Abstract
Conflict-related sexual violence has become increasingly recognized in international spaces as a serious, political form of violence. As part of this process, distinctions between the categories of ‘sexual violence’ and ‘torture’ have blurred as scholars and other actors have sought to capitalize on the globally recognized status of torture in raising the profile of sexual violence. This move, while perhaps strategically promising, even already fruitful, prompts us to heed caution. What might we inadvertently engender by further pursuing such positioning? While torture and sexual violence have both been widely framed within the academic literature as strategic in recent decades, only torture, and not sexual violence, has emerged from elements of this literature as (potentially) legitimate, despite the slippages between them as categories of violence. This article offers one avenue for thinking through what an invigorated focus on sexual torture as a category of violence might unwittingly render possible, and thus for reflecting on the possible stakes of collapsing the categories of sexual violence and torture. Ultimately, we argue that we should perhaps resist the urge to frame sexual violence as torture and instead cleave to the sticky signifier of ‘the sexual’, despite the ways in which it has served to normalize, perpetuate and obfuscate grievous harms throughout history.
Highlights
A member of an armed group forces a civilian prisoner to rape his daughter and son; a soldier sodomizes and mutilates several women during a village raid; a commander impregnates a young girl kept as his sexual slave; a doctor applies electric shocks to the testicles of a suspected terrorist
It has led to the existence of deliberate and explicitly politically strategic efforts on the part of feminist scholars to merge the categories of sexual violence and torture, as well as an increasing understanding in international spaces that many harmful acts fall into both
While the interwoven gendered dichotomous relationships between mind/rationality/ public and body/irrationality/private have been widely recognized, we seek to make an additional connection to this chain of signifiers by linking ideas about the ‘legitimacy’ and ‘illegitimacy’ of particular enactments of violence in order to interrogate the conditions of possibility through which, within particular debates, torture is rendered as potentially legitimate in the context of war and international politics
Summary
A member of an armed group forces a civilian prisoner to rape his daughter and son; a soldier sodomizes and mutilates several women during a village raid; a commander impregnates a young girl kept as his sexual slave; a doctor applies electric shocks to the testicles of a suspected terrorist.
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