Genocidal rape as spectacle

Debra Bergoffen

pp. 379-394

in: Jung, Lester Embree (eds), Political phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

Drawing on the phenomenology of the ambiguous body, Simone de Beauvoir's categories of the subject, the other and the inessential other, and Jean Baudrillard's discussions of scandals and simulacrums, this analysis of the genocidal rapes in the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgment that condemned them as crimes against humanity, finds that ending this military tactic requires that we expose the injustices of current gendered meanings of vulnerability. It argues that in affirming the dignity of the phenomenological body we discover that human rights claims are best understood as protecting the spaces within which our embodied life with others is lived.

Cited authors

Baudrillard Jean