexual or
gans, infants and small children, and family bonds).63 Common practices across geno
cides include killing infants in front of their parents, forcing family members to rape one
another, destroying women's reproductive capacity through rape and mutilation, castrat
ing men, eviscerating pregnant women, and otherwise engaging in ritual cruelties aimed
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directly at the spiritually sacred, biologically generative, and emotionally nurturing struc
tures of family life.
The Armenian genocide is a key example of this genocidal pattern. Over and over again,
perpetrators followed a family‐based pattern of destruction. When villages were attacked,
men were murdered and their surviving family members were raped, expelled, and killed.
Perpetrators frequently engaged in inversion rituals and ritual desecrations in the
process.64 As in other cases, rape during the Armenian genocide served many purposes: it
was part of the process of eliticide, the destruction of a group's leadership in order to sow
confusion; it publicly demonstrated the perpetrators' mastery over the Armenian life
force; it inflicted ‘total suffering’ on both the men and the women (and, presumably, the
boys and girls) who were tortured in two ways—through violent attacks on their own bod
ies and by having to witness the immense suffering of their loved ones; and it compro
mised the future integrity of the group by sowing the seeds of psychic and familial disso
lution.
Few scholars have recognized the central importance of relational violence to genocide,
or its terrifying efficacy, even though it is a consistent characteristic of survivor testimo
ny. The absence of a ‘relational framework’ in genocide scholarship, to use Adam Jones'
phrase,65 has ensured that some of the crimes common to genocide have languished in
scholarly and legal obscurity. Most often these genocidal ‘life force’ atrocities are catego
rized simply as ‘rape’ in the literature. So, for example, atrocities listed as instances of
sexual violence by the US State (p. 74) Department's Atrocities Documentation Team in
Darfur have included the following acts:66
• The killing of young children;

