VISIBILITY AND VAULNRABILITY: DECONSTRUCTING 
REPRESENTATIONS OF RAPE IN THE CONTEXT OF 
WAR IN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
 
FRANKIE SILVESTRI 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Department of International Studies 
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon 
in partial fulfillment of the requirements 
for the degree of 
Master of Arts  
March 2017 
 
ii 
 
 
THESIS APPROVAL PAGE 
 
Student: Frankie Silvestri 
 
Title: Visibility and Vulnerability: Deconstructing Representations of Rape in the Context of 
War in Democratic Republic of the Congo 
 
This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the 
Master of Arts degree in the Department of International Studies by: 
 
Yvonne Braun Chairperson 
Kristin Yarris Member 
Gretchen Soderlund Member 
 
and 
 
Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School  
 
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. 
 
Degree awarded March 2017 
  
iii 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
© 2017 Frankie Silvestri 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
iv 
 
THESIS ABSTRACT 
 
Frankie Silvestri 
 
Master of Arts 
 
Department of International Studies 
 
March 2017 
 
Title: Visibility and Vulnerability: Deconstructing Representations of Rape in the Context of 
War in Democratic Republic of the Congo 
 
My work explores protracted conflict in DR Congo representationally, considering ways 
in which conflict is thematized in Western media around sexual violence. I use content and text 
mining to think through the role of framing in media, and conduct discourse analysis tracing how 
rape in the context of war has become instrumentalized by Western media to make sense of and 
justify interventions in the conflict in DR Congo. Specifically I examine forty-two articles 
published in diverse sources containing the phrase "rape capital of the world" to uncover links 
between violence, gender, and power. This thesis is generally situated within a postmodern 
feminist critique of overemphasis on rape and sexual violence as a universal narrative about 
women’s lives.  My policy recommendation is stop implementing laws singling out rape in the 
context of war as a unique assault, because they enforce female vulnerability and injurability by 
representing women as victims/pre-victims of SGBV.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
v 
 
CURRICULUM VITAE 
 
NAME OF AUTHOR:  Frankie Silvestri 
 
 
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: 
 
 University of Oregon, Eugene 
  
 
DEGREES AWARDED: 
 
 Master of Art, International Studies, 2017, University of Oregon 
 Bachelor of Art, Art History, 2009, University of Oregon 
 
 
 
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: 
 
 African Studies 
 Women and Gender Studies 
  
 
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: 
 
Social Service Provision Intern, Society for Women and AIDS in Africa, June-September 
2016 
  
 Social Service Provision Intern, Cape Town Refugee Center, March-June 2014  
 
Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Department of International Studies, University of Oregon,                                     
 2014-2015 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
vi 
 
 
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
I wish to express sincere appreciation to Professors Braun, Yarris, and Soderlund for their 
assistance in the preparation of this manuscript.   
  
vii 
 
 
 
 
 
I would like to dedicate this work to my parents, without whose support none of this would 
be possible. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
viii 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Chapter Page 
 
 
I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................     1 
II. LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................ 12 
 i. Gender & Human Rights .................................................................................... 12 
 ii. Gender & Sexuality ........................................................................................... 19 
      iii. Rape in the Context of War & International Law ............................................ 35 
      iv. The Male Gaze…… .......................................................................................... 51 
       v. Media…………………………………………………………………………  59 
III. WAR IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO .......................... 62 
IV. (RE)PRESENTATIONS OF RAPE IN THE CONTEXT OF WAR IN  
CONGO……………………………………………………………………………..      69 
      i. Introduction .........................................................................................................    69 
      ii. Thematic Analysis…………………………………………………………....      78 
            a. Performativity…………………………………………………………….      78 
            b. Single-Story………………………………………………………………      80 
            c. Instrumentality……………………………………………………………      85 
            d. Lootrapeandpillage……………………………………………………….      88 
            e. Coming to Voice…………………………………………………………       90 
      iii. Narratives & Counter-Narratives……………………………………………      92 
V. CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………………       99 
APPENDIX ..................................................................................................................  113 
REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................  116 
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LIST OF FIGURES 
 
Figure Page 
 
 
1. Examples of Performativity in media data sample ................................................ 79 
 
2. Examples of the Single-Story in media data sample ............................................. 82 
 
3. Examples of the Single-Story in media data sample cont...................................... 83 
4. Examples of Instrumentality in media data set ...................................................... 86 
5. Examples of Lootrapeandpillage in media data set ...............................................    89 
6. Examples of Coming to Voice in media data set ................................................... 9 
1 
 
CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 
“The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent 
existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language” ~Cassirer 
Forward: 
As a woman I feel an interest and stake in how my gender is being represented.  As a 
white, western woman trying to discuss the problems of speaking for “others” in awareness 
raising representations I could not, in good conscience, ignore the obvious contradiction of 
writing a paper about Congolese women that repeated the object of my critique.  Beyond these, 
perhaps obvious, pitfalls as an academic, I daily encounter and participate in conversations about 
well-intentioned scholars and researchers who go into the field with the aim of better 
understanding and improving upon the lives of individuals in the Global South, and end up 
essentializing, infantilizing and disempowering people as knowers and experts in their own lives.  
This work is a reflection of my desire to reconcile my interest in the lives of Congolese women 
without engaging in their silencing.  I hope to do this through an investigation that begins with 
my subject position to elucidate how “othering” narratives are created and inscribe meaning in 
the West, and the effects this has on policy implemented in DR Congo.  In addition, I want to 
continue a conversation about the social construction of gender and the spaces proscribed for 
women within this narrative that are limited and anti-agential.  It is certainly a partial and 
imperfect attempt.  I hope my work contributes to elaborating these tensions and demonstrates a 
willingness to engage a more nuanced understanding of the stories, like gender, we tell 
ourselves.  Gender is not neutral, but does work that impacts self-perception, our ability to fully 
perceive “others”, and becomes economic, political, and social policy that moves through the 
social imaginary shaping material reality. 
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Currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo is struggling to overcome a history of 
violence and wars that have claimed the lives of an estimated 6 million people.  The 1994 
genocide in Rwanda was the catalyst for what is often referred to as Africa’s Great War.  One of 
the tactics employed by soldiers and rebel groups on all sides of the conflict was systematic rape.  
After the second Congo war ended the conflict did not, and increasingly civilians in addition to 
remaining armed groups continued committing rape leading the DRC to be given the macabre 
distinctions “rape capital of the world” and “the worst place on Earth to be a woman” most 
notably by Margot Wallstrom, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in 
Conflict.  Widespread and ongoing use of sexual violence and rape in the DR Congo was 
instrumental in the United Nations (UN) declaring rape a weapon of war in 2008.  
In my work I explore protracted conflict in the Congo “representationally” by considering 
ways in which conflict is thematized in Western media in relationship to sexual violence, 
specifically the rape of Congolese women.  By thematized I mean-taking a subject, in this 
instance rape in the context of war, and presenting it as a salient framework for understanding a 
topic.  In order to do this I would like to trace the deployment of the phrases: “the rape capital of 
the world” and “the worst place on Earth to be a woman” in order to demonstrate these are not 
benign phrases, and ask what work is being done when we tell this “single story” about 
Congolese women (Adichie, 2012). 
To be clear, it is in no way my intent to minimize or undermine the very real experiences 
of rape in the DRC, “To challenge how we discuss violence, it seems, or to question the 
analytically undisciplined proliferation of a rhetoric of violence has become tantamount to 
doubting a victim’s integrity, experience, or pain” (Haag, 26, 1996).  My point of intervention is 
to think through the role of framing in media, and to conduct a discourse analysis tracing how 
3 
 
rape in the context of war has become instrumentalized by Western media to make sense of and 
justify interventions in the conflict in DR Congo. When I say instrumentalized I am drawing on 
the work of Adam Branch.  Branch defines instrumentalization as rendering a topic, like rape in 
the context of war, or in his work child soldiering, into an instrument for pursuing an aim or 
policy.  This thesis attempts to reconcile discourse and policy; two deeply interconnected ways 
of knowing.  
The central theme of my work is female agency.  This paper is generally situated within a 
postmodern feminist critique of the overemphasis on rape and sexual violence as a universal 
narrative about women’s lives.  It is my intention to unpack how we, in the West, make sense of 
violence, and to uncover the links between violence, gender, and power.  I will explore themes of 
mobility and bodily integrity as well as the parallel constructions of gender and sexuality as 
regulatory.  Further, I will complicate legal definitions and popular understandings of rape as a 
sex crime distinct from other forms of assault.  I will ask how Western media, informed by these 
links, constructs narratives about the Congo that rely on the thematization of rape in the context 
of war to render intelligible “the other”.  Lastly, I question the implications these powerful 
narratives have in shaping foreign policy at the level of NGOs and the state.  
The other concept central to my project is the gendering of violence, explicitly the 
simultaneous privileging of violence and masculinity and the equation of femininity with 
vulnerability.  Thinking through the conversion of rape as a weapon of war into an instrumental 
narrative (Branch, Foucault, Brownmiller, Marcus) with reliance on militarized masculinity 
(Enloe) allows me to explore how violence becomes gendered.  It also allows me to problematize 
considering sexual assault as a category apart from other forms of assault.  Drawing on the work 
of Sharron Marcus I will suggest the legibility of sexual assault is derived from preauthorized 
4 
 
rape scripts that are culturally informed and legitimated, and unpack why women are effective 
targets for violence directed at states.  Media is the conduit for our knowledge of the Congo war 
and it is paramount to understand how stories become assimilated into the social imaginary by 
analyzing content and cultural context, “The imaginary is the net which binds bodily awareness 
and social meaning” (Mann, 100, 2014).  How are stories told?  Are there themes across 
reporting on the DR Congo?  Do these themes employ gender as a justification for violence?   
 At the theoretical level I think through the production of racialized and gendered bodies, 
and everyday knowledge and construction of the “other”.  Furthermore, the ways in which media 
reify and exploit stereotypes for intelligibility, in this instance that of the rape-able woman, and 
Africans as brutish, violent, and unknowable; although ironically seemingly known through their 
hyper-visibility and accessibility in media, the discussion of which I will return to in greater 
depth. Additionally, there is a problematic equation between masculinity and violence, and 
femininity and victimization that needs unpacking.  As Cynthia Enloe posits the danger is that, 
“mere maleness will be accepted as sufficient cause for wartime rape” (Enloe, 134).  Who or 
what is being left out when we tell the story this way?  Based upon this analysis I problematize 
the way policy is written that uncritically reproduces these constructions.  My claim is policy and 
media in the United States are mutually generative and reinforcing of discursive frames that do 
not accurately reflect the lived experience of Congolese men and women, but merely a tokenized 
snapshot turned information currency that plays on culturally authorized myths of gender and 
race, i.e. female inviolability.    
I am going to borrow from and expand upon Edward Said’s seminal text Orientalism as a 
way of unpacking and exploring the process of gendered “othering” happening in awareness 
raising representations of rape in the context of war.  Said describes orientalism as, “a style of 
5 
 
thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction…” (Said, 2, 1979).  In other 
words it is both a theory of knowledge and a way of knowing about the world.  Orientalism is the 
domestication of the other, the rendering intelligible of the other, and the possessing of the other 
as a form of knowledge produced by and for the West, “a distribution of a geopolitical awareness 
into aesthetic…an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction…but also of a whole 
series of interests…it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand…it is, 
above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political 
power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of 
power…power political…power intellectual…power cultural…power moral…” (ibid, 12).  
There is no such thing as the Orient; it exists as an exercise of power-over, and an affirmation of 
Western culture.  Gender functions the same way. 
Gender is a social construct to legitimize operations of power linked to biological sexual 
distinctions the way Orientalism exploits geography.  Gender relies on binary thinking taking the 
form of masculine and feminine just like the opposition of the Orient and the Occident, the Core 
and the Periphery, or us and them.  Colonialism actively under-developed the so-called Orient 
and utilized its underdevelopment to legitimate further interventions and superiority.  Gender 
colonizes the mind creating ideological and material conditions whereby women have spatial, 
temporal, monetary, legal, cultural, and political constraints put on their existence that become 
self-fulfilling prophecies in patriarchal society.  It is important to situate and link gender with 
parallel forms of domination.  It is even more important to link gender with orientalism in the 
context of awareness raising representations of raped Congolese women, because our 
understanding of rape in the context of war is predicated upon western conceptualizations of 
gender and race as well as a desire to dislocate our own capacity for barbarity and sexualized 
6 
 
aggression by constructing a predatory and savage other.  Because this boogeyman lives in a 
faraway land, look different, and has been historically registered as unintelligible to our way of 
life his capacity for violence and her capacity for injurability must not only exceed our own, but 
require our intervention to disable.  Yet it contradicts our interests to “save”, because then the 
gaze would be available to direct back onto ourselves.  All the better to regulate, manage, and 
maintain the suffering of others and our moral outrage to prevent such introspection.    
In her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, Chimamanda Adichie tells us that 
stories are dependent upon power.  Not just the power to write and tell the story of another, but 
to make it the definitive narrative of that person or place.  Historically, the single story told about 
Africa is one of beautiful landscapes, says Adichie, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible 
people who are unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved.  In contrast, because of 
America’s cultural and economic power, there are many, poly-vocal stories told about it, “The 
western default position becomes one of feeling sorry for Africans even before one has met one” 
(Adichie, 2012).  Adichie believes, and this paper will echo, people are vulnerable and 
impressionable in the face of stories.  Therefore this tradition of speaking about and for Africa as 
a place of difference and darkness leaves no possibility of feelings more complex than pity.  If all 
one hears about Africa is the people are poor, poverty becomes the single story of them.  I am 
suggesting, if all one hears about Congolese women is that they are raped or living precarious 
lives as rape-able, victim becomes the single story told about them.  To tell as single story is to 
show people as one thing, as only one thing over and over again until that is all they become 
(Adichie).  I would like to unpack these dynamics in media coverage of rape in the context of 
war in the Congo. 
7 
 
