Atrocities committed during war, genocide, and violent political conflict span the entire globe and many time periods. In their edited volume Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Gender and Political Violence, Ayşe Gül Altınay, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Sabancı University, and Andrea Pető, professor in the CEU Department of Gender Studies, analyze cases ranging from the Italian and Spanish civil wars to the wars in Afghanistan to the Holocaust. "We wanted to explore the intersection of gender, memory, war, and military studies," explained Altınay. "To quote Virginia Woolf, 'History is too much about wars, biography too much about great men.' What new words and methods do we need to change this picture?"
SPP Visiting Professor Margaret Jenkins, who teaches a course on Gender, Violence, and War at SPP, offered a thoughtful analysis of the book. She noted that in analyzing the role of women as both victims and perpetrators of political violence, the book "challenges incomplete accounts and inaccurate interpretations, and how these stories have been exploited." She explained that when no story is told, there are actually two stories to tell: the story itself and the story of why it wasn't told. Recognition is intrinsically important to the human experience, Jenkins argued, and by "not allowing history to blow over trauma, we can reach something verging on accountability, even if the time for full accountability has past, or never really existed to begin with."
The book offers many stories of women who demonstrate tremendous bravery in the face of oppressive violence, challenging the association of female with being weak. The cases show how agency "can operate in contexts that are highly constrained." At the same time, gender is a performance of deep-seated norms, which can contribute to self-censorship by both men and women as they reflect on what stories they are prepared to tell themselves and others. "The process of silencing and un-silencing is an important process to study," Pető noted. Jenkins urged those working on public policy to "find creative policy interventions to make sure there are incentives rather than disincentives for reporting violence," and for breaking the silence. This is happening more and more at a high-profile level, Jenkins explained, as evidenced by the recent awarding of the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize (Council of Europe) to Nadia Yurad, a Yazidi woman who was sexually abused by ISIS before escaping and becoming an international human rights activist. But innovative policy efforts must also target the "the police station off the highway, the military checkpoint down a dusty road, and the border crossing in the middle of the night" to ensure violence is prevented, and victims are safe, respected and heard.
Feminist conversations on war can alter perceptions of history and its winners, concluded Jenkins, and of the calculus that leads to further silencing. "It pushes a new sense of self," she said. The panel urged the audience to find new methods for understanding history, and for uncovering gaps in narratives of political violence. If we are to learn from the past, Jenkins concluded, we need "a fuller, more robust typology of human and political evil in order to understand when atrocity comes to fruition. Books like this are part of this project of understanding."