• The use of infants as weapons against their parents;
• The slashing of pregnant women's bellies and the murder of their babies; and
• The mutilation of women's reproductive organs, including their breasts.
We see here that the acts that go recorded by governments and NGOs as ‘rape’ involve
many kinds of tortures that are not synonymous with sexual violence.
An example from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) demonstrates the way that
genocidal rape is part of an elaborate set of relational rituals aimed at the total devasta
tion of the life force of families and communities. A survivor named Nadine told the Amer
ican playwright Eve Ensler in 2007 about an attack on her village that resulted in her
gang rape and sexual enslavement. The unidentified soldiers killed the village chief and
his children, her parents, and her brother after he refused to rape her. They then killed
each of her three children—‘They flung my baby's body on the ground like she was
garbage.’ Nadine was gang‐raped and suffered complete rupture of her vagina and anus.
While enslaved by the soldiers, she witnessed the evisceration of a pregnant woman,
whose baby was cooked and force‐fed to Nadine and the other enslaved women.67
Although Nadine's story is framed by a magazine article about rape, the crimes and the
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victims far exceed the word. Her case demonstrates how some instances of the current vi
olence in the DRC are clearly genocidal.
Focusing on relational violence and life force atrocities draws in many other instances of
gross violations of human rights that do not easily conform to the common understanding
of genocide. During the 1971 war in Bangladesh, for example, many of the estimated
200,000 rapes were accompanied by relational violence similar to that found in Bosnia,
Rwanda, and the DRC, including the evisceration of pregnant women and the mutilation
of fetuses.68 Other instances include the Japanese Army's attack on Nanking in World War
II, its ‘comfort women’ system, and the recent war in Sierra Leone.69 Some of the elec
tion‐related violence in the Rift Valley region in Kenya (p. 75) in 2008 also has shown a
genocidal logic, especially as regards the treatment of children.70 Each of these cases is
marked by distinct patters of inversion rituals and desecrations of symbols of the life
force.
Determining what relationship such cases have to our understanding of genocide will rely
on how we understand perpetrator intent. In Nanking, Japanese Imperial Army soldiers
may have seen the city's inhabitants as symbolic stand‐ins for the Chinese people as a
whole. In the case of the Imperial Army's sex slavery system, it may be that some Japan
ese soldiers were opportunistically acting out their subjective genocidal fantasies against
the Korean, Chinese, and Philippine peoples through their torture, mutilation, and mur
der of young women in the dark anterooms of the rape camps. In Sierra Leone, by con
trast, it appears that perpetrators saw civilians as such to be the group to be targeted
with genocide, since there was no clear ethnic logic to the attacks though life force atroc
ities were widespread. And in the DRC, where many different militia groups are involved
in committing genocidal atrocities, it may be that genocidal atrocities have become a
habitus, an unforeseen long‐term consequence of the world's mishandling of the Rwan
dan genocide.
Genocidal Masculinities
The widespread nature of sexual violence against women and men during many geno
cides indicates that genocide is a crime intimately connected to particular concepts of
masculinity.71 Though much research remains to be done before we can determine exact
ly how this is the case, it seems clear that the ideologies and practices associated with
genocide are in large part the products of the historical experience of men and their at
tempts to make meaning from this experience. It is certainly true, as Adam Jones has sug
gested, that the field of masculinity studies has the potential to yield insights specifically
into the long‐term cultural (p. 76) developments that facilitate genocide and the perpetra
tors' intentions and motivations.72
One area that would benefit from sustained scholarly attention is the relationship be
tween war and the development of a specifically genocidal form of masculinity. Such
‘genocidal masculinity’ is characterized by a concept of power that is dependent upon the
destruction of those institutions and groups that the perpetrators believe set limits upon
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Gender and Genocide
and constitute threats to the full expression of their masculine identity. Since genocide is
a crime intimately linked with war,73 the ways that men make sense of war and seek to
cope with it should shed light on political, social, and cultural processes that can hasten
the development and spread of particularly violent forms of masculine identity. Promising
work has been done on this front regarding veterans of World War I in interwar Germany,
especially the noted writer Ernst Jünger, who called war the ‘male form of procreation’.74
Andreas Huyssen has linked interwar fascist gender constructs like Jünger's to soldiers'
‘traumatic experience of emasculation’ during the war.75 In his view, interwar fascism was
a means of ‘remasculinizing’ the self by rejecting the feminized civilian and peacetime
world and insisting on the liberatory and elevating power of violence, a construct that
took on genocidal dimensions within the Nazi party.
Another promising line of enquiry is the relationship between institutions of male domina
tion and genocidal ideology. Christopher Taylor highlighted the gendered nature of geno
cidal utopia when, writing on the Rwandan genocide, he described Hutu Power ideology
as one that sought ‘an imagined past condition of patriarchy as well as the perpetuation
of Hutu dominance.’76 The link between male domination within the perpetrator group
and genocide against ‘outside’ groups is a common one, and usually expresses itself in
terms of an ersatz patriarch (the leader, the party) who is both god and father in that he
exercises final power over reproductive choices and determines who shall live and who
shall die. This explains why political leaders who oversee genocides also often promote
authoritarian and coercive reproductive policies within their own groups. Their efforts to
erode institutions of autonomous generation among ethnic or national insiders (by reduc
ing women to breeders, co‐opting children, and forcibly separating family (p. 77) mem
bers) are intimately intertwined with their plans to destroy outside groups, in whole or in
part.
The relationship between masculine identity and the behaviour of foot soldiers in geno
cide also warrants more in‐depth research. Euan Hague has shown how the all‐male ritu
als of genocidal rape in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, for example, were a means of performing
the potency of their Serbian national identity.77 In his interpretation, when Serb soldiers
raped Muslim and Croat women and men, girls and boys, they were exercising their mas
culinist domination over civilians that they identified specifically as feminized ethnic ene
mies, and this drama was a core feature of ‘hetero‐masculinist’ constructions of Serbian
national identity under Milošević.78 Such an approach frames genocide as an expressive
act that, in large part because of its gendered nature, requires constant recapitulation.
Such an understanding helps explain why genocides tend to radicalize even further at the
peripheries and expand to new victim groups.79
Finally, the ways that women find agency in these masculinist projects needs to be better
explained. Roger W. Smith, discussing the high level of direct female participation in the
Cambodian genocide, notes that ‘[i]f there had been a question about the capacity of
women to participate in political murder and to exhibit elements of will and cruelty that,
in the common imagination, are restricted to males engaged in warfare, Cambodia seems
to have resolved it.’80 He suggests that genocide in the Cambodian case ‘occurred where
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Gender and Genocide
gender distinctions had been eliminated’. However, despite the coercive gender neutrali
ty of Khmer Rouge ideology, it is nevertheless historically part of a highly masculinized
revolutionary tradition—Stalinism, to which the Khmer Rouge leaders had been intro
duced as students in France.81 The Khmer Rouge's radical attempt to destroy all family
ties, especially the bond between mothers and children, puts it squarely within the norm
of masculinist genocidal ideology. The high level of participation of women does not
change its hegemonic masculinity, though it shows it to be much more complex a phe
nomenon than we may otherwise assume. While genocide may not be an all‐male crime, it
remains a masculinist one.
(p. 78) Gender and the Definition of Genocide