    In an op-ed letter published in the New York Times responding to Helen Cooper's 
editorial, "Waiting for Their Moment in the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman", Jana Frazier 
McLaughlin expresses the single story understood by Americans about Africa and African 
women. According to McLaughlin, her knowledge of Africa is based solely on new stories. In 
spite of her limited interaction with Africa, and despite the subject being her feelings, she felt 
confident enough titling her piece "The Women of Africa.”  Cooper's editorial does not represent 
all African women though she calls Africa, "the worst place there is to be a woman" (Cooper, 
2005).  Cooper specifically references Monrovia, Liberia, her home, and Bukavu, Congo, as well 
as a brief nod to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana. For McLaughlin, Cooper's story represents the 
whole African experience, "the horror and the poverty and the injustice" (McLaughlin, 2005). 
There is a lack of specificity in McLaughlin's description, referring to "these places", "that 
continent", and "Africa" as if the story were about some indeterminate, but unified land.  In 
conclusion McLaughlin writes, "If only every American had the chance to walk through the 
villages of Africa, we might not be able to so easily ignore the suffering of that continent, and 
our own lives here at home might take on a deeper, richer meaning" (ibid).  Africa is not just 
villages and quaintly suffering natives. 
Helen Cooper describes the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf to the presidency in Liberia 
amid her recollections of huts, women carrying water on their heads, war ravaged buildings, 
naked children, and exotic landscapes.  According to the African Development Bank, as of 2010 
36% of Africans live in cities, and that number is expected to increase to 50% by 2030 (African 
Development Bank, 2012).  McLaughlin writes remorsefully of her, "superficial life here in 
America, " and suggests awareness of African women's suffering will infuse life with 
meaning.  (How can strangers you have never met on a continent you have never been be 
8 
 
responsible for your humanity?)  It is their "otherness" that lends itself to feelings of gratitude for 
contentment and satisfaction where they are portrayed to have none.  Aspects of this story offer a 
limited glimpse of life in parts of Africa, but walking long distances to gather water no more 
defines the lived experience of African women than grocery shopping does women in the United 
States.  McLaughlin pens her gratitude for exposure to "the humble dignity" of African 
women.  The word humble means to have a lowered estimation of oneself, and its synonyms 
include: undistinguished and submissive.  Dignity connotes just the opposite, self-respect and 
worth. I cannot imagine a more underhanded compliment.  I do not believe it was her intent to 
undermine or insult African women, but I do believe her frame of reference does not permit 
more than pity and amazement.   
Awareness raising representations, while aiming to do no harm, commit a different kind 
of injury. What does it mean to be both hyper-visible and invisible at the same time? In Western 
media “the raped woman”, as a trope, is on constant display. However, the actual women remain 
anonymous, and actively silenced beyond the fact of their violation. No details are offered as to 
the substance of their character or daily lives.  They go unnamed; deprived of even an alias while 
someone else authors and authorizes their story. The raped woman becomes a character, a 
statistic, reduced to one impersonal fact that comes to stand for her being in the world, and is 
extended to represent all life in the Congo.  Yet this fact could not be more personal, and it is its 
origin in lived experience/living bodies that first imbues the story with power. Rape violates a 
person on multiple levels; from bodily integrity to mental and emotional wellbeing. In this way 
the erasure of individual personhood ignorantly works in tandem with the assault. Reporting on 
rape in the context of war in the Congo becomes predicated on the false consciousness that 
women as a category are doubly available for use.  First, defined as alternately pre-rape or rape 
9 
 
victims.  Second, installable as prop characters in a pre-scripted story, which has been fabricated 
by Western media to elicit a response and reinforce culturally salient beliefs about femininity, 
masculinity and race.  
For Westerners “the rape capital of the world” and “the worst place on Earth to be a 
woman” become the definitive narrative about the DRC.  Unfortunately, this story is abstracted 
to the point of meaninglessness.  Stories of “the raped Congolese woman” are ubiquitous, but 
Congolese women are absent.  Recuperating living bodies in this tenuous discursive space is 
challenging, and will require cooperation among seemingly divergent feminisms.  There is a, 
“current shorthand that views poststructuralist feminism as a “forgetting” of the body and 
essentialist feminism as an imprisonment within it” (Haag, 27-28, 1996).  A toolbox cannot be 
complete when it is filled with only one tool, and therefore I will be approaching rape and sex 
difference from multiple theoretical viewpoints.  My insistence on a nuanced understanding of 
sexual violence would not be possible with obedience to only one feminism or disciplinary lens 
nor do I feel pledging such allegiance is productive in a time where acknowledging multiple 
ways of knowing and encouraging poly-vocality is championed.  
What are salient Western cultural beliefs about femininity, masculinity, and race?  
Violence is both gendered and racialized.  Men are equated with perpetrator and women with 
victim of violence.  This equation functions in the cultural imaginary as a continuation of historic 
policing of gender boundaries.  Cultural beliefs are constituted in the form of discourse, “the 
discourse that women have developed about their lived reality…includes concepts such as rape, 
sexual harassment, and battery…” (Hekman, 1997, 352).   
Women, until recently, were relegated to the domestic sphere.  Here attributes deemed 
female, such as mothering, caregiving, and physical weakness, are proscribed a spatial 
10 
 
dimension.  Beyond the boundaries of the home, everywhere else, is masculine space where 
women are vulnerable.  Conversely, men are stripped of the capacity to nurture, and those that 
show signs of caring are branded weak and ineffectual, effeminate.  Male power is equated with 
physical strength, sexual prowess, and mental acumen.  Women’s labor is to reproduce the 
home; tasks include the four C’s cooking, cleaning, childcare, and compliance.  Men’s labor is to 
reproduce the world.  Of course I am using broad brushstrokes to paint a portrait of the American 
cultural imaginary.  Women have agency and have always negotiated normative claims to their 
being in varied and nuanced ways.  That does not delegitimize the pervasiveness and weight of 
the cultural myths surrounding gender. 
In order to police these norms and demonstrate their strength, violence is employed by 
men as a tool of power.  In this way both violence and masculinity are simultaneously privileged 
in society (Enloe).  When men utilize violence to enforce their power normative boundaries are 
also being protected and exploited.  Understanding of women as mothers extends to thinking of 
women as mothers of the nation.  Not only do they bear future generations of men, but women 
are the bearers of culture and tradition.  Women make homes for men and preserve their culture 
making them a source of value and security, and also effective targets for violence directed at the 
state, and men.    
In the work that follows I am going to outline recent research about rape as a weapon of 
war and establish the reasons women are believed to become targets for SGBV.  Then I am going 
to disrupt the conventional wisdom by suggesting another way in which women are vulnerable.  
In the process of unfolding a truth about “others” what I disclosed was a truth about myself, and 
so you will see and hear me throughout.  Calling Congo “the rape capital of the world” and “the 
worst place on Earth to be a woman” conceals the dynamism of the human condition by showing 
11 
 
a place and a people as only one thing, and offers a mirror through which we can see more about 
ourselves. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER II 
 LITERATURE REVIEW 
“Each thing or person photographed becomes – a photograph; and becomes, therefore, morally 
equivalent to any other of his photographs.” ~Sontag 
(Each woman raped becomes -- a rape victim; and becomes, therefore, morally equivalent to any 
other victim.) 
i. Gender & Human Rights 
Both gender and human rights are terms that have ontological weight (Mann, 2014).  
They structure the ways in which human beings understand and experience being in the world.  
In order for me to look at the work being done representationally by the media, I/NGO’s, 
governments, and civil society utilizing rape in the context of war as a lens to frame the Congo 
wars, I must first understand the work being done by gender and human rights to frame 
embodied experience.  That we recognize gender is a social construct does not negate its role in 
ordering and thinking about our lives.  While my agenda is in part to challenge gendered 
thinking, it is more specifically to investigate how power is accessed differentially based on 
gender identification, and the links between violence, sexuality, and gender.  I am not contesting 
the prevalence or experiences of rape in DR Congo.  My inquiry is predicated on the belief that 
discourse is not neutral, “it defines and produces the objects of knowledge” (Dragotesc, 128, 
2011).  To conduct a patterned analysis of the representation of women I think through and 
elaborate on the theoretical work of Adam Branch, Cynthia Enloe, and Bonnie Mann.  Branch’s 
work on human rights intervention allows me to problematize the construction of gendered and 
racialized bodies, and demonstrate the continuity between theory and lived experience.  Enloe 
13 
 
and Mann will elucidate the connections between masculinity and violence and violence and 
power.  
Branch is deeply concerned with the question of intervention, which he argues is an 
umbrella term for the global administrative dimension of power relations, by which he means the 
process of putting the theory of human rights into action through bureaucracy by states, NGO’s, 
and civil society.  Rescue and Peace are the two frames for understanding instrumentalization of 
human rights discourse to justify physical intervention.  Types of intervention include: 
humanitarian, peacebuilding, ethnojustice, and justice via militarization.  Branch asserts, “The 
invocation of human rights allows the mystification” of power structures (Branch, 37, 2011).  
Furthermore, “human rights interventions can become the building blocks of lasting 
administrative structures intended to normalize states, economies, cultures, societies, and 
individuals in line with given models” (ibid, 36).  These models become internalized and, 
“people in the South are no longer ordered what to do—they are now expected to do it willingly 
themselves” (Branch, 38, 2011).   
Rescue must be understood in the context of the end of the Cold War, post-colonial shift 
to independent African states, and the rise of a new world order that included a proliferation, 
privileging, and professionalization of human rights activists working internationally without 
regard for state sovereignty.  In Africa this project was taken up to “rescue” Africans from 
predatory states (ibid).  Peace includes rescue, but becomes a totalizing intervention agenda that 
revalues the African state to fulfill and protect human rights, “the total intervention agenda 
declares Africa to be caught in a multi-dimensional “trap” of social, political, economic, cultural, 
psychological, and legal crises that fuels and is fueled by violent conflict” (Branch, 28, 2011).  
Former UN Secretary General Koffi Annan articulated this platform best in a speech given to the 
14 
 
General Assembly in 1996 claiming, “Sovereignty is responsibility.”  In other words, 
sovereignty does not mean protection from outside interference in a state’s political affairs, 
rather sovereignty means the duty of the state to protect the human rights, a universal term, of its 
people, and if it fails to do so it is abdicating its responsible sovereignty, and may be subject to 
intervention (UN R2P Doctrine).  This affirms the capability of the African state by making it the 
locus of power, while simultaneously undermining its authority by claiming human rights 
failures are a result of predatory African governance, ignorant of historical conditions that would 
implicate the West in African conflict as well as cultural factors, making African states 
constantly open to paternalistic managing via humanitarianism (Branch, 2011).   
Human rights exceed the purview of the political sphere, and open up the economic, 
social, and cultural areas to reform and reconstruction under this broad new intervention logic.  
Branch’s thesis is the new international human rights regime works to displace human rights 
through interventions in the name of human rights.  What may also be termed neocolonialism is 
removed from the realm of contestation, because of the moral authority of human rights.  It is a 
perversion of language envisioned to protect individuals from undue harm re-framed within 
Mutua’s “savage-victim-savior” structure where, “the savage is the African violator of human 
rights…the victim is individualized but anonymous, defined in terms of a universally applicable 
set of basic rights…this depoliticized victim image, in need of outside intervention for its 
redemption…the savior is the self-proclaimed enforcer of global law” (ibid, 182).   
How is human rights discourse being deployed as a total intervention agenda by the West 
in Africa?  The problem and the solution are predetermined previous to intervention.  The goal is 
to get individuals and states to self-regulate into these predetermined categories available for 
intervening.  Foucault calls this the creation of docile bodies.  People self-regulate into 
15 
 
prescribed roles such as victim, soldier, and savior, which have been defined and “solved”, 
“Human rights are incorporated into a program of self-management, in which foreign 
intervention provides the tools with which the community is supposed to pacify itself” (ibid, 
131).  Conflict is seen as either the preeminent historical condition of Africa, the current plague 
of Africans, or the inevitable creation of a geography of violence where, “intervention becomes 
highly self-referential and self-justifying” (Branch, 30, 2011).   
This parallels the work done by the invocation of “rape in the context of war” in 
discourse about the Congo wars in that there are implicit assumptions about who is the victim, 
who is the perpetrator, what the response should be, and how power is operating.  People come 
to internalize these narratives, and instrumentally categorize Congolese women as either pre-
victims or victims of rape.  In the media the individualized but anonymous victim is Woman, and 
the frame for understanding her violability is universal human rights.  The recognition of rape as 
a weapon of war is intended to be an emancipatory project for women, but once it becomes 
institutionalized it falls into a total intervention agenda, which, “renders it not emancipatory but 
disciplinary and leads it to steer agency into externally provided models that may not match what 
those subject to intervention genuinely desire or need” (ibid).  One of those external frameworks 
is gender.    
Gender is not only one of the first things we learn about one another, but it is one of the 
first things we learn about ourselves.  Gender is medicalized from birth.  Before babies leave the 
womb they are given a gender.  Gender is culturally weighty.  It confers and strips status, and 
links to ideas about the types of labor one can perform.  Gender can be the basis of a contract in 
the form of marriage.  Gender is economic.  According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015), 
women earn 78 cents to every dollar a man makes for equal work.  The socially constructed 
16 
 
attributes of gender, known as masculinity and femininity, are overwhelmingly culturally 
authorized, and therefore shape experience, expression, and identity. 
Masculinity comes with a set of virtues that are culturally salient that inextricably link 
maleness with power, strength, success, and invulnerability.  War is the vehicle for performing 
and protecting these American virtues.  For men militarization confers status and citizenship.  
Sovereign masculinity has aesthetic, economic, political, social, cultural, linguistic, and 
psychological dimensions (Mann, 2014).  Mann invokes “gender” as a justificatory project the 
way Branch articulates human rights as a mobilizing narrative, “…gender is a structure of the 
social imaginary that binds us together in a community with others.  It is at the same time a 
structure of and operation of language that shapes how we think and what we can think.  And it 
is a brute material operation of power, of bodies on bodies, a structural impetus of funding 
decisions, institutional formation, government deliberations and military decisions” (ibid, 8).  By 
problematizing gender as a social construct used to justify torture, Mann continues to elucidate 
the work gender does in society.   
Essential to Mann’s thinking is her claim gender has ontological weight, because it 
anchors our existence in the world.  Both biologically and physiologically, gender is an 
embodied mode of interacting with the world, but that is just one of its many facets; it also 
occupies both the linguistic and imaginary domain (Mann, 2014).  How does gender develop 
ontological weight?  Mann asserts it becomes embodied through the apparatus of war, “linking 
the imaginary domain to the material conditions of existence” (ibid, 176).  The truth claim Mann 
presents is sovereign masculinity needs violence for its very existence.  War is a way to wed 
violence and control, and gender is the infrastructure facilitating the marriage of the two.   
17 
 
