BOSNIA JUDY'S PUNCH * by Flick Ruby

Making the World Safe for Patriarchal Capitalism

The factors that inform and shape concepts of gender are; race, ethnicity,
locale, sexuality and nationality amongst others.  As gender is not one
thing depending upon these variables, neither is war, so haw can we apply a
gender analysis to war and militarism?  Cooke states in Gendering War Talk
that legitimised, psychotic violence depends upon a particular way of
constructing and maintaining gender identities.  By placing gender at the
centre of an analysis of war, we begin to question the mythology : the
mystique of the masculinity of soldiering and of the essential femininity
of peace advocacy. After reproduction, war is perhaps the arena where
division of labour along gender lines has been the most obvious, and thus
where sexual difference has seemed the most absolute and natural.'

I believe that it is in the interests of the military and the state to
maintain notions of a warlike masculinity and a peace like femininity, for
what better force maintains the status quo in international, domestic and
private politics?  War has traditionally been considered the quintessential
proving ground for masculinity and femininity has been constructed in
relation to this notion of masculinity.  I believe that ideas about
masculinity are validated and reproduced by militarism, that war experience
is constructed according to culturally distinct gender expectation, that
war is profoundly gendered and its violence is sexualised. This is not to
say that there are inherent qualities in men or women because masculinity
and femininity are not natural but socially constructed and can therefore
be changed.  Isn't theory beautiful?

Let me take you to a place where theories hit history, passion and pain
hits representations and politics and lives; the lounge room of my closest
friend who is Bosnian.  The family sit every night watching the news in a
lounge room decorated with tapestries of bridges now bombed to smithereens.
They listen to the radio during the day and wait each night to watch the
ABC, the SBS, the CNN, the Derryn Hinch version of truth, the
disinformation, the news. In one room , in one family, sit Croation,
Bosnian, Catholic and Muslim, testament to the fallacy of the clear cut
splits between racial and religious groups advertised as the Bosnian
conflict.  I sit with them sometimes, wincing pathetically, asking
questions that betray the luxury of ignorance, asking questions about the
Ottoman Empire and asking for theories to be answered through tears and
frustration. Slavenka Drakulic, a writer from Zagrab says 'When you are
forced to accept war as a fact, death becomes something you have to reckon
with, a harsh reality that mangles you life even if it leaves you
physically unharmed..war snaps your life in half, you you have to go on
living as if you are still a whole person.'

Drakulic goes on 'This war doesn't have only two warring sides.  It is many
sided, nasty and complex.' another Bosnian feminist says 'It seems
impossible to over emphasise the complexity of the multi-ethnic,
multinationality composition of the country and the intricacies involved..'
It is precisely because this conflict has no obvious good and bad guys
that the Western Hollywood enculturated mind cant grasp the realities.
Instead, the 'it's too far away' mentality reigns under the banner of
'religious historical madness'. What is not mentioned is that two insane
world wars have a lot to answer for here, what is not mentioned is that
this is what happens in war, the terror, horror, gore and rape. What is not
mentioned is that some people are profiting from this.

Patriotic nationalism and militarism however are not far away at all.
Australia spends $26 Million PER DAY on the military and conducts and
participated in arms sales such as AIDEX and Aerospace.  The complexity of
affluent 'first world' patriarchal-capitalist nations like Australia in
fuelling increasing global militarisation, in profiting from death and
destruction, implicates every one of us.  It's not so far away after all,
when we realise that the relative freedom, the food and the secure well
being we suck through the straw of 'democracy' is refined from the juices
of the dying, the raped the tortured by profoundly gendered institutions -
the military and the government.  Okay, so Bosnia is far away, you might
have to actually seek some information about the history, you might have to
have a shit detector on when you watch the news but this is simply another
event in the history of militarism. 'I used to think that war finally
reached you through fear, the terror that seizes your whole being; wild
heartbeats exploding, a wave of cold swear, when there is no longer any
division between mind and body, and no help.  But war is more perverse.  It
doesn't stop with the realisation of your victimisation, it goes deeper
than that.  War pushes you to the painful point where you are forced to
realise and acknowledge the way you participate in it, become its
accomplice.  It may be a seemingly ordinary situation that makes you aware
that you have become a collaborator.' from Bulkan Express, Drakulic.

So what happens to women in war?  Bodies are rendered passive and
penetrable by a stronger force.  The strict lines that create binary
oppositions like women/man, nature/culture, irrationality/rationality,
peace/war are extended to an us/them mentality.  Certain ideas, concerns,
interests, information, feelings and meanings are marked in national
security language as feminine and are devalued, others are masculinised and
are valued.  'Leave the soft life behind, join the army and become a real
man.' As in all war, not just this war, women are raped systematically,
used as a battle ground and defiled as the enemies property. This could be
seen as simply an extension of the normal patriarchal peace-time war
against women. Propaganda shows patriotic mothers and wives knitting socks
by the fire, not the images of women in pieces, or of rape, torture and
hunger; neither participation nor resistance is shown, just images of good
women doing good deeds for the good men protecting the good state.

Women are used as labour and as symbolic objects that bolster the idea that
masculine, gallant men protect women from the enemy who are usually brutal
sexual. In propaganda you can see how war planners manipulate allegedly
private and sharply gendered relationships playing upon class interests,
racial fears and sexual norms in order to recruit women's bodies, services
and labour for military affairs. War and militarism distort the economy to
such an extent that social justice or welfare goals are almost impossible.
It is the services for women, if indeed they exist at all, that are the
first to go when governments spends  more on weapons in peace or in war.
So war is not removed from women and children.  If you are a 'third world'
woman you have a greater chance of dying because of war than any soldier
fighting in war machine.  The 'soft targets' spoken of during the Gulf War
were the 200,000 civilians, women and children killed by technological
wizardry, the great wargasm.  Military men give birth to wonderful
explosions.  Klaus Theweliet in Male Fantasies states, 'Men are being
extended, transformed, reborn through the use of new technical media.  The
bomb was a new medium, like T.V.; it has become the ultimate medium of
change through media - being (re) born without women.

As one Bosnian feminist says 'these new nation states function over women's
bodies.  They need their national body and women to reproduce them.  They
are fed with hate, and with the saparation of women.  They are based on
violence against Others, but everyone is a potential Other, neither the
'sacred nationality' nor the 'sacred gender' is guaranteed any more.
Nationalistic policy brought in the war, the death, the war rapes, the
refugees, then the punishment of the ordinary people with an economic
embargo'  Feminist writers who spoke out against rape as a war crime
against women, have been viciously accused of betraying their nation.
Raped, murdered women will never be considered brave, except by us.' says
Lepa Mladjenovic and Vera Litricin (Feminist Review Autumn 1993)

