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Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body
Contributor(s): Bergoffen, Debra B. (Author)
ISBN: 0415891272     ISBN-13: 9780415891271
Publisher: Routledge
OUR PRICE:   $152.00  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: October 2011
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Sociology - General
- Social Science | Women's Studies
- Social Science | Gender Studies
Dewey: 364.153
LCCN: 2011018655
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 6.1" W x 9.3" (0.90 lbs) 144 pages
 
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Publisher Description:

Rape, traditionally a spoil of war, became a weapon of war in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia. The ICTY Kunarac court responded by transforming wartime rape from an ignored crime into a crime against humanity. In its judgment, the court argued that the rapists violated the Muslim women's right to sexual self-determination. Announcing this right to sexual integrity, the court transformed women's vulnerability from an invitation to abuse into a mark of human dignity. This close reading of the trial, guided by the phenomenological themes of the lived body and ambiguity, feminist critiques of the autonomous subject and the liberal sexual/social contract, critical legal theory assessments of human rights law and institutions, and psychoanalytic analyses of the politics of desire, argues that the court, by validating women's epistemic authority (their right to establish the meaning of their experience of rape) and affirming the dignity of the vulnerable body (thereby dethroning the autonomous body as the embodiment of dignity), shows us that human rights instruments can be used to combat the epidemic of wartime rape if they are read as de-legitimating the authority of the masculine autonomous subject and the gender codes it anchors.