Why does gender function so effectively in this role?  Mann argues gender is 
fundamental to our sense of self and being in the world (Mann, 2014).  If we accept this as true 
then we must also reflexively ask: what does violence do for gender?  It locates gender in the 
body, by creating a spectacle of power relations that are otherwise ephemeral and disembodied 
(ibid).  Violence takes ideology and corporeally animates it, and our fleshy integument becomes 
its greatest ally and justification, “Gender is justificatory in the sense that my living of it, and 
others recognition of my living of it, is part of what makes my life appear as socially worthy or 
worthless.” (ibid, 175).  To demonstrate how gender confers or strips away power Mann asks us 
to think through the use of torture to break down bodies and selves.  
 In instances of sexual torture one’s own body becomes complicit in the undoing of the 
self.  During the War on Terror, the United States actively invoked gender as a method of torture.  
Male, Muslim prisoners were interrogated by female soldiers.   Female soldiers would invade 
their physical space by straddling the detainees, shoving their breasts into the men’s faces, and 
showing them provocative western media images of women in order to elicit arousal.  Once 
aroused the men were made to dress like women.  This combined state of powerlessness and 
self-betrayal is effective, because it creates an embodied awareness of gender.  It accomplishes 
this by drawing on presumed gender differences to enact domination.  Furthermore, “by 
shattering the manhood of the purported “enemy” it produces the manhood of the nation,” 
(Mann, 198, 2014) by rendering the enemy impotent and powerless American masculinity is 
(re)affirmed as invulnerable and omnipotent.   
Rape in the context of war also violently locates gender in living bodies.  When men are 
raped during war it emasculates them and makes their bodies vulnerable and self-defeating.  
When women are raped during war it is often violence directed at men, but acted out on a 
18 
 
woman’s body.  Soldiers rape to perpetrate genocide, terrorize civilians, because they view 
women as a resource, and to psychologically destroy the enemy by engaging constructs of 
women as the mothers of the nation.  Rape further reminds women of their status as vulnerable.  
It is an action that locates the site of their vulnerability in their body and lack of ability to control 
it.  Likewise male perpetrators are using their body as a locus of power-over their victims that is 
symbolic of social status. 
Sovereign masculinity is only possible if femininity acts as its foil.  Masculinity can only 
claim its ties to state sovereignty if the experience of being a woman is devastating, and comes 
from a disruption in the “I can body” (ibid, 79).  Linguistically, the privileging of masculinity 
can be seen in the use of words like “bitch”, “pussy”, or “fag” to equate weakness with female 
embodiment (Mann, 76, 2014).  Psychologically and socially it is demonstrated in the shame to 
redemption conversion women undergo when they redeem themselves by being able to 
(re)produce male desire and compete for male patronage.  Masculinity becomes co-constituted 
with the vulnerability of femaleness as the denial of male vulnerability, “Frames evoke whole 
networks of meanings, so that contempt for women, the injurability of the female body, its 
penetrability, its shame, and masculine invulnerability and pride are evoked by the same frame.  
Sovereign manhood stakes its reputation on the power of such frames, such it is through almost 
ritualized, repetitious verbal references to the vulnerability and violability of the feminine that a 
sense of sovereign masculinity is secured”  (ibid, 147).       
In Maneuvers Enloe defines militarization as, “a step-by-step process by which a person 
or thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being 
on militaristic ideas…involves cultural as well as institutional, ideological, and economic 
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transformations” (Enloe, 3, 2000).  Furthermore, Enloe offers a salient definition of militarized 
rape that both distinguishes it from other types of rape and problematizes it: 
“First, the male militarized rapist in some way imposes his understandings of “enemy,” 
“soldiering,” “victory,” and “defeat” on both the woman to be raped and on the act of 
sexual assault.  Secondly, consequently, the militarized rape is harder to privatize than 
non-militarized rape is, since it draws so much of its rationale from an imagining of 
societal conflict and/or the functions of a formal institution such as the state’s national 
security or defense apparatus or an insurgency’s military arm.  Third, the woman who has 
endured military rape must devise her responses…not only be weighing her relationships 
to the rapist and to her personal friends and relatives, to the prevailing norms of feminine 
respectability, and perhaps to the criminal justice system, but in addition, she must weigh 
her relationships to collective memory (my emphasis), collective notions of national 
destiny, and the very institutions of organized violence” (ibid, 111). 
Enloe argues rape in the context of war is not just about power, but about patriarchy, and to 
suggest otherwise is to, “risk that mere maleness will be accepted as the sufficient cause for 
wartime rape,” to the exclusion of other structures of power (Enloe, 134, 2000). Sexuality is 
another structure of power used to regulate bodies and to maintain patriarchy.  Along with Mann, 
Enloe is concerned with the link between the military, the state, and patriarchy.  She asks, “…is 
male privilege so tightly woven into any sovereign public authority –a state—that the phrase 
“nonpatriarchal state” should be considered an oxymoron?  There is a package of attributes that –
when they exist simultaneously—distinguishes a state: publicness, authority, exclusiveness, 
sovereignty, and the capacity for coercion” (ibid, 273).  These attributes also describe masculine 
privilege. 
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ii. Gender & Sexuality 
How does the western world perceive and regulate sexuality?  According to Foucault, 
sexual repression is not the absence of sexuality or its silencing and removal from daily life, but 
rather its ubiquity.  This is not to imply that prohibitions on human sexuality have not 
proliferated.  However, Foucault sees power operating at various levels in the process of 
prohibition. There are actors within and without institutions that are ceaselessly talking about 
sex, prescribing its proper exercise, and conducting thorough investigations as to its incarnations.  
Foucault traces the origins of what he terms the “repressive hypothesis” to the Catholic invention 
of confession.   
Confession was designed to illicit people to talk about sex without end as a duty to God.  
While at the same time all forms of sexuality outside of the reproductive function between 
husband and wife were banned, and public discourse about sexuality equally maligned.  
Sexuality was being simultaneously interdicted and made the source of salvation.  As a result a 
“regime of discourses” emerged to control how people could talk about sex creating “not one but 
many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate 
discourses” (Foucault, 27, 1978).  These silences are not a form of censorship, but rather a way 
of obfuscating the new overt sexual preoccupation by making sexuality a secret, in spite of the 
fact that it permeates all facets of life.  
 Further, Foucault questions a Marxian interpretation of sexual repression as a means of 
guaranteeing labor capacity by regulating sexuality to marriage relations.  Instead he argues 
sexuality was first and foremost created by and for the bourgeoisie not the proletariat.  
Regulation of sexuality was extended to the working class only after the bourgeoisie utilized it to 
establish hegemony, “what was formed was a political ordering of life, not through an 
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enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self” (ibid, 123).  Ruling classes began to 
seek an understanding of how the body was a site of control maximization through the extension 
of their lives; what Foucault describes as an intensification of the body.  Marxian analysis of 
sexuality interprets sexuality in a more limited way as a tool of repression. 
As time has passed confessional prohibitions on sex have become part of legal 
frameworks.  This includes the criminalization of sex acts outside marriage and not between a 
man and woman; these include homosexuality, incest, sexuality of the mentally ill (for whom 
supposed sexual perversion could be their illness), and miscegenation.  Foucault asserts the great 
lengths to regulate these supposed aberrant sexualities were a way to bring them under close 
surveillance.  Not render them invisible, but hyper-visible, “forcing them into hiding so as to 
make possible their discovery” (Foucault, 42, 1978).   
Essential to Foucault’s argument is his belief power is operating everywhere. There is a 
“multiplicity of force relations” that make the origins of power diffuse and open to resistance.  
Forms of resistance, like power, are plural and multifaceted.  It is within these many incarnations 
that it is possible to interrogate the way power operates, and the way sexuality is deployed as a 
tool of power, which Foucault terms “instrumentalization.”  Sexuality has instrumentality in four 
main domains: hysterization of women’s bodies, pedagogization of children’s sex, socialization 
of procreative behavior, and psychiatrization.  Surrounding these is the superstructure of law, 
which is how humans make sense of power.   
The new hyper-visible state of sex coincided with the medicalization of sexuality.  The 
medicalization of sexuality was reflexively about visibility.  Where can you locate sexuality on 
the body?  In this search for the location of sexuality on the body, “pleasure spread to the power 
that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered” (ibid, 45).  In less poetic words 
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pleasure became inextricably linked from the search for the location of pleasure, and thus the 
sciences as the purveyors of this pursuit.  In this way the surveillance of sexuality located it as a 
source of power and a target of the operation of power.  Foucault terms this “instrument-effect.” 
Since, in the West, science and truth are often equated, and the medical profession is a 
branch of science, a new vocabulary about human sexuality was created through the diagnoses, 
“in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth” (Foucault, 56, 1978).  This recollects for 
us the importance of confession, because it was employed to elicit “truth” from individuals in the 
same way that science is.  Science and medicine became intensifications of the confessional, 
where every last detail of sexuality was to be made knowable, not just the acts but the desires 
and outcomes, to discover its truth.  In seeking to regulate sexuality sex was deployed as a cause 
of all forms of malady, and constantly in discourse; in the nineteenth century truth and sex 
became inextricably linked.   
First, sex was rejected.  Then we began to legislate it.  Afterward certain forms of 
sexuality were prohibited, and this was swiftly accompanied by a denial or censorship of the 
prohibited sexualities.  Lastly, an attempt was made to regulate sexuality as a form of universal 
obedience.  Because in the West we accept that the law is the best way to exercise power, we 
cannot hope to examine power relations regarding sexuality until we first reject the juridical 
model, “we still have not cut the head off the king” (ibid, 88-89).  Our inability to, “cut the head 
off the king” is one of the ways we internalize power structures and self-regulate.  When 
thinking through the legal recognition and prosecution of rape in the context of war it is 
productive to keep in mind the historical link between sexuality and the law. 
Ann Cahill suggests one way of beginning to unpack this topic in attempting to 
understand and respond to Foucault’s suggestion that rape should not be thought of as a sex 
23 
 
crime, but a violent crime indistinct from any other by examining feminisms and bodily 
inscriptions. Cahill begins by refuting Judith Butler’s reading of Foucault.  Instead she 
understands the body to be part of power structures from the moment of conception, and 
therefore there is no “blank slate” stage. Cahill argues women’s identity is very much constituted 
by a regulation of their sexuality; necessarily involving their ability to navigate and avoid rape.  
Employing Susan Brownmiller, Cahill suggests Foucault’s assertion was not more radical than 
feminist lines of thinking at the time that sought the same objective, albeit for different reasons.  
While Foucault’s objective was to destabilize, “sexuality as a means of social and political 
power” (Cahill, 44, 2000), Brownmiller felt that by eliminating the sexual connotation from the 
crime of rape people would no longer participate in victim blaming.     
 When rape is not wholly taken for granted as a sex crime it can undermine the 
disproportionate way rape intersects with women as victims and men as perpetrators.  Men can 
be raped as well, but statistically it happens overwhelmingly more often to women.  When men 
are raped they are often stigmatized as feminine, with the accompanying attributes of weakness 
and submission further reifying the connection between rape and femininity.  This illustrates the 
important connection between sexuality and bodily integrity.   
How does the threat of rape operate in constructing female bodies?  Being a potential 
victim forecloses spaces in which women can access power. Cahill notes women are uniquely 
vulnerable to rape, because it targets their mobility, and while men may also be raped it does not 
restrict their mobility.  This constant monitoring of oneself creates a pre-victim complex 
according to Iris Marion Young and Sandra Lee Bartky. Women in the West are under constant 
surveillance to maintain narrowly defined standards of beauty, physique, and countenance.  It is 
a woman’s responsibility to control her body, which constructs a narrative which, “does not 
24 
 
locate the dangers presented to her body as originating from outside of her body”, but from 
within (ibid, 53).  It helps me to think of it as analogous to Marxian alienation theory whereby a 
woman is separated from her body, the physical product of her labor, by standards of beauty 
imposed by society as a means of regulating sexuality, which are extracted from her in the form 
of a wage of beauty.  Problematically, in this discourse women are always available for rape.  
Cahill reminds us that women are not passive recipients of these bodily inscriptions.   
Indeed, keeping with Foucault’s understanding of power dynamics, women both shape 
and are shaped by regimes of sexuality; they may resist.  Furthermore, the above argument limits 
the space in which women can operate to the confines of their physical form, because the 
suggestion of entering public spaces means impending violation.  Here Cahill makes an 
intervention in the literature, and points out this violation is always sexual in nature, and 
therefore rape is not the same threat as other forms of bodily harm, because it is synonymous 
with women’s mobility.  Women can also be victims of other physical assaults, just as men can 
also be victims of rape, but rape, according to Cahill, does not dictate a man’s agency and 
mobility.   
Moreover, Cahill believes it is not enough to alter the legal definition of rape to liberate 
women from pre-victimhood.  Additionally, “were rape to be redefined as primarily a crime of 
assault, the sexual behavior and aggression inherent in this particular crime, which is virtually 
always the action of a man, would be accorded no legal relevance” (Cahill, 57, 2000).  I would 
like to push back, and point out that men overwhelmingly commit all violent crimes so there is 
no reason to privilege rape to underscore the link between violence and the construction of 
masculinity.  Instead it only serves to segregate women as victims of a special form of violence 
that remains exclusively in the domain of male privilege without challenging the larger power 
25 
 
