Nationalist Narratives and (Dis) Appearing Women: State-Sanctioned Sexual Violence Anna M. Agathangelou
fagathan@oberlin.edu
Introduction
The sociopolitical landscape has been subject to profound shifts in recent times. Political upheavals and the shedding of old identities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the aftermath of the Gulf War signal major realignments in the structuring of the world political order. Fundamental transformations in the political economy include an increasing consolidation of global markets, the formation of a new international division of labor, and dramatic changes in technology and communication systems. In the cultural sphere, the reconstitution of this world political order is marked by mass consumption across transnational boundaries and the call to recognize and reassert different local and ethnic traditions (Mies 1986; Vickers, 1991). Unfortunately, the reassertion of ethno-nationalism is frequently reconstituted through violence against "the other". The resurgence of sexism and racism works to affirm and essentialize the "defining" characteristics of cultural groups, while simultaneously supporting the systematic application of force and genocide against "others". It is imperative that feminist theorists rethink the concept of nationalism and consider its affirmative inscriptive possibilities as well as its susceptibilities to potential recuperation in sexism and racism. Under what conditions are nationalism, and feminism, recuperated by the state for the reconstitution of global power? How does sexism articulate with nationalism? How does gender inscribe these intersections?
This paper addresses some theoretical and political aspects raised by current theorizations and explanations of nationalism and gender relations. I first discuss Benedict Anderson's understanding of 'imagined communities' and nationalism. I then show how the process of 'becoming national' is gendered and racially informed within Third World contexts. I develop my analysis with a focus on the rapes of women during ethnic conflict and war within Cyprus in 1974 and Yugoslavia in 1991. I argue that when sexual violence (rapes) is subsumed under understandings of nationalism, a sustained reading of the traumas sanctioned by the sexual symbolism and reality of conflict is not possible. I posit that liberal and radical feminist theories, when they are dealing with the reality of rape under the conditions of war and ethnic conflict, fail to challenge the terms of nationalist discourse, which invokes genocide and rapes in order to legitimize its constitution. One example is the argument that women experience violence as representatives of a particular ethno nationalism. In this sense, the discussion fails to engage the sexual violence that women experience during war and at other times. Feminists conceive, at least implicitly, that patriarchy is parallel to the power of the state. In this case, women of the Third World are conceived as property of men and the victims of nationalism and ethnic violence. I conclude by suggesting a (re) formulation of Anderson's understanding of the development of nationalism and the feminist understanding of violence against women.
I. Benedict Anderson and Nationalism
Promulgated by Anderson and supported by postmodern, postcolonial theorists (Chatterjee, 1986 and 1994; Bhabha 1990) and feminists (McClintock, 1992; 1995), the concept of the nation as an "imagined community" has played a critical and contradictory role in stalling the scholarly study of nationalism. Conceptualizing nationalism as socially constructed, Anderson creates intellectual space for seeing possibilities of "cultural liberation." His classic text Imagined Communities (1983) develops a complex argument about how the nation is represented, and how its aspirations, origins, and claims are legitimated in the process of communities becoming idealized and abstractly unified. This process of communities becoming national depends on the elite's "recovery" of a history capable of binding disparate elements into a whole and simultaneously concealing actual inequalities and patterns of subordination and exclusion. National loyalty depends on a transcendental appeal, on invoking "the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of regeneration...a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of 'continuity'" (Anderson, 1983: 11). The nation is conceived as an horizontal comradeship predicated on the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of women and working class peoples (Guha, 1985). This abstract conception of unified fraternity is sustained and given meaning through transcendental appeals to a "pseudo-genetic condition" (Berlant, 1991: 20).
The creation of a sense of fraternal and national unity, embodied in the power of selective past history, makes it possible for theorists of nationalism to focus more on the realm of institutional generation of meaning and (re) constitution of new cultural meanings of liberation and non subordination. Nevertheless, Anderson's conceptualization of nationalism as an imagining whose possibility lies in culture seems to obscure that this idea of 'imagined community' has material effects and concrete actors and decision makers who implement it under particular social and material conditions. Nationalist narratives may be 'imagined' or cultural in the sense that they are temporal, mutable, and socially produced by interpolating between structure and agency, and the given and the negotiated reality; nevertheless, their constitution does not happen in a vacuum. These narratives take shape within a global context of unequal development (Stavrianos, 1981; Mies 1986; and Callinicos, 1993). While plausible, Anderson's formulation of the nation as "fraternity" of "deep horizontal comradeship", which "makes it possible, for so many millions of people, over the past two centuries, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings" (1983: 16), remains problematic because it does not lead to an explicit discussion of the role gender plays in the constitution of nationalism. Anderson's formulation silences the way this narrative impacts women's and men's lives differentially and presumes a homogeneity in the naturalization of the desire of all people's allegiances to this process of "nation-ness" "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail" in this creation (Anderson, 1983: 16).