When the Genocide Convention was drafted after World War II, international law—like
the social sciences—was concerned with the ‘public sphere’, which was defined in gen
dered ways in opposition to the ‘private sphere’. The definition of genocide reflects the
public sphere emphasis of international law inasmuch as many of the experiences most
common to women in genocides were not explicitly considered when crafting the
convention's language. This includes rape, but also the host of other life force crimes
common to genocidal destruction that occur in contexts that generally have been as
sumed to be ‘private’ (such as the household, the space of sexual intercourse and concep
tion, and the relationships between family members). Life force crimes can be prosecuted
under one or another of the elements of genocide listed by the convention, but to do so is
artificially to tear apart phenomena that belong together. Taken as a whole these particu
lar crimes demonstrate a patterned obsession with the destruction of the life force of a
group and are aimed at the most sacred aspects of communal life.
Looking at genocide through the lens of gender therefore can help us see aspects of the
crime that otherwise have remained ‘hidden’ by bringing together phenomena in a way
that restores the internal logic of the original crime. Gender can help us see that geno
cide is, in its most basic form, a crime against the generative power of a group and the in
stitutions that support it, especially the family. The perpetrators of genocide organize the
destruction of a group by targeting members in accordance with the roles that they are
perceived to play in the group's biological and social reproduction. Since the family is the
basic unit of the reproduction of groups, and since perpetrators so often find their victims
in family situations, the family and the roles that adhere to it are prime theatres for the
enactment of genocidal intent.
When we look at victims in terms of their roles as members of families, we also are able
to identify genocidal intent very early on in a conflict. Atrocities against the life force,
which are so often focused on small groups like extended families, can be used as evi
dence of genocidal intent for the purpose of early warning and intervention. Further
more, the family basis of much genocidal violence has the potential to offer us deeper in
sight into the longer term causes of genocide, particularly in terms of genocidal ideolo
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Gender and Genocide
gies and the creation of conditions under which people are tempted to embrace and par
ticipate in genocidal killing.
Gender analysis problematizes definitions of genocide that rely on direct killing and num
bers of dead, since focusing only on group members killed outright—the majority of
whom are often men—can erase the genocidal intent behind the persecution of women in
cases where they are allowed to go on living. The genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and
the current violence in the DRC, point to the theoretical possibility of committing and
achieving genocide solely through the systematic use of sexual violence against men and
women alike. The immediate ideological precursors to the Nazi party—the Pan Germans—
recognized such a possibility in 1905 by proposing (p. 79) mass sterilization programmes
for unwanted groups that would result in their eventual annihilation.82
If the study of gender in genocide is important to an early warning system, it is equally

important to rebuilding efforts in post‐genocidal societies.83 Gender analysis brings atten
tion to the intentional ways in which families are disrupted and destroyed; therefore spe
cial emphasis will need to be placed on rebuilding families and fostering cohesion. This
will require intensive public policy efforts to recognize and de‐stigmatize male and female
survivors of rape by giving due attention to the concentric circles of suffering caused by
the relational nature of genocidal violence. Particular attention will need to be paid to
women survivors who experience enormous structural vulnerability in post‐genocidal so
cieties in the form of social ostracism, impoverishment, and homelessness due to discrim
inatory customs of inheritance and limited occupational options. Many are forced to raise
children alone, including children born of wartime rape and war orphans. Many are suf
fering from disabilities and illnesses related to genocidal violence. Many are unable to
conceive or carry children, which can interfere with their ability to marry and thereby
condemn them to a lifetime of economic hardship. Furthermore, studies indicate that vio
lence against women increases in postwar contexts. In places like Bosnia, Rwanda, and
Sierra Leone, where so many rapists have gone unpunished, women continue to live in
fear of reprisals.
Gender analysis demonstrates that genocidal violence is part of a continuum of violence

