1. Victims and Peacemakers : "Contextualizing Representations -- 2. Wartime : Gender, Nationalism, and Sexualized Violence -- 3. The NGO Boom : Women's Organizing and Foreign Intervention in the Wake of War -- 4. The Nationing of Gender : Nationalism, Reconciliation, Feminisms -- 5. Politics Is a Whore : Women and the Political -- 6. Avoidance and Authenticity : The Public Face of Wartime Rape
Summary
The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. The author shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, this book offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society