Narratives of nationalism become possible through this silencing of the uneven process of becoming "national" because they are governed by accounts of reality with a beginning and an end (McClintock, 1994) which require abstract and "free" historical subjects in a bourgeois sense. The continuity and identification presumed in nationalist narratives require a moral center of authority through which events may be located with respect to and in relation to one another. As Anderson claims, the 'imagined community' of the nation constitutes the major source of morality in the modern age. But this continuity of narrative and its sustenance as such requires an actor who is not abstract. This actor, whom the state centralizes as the ultimate decision maker, is male and is not fixed or unchangeable. When the idea of national comes to assume this role, then, as a consequence, it is represented as coterminous with history and obscures the fact that "all nationalisms are gendered." They are "contested systems of cultural representation that limit and legitimize people's access to the resources of the nation-state....No nation in the world grants women and men the same access to rights and resources of the nation-state" (McClintock, 1994: 260). Through the assumption of a singular, homogeneous, always male identity and agent, and the conflation of nation with this masculine subject, nationalisms are able to deny the desires of other ethnic groups and ignore the gendered implications of such power relations. Nations are contested systems whose constitution always happens at the simultaneous mobilization of and expense of women, working classes, and, in the case of the global context, the communities that underwent colonialism. Following Fanon, McClintock argues that the constitution of "imagined communities," that is, the nation, depends on the vigilant discipline of the subjects who mark the homogeneity, the autonomy, and the finiteness of the idealized nation. These visible markers are the women within a community and popular sectors in both the modern and postcolonial societies. Women and the working class are most frequently the object of concerted "disciplinary efforts," and such efforts stem largely from a perception of internal class and gender divisions as a threat to the "homogeneously imagined community" of the nation.
Moving from structural analyses of the development of the nation-state and focusing on the generation of meaning in the process of creating the nation-state, theorists like Anderson, following Marxism, have made it possible for us to understand the implication of culture in the study of nationalism and to imagine other understandings of "cultural liberation." However, by taking Marxism into a postmodern direction, Anderson ends up neglecting if not obscuring the prevalent structural inequalities that cut across national lines. Feminist and postcolonial critiques of Anderson's explanation of nationalism's development open up space to further theoretical understandings of the "maleness of the nation's profile" and its racist underpinnings. Neither monolithic nor homogeneous, this social (or national) agent is a product and producer culture under particular socio-economic conditions. Anderson promulgates that the forgetting of certain relationships (i.e., international, religious, and social) is central to the construction of national identity. However, focusing only on its self-representation, ethno-nationalism overlooks the practices and representations of inequality. Pivotal to these is the gender inequality (Pratt, 1991) which creates a "deep cleavage in the horizontal fraternity" and the racial exploitation, a result of colonization.
From the outset of the modern era, women have been produced as permanently unstable and dependent in relation to the imagined community. According to Mies (1986: 169) women, following the formal logic of capitalism, did not own property and thus they could not be considered 'free', sovereign, historical subjects: "They themselves, their whole person, their emotionality, their children, their body, their sexuality belonged to their husband", and in general to the nation-state. In the case of Third World contexts, nationalism claims ambiguous relation to the statehood of the modern era, and women are identified with the natural and the metaphysical, the instinctive and the subordinate. Thus, there is a need for theorists of nationalism to produce ever sharper tools which examine historically how values and institutions introduced by new emerging nation-states were grafted onto their hospitable traditional analogues. For example, in France and Great Britain, structural and discursive enforcement of sexually differentiated national spaces (like the public and private divide) led to a constitutional formalization of citizenship which legally excluded women from the nationally defined bourgeois sphere (Hunt, 1992 and Landes 1988). Positing that the imagined community is not the ideal, seamless, and monolithic community of comradeship but rather a community whose constitution and emergence depends on sexual violence against women, feminist theorists point to the anti-feminist stance of nationalisms that exalt women. For example, Gaitskell and Unterhalter (1989: 60) argue that in South African women are glorified for being mothers and for being "saintly in suffering, admired for stoicism in victimization, and [motherhood's] strength is an inspiration to the rest of the defeated nation." However, this glorification of motherhood is shaped by male cultural entrepreneurs who are only interested in having women remain at home, "an appropriate arena for fostering national identity through child rearing and domestic" work rather than participating in public policy making processes which may challenge and confront current visions of power organization.
National 'communities' are neither autonomous nor finite (Pratt, 1987) but rather contingent on relations of hierarchy. When this assumption is silenced, the state is able to invoke a nationalist discourse that subordinates gender, class, race, and sexual considerations to an ethno-national agenda. This strategic, discursive move by the state to remember sexual violences against women is a metonym for ethno-national power. In this fashion, ethno nationalist discourses subordinate gender and ethnicity to an idealized masculinized ethno national group. Despite his "progressive intentions," Anderson's approach to nationalism fails to take into account that women are an object of domination on the part of the elite powers of postcolonial states. In fact, I would argue that this subordination of women is a necessary precondition for the exercise of much power. The conceptualization of modern democracy as we know it today would be significantly different if we seriously engaged the constitution of nationalism through sexual violence. Let us turn our attention to a feminist, postcolonial critique of the thesis that nationalisms are imagined communities with ideal abstract subjects.