related to the mystery of life‐giving and women's central place within it. In attempting the
destruction of groups, which are, after all, microcosms of our collective humanity, géno
cidaires are pursuing a scenario of power that is gendered at its core. Recognizing the
gendered nature of this crime holds out the promise of helping us not only to understand
it better and to define it more precisely, but also to engage more successfully in genocide
prevention—that aspect of the Genocide Convention that has eluded us for over six
decades.
Select Bibliography
Allen, Beverly, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia
(London/Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Page 14 of 21

Gender and Genocide
Bridenthal, Renate, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (eds), When Biology Be
(p. 80)
came Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1984).
Carpenter, R. Charli, Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in

Conflict Zones (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007).
Fein, Helen, ‘Genocide and Gender: The Uses of Woman and Group Destiny’, Journal of
Genocide Research 1:1 (1999).
Grossmann, Atina, ‘Women and the Holocaust: Four Recent Titles’, Holocaust and Geno
cide Studies 16:1 (Spring 2002), 94–108.
Jones, Adam (ed.), Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
2004).
Koontz, Claudia, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New
York: St Martins Griffin, 1988).
Lentin, Ronit (ed.), Gender and Catastrophe (London/New York: Zed Books, 1997).
Pine, Lisa, ‘Gender and the Family’, in Dan Stone (ed.), Historiography of the Holocaust
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 364–82.
Smith, Roger, ‘Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History’, Holocaust and
Genocide Studies 8:3 (Winter 1994), 315–34.
Stiglmayer, Alexandra (ed.), Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia‐Herzegovina
(Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
Taylor, Christopher C., Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford/New
York: Berg, 1999).
Notes:
(1) R. Charli Carpenter, Born of War: Protecting Children Sexual Violence Survivors in
Conflict Zones (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007); ‘Surfacing Children: Limitations
of Genocidal Rape Discourse’, Human Rights Quarterly 22:2 (2000), 428–77; ‘Forced Ma
ternity, Children's Rights, and the Genocide Convention’, Journal of Genocide Research
2:2 (2000), 213–44; Adam Jones (ed.), Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2004); Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London/New York:
Routledge, 2006). See also Jones' Gendercide Watch website: http://www.gendercide.org
(2) Helen Fein, ‘Genocide and Gender: The Uses of Women and Group Destiny’, Journal of
Genocide Research 1:1 (1999), 43.
(3) Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988), 42.
Page 15 of 21

Gender and Genocide
(4) ‘A Woman among Warlords: Interview with Zainab Salbi’, Wide Angle, August 31,
2007, Daljit Dhaliwal, http://www‐tc.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/warlords/interview/
interview.pdf
(5) Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 127.
(6) Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London/Portland,
OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), 41.
(7) Hilberg, Perpetrators, 127, 130.
(8) Baumel, Double Jeopardy, 40.
(9) Lisa Pine, ‘Gender and the Family’, in Dan Stone (ed.), Historiography of the Holo
caust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 364–82; Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Gold
enberg (eds), Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2003); Atina Grossmann, ‘Women and the Holocaust: Four
Recent Titles’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16:1 (Spring 2002), 94–108; Esther Fuchs
(ed.), Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation (Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1999); Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds), Women in the Holo
caust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); John Roth and Carol Rittner (eds),
Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993); Renate
Bridenthal et al. (eds), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Ger
many (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984).
(10) Hilberg, Perpetrators, 126.
(11) Joan Ringelheim, ‘Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research’, in Roth
and Rittner (eds), Different Voices, 387.
(12) Quoted in Baer and Goldenberg, Experience and Expression, xxviii.
(13) Pine, ‘Gender and the Family’, 372.
(14) Pascale Rachel Bos, ‘Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference’, in
Baer and Goldenberg (eds), Experience and Expression, 23–52.
(15) Lawrence L. Langer, ‘Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies’, in

Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds), Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1998), 355.
(16) Pine, ‘Gender and the Family’; Baumel, Double Jeopardy, 15.
(17) Myrna Goldenberg, ‘Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women's Holocaust Nar
ratives’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548 (November
1996), 78–93.
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Gender and Genocide
(18) Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz (Chicago:
Academy Chicago, 1995), 199.
(19) Joan Ringelheim, ‘Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory’, in Ronit Lentin (ed.), Gen
der and Catastrophe (London/New York: Zed Books, 1997), 26–8.
(20) Nechama Tec, ‘The Fate of Women’, in Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York/
London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 154–69.
(21) Isabella Leitner, ‘Book Two: Liberation’, Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom (New
York/London: Anchor Books, 1994), esp. 89–91, 108–11.
(22) The classic studies of Nazi misogyny are Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nation
alsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Ver
lag, 1986), and Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi
Politics (New York: St Martin's, 1986).
(24) Gisela Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1984), 80. Quoted from
Goldenberg, ‘Lessons Learned’, 86.
(25) Ibid. 86.
(26) Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1985), 146.
(27) Fein, ‘Genocide and Gender’, 43–63.
(28) Tim Cole, ‘A Gendered Holocaust? The Experiences of “Jewish” Men and Women in
Hungary, 1944’, in Randolph L. Braham and Brewster S. Chamberlin (eds), The Holocaust
in Hungary: Sixty Years Later (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 54.
(29) Hilberg, Perpetrators, 128. He notes that there was a ‘reversal of fortunes’ after the
development of the gas vans and the death camps, which made killing women and chil
dren psychologically less taxing on the killers.
(30) Ibid. Hilberg notes that many women were also forced to do hard labour, though per
haps in smaller numbers. See also Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men,
and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 11.
(31) This latter possibility was suggested by Bos in ‘Women and the Holocaust’, 34.
(33) Roth, ‘Equality, Neutrality, Particularity’, 11.
(34) R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Innocent Women and Children’: Gender, Norms and the Protec
tion of Civilians (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).
Page 17 of 21

Gender and Genocide
(35) Adam Jones, ‘Gendercide and Genocide’, in Adam Jones (ed.), Gendercide and Geno
cide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbildt University Press, 2004), 23.
(36) For an overview of the concept of ‘gendercide’, see Jones, ‘Gendercide and Geno
cide’, 1–38. See also his Gendercide Watch website: http://www.gendercide.org.
(37) Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (Totowa, NJ: Row
man and Allanheld, 1985).
(38) Stuart Stein, ‘Geno and Other Cides: A Cautionary Note on Knowledge Accumula
tion’, in Jones (ed.), Gendercide and Genocide, 196–229; R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Beyond
“Gendercide”: Operationalizing Gender in Comparative Genocide Studies’, in Jones (ed.),
Gendercide and Genocide, 230–56. See also Jones' response, ‘Problems of Gendercide: A
Response to Stein and Carpenter’, in Gendercide and Genocide, 257–71.
(39) ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstić, 19 April 2004, www.un.org/icty/krstic/Appeal/judgement/

index.htm; ICJ, Press Release, 26 February 2007.
(40) ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstić, Parts II.A & II.B. See also ICTY, Press Release, ‘Address by
ICTY President Theodor Meron, at Potocari Memorial Cemetery’, The Hague, 23 June
2004, http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/2004/p860‐e.htm
(41) ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstić, 8.
(42) Ibid. 14.
(43) Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
(44) Louise Chappell, ‘Gender Mainstreaming in International Institutions: Developments

at the UN Ad Hoc Tribunals and the International Criminal Court’, Paper Presented at the
Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolu
lu, Hawaii, 5 March 2005; Marsha Freeman, ‘International Institutions and Gendered Jus
tice’, Journal of International Affairs 52:2 (1999), 513; Kelly Dawn Askin, ‘Prosecuting
Wartime Rape and Other Gender‐Related Crimes under International Law: Extraordinary
Advances, Enduring Obstacles’, Berkeley Journal of International Law 21:2 (2003), 317.
(45) Catherine A. MacKinnon, ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide’,

MS 5 (July/August 1993), 24–30. MacKinnon's article was later published in Alexandra
Stiglmayer (ed.), Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia‐Herzegovina (Lincoln/
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 74–81.
(46) Siobhan K. Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide’,