dynamics that afford men control over violence as an exercise of their power to begin with.  I 
believe that redefining rape as assault without the sexual connotation allows the possibility to 
reveal previously invisible connections between violence, power, and masculinity.  If we 
continue to define rape as a sex crime we draw attention to women’s common experience as 
victims of rape, but we also perpetuate thinking of women as pre-victims and victims, and 
delimit male rape victim’s ability to seek redress.   
Cahill argues it is necessary, “to punish not only the violence of rape (although that 
element should certainly be recognized as punishable as well) but also its role as an enforcement 
of a set of patriarchal, misogynist values” (ibid, 58).  While as a woman I find it compelling to 
criminalize misogyny I do not believe prosecuting rape uniquely as a sex crime is the best way to 
win that war.  In addition, Cahill asserts, “Foucault’s error lies in his interpretation of rape only 
as something which a man does, and for which a man may be punished” (Cahill, 60, 2000).  
However, Cahill is originating from that same premise, and I think Foucault is trying to subvert 
that assignation.  Lastly Cahill suggests rethinking domestic violence as sexual assault, because 
it can prefigure rape.  In fact the label domestic already relegates it to the sphere of women who 
are prescribed the home as the only space in which they have agency.  Meanwhile public spaces 
have been exclusively the reserve of men.  How is it empowering women to further legitimize 
traditional gender roles that have been the source of disempowerment by expanding the 
definition of all types of assault directed towards women by men as sex crimes?  We need to 
contest the narratives of woman as pre-victim/victim not expand their institutionalization.  
Cahill’s work unintentionally reifies the uncritical equation between woman-ness and 
victimization that Sharon Marcus’ concept of a rape script can further help uncover.       
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A rape script is a blueprint for making sense of rape, “a scripted interaction which takes 
place in language and can be understood in terms of conventional masculinity and 
femininity…inscribed before an individual instance of rape” (Marcus, 390, 2002).  According to 
Sharon Marcus it outlines the available victim type, perpetrator, and way of describing the act.  
Rape narratives falling outside the purview of the socially accepted script are rejected by society 
as lacking preordained authenticity.  In order for the rape script to do work it must be understood 
as, “a linguistic fact: to ask how the violence of rape is enabled by narratives, complexes and 
institutions which derive their strength, not from outright, immutable, unbeatable force but rather 
from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts” (ibid, 388-389).  The 
archetypal victim is a woman, preferably white.  The antagonist is male, preferably non-white.  
Our white, female protagonist should not be promiscuous, intoxicated, or wearing anything short 
of a habit.  Any deviation from these characteristics invites questioning the morality of the now 
alleged survivor; who may have been asking for it or should have known better or is suffering 
from a case of morning after regret, “Rapists do not prevail simply because as men they are 
really, biologically, and unavoidably stronger than women.  A rapist follows a social script and 
enacts conventional, gendered structures of feeling and action which seek to draw the rape target 
into a dialogue which is skewed against her” (Marcus, 390, 2002).   
More importantly adhering to this script makes women always potential victims of rape, 
“rape scripts gender…we view rape not as the invasion of female inner space, but as the forced 
creation of female sexuality as a violated inner space.  The horror of rape is not that it steals 
something from us but that it makes us into things to be taken” (ibid, 399).  For rape to be 
culturally and socially authenticated it must violate all of societies taboos regulating race, class, 
gender, and sexuality.  Rape scripts as a gendered grammar of violence can be seen to operate 
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within three categories of violence: legitimate violence between, illegitimate violence between, 
and legitimate violence against (Marcus, 392, 2002).  Legitimate violence between implies the 
participants are seen as social equals.  Illegitimate violence between challenges social 
inequalities and legitimate violence against maintains the status quo.  Marcus gives the example 
of a man of color assaulting a white person as illegitimate, lynching as legitimate violence 
against, and man on man combat as legitimate violence between.  Within these frameworks 
violence is both racialized and gendered.  
Men participate in subject to subject violence and women in sexual violence (ibid, 396). 
This distinction trades on the logic, “the gendered grammar of violence predicates men as the 
objects of violence and the operators of its tools, and predicates women as the objects of violence 
and the subjects of fear” (Marcus, 393, 2002).  In other words, female subjectivity is constituted 
through fear as a passive recipient of violence.  Marcus suggests women are incapable of 
defending themselves, because women have internalized this gendered language that prevents 
them from using violence.  While I take issue with this I agree with her adjacent claim that, 
“Feminine fear also seems to entail a complete identification of a vulnerable, sexualized body 
with the self” (ibid, 395).  Drawing on Brownmiller’s instrumental theory of rape, Marcus 
explains how the male body is perceived as a tool; in the case of rape in the form of a phallus.  
Meanwhile women’s bodies are non-instrumentalized as having no viable parts for weaponizing 
in self-defense.  In fact, were a woman to fight back she would effectively be transcending the 
rape script, because she would no longer perform the role of a, “grammatically correct feminine 
subject” (ibid, 396).  The rape script has legal implications as well as constituting subjectivity, 
“Legislation backs up the objectifying violence of the rape script by not defining rape as an 
assault, which would fall under the rubric of subject-subject violence against persons, but as a 
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sexual offense” (Marcus, 397, 2002).  This is a question that reemerges throughout the literature 
and one I will revisit in my findings.   
While some have been critical of Marcus for minimalizing survivor experiences, I find 
her linguistic framework useful for elucidating the type of representational work being done by 
media coverage of rape in the context of war in the DR Congo.  I concur with Marcus that, 
“Rape exists because of experience and deployment of our bodies is the effect of interpretations, 
representations, and fantasies” (ibid, 400).  Marcus advocates utilizing the rape script as a 
conceptual tool for demystifying these narratives that authorize rape so that we may trespass 
them, and, “represent ourselves in militant new ways” (Marcus, 2002).  At a macro-structural 
level I would like to combine her rape script with mediatization to illuminate patterned forms of 
representational female vulnerability. 
Masculinity and femininity work together to structure our understanding of the world, 
and, while my discussion is focused on women’s experience and representation, men and 
masculinity are never outside view.  When trying to make sense of rape in the context of war 
there are two ways of understanding the responsibility of men.  First, deciding if male 
perpetrators take responsibility as a group or individuals.  Second, if systems of gender are 
responsible for saddling men with violence as their access to power then to what degree can we 
hold men responsible as agents of sexual violence?  Paul Kirby helps to make sense of what he 
terms this ‘paradox of responsibility’ by categorizing four types of responsibility: moral, legal, 
causal, and political (Kirby, 96, 2014).  Being clear about what forms responsibility can take 
makes Kirby able to better think about and address how responsibility can be assumed and the 
various implications for men and rape in the context of war.  In the end he concludes, “excessive 
focus on the collective character of patriarchy,” championed by postmodern feminism treats all 
29 
 
men as a coherent class ignorant of context, and may work against seeking justice for individual 
crimes (ibid, 109).  However, “directing moral condemnation primarily at individual actors 
neglects the inescapably social contexts in which they act,” making us unable to address 
structural factors that enable rape (Kirby, 2014).     
 Moral responsibility is the ‘vocabulary’ of crime and punishment and is the conversation 
had to assign blame (ibid, 96).  Legal responsibility involves moral responsibility, but is codified 
and systematic through rule of law (Kirby, 2014).  Causal responsibility maps events as they 
unfolded, and is best understood as an explanatory mechanism for responsibility (ibid).  Political 
responsibility recognizes individuals working as agents of a state (ibid).  Within these categories 
there are also three types of responsibilities one can take: command, omission, and facilitation; 
or as I think of them: leaders, bystanders, and beneficiaries (Kirby, 97, 2014).  As Kirby unpacks 
these categories and responsible-types he comes up against the agency/structure problem 
contained in the opening questions.  Either patriarchy is responsible or men are.  He cites Susan 
Brownmiller and Catherine MacKinnon as examples where there is, “an oscillation between the 
ubiquitous and the singular, the general and the specific, and the normal and the pathological” 
(ibid, 107).  Patriarchy is a system in place that allows men access to privilege through violence, 
and sustains that power-over with violence directed against women, AND that fact does not 
annul individual accountability for profiteering from that system.   
 Eileen Zurbriggen helps us understand how men are socialized through violence and 
sexuality.  Zurbriggen posits Western masculinity relies on sexuality as, “a primary means of 
proving one’s masculinity” (Zurbriggen, 540, 2010).  As a result there is a correlation between 
rape and war in cultures where men are socialized to be violent across domains (ibid, 538).  
30 
 
Zurbriggen echoes the findings of Mann previously discussed and is productive for solidifying 
how masculinity and violence are co-constituted and actualized. 
Using J.M. O’Neil’s model she links six consequences of masculine socialization with 
rape and militarization (Zurbriggen, 2010).  First is “Feminine Avoidance” where women are 
devalued and men must distance themselves as much as possible from feminine attributes to 
devaluation (ibid).  Second is “Status and Achievement” where women are objectified and 
dehumanized making their inferior treatment justified (Zurbriggen, 2010).  Third is “Toughness 
and Aggression” that praises those two essential male attributes, and encourages violence as a 
way of acting them out (ibid, 541).  The fourth consequence is “Restricted Emotionality” 
whereby anger becomes the only socially acceptable emotional expression for men (Zurbriggen, 
2010).  Six is “Nonrelational Sexuality” exemplified with the character of Don Juan, a man who 
has casual sex with careless abandon (ibid, 542).  Lastly is “Dominance/Power/Control” where 
relationships are based on manipulation to access privilege (ibid).  (As I was reading this list it 
reminded me of Stanton’s “Eight Stages of Genocide”.)     
 Masculine socialization and its consequences reinforce war. Under wartime conditions 
and military training these same six categories link masculinity with state power and 
militarization.  “Status and achievement” is obtained by obedience to the chain of command 
(ibid).  In order to kill the target must be dehumanized and objectified, which often means 
feminization (Zurbriggen, 543, 2010).  Physicality and aggression are necessary characteristics 
of soldiers, “traditional masculine socialization teaches men that violence is manly, and that 
walking away from violence…marks a man as a cowardly “sissy.” Men who have internalized 
this hypermasculine, macho script believe that violence is not just acceptable, but is actually 
preferable” (ibid).  Emotionality, beyond aggression, is counterproductive to inflicting harm, and 
31 
 
so military training like masculine socialization denaturalizes empathy (ibid).  Lastly, war and 
masculinity are both acts of power (ibid, 544).     
 What does masculine socialization look like in the context of DR Congo?  The authors of 
the study of men and women in North Kivu conducted by Desiree Lwambo and published by 
HEAL Africa there exists a “masculinity gap” between idealized norms of masculinity and 
men’s actual agency (Lwambo, 7, 2011).  The study is right and careful to point out that 
masculinity in Congo is not homogenous, but these were the overwhelming trends.  Congolese 
masculinity is primarily monetized.  Male and female participants identified being stable 
providers, bread winners, and earning good money as the hallmarks of being a “real man” (ibid).  
When men cannot meet the needs of their family and community monetarily they are feminized, 
and receive less access to “hegemonic dividends”.  Hegemonic dividends are privileges accrued 
from patriarchal power, which for men may consist of more leisure time and money, and for 
women may be male patronage (Lwambo, 8, 2011).  As a result of the protracted conflict, 
corruption, impunity, and internal displacement men are unable to meet the cultural requirements 
of masculinity leading to feelings of shame and further exacerbating violent tendencies toward 
women. 
 Men in the study self-identified positive attributes of masculinity related to being able to 
provide for one’s family and, “behave in non-violent ways towards household and community 
members,” but when circumstances outside men’s control make them incapable of meeting the 
needs of the community, family, and hegemonic masculinity violence seems to be an all too 
available answer (ibid, 12).  Violence becomes a vehicle for the display of power and control, 
particularly sexual violence which indicates virility where it may be questioned when households 
fall on hard times.  This is fueled in part by women’s growing independence and the expectations 
32 
 
they “co-create” about masculine ideals (Lwambo, 2011).  Female respondents also said men 
should be the providers.  An example of men’s new precariousness can be seen with the 
traditional occupation of farming.  Farming has lost its prestige, because displacement from 
ongoing conflict makes farming unsustainable, and youth feel that farming does not offer the 
large monetary rewards and social status largely seen in Western media (ibid, 15-16).  Men are 
no longer being socialized around men without violence, and in the presence of traditional 
occupations like farming so they become devalued (Lwambo, 17, 2011). An effect of the now 
perceived weakness of farming is the feminization of farm work.  Femininity is traditionally 
defined as being dependent, weak, subordinate, mothering, and sexually available according to 
study participants (ibid, 15). 
 This is further troubled by women’s increasing independence.  More women have access 
to education, and have been forced to find work to provide for themselves and their children as 
the conflict separates and displaces families, and renders men incapable of earning a stable 
income.  As a way to cope with their loss of power men have responded with, “A prevailing 
narrative to discredit women’s empowerment…to connect female entrepreneurship to 
prostitution” (Lwambo, 16, 2011).  Girls attending school are said to have contracted sexually 
transmitted grades or STGs, and women in the workplace are believed to trade sexual favors for 
position (ibid, 18).  Again we see women being reduced to the physical body and sexuality, and 
sexuality being deployed to shame and devalue. 
 This enforced renegotiation of traditional masculinity has policy implications for NGOs, 
the United States alone spends 1.5 billion annually on aid to the Congo (ibid, 6), “Masculinity is 
thus a constant enactment of power, it is not something a man simply has or is, but rather a way 
of being that he needs to perform and assert” (ibid, 12).  NGOs primarily focusing on working to 
33 
 