II. Nationalism and Women
Postcolonial and feminist critiques suggest that Anderson's imagined fraternal community of nationalism obscures and displaces the sexual violence through which the nationalism narrative is constituted (McClintock, 1995). A focus on the imagined fraternal community of nationalism silences the fact that the socially transcendental individual as imagined by liberal ideology is fictional. Human beings and the cultures they inherit and re create are infinitely varied and their visions of good life as promised by nationalism may be incommensurable. This dominant construction of nationalism, in turn, is able to mobilize particular constructions of womanhood in the service of an ethno-national logic. However, the ideal agent of this 'imagined community,' once deconstructed, is male and of upper or middle class. He is the decision maker and the sovereign of all power relations. He is, moreover, the one who chooses when to make "retroactive attempts to recapture the past" and when to "remember to forget things." This process is justified because the agent is supposedly working to imagine the community for the benefit of all.
However, "nationalism is rarely the nationalism of [all people in] the nation, but rather represents the site where [different] positions [and interests] negotiate and contest with each other" (Duara, 1994: 152). In these contestations, the state intervenes and through its charge of institutions creates the requisite interchangeability of individuals (Duara, 1994: 152). This process, however, is contradictory even when it is founded on systematic silences and suppressions in order to sustain the interests of the elites. That is, the development of nationalism through the nation-state and its democratic advance is predicated on the "gendering of political capacities, on the social qualification and limitation of citizenship, and on the exploitative domination of some peoples over others" (Elley and Grigor Suny, 1994: 27) both in the domestic and international arenas. Of course, this gendering of the nation state has roots in colonial relations, something which we cannot ignored when we seek an understanding of how power is consolidated internationally through the practices of peoples in the First and Third World contexts (Stoler, 1992; Wildenthal, 1993). In order to understand how nation-states of the Third World consolidate their power internationally, I focus on how nationalism in two Third World_ states, Cyprus and Yugoslavia, became predicated on men's rape of women.
Cyprus won its independence from the British in 1960. The elites of the Greek and Turkish ethnic communities worked together towards consolidating their power in Cyprus. However, three years later, this national project of progress, democracy, and development did not resemble the form it had taken in Europe. "Figuring a landscape of complacency and promise, inciting memories of community" (Elley and Grigor, 1994: 30) by producing a common 'national fantasy' was impossible because the nationalisms of both communities had originated elsewhere, and their goals, values, interests, and agents conflicted due to historical political relations. Thus, within Cyprus, two 'national fantasies' or cultures_, the Greek and the Turkish, attempted to become local "through images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness" (Elley and Grigor, 1994: 30 citing Berlant, 1991: 20). The national conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots were founded on the systematic exclusion of women and continue to be played out through violence on their bodies. In 1974, when the Greek junta invaded, the military of Cyprus (re) organized socio-political and economic power on the island by trying to kill president Makarios and imprisoning and threatening the lives of Greek Cypriot men who belonged to parties on the left (communists and socialists). Claiming its role as a guarantor and protector for the Turkish Cypriot minority, Turkey militarily intervened, protecting the Turkish minority from the Greek junta and (re) organizing its power bases on the island. During the months of July and August, Turkish soldiers raped Greek women in churches, at their homes in front of relatives, and in several villages before other soldiers._ These rapes did not have the same currency as other issues in the discourse of the state in 1974. The marginalization of this issue is evident in that while no agencies or support groups were created to address acts of sexual violence, a plethora of agencies were developed to redress the loss of property and homes of thousands of refugees, and support networks for women who lost their sons during the war.
When I interviewed women in 1993 and 1995, they spoke primarily about refugees and the mothers missing sons and husbands. These topics are part of a nationalist discourse used to reinforce a supposed social homogeneity among Greek Cypriots and the wives of missing persons. This dominant nationalist discourse fails to address--indeed actively displaces--another aspect of the development and stabilization of Greek Cypriot ethno nationalism: its own narrative of rape and violence both within the boundaries of Greek Cypriot nationalism and outside them by targeting Turkish Cypriot women._ The Greek Cypriot women I interviewed during 1993 and 1995 in Cyprus did not volunteer any information about sexual violence against Greek or Turkish women during the 1974 war. When I broached the topic, they expressed concern that discussing such violence might endanger themselves or those who had been attacked. A 50 year old Greek Cypriot working class woman who originally came from a mixed village said:
That's the past. What's the point of bringing it up? You know that woman, two doors away from my home? We were all, both women and men, incarcerated in two rooms in our village. The women were put in one room and the men in another. One night several Turks and Turkish Cypriots showed up and grabbed four women. Some of the mothers were pulling their daughters not to go. The soldiers, pointing guns at the daughters, told the mothers to let them go....You know what happened after that. You know (pointing to a woman who is sitting two doors away from her house), she is married now with children but she still carries the 'weight.' Do you understand what I mean? And you know what can happen if we do (Interviewee 24, 1993: 5).
The state addressed the issue of rapes against Greek women only in passing. In 1990s, for the first time, after the incidents of rape in Yugoslavia, the Greek Cypriot state has been raising the issue of rape as a form of 'ethnic cleansing.' Rapes are framed within the pre-existing nationalist discourse which presumes a colonizing 'other,' that is, Turkey, responsible for the "application of [extermination]...policy and methods [against] Greek Cypriots as an ethnic and religious group" (www.kypros.org/Cyprus_Problem/Turkish-Atrocities.html#III)._ The state, to consolidate its power, searches for ways that the international community can hear its concerns and mobilize its support, whether through aid or other political means. Thus, the state invokes arguments similar to those circulated by the other ethnic groups in the international media and institutions in order to mobilize the support of the international community. When the Greek Cypriot state argues that Turkey is intending to exterminate the Greek Cypriots through its policy of "wholesale and repeated rapes," it is appealing to the line of argument about sexual violence in Yugoslavia. The state seizes upon these international events, defocuses its attention from domestic sexual repression, and orchestrates anxieties about the sexual violence of the enemy in 1974, events easily and brutally magnified in times of socio-political stress. Retroactively, the state attempts to recapture the past not to redress the injustices of sexual violation, but to remind the international community that Turkey, the former brutal invader, is still the implacable enemy of Greek Cypriots and especially of women. For example, several recent pronouncements by the state of Cyprus centralize the discourse of rape against women under the category of 'ethnic cleansing':
The atrocities of the Turkish army included wholesale and repeated rapes of women of all ages, systematic torture, savage and humiliating treatment of hundreds of people, including children, women and pensioners during their detention by the Turkish forces, as well as looting and robbery on an extensive scale, by Turkish troops and Turkish Cypriots (www.kypros.org/Cyprus_Problem/overview.html)
These retroactive attempts to recapture the past include deliberate efforts to simultaneously recover and forget the 1974 war rapes of Greek women, precisely because they underscore, however indirectly, the "impotence" of Greek Cypriot men. Broadcasting its ethnonational discourse beyond its borders, the Greek Cypriot state moves to tell the global community about the violations by the Turkish Cypriots or Turks (from the mainland) to mobilize support from international institutions, and, consequently, to consolidate its power internationally and domestically. Ethno-nationalism's contact with other international institutions opens the space for a possible renegotiation of gender relations, creating the possibility of changing the assumptions that have informed the development of the nation state: that Greek Cypriot men are the protectors and Greek Cypriot women are inviolable. However, the Greek Cypriot state's demands at the European Convention on Human Rights that the international community reprimand the barbarous Turks who raped Greek women, even when it challenges sexual violence and seems to create some degree of fluidity in transforming gender relations, harks back to an ethno-nationalist culture destroyed or violated by foreign invasion and rape. The recovery of the violation of Greek Cypriot ethno nationalism reinforces the powerful imagery involved in merging the idea of national community with that of the mother. This automatically triggers the response that one should ultimately be prepared to come to the defense and be the protector of women as a decisive criterion of men's masculinity (Parker et al. 1992). This strategy to regulate gender relations at a discursive level is a strategy that nationalism presumes necessary at this historical moment to (re)legitimate its power and consolidate itself as a "geographically and culturally fixed unit [the Greek Cypriot nation-state]" (Yang, 1998: 129)
Even when the 'protector' state is (re) opening the discourse of sexual violence that occurred during the 1974 war, it does so in ways that redeploy patriarchal norms: the state remembers the acts of sexual violence during the war against women as symbolic violence toward the Greek Cypriot culture; a violence enacted, we might say, by displacing the real violences against women. In other words, the state charges the Turks with doing violence to Greek Cypriot womanhood and reminds the international community of the brutalities of the enemy. Instead of facilitating an understanding of violence or overcoming it, this strategy works to perpetuate it. While the core of nationalism relies on discourses of sexual violence as a way of contesting the enemy, this nationalist discourse, by focusing on sexual violence as merely a national concern, blurs the contestation and only serves to consolidate males' power over women. Thus, the state would do well to consider how its silencing of the rapes as violence against women first and foremost, enacts a different kind of violence against women: it reminds women of the violence against them, but it does not redirect resources to combating, and denouncing rape first as a crime against women at all times, and then as a gendered political strategy in war. Through this strategy, the state demonizes the 'other' as the barbarian rapist (the other is always a Turk, and the victims are invariably the Greeks and Christians), and, simultaneously, it destroys the possible domestic and transnational solidarities among women of different ethnic groups.
Rapes mentioned as human rights violations in 1976 were subsequently marginalized by the state. Partially, this discourse of 'ethnic cleansing' is currently employed by the Greek Cypriot state as a result of two major international developments: the rapes and violations of Yugoslav women during the 1990s ethnic conflicts, and the work of feminism on sexual violence._ Events in Yugoslavia further demonstrate how nationalism's progress and advancement is founded on the sexual assault of women first and foremost. The abstract conception of an imagined horizontal fraternal comradeship, although useful in helping us understand how communities are organized, is contingent upon structures of inequality and practices of violence; Anderson's imagined community sustains its meaningfulness and its legitimacy within a context of exploitation and oppression.