Duke Law Journal 46:1 (1996), 109; Joana Daniel‐Wrabitz, ‘Children Born of War Rape in
Bosnia‐Herzegovina and the Convention on the Rights of the Child’, in Carpenter (ed.),
Born of War, 23.
(47) SURF‐Survivor's Fund, ‘Statistics of the Genocide’, http://www.survivors‐fund.org.uk/

resources/history/statistics.php
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Gender and Genocide
(48) Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Geno
cide and its Aftermath (New York: HRW, 1996); Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide in Rwanda’,
in Jones (ed.), Gendercide and Genocide, 98–137; Marie Consolee Mukangendo, ‘Caring
for Children Born of Rape in Rwanda’, in Carpenter (ed.), Born of War, 40–52.
(49) Mukangendo, ‘Caring for Children Born of Rape’, 45.
(50) MacKinnon, ‘Turning Rape into Pornography’, 74.
(51) Rhonda Copelon, ‘Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes against Women in

Time of War’, in Stiglmayer (ed.), Mass Rape, 197.
(52) Susan Brownmiller, ‘Making Female Bodies the Battlefield’, in Stiglmayer (ed.), Mass
Rape, 180.
(53) Aryeh Neier, War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice
(New York: Times Books, 1998), 186. Quoted in Carpenter, ‘Surfacing Children’, 439.
(54) Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb’, 124.
(55) Donald Bloxham, ‘Internal Colonization, Inter‐Imperial Conflict and the Armenian
Genocide’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and
Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 338.
(56) Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb’, 93.
(57) Mark Ellis, ‘Breaking the Silence: Rape as an International Crime’, Case Western Re
serve Journal of International Law 38 (2006/2007), 232–35.
(58) ICTR, Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case No. IT‐96–4‐T, 731.
(59) Rape is specifically recognized as a crime of war and a crime against humanity. Ellis,
‘Breaking the Silence’, 240.
(60) Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide’, 25.
(61) Elisa von Joeden‐Forgey, ‘Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocity’ and the Assault on
the Family in Times of Conflict’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 5 (forthcoming 2010).
(62) A. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History’,
in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, 13.
(63) Joeden‐Forgey, ‘Devil in the Details’.
(64) Katherine Derderian, ‘Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender‐Specific Aspects

of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19:1 (Spring
2005), 5.
(65) Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide’, 25.
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Gender and Genocide
(66) Kelly Dawn Askin, ‘Prosecuting Gender Crimes Committed in Darfur’, in Samuel Tot
ten and Eric Markusen (eds), Genocide in Darfur: Investigating the Atrocities in the Su
dan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 146–8.
(67) Eve Ensler, ‘Women Left for Dead—and the Man Who's Saving Them’, Glamour Mag
azine, http://www.glamour.com/news/articles/2007/08/reallifedrama
(68) Yasmin Saikia, ‘Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971
Liberation War of Bangladesh’, History Workshop Journal 58 (2004), 275–87.
(69) Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000);
James Yin and Shi Young, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs
(Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1996); Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The For
gotten Holocaust of WWII (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort
Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation
(New York: Routledge, 2002); Kelly Dawn Askin, ‘Comfort Women: Shifting Shame and
Stigma from Victims to Victimizers’, International Criminal Law Review 1 (2001), 5–32;
The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal 2000 for the Trial of Japanese Military
Sexual Slavery, Summary of Findings, 12 December 2000; Amnesty International, Sierra
Leone: Rape and other Sexual Crimes against Girls and Women (New York: Amnesty In
ternational, 2000); Human Rights Watch, Sowing Terror: Atrocities against Civilians in
Sierra Leone (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998); Amnesty International, Democratic
Republic of Congo, Mass Rape: Time for Remedies (New York: Amnesty International,
2004); Jan Goodwin, ‘Silence=Rape’, The Nation, 8 March 2008.
(70) Xan Rice, ‘Murder of the Children who Sought Sanctuary in Church’, The Guardian, 3
January 2008.
(71) Ronit Lentin, ‘Introduction: (En)gendering Genocides’, in Ronit Lentin (ed.), Gender
and Catastrophe (London/New York: Zed Books, 1997), 7.
(72) Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide’, 26–7.
(73) Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2003).
(74) Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, Samtliche Werke 2.1, vol. 7 (Stuttgart:
Klett‐Cotta, 1980), 50.
(75) Andreas Huyssen, ‘Fortifying the Heart–Totally Ernst Jünger's Armored Texts’, New
German Critique 59 (Spring/Summer 1993), 9.
(76) Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide in Rwanda’, 101–102; Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as
Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford/New York: Berg, 1999), 151–79.
(77) Euan Hague, ‘Rape, Power and Masculinity: The Construction of Gender and Nation
al Identities in the War in Bosnia‐Herzegovina’, in Lentin (ed.), Gender and Catastrophe,
50–63.
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Gender and Genocide
(78) Hague, ‘Rape, Power and Masculinity’, 55.
(79) Robert Gellately, ‘The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide’, in
Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Histor
ical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241–63; Helen Fein,
‘Genocide, Terror, Life Integrity, and War Crimes: The Case for Discrimination’, in George
J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: Uni
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
(80) Roger W. Smith, ‘Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History’, Holocaust
and Genocide Studies 8:3 (1994), 325–6.
(81) Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton/Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 146–7.
(82) Josef Ludwig Reimer, Ein pangermanisches Deutschland. Versuch über die Konze
quenzen der gegenwärtigen wissenschaftlichen Rassenbetrachtung für unsere politischen
und religiösen Probleme (Berlin/Leipzig: Friedrich Luckhardt, 1905), 22–3; Elisa von Joe
den‐Forgey, ‘Race Power, Freedom, and the Democracy of Terror in German Racialist
Thought’, in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of Histo
ry: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007),
21–53.
(83) These final comments are based on the essays included in Carpenter, Born of War.
Elisa von Joeden‐Forgey
Elisa Von Joeden‐Forgey teaches History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the
author of articles and book chapters on race and colonialism in German history and
is currently writing a book on gender and genocide, entitled Killing God: The Family
Drama of Genocide.
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Gender and Genocide