ameliorate SGBV miss the performative aspect of masculinity and therefore miss effectively 
reaching men in their performance.  Men who participated in the study said they felt gender 
training was synonymous with women, and failed to address men’s needs and vulnerabilities, 
“while it is true that a great majority of individuals suffering from SGBV are female, a single 
focus on this group renders the equality aspect of programs obsolete” (Lwambo, 21, 2011).  Men 
are critical of formal education of any kind, because they link it with women’s empowerment 
which they see as a source of their disempowerment, and an example of an ineffective “foreign 
import.”   
 Further, state violence and impunity is cited by men as a direct cause of violence, and 
NGOs are seen as non-governmental bad actors that fail to set good examples of the masculinity 
they preach (ibid, 22).  Many NGO workers partake in petty corruption and graft as well as 
sexual exploitation of women (Lwambo, 23, 2011).  Men interviewed also said they would like 
to see peer education with community members instead of outsiders.  Perhaps most revealing 
was the widespread sentiment that humanitarian work to empower women was a direct 
contributor to men’s feeling a loss of masculinity and responsible for the increased SGBV, and 
men would be more open to working towards gender equality if their needs as providers were 
being met by NGO work (ibid, 21).  This may come off as victim blaming, but should not be 
dismissed out of hand.  Remember that women, even women entrepreneurs, felt ideally men 
should be the main providers.  In addition, if the aim is to combat militarized notions of 
masculinity ignoring the needs of already agitated, traumatized, and emasculated men is not the 
best strategy; particularly when they are saying they feel ignored.  Finally, men also felt 
victimized by the violence, and sought psychosocial and medical help, and reported feeling the 
majority of the resources and concern were directed toward women to the exclusion of men. 
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 Interestingly militarism was not well thought of among respondents.  Joining the military 
or a rebel group was described as a desperate act that was not favorable to family members 
(Lwambo, 19, 2011).  However, because the conflict has existed for so long there is no easy line 
to draw between civilian and militarized masculinity in Congo.  According to Lwambo, SGBV is 
the keenest example of the integration of violence into everyday existence, because it coexists 
with other forms of violence against women that do not rely on militarism for their realization, 
most notably domestic violence (ibid).  Instead, traditional constructions of masculinity that link 
it with sexual prowess become hyper-actuated when coupled with violence.   
 I selected this study, because it was conducted by a Congolese, and directly 
communicated with both men and women about their perceptions of masculinity in DR Congo.  
The responses looked strikingly similar to dominant constructions of femininity and masculinity 
in the U.S. and Western World more generally.  Women are mothers, defined by their sexuality, 
and subservient to men.  Men are dominant, bread winners, and have a monopoly on the use of 
violence.  While these are very general characteristics they form a pattern about gender 
construction and performance that is echoed in reporting.  Two important takeaways are the 
emphasis put on the telling of a single-story about women’s suffering, and dedication to the 
maintenance of normative masculinity in the face of political, economic, and social conditions 
that make it nearly impossible to maintain (Lwambo, 8, 2011). 
As we move forward into thinking about rape in the context of war and international law 
it is important to keep in mind Foucault’s intervention that sexuality is a disciplinary power that 
produces docile bodies.  Further, that the instrumentalization of sexuality coincided with the 
scientific turn in the West, which in its pursuit of truth sought to make visible sexuality on the 
body.  Sexuality, as reinvented by science, and gender as socially constructed work together to 
35 
 
engineer reality.  Part of the instrmentalization of sexuality is the imagining of female bodies as 
vulnerable, particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. Rape scripts, as described by Marcus, are 
culturally authorized narratives that employ the language of female vulnerability to legitimate 
certain experiences and foreclose others.  Rape then becomes a mechanism for enforcing 
patriarchy both when men rape and laws interpret the crime where men are the assumed 
perpetrators and women the victims.   
iii. Rape in the Context of War & International Law 
I will use as the International Criminal Court’s definition as a foundation for 
problematizing rape as a weapon of war is that of the ICC, Article 8 (2) (b) (xxii) from Elements 
of Crimes (ICC 2002): 
1.  The perpetrator invaded the body of a person by conduct resulting in penetration, 
however slight, of any part of the body of the victim or of the perpetrator with a 
sexual organ, or of the anal or genital opening of the victim with any object or any 
other part of the body. 
2. The invasion was committed by force, or by threat of force or coercion, such as that 
caused by fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or abuse of 
power, against such a person or another person, or by taking advantage of a coercive 
environment, or the invasion was committed against a person capable of giving 
genuine consent. 
3. The conduct took place in the context of and was associated with an international 
armed conflict. 
4. The perpetrator was aware of factual circumstances that established the existence of 
an armed conflict. 
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According to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820, “Noting that civilians 
account for the vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict; that women and girls 
are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war (my 
emphasis) to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian 
members of a community or ethnic group; and that sexual violence perpetrated in this manner 
may in some instances persist after the cessation of hostilities… 4. Notes that rape and other 
forms of sexual violence can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive 
act with respect to genocide…” (United Nations S/RES/1820, 2008).  This document is the first 
time rape was legally recognized as a weapon of war, and was largely a response to the ongoing 
sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) in the DR Congo.  SRC1820 additionally makes clear 
the important role women play in political, social, and economic life before, during, and after 
war, and in the period of reconstruction.  It goes on to affirm the necessity of peace-building 
operations that take into account gender issues, specifically women and girls, and recommends 
incorporating more women in security forces, pre-deployment gender training to ensure proper 
response in the field, and operations that promote capacity building.  Leading up to these 
findings the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women outlined the 
use of sexual violence in the DRC, and published its findings in a country report. 
According to the second CEDAW DRC country report (2003, pub. 2004), armed conflict 
exacerbates violence against women.  In chapter 11, section d, sexual violence linked to the 
perpetual state of war is highlighted. The report reaffirms rape is being used as a weapon of war.  
It further states the aims of rape in the context of war as follows: population control and 
suppression of resistance, spreading terror, and punishment.  CEDAW’s country report lists the 
age range of rape survivors from 4-80 years old, citing data from MSF (Doctors without Borders) 
37 
 
and Aide Médicale Internationale to support their findings.  Additionally, it locates the regions 
most affected as South & North Kivu, Equateur, Orientale, Maniema, and Northern Katanga 
Provinces.  There are numerous consequences of sexual violence that reverberate after the initial 
violation and last beyond the conflict.   
Women who experience SGBV suffer medical, social, economic, and legal consequences.  
Medical consequences include exposure to sexually transmitted infections, particularly high risk 
for contracting HIV/AIDS, psychological damage, unwanted pregnancy, and physical injury, 
particularly traumatic fistula.  Social consequences include being ostracized and stigmatized by 
husbands, families, and communities.  Economic consequences result from loss of income due to 
inability to work from bodily injury and homelessness and poverty from being kicked out their 
homes.  Legal consequences abound from a lack of juridical infrastructure, political 
accountability, and an overarching state of impunity.  Because of social stigmas victims often do 
not feel they can report the crimes, and when they do there is no judicial body to conduct 
proceedings or police force to investigate the crime.  Survivors are often living in the company 
of their attackers with no redress.   
CEDAW has a list of recommendations to address SGBV for the government, I/NGOs, 
and civil society.  Women should take responsibility for themselves, educate their children about 
sexual violence, and “change attitudes.”  I/NGOs should improve cooperation and coordination 
among agencies, increase awareness-raising and advocacy work, and specifically work to combat 
stigmatization of rape survivors.  I would add local capacity building is indispensable for making 
Congolese feel personally invested in and responsible for affecting positive changes in their 
communities.  Without empowering community members, men and women, to be agents in these 
38 
 
initiatives they will continue to feel disempowered in the face of monumental social 
reconstruction.       
The Congolese government must remove legal barriers to implementation of CEDAW’s 
recommendations, such as funding the Ministry on the Status of Women to be accountable for 
improving the status of women in the Congo, and representing women’s issues in government.  
Further, to act to disseminate, in local languages and with appropriate media, the conventions 
suggestions for change.  Next, build institutional capacity in government and civil society.  Also, 
to work on building a lasting and sustainable peace in Congo and make ending SGBV a priority 
of the new government of peacetime.  Lastly, write gender specific language into “development 
policies and programs” (CEDAW DRC Country Report, 51, 2004).  That is a summary of the 
CEDAW country report findings and recommendations for the cessation of SGBV in the 
Democratic Republic of Congo.     
International law may be an imperfect tool to address rape in the context of war.  
According to Nicola Henry, international law unintentionally reinforces victimization by creating 
victim hierarchies, and prosecuting rape as the worst type of offense marginalizes victims of 
other crimes.  In spite of these critiques Henry believes law is a necessary form of advocacy for 
women whose unique burdens have been historically excluded from survivor recognition.  Henry 
situates her argument within postmodern feminist unease with the overemphasis on rape and 
sexual violence as a universal narrative about women’s lives.  Postmodern feminists draw 
attention to the problematic nature of making female sexuality the source of oppression that 
makes women’s bodies passive recipients and always available for sexual violence.  Also, it 
denies women’s agency by narrowly casting them in the role of victim.  Lastly it is worth 
39 
 
considering the implications of privileging the law as the only and appropriate means of redress, 
and provider of rights.   
Law may not be the best tool because, “law has the power to define and legitimate some 
narratives, while at the same time, silence and suppress other meanings and stories…law 
pronounces the ‘truth’…it creates meaning and is authoritative” (Henry, 97, 2014).  In other 
words by defining and prosecuting rape it leaves out a whole range of other gender harms, and 
makes rape a crime that is uniquely viewed as a crime against women.  Henry echoes concerns 
voiced by Sharon Marcus on the “rape script”.  In fact women’s and men’s lived experiences of 
war and sexual violence are much more nuanced and complex then the law allows.   
 Focusing on rape as the worst crime possible against women during war narrows the 
conversation about violence.  When you prosecute rape as a weapon of war you are not looking 
intersectionally at the causes of war that also create the circumstances by which women are 
unduly burdened, like poverty and capitalism.  Furthermore, “the international legal order may 
render invisible everyday violence and injustice” (ibid, 105).  However, Henry concludes 
testifying before a tribunal, for example the ICTY, may offer agency to survivors by creating a 
space where they can talk about their experiences with violence.  Tribunals may also give voice 
and legitimate untold stories of victims who died, and record the conditions for survivors who 
are not willing to come forward and speak out of fear (Henry, 2014).  It is also possible, in spite 
of the legal categorization of rape in the context of war, in practice rape in the context of war 
survivor is not among the available categories for women to access.   (I would suggest this is an 
example of self-regulation by internalizing the juridical model of power as the only legitimate 
source of agency.)    
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International Relations (IR) provides methodology that is incomplete for framing and 
discussing rape in the context of war.  K.R. Carter asserts, that while IR has been bereft of study 
on the topic, its positivist/realist approach is well suited to tackling the subject.  While I locate 
my work in what Carter terms the “peripheral” areas of scholarship, “critical theory, 
postmodernism, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, normative theory, peace studies, 
anthropological approaches, and historical sociology,” or soft-IR as it were, I find the framework 
she establishes useful for an initial understanding of why conceptualizing rape in the context of 
war is of paramount importance (Carter, 347, 2010). According to Carter, IR’s theoretical 
underpinning has three basic tenants: state-security as the base unit of analysis, a specific 
understanding of power as material, concerned with domination, and, “operating in a zero-sum 
game of relative gains,” and a belief in rational actors (ibid, 348).  Since rape in the context of 
war threatens state sovereignty and fits within the bounds of positivist approaches it is within the 
purview of IR to theorize. 
Carter suggests rape in the context of war threatens state sovereignty in two important 
ways.  First, it deprives states of a monopoly on the use of force.  The field of International 
Relations accomplishes this task by being available to everyone without capital investment or 
labor and is an infinitely renewable resource.  Second, it impacts inter-state relationships, 
because it can cross borders; for example the rapes in the Rwandan genocide spreading into 
Eastern Congo.  Rape in the context of war is amenable to positivism, because it can be 
separated into value-neutral facts and values, patterns can be uncovered distinct from the 
methods employed to discover them, and empirical knowledge is the standard (Smith, as quoted 
in Carter, 349, 2010).  I question whether it is possible to ever truly know if patterns uncovered 
are beyond the methods used to excavate them, or in other words value-free.  Further, I do not 
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find productive the distinction that rape in the context of war can be empirically value-free, but 
normatively value-laden.  It is impossible for me to separate the act of rape from the cultural 
connotations of gender and sexuality, and I not sure a necessary step beyond strictly policing 
disciplinary boundaries.   
Understanding the gendered and sexed dimensions of power in authorizing rape in the 
context of war is not only the focus of my work, but a facet Carter is unable to dispense with in 
her own inquiry: 
On the one hand, raping some women sends a message to all women that they need 
protection.  This places women in a situation of “double powerlessness.”  Not only do they sit in 
a position of relatively less power in the victim-perpetrator model but – even if never suffering 
the direct effects of rape – they also require the protection of those (men) with relatively more 
power to protect.  On the other hand, the broader power implications of this war weapon are to 
reinforce rapists’ relative power position over not just the victim herself but over those men who 
failed to protect her.   
Clearly culturally determined femininities and masculinities require unpacking, which 
demonstrates the ineffectiveness of a purely positivist approach.  Not only, as Carter rightly 
establishes, does rape work effectively because it has low barriers to entry, but based on 
culturally salient models of gender and sexuality that authorize or de-authorize access to power 
and model culture.  Is this why rape in the context of war has been excluded from consideration 
in IR? 
 Carter believes rape in the context of war has been marginalized in International 
Relations for two reasons.  First, debate over whether or not it proves to be an international 
security concern.  Second, because it is widely thought of as a “women’s issue.”  On both fronts 
42 
 