The disastrous effects of the war in Yugoslavia in 1991 resulted from both internal contradictions and external ones of the international world order. The ethnic conflict, despite claims that it is an inter-ethnic conflict based on historical and traditional antagonisms, emerged out of contradictions among several elites who wanted to consolidate their power after the death of Tito, under whose rule nationalism was extensively suppressed (Coulson, 1993: 98)._ Throughout the early 1990s, nationalism was gaining credence in Slovenia and Croatia. The contradictions of the socialist system encouraged and validated what Anderson calls the process of becoming national: the systematic recovery, and forgetting, of aspects of the past. In addition, the degenerative socio-economic conditions in Yugoslavia, especially after the 1973 oil crisis, instigated the "reclaiming and reconstituting of earlier histories and further activated in defensive response to Serbian nationalism which they also fed" (Coulson, 1993: 99). By the early 1990s, when communist parties all over Eastern Europe were being pushed out of power, the first multi-party elections in Yugoslavia (1990) led to the creation of a looser confederal structure of relationships among the republics. Serbia saw this confederal idea as marking the end of Yugoslavia and therefore did not accept it. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves independent sovereign states. When the Yugoslav National Army moved into Slovenia to 'secure the borders' of the federation, it was rebuffed. By early 1993, Yugoslavian soil turned into a stage for a many-sided war, spiraling out of control by attempting to construct 'new democracies.' These new political systems were based on exclusion, discrimination, and violence against the 'others,' members of different ethnic groups and those who refused to identify themselves in national terms. For example, when feminists in Belgrade raised the issue of rape and violence against women as first and foremost crimes against women, and then as crimes of one nationality against another, these 'others' were vehemently accused as traitors to the nation. Feminists from Zagreb who spoke out against rape as a "war crime against women have been viciously accused of raping Croatia" (Coulson, 1993: 100).
During the war in Yugoslavia, the majority of the population experienced acts of violence, most of which were directed towards women (Jones, 1993). The different ethno nationalisms within Yugoslavia dominate, humiliate, and attempt to destroy "the other" through women. Rape becomes a weapon of war and a tool of political repression (The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women's Human Rights, 1995: 1). Women's bodies have been always used by male conquerors as the spoils of war, trophies which prove that the masculine unified nation has been victorious over the enemy. When the first rapes occurred in Yugoslavia, Zagreb independent feminists raised the issue internationally, but their presentations did not gain prominence because they were viewed as lacking a 'clear national approach.'_ However, when the warring parties recognized the propaganda value of women's suffering and violation, rape stories spread all over the world, locally and internationally._ As Allen (1996: 69) cites:
Rape has been used since the beginning of the conflict on a large scale, as a means of implementing the strategy of ethnic cleansing and to increase inter-ethnic hatred....The victims are said to be mainly Muslim but also Serb and Croat women....Attempts made to locate specific places where women were allegedly detained and raped have proved unsuccessful to date. Information was often too imprecise._
When ethno-nationalisms wield rape within both domestic and international spaces as an instrument of humiliation and violation, rape is presented as a crime against ethno nationalism and not as a crime against women nor as a gendered political strategy. Thus, facts about the rapes and the aftereffects on women's lives are deemed unimportant in comparison to how these crimes against women can be used to capture attention within the international community as an ethno-national crime against another ethno-nationalism. The text below shows how the documentation of rape can be used to determine which ethno nationalism is worse than the other:
The rape of thousands of women had been documented. The Serbs even had camps for the sole purpose of detaining women. Serbs had taken 150 Muslim women away from the town of Brcko in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Allen, 1996: 66).
In such texts and others presented at the United Nations, we see a resituation of rape to consolidate the power of a particular ethno-nationalism. Rape as the bodily violation of women is utterly silenced because their sexual violence is not the real issue. After all, sexual violence against women happens all the time! Here is the "real issue" in war:
They [the raped women] did not want in any way to let rape overshadow the real problem which is the extermination and execution of thousands and thousands of men and women (Jones quoting Jacobs, 1994: 119).
This quote suggests that women participate in their own oppression by setting aside their traumatic experiences, while their ethno-nationalism wages a war of public relations over "the other" by referring the international community to the crimes of the other ethnic groups. This reframing of rape, which points to the violent crimes of another ethno-nationalism, places rape within ethno-national and religious boundaries while eclipsing the violations of women's bodies both then and now. Sexual violence (that is, between Serbian men and Bosnian women) is resituated through nationalist discourse as a relation between one ethno nationalism and another. This resituation blurs the contestation between men and women and reduces it to an issue between Serbian and Bosnian men.
It is not a coincidence that few women want to discuss the atrocious experience of rape, and if they do decide to speak, they choose to remain anonymous (Nikolic-Ristanovic et al. 1995; and Agathangelou, 1997). Sexual violence is condemned by various ethno nationalisms as a way of defining the violator of the collective or nation. Thus, while women's identities are necessary ingredients for the development of any ethno-nationalism and its own boundaries, sexual violence against women becomes the weapon to condemn men of other ethno-national groups during times of war. In this way, ethno-nationalisms can continue to silence women as individuals, individuals who do not want their ethno-nationalism's power to be predicated on sexual violence within the boundaries of their own nationalism or against women of other ethno-nationalisms. Women as individuals with their own ambitions and visions about community are eclipsed in front of ethno-nationalism's means and ends. Women's status as righteous victims is contingent upon the global community's perception of the nation as a righteous victim:
Out of their lost lives they are being raised into the witness stand, to testify for--
or against -- national history. But as witness, a person is only visible and audible in the witness stand, his individual testimony is being collected into a general one, his identity, his being is dissolved into collective identities. After the testimony [she] is invisible again or becomes captive of [her] own statement, turns into a monument of ideological fixations of the political and intellectual elites with ideological claim to leadership (Greverus, 1996: 281).