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Print Publication Date: Apr 2010

Abstract and Keywords

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Making Gender Visible

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gender as an important variable in the context of the unspeakable suffering brought

In addition to demonstrating the importance of misogyny to genocidal ideology, the study

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(p. 67) Adding Men

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For Jones, these sex‐selective massacres, in addition to being harbingers of root‐and‐

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rapes in the Serbian war of aggression against Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia

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• The killing of young children;

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(p. 78) Gender and the Definition of Genocide

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If the study of gender in genocide is important to an early warning system, it is equally

Gender analysis demonstrates that genocidal violence is part of a continuum of violence

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Carpenter, R. Charli, Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in

Subscriber: Yale University; date: 27 May 2019

(7) Hilberg, Perpetrators, 127, 130.

(8) Baumel, Double Jeopardy, 40.

(10) Hilberg, Perpetrators, 126.

(12) Quoted in Baer and Goldenberg, Experience and Expression, xxviii.

(13) Pine, ‘Gender and the Family’, 372.

(15) Lawrence L. Langer, ‘Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies’, in

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(23) Hilberg, Perpetrators, 130.

(25) Ibid. 86.

(27) Fein, ‘Genocide and Gender’, 43–63.

(32) Hilberg, Perpetrators, 129.

(33) Roth, ‘Equality, Neutrality, Particularity’, 11.

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(39) ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstić, 19 April 2004, www.un.org/icty/krstic/Appeal/judgement/

(41) ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstić, 8.

(42) Ibid. 14.

(43) Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

(44) Louise Chappell, ‘Gender Mainstreaming in International Institutions: Developments

(45) Catherine A. MacKinnon, ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide’,

(46) Siobhan K. Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide’,

(47) SURF‐Survivor's Fund, ‘Statistics of the Genocide’, http://www.survivors‐fund.org.uk/

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(49) Mukangendo, ‘Caring for Children Born of Rape’, 45.

(50) MacKinnon, ‘Turning Rape into Pornography’, 74.

(51) Rhonda Copelon, ‘Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes against Women in

(54) Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb’, 124.

(56) Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb’, 93.

(58) ICTR, Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case No. IT‐96–4‐T, 731.

(60) Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide’, 25.

(63) Joeden‐Forgey, ‘Devil in the Details’.

(64) Katherine Derderian, ‘Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender‐Specific Aspects

(65) Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide’, 25.

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(72) Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide’, 26–7.