Carter quickly dismisses the assumptions.  As previously stated rape in the context of war 
seamlessly crosses borders; examples include Rwandan and DRC, Croatia and Bosnia, and 
Sudan and Chad, just to list a few.  Further, rape does not only effect women.  This can 
immediately be taken as false if one just looks at the act, which involves a male perpetrator.  
Beyond that obvious observation women also participate in community life, which will be 
effected by their assault or the constant threat of it.  More fundamental, “if rape were to be a 
“women’s issue”…then even still it would present a weapon of war that directly impacts at least 
50% of the population in question,” making it best an embarrassing omission, and at worst 
condoning women’s inferiority and victimization (Carter, 355, 2010).  Assuming rape to be a 
problem unique to women also omits male rape from the record as well as ignoring its use on 
children.  So, what can IR tell us about rape in the context of war? 
 According to Carter, the numbers are staggering and on the rise internationally.  Rape is 
misreported because of the shame and stigma attached to the survivor.  Many women die from 
traumatic injuries related to their assault or commit suicide out of fear and internalizing societal 
shame before they can report.  Also, “injustice systems” predominate where no systems are in 
place for reporting and holding those responsible to account.  Male rape also occurs, and has 
similar results.  Men die from health complications because they are too ashamed to report their 
injuries.  Men are stripped of their masculinity and thereby forfeit the power and status it 
afforded.  Male rape survivors are shamed and stigmatized, but interestingly, beyond the 
violation of the act, by equating them with women.  This seems to suggest that it is not altogether 
implausible to conceive of rape as a “women’s issue”, because male harm from rape, beyond the 
obvious physical consequences, is emotionally and psychologically damaging because femininity 
is used as a tool of violence.  Lastly, rape is a method of ethnic cleansing, either as an intentional 
43 
 
strategy or a tragic side effect.  In conflicts where rape is a tactic of war, including DRC, Bosnia, 
and Darfur, rape camps are engineered for sexual slavery that produce “rape babies” of mixed 
ethnicity (ibid, 361).  Also, many rapists shout racial slurs while they are assaulting their victims 
announcing their intent to destroy future generations through traumatic, forced sterilization with 
foreign objects or by forced insemination.  Public rape is also common so that the act(s) fray 
communal ties.  The children who are the products of such rapes also face being stigmatized and 
ostracized as reminders of the conflict and ethnic hatreds.  Lastly, systematic rape has grave 
public health consequences regarding the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted 
infections.  In the DRC only one organization is providing antiretroviral treatment, and 
projections indicate that half the population could be positive (Carter, 363, 2010).  While these 
are all valid and useful conclusions reached from employing IR’s realist/positivist approaches 
none of them account for ideological motivations and cultural models that may illuminate why 
rape is authorized as an effective strategy and tool for war waging. 
Katrina Koo attributes the silencing of rape in the context of war survivors to dependence 
on realism in International Relations discourse.  Realist discourse creates a universal category of 
woman and does not allow room for nuance and ambiguity.  Further, the state is privileged as the 
best mechanism for dealing with conflict and redress to the detriment of examining power 
relationships that constitute and limit women’s agency. In wartime, its immediate aftermath, and 
reconstruction women are only depicted in supporting roles, “ such as family members, nurses, 
factory workers and occasionally spies, prostitutes…state-sanctioned representations of women” 
(Koo, 525, 2002). Koo believes in spite of the recognition of rape as a weapon of war, and 
thorough documentation of its use there is an absence in literature on war of a critical 
44 
 
examination of rape in the context of war.  Additionally, she interprets this silence as deliberate 
and problematizes it through the understanding that states are the best mechanism for redress.   
The role of the state is problematic, because the state is usually instrumental in ordering 
rape, or it requires the support of the new government, which also likely employed rape as a 
tactic, “ not surprisingly, therefore, a long history of unprosecuted violence against women in 
war has allowed it to become naturalized and part of acceptable practice” (ibid, 530).  This 
silence is also a product of the equation of knowledge with scientifically observable fact in the 
West.  A soldier’s death can be quantified, but the trauma of rape is much more elusive and 
qualitative.     
Koo suggests the process of collective forgetting is engineered by the state as a vital part 
of post-conflict reconstruction.  This state-sanctioned memory construction makes women’s 
experiences invisible, because, “women face an international community that has historically 
preferred to consider rape outside the realm of the political” (Koo, 531, 2002).  While 
historically this has been true in post-war reconstruction, “as a strategy of war, rape is one of the 
means by which the sanctioned and systematic pursuit of a political objective is undertaken” 
(ibid, 528).  There seems to be a discontinuity between the wartime objective that relies on rape 
for its realization, and the reconstruction and reconciliation project that rejects rape as an 
acceptable chapter in the healing story of the nation.  What is evident is how intrinsic sexuality is 
to state construction and political identity, and as Koo notes, “It is also evidence of the 
politicized and persuasive relationship between power and knowledge” (Koo, 533, 2002).   
A central question in my work and feminist studies more broadly is, how can you discuss 
and write about women’s lives without either essentializing or being relativistic?  Women are 
being sexually assaulted in the DR Congo.  Not all Congolese women experience sexual assault 
45 
 
the same way, but there are patterns to the types of assault.  How can I tackle an investigation 
into the representations of Congolese women without reifying some of the epistemological 
norms I am trying to question?  Feminist standpoint theory is a useful analytical tool for 
privileging women-situated knowledge that has been historically marginalized in favor of white, 
male, Western knowledge.  It locates voices on the periphery or “others” and elevates them to 
credible knowers and experts in their own lives.  However, if we admit experience is poly-vocal 
then how can we maintain the category of “woman” as a unit of analysis?  What are women’s 
issues in a movement that privileges difference as the starting place for theorizing?  Susan 
Heckman does a wonderful job analyzing scholarship on feminist standpoint theory, which 
addresses these very problems of knowledge and desire to accurately represent women’s lives 
and experiences.  
Feminist standpoint theory arose in the 1980’s as a response to Western, white, male, 
positivist epistemology, and was rooted in Marxian theory.  At the fundamental level it 
endeavors to ask and answer the question, “How do we justify the truth of the feminist claim that 
women have been and are oppressed” (Hekman, 342, 1997)?   However, in the course of 
destabilizing doctrinaire disciplinary boundaries to make room for new knowledge paradigms 
based on difference, tensions quickly erupted around the ways this new feminist project may be 
assimilating the old, masculine thinking under the guise of feminism.  First, the central 
contradiction facing feminist scholarship is the rejection of the essentialization of women while 
reducing all men to one ‘unitary group’ (ibid, 350).  This not only occurs when men are 
stereotyped in feminist theory as white, Western and affluent (characteristics I find ready at hand 
for my own work), but when feminist thinkers like Nancy Hartsock refuse to move beyond the 
core/periphery model (Hekman, 350, 1997).  If the project is to destabilize the core by including 
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“other” voices then the new politics created can no longer operate on a binary model.  Hartsock 
is unwilling to shed the core/periphery model, because, “the postmoderns, she claims, who want 
to eliminate the center, thereby deny us our right to self-definition…they deny us the right to 
speak the truth about our subjugation, obviating the very possibility of knowledge and truth” 
(ibid, 351).  Hekman is sympathetic to this concern, because it is a veritable fact women and 
“others” must demonstrate their oppression and exclusion, their standpoint, in order to arrive at a 
new truth.  Hartsock’s logical fallacy is not her identification of this problem, but her solution, 
which rearticulates the core/periphery dichotomy that silenced and marginalized women in the 
first place.  As Hekman rightly points out, conceiving of any standpoint as privileged above 
another does not accommodate diversity and recognize situatedness (Hekman, 351, 1997).     
Second, feminist standpoint theorists are reluctant if not outright hostile to admit the 
feminist standpoint is a constituted discourse, because they feel to do so would cause it to lose its 
‘necessary grounding’(ibid, 352).  For some reason it is considered a failure by feminists such as 
Hartsock and Collins to accept the feminist standpoint is one of many standpoints that are valid.  
While I understand the importance of creating a counter-hegemony, refusing to admit multiple 
perspectives is just an appropriation of ‘the master’s tools’ (Lorde, 2007), which is less 
revolutionary and more despotic.  Sandra Harding believes standpoint theory can overcome this 
obstacle by developing something she calls “strong objectivity”, which, “recognizes the social 
situatedness of all knowledge but also requires “a critical evaluation to determine which social 
situations tend to generate the most objective knowledge claims” (142)” (Hekman, 354, 1997).  
This is a departure for feminist standpoint theory, because it does not outright reject masculinist 
definitions of objectivity.  Heckman points to two pitfalls of Harding’s “strong objectivity.”  
One, Heckman fails to acknowledge the “reality of women’s lives” from which she would like to 
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originate her telling of “less false stories’ is contested reality and constituted discourse, “the fact 
that it is closely tied to the social actors’ own concepts and provides a counter to the hegemonic 
discourse of masculinist science makes it no less a discourse” (ibid, 355).  Further, Hekman 
suggests the admission of it as a discourse would not discredit it.  Second, there is an implicit 
assumption that by using objective masculinist science to tell “less false stories” about women’s 
lives they will be recognized as such unchallenged.  However, feminist scholarship has been 
forever discredited by the establishment, and why would this be any different (Hekman, 1997).      
Hekman concludes that feminist standpoint theory is not beyond saving, but that its true 
contribution to epistemological power shift is not by privileging either universal truth or social 
construction, “but by deconstructing the dichotomy itself” (ibid, 356).  She describes this new 
form of politics as not reading from a “script” (Hekman, 357, 1997).  I find this thinking useful 
in light of my reading of Marcus and her interpretation of discursive rape scripts.  There is still 
the problem of poly-vocality, “if we take the multiplicity of feminist standpoints to its logical 
conclusion, coherent analysis becomes impossible because we have too many axes of analysis” 
(ibid, 359).  In an unforeseen turn of events, Hekman posits deploying Weber’s “ideal type” as a 
solution, “At the root of Weber’s concept of the ideal type is his claim that no aspect of social 
reality can be apprehended without presuppositions” (Hekman, 360, 1997).  Social reality is 
intelligible via cultural values that order meaning and map reality (ibid).  The “ideal type” is the 
choice of what to analyze predicated on subject position, “the purpose of ideal types is to provide 
a means of comparison with concrete reality in order to reveal the significance of that 
reality…We cannot justify ideal types by claiming that they accurately reproduce social reality.  
No concept can do that – all positions are partial and perspectival” (Hekman, 1997).  All 
knowledge is situated and partial and analytical value is located in the subject’s choosing, and 
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feminist standpoint theory opens the perspective to include another ‘social world’ without 
conceding the need for a metanarrative to justify objectivity (ibid, 361).  I would counter that 
regardless of whether or not we engage a metanarrative it is never the less there like an elephant 
in the room.  Being a woman is the metanarrative that Hekman, alongside other feminist scholars 
and thinkers, have failed to reconcile.       
While it is clear there is no universal category “woman” that encapsulates all women’s 
experiences it remains a fact that there are women’s experiences.  How do feminist theorists 
reconcile this paradox?  One potential avenue is theorizing a “politics of difference” (Sawicki, 
1986).  Jana Sawicki draws parallels between feminist theorist Audre Lorde and Michel Foucault 
to ground a politics of difference.  Both critical theorists are able to harness difference, “as a 
creative source of resistance and change” (ibid, 24).  Although it may seem feminism has only 
recently take up the project of difference, Sawicki contends feminism has its roots in elucidating 
the differences between women and men to theorize what is unique about women’s experience 
(Sawicki, 23, 1986).  Tensions arose in the creation of a “collective feminist subject” when 
multiple systems of oppression were uncovered that seemed to destabilize the feminist project 
(ibid).  Marxian and other radical feminists want to engage in traditional revolutionary theory, 
while Foucault and Lorde believe, “power utilizes difference to fragment opposition” (Sawicki, 
24, 1986).  By revealing contrasting understandings of power between Foucauldian and 
Revolutionary Theory, Sawicki moves us towards conceptualizing a new feminist politics of 
difference. 
Foucault saw traditional power structures and revolutionary theories operating within a 
“juridico-discursive model” whereby power is possessed, top-down, and repressive (ibid, 26).  
Within this model micro-powers are omitted and power is limited to operate in the political 
49 
 