In the end, rapes are consistently reduced by ethno-nationalisms to crimes against the larger community and nation-state via a systematic process of de-emphasizing sexual violence against individual women. Clearly, gender and sexual relations are constitutive of elements of other sociopolitical identities, and, thus, sexual violence against women during war cannot be reduced solely to violence of men against women. Neither is it solely a violence against the community or the nation-state. Sexual violence against women originates in the symbolic construction of the female body as the body of the community (Seifert 1996: 39 citing Wobbe 1993). Once that construction circulates as a central currency within national contexts, "the rape of women of a community, culture, or nation can be regarded--and is so regarded--as a symbolic rape of the body of that community" (Seifert, 1996: 39)._ Furthermore, rape, ethno-nationalism argues, endangers the existence and homogeneity of the state, the nation, and the community and humiliates its men. Thus, rape is always "resituate[d] to question social and national power and agency, not just bodily [and almost always female] violation" (Layoun, 1994: 73).
Layoun raises an important point: how do Third World states (re) situate and remember rape to question the "other's" national power? Again, the notion that rape originates in the political construction of the female body as the symbol of the community and nation does not sufficiently explain the act of rape. Although the ethno-national aspect of rape is prevalent, for example, in the case of Turkish men raping Greek women, and the violence and violation of Greek bodies being converted into the power of the Turkish regime, the fact remains that women are raped by men in many contexts, which means that the "incontestable reality of [violated and raped] female bodies is translated into male power" (Seifert, 1996: 41) because women are also defined as the property of men. Some women are not interested in indirectly achieving power through the sexual violence perpetrated against other ethno-nationalisms' women because they know that sooner or later it may be their turn. Thus, the simultaneous deployment of sexual violence is designed to consolidate power of particular ethno-nationalisms and political agendas, to consolidate gender relations both within the boundaries of a particular ethno-nationalism and in relation to others, and to prevent possible transnational solidarities.III. Feminist Analyses of Sexual Violence in War
Benedict Anderson's posing of nationalism as an imagined community has been challenged by feminist and postcolonial theorists who argue that nationalism is gendered and depends extensively on the violence against women and colonized peoples for its imagining. This conceptualization relies heavily on abstracting the subjects within historical and material socio-economic relations as symbols and tropes. Such rhetorical and metaphorical uses of nationalism as they intersect with sexuality (especially sexual violence) turn away from concrete social contexts and specific historical realities of war and violence where women are treated as "reified property of the masculine nation" (Yang, 1998: 130). Additionally, such conceptualizations falsely imply that we know all there is to know about these realities and that the production of nation-state power follows a similar trajectory everywhere. As long as nationalism and its "products" are understood as merely cultural narratives, sustained readings of the trauma of sexual violence cannot take place.
At the same time, most of the feminist studies of sexual violence against women, especially in the case of Yugoslavia, have argued that rape is a weapon of war and a genocide against humanity. Such explanations are steeped in a nationalist discourse which assumes that its agents are all equal 'free' historical subjects despite material realities to the contrary. In fora such as the United Nations, feminists have presented rape as a crime against a nation and have sought the attention of a global community outside the boundaries within which sexual violence has been committed. For example, MacKinnon (1994) argues that rape is an attack on human rights because it is genocide: "What is happening here is first a genocide, in which ethnicity is a tool for political hegemony: the war is an instrument of the genocide; the rapes are an instrument of the war" (MacKinnon, 1991: 187). The Human Rights Report similarly argues that the "mass rape of women has also been used as a tool of 'ethnic cleansing,' meant to terrorize, torture and demean women and their families and compel them to flea the area" (Human Rights Report, 1995: 8). Seifert (1994) argues that rapes are "part of the 'rules' of war....rapes in wartime aim at destroying the opponent's culture....the background to rape orgies is a culturally rooted contempt for women that is lived out in times of crisis" (58, 62, 65). Despite efforts by MacKinnon, Seifert, Brownmiller (1994) and Stiglmayer (1994) to suggest that rapes are about genocide, misogyny, and cultural destruction, they all participate in producing a liberal understanding of domination, the elimination of which depends on legally proving that the rapes are a form of genocide. However, a legal proof linking war time rapes with genocide has yet to be achieved. Feminists like Brownmiller argue that "the effect is indubitably one of intimidation and demoralization for the victim's side....[men of the loosing side] appropriate the rape of 'their women' as part of their own male anguish of defeat" (1975: 31). As long as rape is understood and explained as a human violation or political violence against the nation-state, which is equated with the male subject position or the international community alone without linking it to material conditions, then sexual violence is relegated to a 'cas de jurisprudence' rather than as a means of (re) distributing power and resources among men (and some women). When feminists (MacKinnon, Stiglmayer, Brownmiller, Seifert 1994) argue that rape is a weapon of war used by ethno nationalisms to consolidate their power, these ideas are echoed by states as a means of serving their own ends (i.e., stabilizing their power in the global context)._ Women cannot exist as sovereign beings in their communities as long as the sexual violence against women of particular ethnic groups is not understood as a strategy in the international community where women are subsumed by the needs and sufferings of the nation-state and reduced to property and objects.
