Friday, January 25, 2013

UNC-Chapel HillInstitute for the Arts & HumanitiesHyde Hall

Dubravka Zarkov (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Lecture has been canceled due to inclement weather

Masculinity, Sexual Violence, and Ethnicity in the 1990s Wars on the Balkan and Beyond

The wars in former Yugoslavia were notorious for the rape of women as one of the major war strategies. It is less known fact that, within the war camps, detained men faced systematic sexual assaults too. Why were the assaults on men invisible? Why the academics and media that wrote extensively about rapes of women did not pay attention to sexual assaults on men? Is this a special, isolated case, or are there other wars and violent conflicts where sexual assaults on men are invisible? And if the violated bodies of men were exposed in other conflicts, what accounts for this exposure? In trying to answer those questions, the lecture explores the nexus of masculinity, heteronormativity and power, in intersections with ethnicity, race, and religion.

Dubravka Zarkov is Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She published The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007) and Gender, Conflict, Development (2008).

 

Co-convener:
the Gender, War and Culture Series
the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill
the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at UNC-Chapel Hill

Co-sponsored by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies