Rejecting Angelina: Bosnian War Rape Survivors and the Ambiguities of Sex in War

Abstract

Before Angelina Jolie's 2011 film In the Land of Blood and Honey, about the rape of women in the Bosnian war, was filmed, a group of Bosnian women war rape survivors persuaded local government officials to revoke Jolie's onlocation filming permit. The survivors’ objections were based on a rumor, subsequently refuted, that the plot was a love story between a Bosnian Muslim woman and her Serb rapist. This paper analyzes these objections, their subsequent permutations, and the film itself in light of the relationships between gender and sexuality, nationalist ideologies, and the logics of war. I contextualize the objections raised and argue that the film ultimately fails to challenge conventional patriarchal and nationalist assumptions about wartime rape, sex, and gender roles in war, despite its seemingly provocative focus on violence against women in war. Ultimately, as I show, the film reinforces clear-cut ethnonational narratives of victims and perpetrators while leaving the gendered logics of sex and power unexamined.