Regarding the current situation in Cyprus, two points should be emphasized. The rapes of women in Cyprus when Turkey invaded in 1974 were in the thousands. Some books and films (e.g., "The Rape of Cyprus") referred to this issue, but not in a way which encouraged women to organize against this heinous crime in both an ethnic and a gender strategy. Such a mobilization would potentially raise issues about Greek Cypriot men raping Greek and other women for the consolidation of their own power. Women who were raped by Turkish men disappeared from the public sphere, and these questions continue to be silenced even when the memories of ethnic violence against Greek Cypriots are sustained strongly through the educational, the state, and the media institutions. Why? The state becomes concerned about arguments which name that which is barred from dominant ethno nationalist discourses of gender and sexuality, arguments which call for a renegotiation of constructions of the Greek Cypriot sovereign subject._ Greek Cypriot ethno-nationalism seeks to rather affirm its bourgeois power domestically and internationally and is not interested in redressing the inequality and sexual violences that prevail within its imagined boundaries. The state recovers past violences against women in a way that reaffirms its power by naturalizing Greek Cypriot women's ethnic, and heterosexual positions in the society. For instance, in the former Yugoslavia, a disciplining of the national female body is taking place in all the republics. Jalusic refers to a palpable change in the social atmosphere there; it is has returned to a "men's world; you can smell it in the air, that sense of fraternity, that heroism. It is not just uniforms, it is even the spirit that smells of the military" (Seifert's translation of Jalusic's work 1992: 18).
In stark contrast to the nationalization of sexual violence evidenced in Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia, in which virtuous Greek Cypriot, Bosnian, and Croatian women are victims of a hypersexualized Turkish and Serbian "animalism," feminists do not suggest that the sexual violence is interethnic. In the Greek Cypriot case, the exception is Layoun, whose analysis of the Greek Cypriot text "Paralogismos" addresses this question extensively. Clearly Western feminists differ with the state's articulation of ethno nationalism's victimization of women, but the feminist assertion that rape is genocide fails to address other violations of women's bodies in Third World contexts, especially where unstable nation-states depend on every strategy to legitimate their existence and sustain their political and economic power. Thus, it behooves us to re-examine the idea of sexual violence as genocide, especially when nation-states appropriate this notion to: (1) invoke support from the international community; (2) consolidate their unstable power and legitimate their existence within the international context and always at the expense of women; (3) (re) integrate the idea that women are the "blood and soil" of the nation-state and the way community's constitution is made possible through the national female body; and (4) manage and control women's bodies by clearly associating the wealth and power of other ethno-nationalisms with violence against women (the objects of gender relations) as a moment of proving one's sexual power.
Feminists can respond to this (re) appropriation by insisting that it is crucial to make conceptual distinctions between women and women of the nation, and inter-ethno-national relations and intra-ethno-national relations. As long as states benefit economically and politically from erasing these conceptual distinctions they will continue to emphasize that women's primary roles are as biological regenerators and the property of the masculine nation rather than political actors in social life and policy making (Milic, 1993). Conflating women with the nation, and sexual violence with genocide, obscures the point that the nation is not equal to women and that women of the nation are not valued the same way that men are valued. Both of these positions are informed by a liberal ideology which presumes equal formal rights for all humans and that each loss of life counts the same way within the boundaries of any ethno-nationalism internationally. Both state and feminist constructions of sexual violence as genocide mobilize particular constructions of Third World womanhood in the service of a First World ethno-national logic. Such a logic is used by Third World ethno nationalisms to measure their own power and legitimacy in the global context. It is one of the great ironies that both ethno-national and feminist discourses simultaneously deploy and erase women in the Third World. In sum, when feminists (mostly Western feminists) call for explanations that emphasize that sexual violence is a war crime, they themselves inadvertently participate in abstracting women as symbols and tropes of the imagined nation-state and in silencing the fact that women are raped because of structural enforcements of sexual relations.
IV. Conclusion: A Reframing and (re) Envisioning of Community
As long as solidarity exists between women's or other groups across the borders, transnationally, it will be a reminder of other possibilities, even if these are obscured, erased or reinterpreted in nationalist discourses (Zarkov, 1995: 116).