sphere.  Foucault contends instead that power is exercised, bottom-up, and productive (ibid).  His 
model of power is about relationships of power that constitute subjects instead of beginning with 
historical subjects, i.e. bourgeoisie/proletariat, “Foucault gives accounts of the ways in which 
certain institutional and cultural practices have produced individuals.  These are the practices of 
a disciplinary power which he associates with the rise of the human sciences” (Sawicki, 27, 
1986).  Disciplinary power produces subjects either through labeling or physical division (ibid).  
Subjects are then normalized within discourse, i.e. sexuality and sanity, which create docile 
bodies primed for intervention.  Working toward “new forms of subjectivity” moves beyond 
trying to group people into Huxley-esque castes by abandoning categorization altogether, “He 
does not deny the phenomenon of class (or State) power,” but argues looking to centralized 
sources of power ignores power, “at the everyday level of social relation” (Sawicki, 28, 1986).   
This is in line with feminism’s desire to elevate non-hegemonic ways of knowing and 
privilege marginalized knowers outside the traditional white, hetero-normative subject position.  
By articulating power as top-down you cannot but deny agency of so called non-elites.  For 
Foucault everyday operations of power enable macro-power structures, “disciplinary power was 
not invented by the dominant class and then extended down into the micro-level of society.  It 
originated outside this class and was appropriated once it revealed its utility” (ibid, 28-29).  To 
be clear disciplinary power is a product of mundane force relations that are constantly shifting 
and resisting. 
Foucault refers to his politics of difference as the “genealogical method.”  Not intended 
as a theory, “genealogy as resistance involves using history to give voice to the marginal and 
submerged voices which lie “a little beneath history,” i.e. the mad, the delinquent, the abnormal, 
the disempowered.  It locates many discontinuous and regional struggles against power both in 
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the past and the present.  These voices are the sources of resistance, the creative subjects of 
history” (Sawicki, 32, 1986).  Coming to voice is the essence of feminism, which began because 
women were silenced and oppressed.  Like other power relations that employ difference as a tool 
of division, i.e. race and class, gender became a dogmatic caste within the feminist movement 
that distorted the project.  Sawicki utilizes the “sexuality debate” to illustrate this distortion.   
American feminists have competing views on sexuality that are predicated on the same 
juridico-discursive understanding of power.  Radical feminist believe sexuality has become male 
dominated and reject its institutions from heterosexuality to pornography to prostitution as 
mechanisms of domination (ibid, 33).  Libertarian feminists originate from the same belief in 
male domination of sexuality, but claim women must engage in any and all forms of sex as a 
liberatory struggle (Sawicki, 1986).  In spite of their divergence, both radical and libertarian 
feminists locate sexual power in male, hetero-normative institutions; top-down and centralized.  
Both interpret sexual power as fundamentally repressive.  And both reify problematic notions of 
sexuality that rely on reductive male and female gendered units of analysis.  A Foucauldian 
analysis, “would attempt to disarticulate gender and sexuality and thereby reveal the diversity of 
sexual experiences” (ibid, 34).  Some feminist theories continue to replicate sexuality as a 
subjugated knowledge, and reduce all women’s oppression to a single working of power: 
sexuality (Sawicki, 35, 1986).  Sexuality is but one location where power does work. 
Sawicki’s reading of Foucault as a tool for articulating a feminist politics of difference 
demonstrates why Foucauldian analysis is intellectually productive for thinking through 
awareness raising representations of rape in the context of war.  First, it enables me to subvert 
leading perspectives and assumptions that inform thinking and policy on rape in the context of 
war.  It is my belief we cannot legislate rape in the context of war as a universal category 
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representing the convergence of sexuality and violence.  Further, reactions to awareness-raising 
representations are informed by “popular knowledge,” which, “is not shared by all people, “but it 
is, on the contrary, a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of 
unanimity” (ibid, 30).  Popular knowledge is an operation of micro-power that, “makes possible 
certain global effects of domination (e.g. class, power, patriarchy)” (Sawicki, 28, 1986).  There 
are specific conditions in the West that permit us to tell a particular story of women and sexuality 
and violence that can be disclosed by a Foucauldian understanding of power.   
It is not enough to describe the reality of rape or legislate against rape where it is found.  
Awareness and direct action are paramount steps toward eliminating SGBV, but they are only a 
piece of the intellectual labor required to wholly understand and reject the conditions necessary 
for rape to be a tool of power.  We must open the dialogue to include an interrogation of the 
power structures that create environments in which rape is possible.  Furthermore, SGBV does 
not exclusively happen to women nor do men always rape.  However, this is the framework we 
are given for making sense of this form of violence.  The construction of femininities and 
masculinities must be examined to uncover the ways in which women are constructed as pre-
victims and victims of rape and men as rapists and pre-rapists, and the silences at the margins of 
such discourse. The male gaze is a theory that explains how women live their daily lives as 
vulnerable.     
 
iv. The Male Gaze 
What is the male gaze and how is it operationalized?  According to Laura Mulvey, “In a 
world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and 
passive/female.  The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female 
52 
 
figure…women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for 
strong visual and erotic impact so they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 
346, 1992).  In life, art, and other media the spectator and curator is always assumed to be a man. 
Not only do men possess the power of the gaze, but women internalize their role as 
object/surveyed and begin to self-regulate, “A woman must continually watch herself.  She is 
almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…And so she comes to consider the 
surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her 
identity as a woman…how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally 
thought of as the success of her life” (Berger, 46, 1973).  Success for women is access to male 
patronage that requires conformity to the desires of men, and acceptance of women’s role as 
subordinate.  For women their own bodies become canvases where identities are inscribed.  They 
inhabit flesh that is no longer their flesh; the female body betrays the female.  There is no escape 
from our fleshy integument, “To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs 
of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded” (ibid, 
54).  Put simply, the male gaze is embodiment as spectacle/performance. 
  Looking is a site of power that both creates and reflects power. Power here being 
broadly understood the ability to make decisions over, and operate one’s own life.  Women exist 
as looked at and looked after, while men exist as lookers and custodians.  When you possess the 
power to look you also possess the power to create culture, which must necessarily be suited to 
your taste.  The ability to curate culture is a site of power for men as spectators, “the social 
presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent 
upon the promise of power which he embodies…But the pretense is always towards a power 
which he exercises on others. By contrast a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to 
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herself…” (Berger, 45-46, 1973).  However, a woman’s attitude toward herself is not her own, 
but that of the internalized male viewer rendering women both hyper-visible and invisible in a 
fantastic cheat (Foucault, 1980).   
Female-ness is to be always available, always under surveillance, always (re)producing 
one’s own image in the image of male desire to reify masculine power and prestige, which is 
dependent upon the construction of the ideal woman.  Simultaneously women are erased as 
autonomous subjects with agency. Women are reduced to surfaces instead of selves.  Flavio 
Rando posits that if men are the creators and females the created then the construction of “the 
feminine is a way to organize that knowledge” (Rando, 51, 1991).  In other words, social 
relationships are predicated on gender mediating power in the exchanges between individuals 
which allows for political action (ibid).  The male gaze is the location where gender is 
instrumentalized as political power.    
The male gaze is dependent upon Western understandings of “normatized corporeity” 
(Ponterotto, 2016).  In the West gender is constructed as a binary, whereby the ideal human 
subject is white, male, heterosexual, and affluent. “This aesthetic ideal has been so rooted in 
popular consciousness that it has been raised to the status of standardized norm…once these 
models become conventionalized and universally accepted, they obviously assume the status of 
cultural norm, a socially sanctioned myth of the ideal body” (ibid, 135).  Because women operate 
within this socially sanctioned imaginary they view self-worth as being inextricably linked to 
being, “fit to be looked at” (MacSween, 156, 1993).   
Women’s internalization of the male gaze in Western culture is operationalized in the 
form of consumerism.  The ideal female body is thin, white, ageless, soft-featured, and fit.  
Entire industries exist for the maintenance of this ideal form: cosmetics, magazines, Barbie, 
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plastic surgery, Weight Watchers and its kin, and beyond.  All of these create, what Susan Bordo 
terms, an “empire of images” that have political and ontological weight.  Pushing beyond the 
bounds of the social imaginary domain to the performative, “some associations between bodily 
experiences and abstract concepts are situated in that they develop from socio-cultural contexts 
and are thus informed by cultural imperatives, values, and habits” (Ponterotto, 142, 2016).   
Masculinity is dependent upon the female body as a resource to situate its power, and that 
conversion from ideology to embodiment is called the male gaze.   
If we are operating under the assumption that women have an internalized male viewer 
that regulates their being in the world, then the question for me becomes, how do we unseat him? 
Sandra Lee Bartky suggests, “We women cannot begin the re-vision of our own bodies until we 
learn to read the cultural messages we inscribe upon them daily and until we come to see that 
even when the mastery of the disciplines of femininity produce a triumphant result, we are still 
only women.” (Bartky, 1990, 82)  Women living a patriarchal society have internalized a 
panoptic male viewer, and become their own disciplinarians (ibid, 72).  Drawing on Foucault, 
Bartky articulates the creation of docile bodies was a counter-movement that occurred 
simultaneously with the rise of modern institutions; examples of modern institutions are the 
prison and the school (Foucault, 1977).  There are spatial and temporal aspects to this creation.  
For the purposes of this discussion the spatial aspects are most generative.   
Bartky’s intervention was to incorporate women into a Foucauldian critique of power by 
showing disciplinary practices produce a recognizably female body in three ways: regulating the 
size of women’s bodies, the space women occupy/their bodily comportment, and ornamentation.  
Even though we are all situated under the “panoptic gaze” that gaze is uniquely masculine.  
Drawing upon the work of Iris Marion Young, Bartky suggests there is an imaginary space 
55 
 
surrounding women which they cannot trespass, “Women’s space is not a field in which her 
bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned 
and by which she is confined” (Bartky, 67, 1990).  Construction of this imaginary space is only 
possible, because of the existence of the male gaze, which Bartky refers to as a “male witness.”  
Women see themselves not through their own eyes, but through the vision of the male witness 
leading to feelings of shame (ibid, 72).  However, the male witness is internalized so the 
woman’s body becomes a site of self-betrayal leading to feelings of alienation and shame. 
   Bartky locates women’s subjectivity as being disclosed within a field of shame. Shame is 
an imaginary landscape in which women locate themselves and are fueled by the presence of an 
internalized male witness, “…it requires if not an actual audience before whom my deficiencies 
are paraded, then an internalized audience with the capacity to judge me, hence internalized 
standards of judgment” (Bartky, 86, 1990).  The male witness regulates women’s diet and 
exercise, bodily comportment, and ornamentation.  Women’s bodies become deficient.  There 
are three ways of thinking about conditioned female bodily deficiency.   
First is the infantalization of the female form whereby the ideal is that of the girl child, 
“The body by which a women feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try 
to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or 
substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed” (ibid, 73). 
Second is paternalism toward, “...the face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the 
marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men” (Bartky, 1990).  Third, I 
have termed the self-project, whereby women conforming to these harmful standards gain access 
to male patronage, “but little real respect and rarely any social power.  A woman’s effort to 
master feminine body discipline will lack importance just because she does it: Her activity 
56 
 