This paper has approached the production of nationalism as a gendered, 'imagined,' or cultural phenomenon in the sense that it is temporal, mutable, and socially produced by interpolating between structures and agency, the given and the negotiated reality. The social or national agent is a product of culture and produces culture, but always under particular socio-economic conditions. Looking at sexual violence both in Yugoslavia and Cyprus, I demonstrated that nationalisms are always gendered, and sexual violences are intersected with the production of ethno-nationalisms' power. Women in these Third World contexts carry the "weight" of the traumas perpetrated by the men who assaulted them (http://www.suc.org/politics/rape/raskovic/index.html). Such violences are a testimony to nationalism's attempts to sustain its power in competition with other nation-states. Unequal material conditions continue to enable violences upon their bodies subsequent to ethnic war. While silenced, their 'bodies in pain' become the sites of violent contestations for the reconstitution of an 'unified', 'masculinist,' and linear national and ethnic narrative necessary to justify the accumulation of resources in the hands of the very few. In Yugoslavia, after the intervention of feminists, rape accounts were used as currencies by political institutions through the media and the human rights commission. The rhetoric of these national discourses is replete with metaphoric references to rape rather than inclusion of rape as a material reality that emerges within existing structures of inequality and impacts women's lives in concrete ways before, during, and after wars. Due to current discussions of rape in Yugoslavia, the Greek and Turkish elites have (re) opened the official, dominant discourses and have (re) integrated rape as a 'reality' in the lives of Cypriot women as an example of how the 'other' violated them. This punctuation of reality obscures the fact that women are still defined as passive objects rather than active agents, despite their participation in building up the nation through their work in the market and the household. Discussions of nationalism which frame women as symbols and tropes in the context of war hold the relations of domination as necessary ingredients in the forming and sustaining of ethno-national communities; but such relations of domination also make possible further violences against women. When women are subsumed under male agency in the construction of community, they cannot challenge "war through rape" because it represents both an unspeakable subject and a political strategy for consolidating the power of the Third World nation, which occupies a subaltern position in relation to First World nations' structural power.
Following the theoretical debates of Anderson, feminists, and postcolonial theorists, I examined closely in two contexts ethno-nationalist contestations over economic and political resources. The historical social location of "woman" as the marker of otherness makes it possible for Third World ethno-nationalisms to articulate her with ethnicity and regional hierarchy through a linear historical narrative. Delimiting the scope of my claims as a means of conclusion, I am putting forward that once we distinguish between women as women and women as figures and tropes within structures of inequality, the issue of community (national, international, global) can be reframed. Any community interested in egalitarianism and democracy must address the problems of women's freedom and their access to resources. This can be accomplished by addressing intra-ethno-national violence in addition to inter ethno-national violence. Exploring this question again reveals a different configuration of "us" and "them," demonstrating how different ethno-national communities are internally fractured along gender and class lines. Our reading of the violence within two Third World nation-states facilitates the exploration of alternative constructions of communities where women are agents who use their own "primary resources" and access the nation's resources without fearing violence. Such alternative communities would allow women to articulate a different identity, one that makes room for Greek and Turkish Cypriot women, and Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian women, to work together to create transnational solidarities for transforming the 'imagined national' communities. Thus, feminists can choose to be politically conscious and avoid creating and imagining 'communities' "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each" (Anderson, 1983: 16). Feminists are encouraged to critique visions of 'communities' which have historically depended on remembering some violences against women and forgetting others as a way of (re) producing structural inequalities between both men and women within nation-states, and competing ethno-nationalisms within the global context.
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Interviews with Greek and Turkish Cypriot Women from four villages. Cyprus. 1993 and 1995. (Translations mine)._Both Cyprus and Yugoslavia were members of the nonaligned movement.
_ Other communities and groups exist in Cyprus but are not discussed here for the sake of brevity.
_Some of this information comes from intervieews I conducted in Cyprus during the years 1993 and 1995 with several women from four villages. All women wanted to remain anonymous because they feared ostracization for revealing such information to the Greek community.
_Turkish Cypriot women were raped and killed by Greek Cypriots during the Kofinou affair in 1963 and 1964.
_For a similar argument about the 'ethnic cleansing' of Bosnians and Croatians see McKinnon (1998: 46).
_ The sexual violations of Yugoslavan women become a spectacle that other nationalisms use to justify their means and ends.
_ I refer the reader to Woodward, S. L., 1995. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War for an excellent analysis which sheds light on the multifaceted global and local dynamics leading to the war.
_ See http://www.suc.org/politics/rape/nanag/index.html.
_ The North American News Analysis Group traces "The Evolution of the Rapes Story" and argues that the first rapes reported to the United Nations (report s/24991) were not rapes of Muslim or Croatian women but rapes of Serbian women by Muslim and Croatian soldiers in Sarajevo. This report was not released till January 5, 1993. According to the North American News Analysis Group's report, the way the international community engages the "rape story" silences that "rape, systematic or not, is being perpetrated by all sides on victims on all sides, Serb, Muslim and Croat". http://www.suc.org/politics/rape/nanag/index.html and
http://www.suc.org/politics/rape/raskovic/index.html
_This report is the fourth one prepared by the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations' Commission on Human Rights, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro-Serbia, and Slovenia on several occasions. The report of the U.N. Commission's team details "allegations of rape in the territory of former Yugoslavia" (Allen, 1996: 69).
_Wobbe (1993) argues that the construction of the feminine calls for a "vulnerability to assault," a major element absent from the construction of masculinity (Seifert, 1996: 40).
_ Scarry (1985) links the power of the state with the level of sexual violence, positing that as the power of an ethno-nationalism or state increases, the incidence of rape decreases.
_ See Layoun for an example of a text by Maria Abraamidou, Paralogismos, that attempts to reveal a different configuration of "us" and "them," demonstrating how there are inter-ethnic relations between Greek Cypriot women and Turkish Cypriot men._