partakes of the general depreciation of everything female.  In spite of unrelenting pressure to 
“make the most of what they have,” women are ridiculed and dismissed for the triviality of their 
interest in such “trivial” things as clothes and make-up.  Further, the narrow identification of 
woman with sexuality and the body in a society that has for centuries displayed profound 
suspicion toward both does little to raise her status” (ibid).  If women attempt to divest 
themselves of the male witness they are in effect de-skilling by revoking access to male privilege 
that is the source of power in the West.  There is a social and physical alienation that has been 
lived experience of women.  
In the West we have a very unhealthy relationship to women’s bodies.  This relationship 
is manifest in the discourses about women’s bodies that pervade media, commerce, and psycho-
social interaction.  One such discourse I have noticed is becoming increasingly prominent speaks 
to childbirth.  When a woman has a baby the conversation centers on how she will “get her body 
back after baby”.  Where did her body go?  It has undergone a transformation as part of a natural 
process, but it has not been lost.  This is an example of female alienation where women are made 
to feel betrayed and powerless in their own bodies.  It is directly related to the construction of 
women as mothers and caregivers that is positively sanctioned by cultural narrative.  Women’s 
bodily integrity is directed by sexuality.  Female sexuality is either positively linked to 
mothering and childbearing or negatively reflected in myths about promiscuity and danger for 
women who do not conform to the available women’s role.  In order for the positively sanctioned 
role of mother to be available for women they must not only perform it, but they must meet 
physical standards of beauty that make them competitive for male patronage.  Immediately after 
performing the only function they are deemed worthy of women are then expected to resume the 
maintenance of beauty standards to feel secure in their position as wives and mothers or face 
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forfeiting even that “privilege.”  From cosmetics to hide and cover up, cosmetic surgery to 
permanently alter, reproductive laws dictating how women can care for their bodies, there are 
regimes of truth that regulate female bodily comportment and mobility, and reduce women to 
one facet of their being in the world-sexuality.   
 This experience has been differentially arrived at for women because of divergent 
histories, cultures, economies, physical abilities, sexual orientations, and skin color.  What makes 
this project uniquely feminist when forms of oppression are multitudinous and not always 
uniquely bounded by being a woman?  Confrontational resistance to the shared oppression of 
silencing can be theorized as a uniquely feminist project by looking to Audre Lorde’s 
conceptualization of the erotic as a form of emotional intelligence.  Emotions have been housed 
within the construction of female-ness not as a way of knowing, or as a privileged position, but 
as the foil to rational man.  Emotions are situated in the body and intelligence is situated in the 
mind.  As explained above, women have been traditionally relegated to their physical attributes.  
Locating the male gaze as the subject position from which men enact patri-normative power 
creates conditions for creating an embodied feminist theory of resistance that acknowledges the 
historical material conditions of women’s oppression without reification. 
There is a tension in feminist theory between universalizing and atomizing (I am 
borrowing this phrasing from Sontaug’s discussion of the photographs of Arbus and Steichen in 
On Photography) the conditions of woman-ness, male-ness, and human-ness.  It is in this 
tenuous space that I believe a feminism can emerge that responds well to ambiguity and 
embraces nuance; both of which are shuttered out in the cold in positivist approaches, and 
become too abstracted in the work of many feminist scholars, “What enormous power lies in the 
objectifying consequences of this male gaze…And that is why perhaps the best form of 
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resistance is, first of all, the simple awareness that the female body is a gazed upon body, and 
secondly, the unrelenting conviction and steadfast commitment to reject that condition” 
(Ponterotto, 148, 2016).  
Visibility is a characteristic of the construction of racialized and gendered bodies.  In 
order to elucidate the similar work being done in both contexts, which overlap in conceptualizing 
feminist theory, Amey Adkins reads together Fanon and Beauvior.  Adkins suggests that for both 
racialized and female bodies the gaze creates a condition of alterity (Adkins, 698, 2013).  Fanon 
is able to capture this through his recounting in Black Skin, White Masks of his 
“epidermalization” by a mother and her child shouting “Look! A Negro!”(ibid, 699). 
Epidermalization is the location of identity in skin, your physical characteristics.  Beauvoir 
echoes Fanon’s concerns surrounding racialization when she discusses gendered “othering” in 
The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Adkins, 702, 2013).  In both 
instances it is not a natural condition that produces the subject as racialized or gendered.  Rather 
both require being taken as other, “The moment of being caught in the gaze is the one that 
inaugurates the possibilities – or to say, the limitations – of being a black man” or woman (ibid, 
705).  Again we find an affirmation of the primacy of the gaze in conceiving subjectivity.   
Although both are theorizing alterity, Beauvoir is attentive to the production of racialized 
bodies in her work, while Fanon is silent towards women’s oppression.  Adkins suggests that 
before the white male gaze Fanon interprets women as competition for white male patronage that 
has the ability to authorize or deauthorize subject positions.  Whether or not this is consciously 
or unconsciously his project it brings into relief the power of the white, patri-normative gaze.  
The ability to look at connotes the ability to name.  To name is to other, to authorize/deauthorize, 
and exercise dominance over.   
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Often Women of Color feminists talk of making theoretical interventions that do not 
engage with western, white, positivist, patriarchal, and historically primary ways of thinking and 
knowing.  I do not believe it is possible to accomplish this aim, because the very need for radical 
paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production is based on reacting to historical omissions and 
violence.  Even suggesting such a project is possible seems counterproductive to the aim, 
because it ostensibly silences the reason for the imperative in the first place.  Historical material 
conditions that constitute racialized and gendered embodiment are necessary explanatory models 
to support theoretical interventions. 
Both gender and race project onto the body “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 1992).  
Gendered and racialized bodies are sites for the articulation of masculine power (Rondo, 1991).  
Gender is situated knowledge, because it is both an abstract concept and a bodily experience 
(Ponterotto, 2016).  The male gaze describes the movement between ideology and embodiment 
that women and men undergo as part of the gendering process.  By internalizing a male witness 
women feel betrayed by and alienated from their bodies leading to female subjectivity being 
disclosed through feelings of shame and powerlessness (Bartky, 1990).  It is this state of 
vulnerability and precariousness before the gaze of men that is codified in Western cultural 
beliefs about femininity that are written into scripts as mundane as whether or not to wear 
makeup, as sacred as virginity taboos, and as institutionalized as laws governing forms of 
assault.  Visibility is enacted in media representations of gender and violence.    
v. Media 
 I would like to make connections between cultural narratives and media by a 
consideration of authorship and authorization.  Whose voices and lived experiences are 
authorized/deauthorized by cultural narratives?  How do cultural narratives influence our 
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epistemologies and daily lived experiences?  Who authors these narratives?  I would like to 
demonstrate Western media relies on gender to curate meaning.  Edward Said described 
Orientalism as, “the distribution of a geopolitical awareness into an aesthetic” (Said, 12, 1978).  
An aesthetic is interpretive, a way of seeing, a set of principles for analyzing work being done, a 
frame, a modality of vision. This succinct description is useful for thinking about reporting as 
aesthetic and the relationship between cultural narrative craft and media craft.  
Gender is the scaffolding of the social imaginary constructing meaning for individuals, 
social groups, political organizations, and economic systems.  Race, class, and ability also 
function in this role, but are not the primary focus of my research.  Unconsciously and 
consciously when we write and read stories there is subtext informed by imagined communities 
(Anderson, 2006) of shared knowledge about the world.  This shared knowledge is codified as 
gender, race, class, and ability.  These code words elicit meaning without requiring further 
explanation or deep engagement.  When “woman” is seen or heard there are a whole series of 
qualifications that are culturally specific and known among members of a community. I have 
spent time above explicating the cultural assumptions underlying man and woman in the Western 
cultural imaginary.  These communities may be formed in the social imaginary, but they are 
enacted by bodies.  When discourse becomes corporeally animated I find it problematic to 
continue referring to it as imaginary.  Understanding, of course, there is no biological condition 
existing outside the fictive construction gender it is nonetheless a material reality.  Anderson’s 
theory of “imagined communities” has been uncritically taken up by the academy as a way of 
describing deeply embodies ways of knowing.  While I find the framework useful I want to be 
careful not to abstract gender to the point of meaninglessness.  One approach is to consider how 
gender mediates knowledge in media that is inscribed on bodies and locations.      
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Mediatization is an intensification of the internalization of media logic that aids in and 
constitutes social and cultural reproduction (Deacon, Stanyer, 2014).  Framing, handmaiden to 
mediatization, involves a process of selection whereby culturally weighty themes are employed 
by the media based on social norms and values to frame stories for the audience in ways they 
will respond to and understand (Easteal, Holland, Judd, 2014).  These frames are typically 
nuance-free and value-laden, and elicit a type of cultural currency, because their 
comprehensibility is based on societal norms and structures.  These conceptual tools for 
evaluating media effects are in part responses to the previously widespread hypodermic needle 
theory and the theory of limited effects.  Instead of positing either complete obedience to media 
messages or total autonomy from them, framing and mediatization help us think through media 
as a “community of discourse”, a “vocabulary of interaction”, as “ensembles of texts” (Tuchman, 
1979). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER III 
WAR IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO 
“US sovereignty is no longer an issue of secure borders and secure interests…instead a certain 
drive toward, self-display, a certain style of national masculinity; and war becomes the material 
arena for its performative constitution, self-making rather than self-defending.  The sublime 
spectacle of overwhelming power is the mechanism through which the feminizing humiliation of 
whatever enemy can be dredged up is to be accomplished, but more than that, it is the material 
sign of the superpower’s superpower.” ~Mann 
On April 6, 1994 Juvenal Habyarimana, the President of Rwanda’s, private aircraft was 
shot down over Kigali, Rwanda.  In the next 100 days approximately 800,000 Tutsis were 
massacred by Hutus.  The genocide was justified by the Hutu power regime as a response to the 
assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu President by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF); a Tutsi rebel 
group working outside Rwandan borders to overthrow the government.  Although we will never 
know with certainty, it is now widely believed the aircraft was shot down by Hutu extremists 
within the government to legitimate the mass killing of Tutsis.  The RPF, operating from Uganda 
and without the aid of the International community, invaded Rwanda, led by General Paul 
Kagame, and ended the genocide.  Immediately after the RPF captured Kigali, Hutu militias and 
civilians began fleeing en masse over the border into neighboring Zaire, because they feared 
reprisal killings by the new Tutsi government. 
Over one million Hutus arrived in hastily constructed refugee camps directly over the 
border causing another immediate humanitarian crisis.  Cholera broke out and killed 50,000 
refugees in the first month.  The militias were never disarmed as they entered the camps, and 
quickly began running them as recruitment centers for a reinvasion of Rwanda.  Hutu militias 
63 
 
began extorting relief workers and stealing relief supplies.  Reports of rape became widespread.  
President Mobutu Sesse Seko refused to send military or police forces to help secure the refugee 
camps.  Due to the increasing militarization within the camps international aid agencies began to 
pull out their workers, including MSF.   
Having established power in Rwanda the RPF wanted to find the Hutu genocidares.  In 
the Zairian camps it was impossible to tell soldiers and civilians apart.  Between November 1996 
and May 1997 the RPF began staging cross-border raids into the refugee camps to murder 
suspected perpetrators of the genocide.  This caused Hutu refugees to flee the camps seeking 
safety further in the interior of Zaire.  As they fled they were actively pursued by RPF soldiers 
supported by the Armed Forces for the Liberation of the Democratic Congo-Zaire (AFDL).  The 
AFDL was a disaffected rebel group in Zaire working to over throw President Mobutu.  This 
collusion between the Rwandan government and a Zairian rebel group further incentivized 
Mobutu from sending in troops to disarm the camps, which were now largely lawless.  In May 
1997 the leader of the AFDL Laurent Kabila succeeded, with the help of the RPF, in sending 
Mobutu into exile, and taking power in Zaire.  They renamed the country the Democratic 
Republic of Congo.        
Still processing the genocide, the United Nations was concerned with Hutu refugees now 
missing in the forests of DRC and presumed dead, and the ongoing RPF military incursions, and 
decided to send in investigators.  President Kabila refused to cooperate with UN investigators, 
because of his alliance with the RPF.  Finally, in 1998 President Kabila decided it was time to 
demonstrate his autonomy from Rwanda and ordered the RPF troops pull out of Eastern DRC.  
Rwandan President Paul Kagame refused to order his troops to withdraw out of fear that 
President Kabila had shifted his support to the Hutu militias, and would help them invade 
64 
 
Rwanda.  In retaliation, President Kabila began to encourage discrimination against the 
Banyamulenge an ethnic Tutsi minority living in Eastern DRC.  Rwanda sought the help of 
neighboring Uganda, and invaded DRC to overthrow President Kabila.  Their attempt was 
unsuccessful.   
Afterward, Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, backed the creation 
of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), a rebel group composed of the Banyamulenge.  
The RCD wanted take possession of the mineral rich areas of Eastern DRC and force Kabila out.  
Clashes between the government and RCD lead to the outbreak of a full-blown civil war in 1998.  
Meanwhile President Kabila enlisted the support of Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia to help him 
retain power.  As the war continued the RCD eventually split into two forces, one allied with 
Rwanda and the other with Uganda, and more and more rebel groups began to proliferate within 
Congo’s borders.  Within this conflict economic exploitation, looting, murder, torture, rampant 
corruption, lack of social service infrastructure, IDP’s, incitement of ethnic rivalry, and 
overwhelming sexual and gender based violence took over. It is within this context, and the 
history of the failure to intervene to prevent or end the genocide in Rwanda, that the United 
Nations felt compelled to act in the DRC.   
In 1999 the Lusaka Peace Accords were signed.  The United Nations monitored the 
implementation of this ceasefire between DRC, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Namibia, and 
Zimbabwe; all supporters of various rebel groups operating in DRC during the civil war.  There 
has been some debate over whether the conflict in the DRC constitutes an interstate war, because 
the rebel groups are not official state parties, and they are operating within the boundaries of one 
country.  However, six nations involved signed the Lusaka Peace Accords, which I feel 
recognizes the legitimacy of their participation in a multi-state conflict.  In July 2002 Rwanda 
65 
 
and the DRC signed a peace deal known as the Pretoria Accord.  It called for the removal of all 
Rwandan troops from DRC, and the cooperation of Congo’s government in the disbanding of 
any Hutu Interhamwe still operating in the Eastern forests.  In 2003 a transitional government 
was established in DRC, followed by disarmament of rebel groups, and the writing of a new 
constitution.  In 2006 elections were held for the first time in almost 50 years.  In spite of this 
progress in DRC violence among militias along the border between Rwanda and DRC is still 
ongoing.   
The United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUC) began in 1999 during the Lusaka Peace 
Accords.  It was conceived of initially to monitor the ceasefire between Angola, DRC, Namibia, 
Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.  MONUC also helped to organize elections in DRC.  This was 
a Chapter VI deployment without permitting the use of force.  On July 30, 2006 the first free and 
fair elections were held in DRC in 46 years.  In 2011 MONUC was replaced in DRC with the 
United Nations Stabilization Mission in Congo (MONUSCO).  The Lusaka Accords did not 
provide the lasting peace and stability hoped for. In March 2013 the United Nations passed 
resolution 2098 authorizing an Intervention Brigade be established and sent into DRC under 
MONUSCO’s mandate to, “neutralize and disarm Congolese rebels, foreign armed groups” (UN 
Resolution 2098).  It is the first time since the inception of the United Nations the Security 
Council deployed UN troops under Chapter VII, which means they have the prior authorization 
to use force offensively to enforce peace.  In March 2014 the UN passed resolution 2147 
renewing the Intervention Brigade mandate.   
When the Intervention Brigade was deployed to DRC in July 2013 it was a force of 3,069 
troops.  They went into Eastern DRC and issued an ultimatum to M23 rebels in Goma to disarm 
by August 1.  As of November 2013 the M23 rebel group had stopped fighting, and agreed to 
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disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR).  This has since been heralded as a great 
victory for the Intervention Brigade, and a sign of the success in deploying a UN army in place 
of traditional peacekeepers, which have been criticized for being too risk adverse to be effectual 
in the field.  The Intervention Brigade has long-range artillery, armored personnel carriers, 
drones, attack helicopters, and snipers.  There is no confusion that this is a military unit.  The 
Office of the United Nations Secretary General has stated that the Intervention Brigade was a 
unique response to special circumstances that will not become a model for future UN missions.  
However, now that the boundaries for peacekeeping have been expanded to include peace 
enforcement, will the legitimacy of future UN missions be undermined or enhanced by the 
Intervention Brigade in DRC?   
MONUSCO’s original mandate was to address human rights violations, promote stability 
in the Congo, protect IDPs, protect civilians, manage positive relationships with neighbor 
countries, promote economic growth and apprehend rebel leader Joseph Kony of the Lord’s 
Resistance Army.  Challenges to this mandate were, and continue to be, the presence of unstable 
refugee camps in Eastern DRC, widespread SGBV, resource exploitation and control by rebel 
groups, DDR of armed combatants, and accusations of UN soldiers operating with impunity; 
raping civilians, and operating corruptly undermining their authority.  To help address these 
ongoing challenges the UN decided to create the Intervention Brigade and opt for military 
intervention over diplomacy.  The war is ongoing.  What are other standards by which to 
evaluate the Intervention Brigades success? 
 It is not possible to distinguish MONUSCO troops from Intervention Brigade troops.  
They both wear the same blue helmets, ride on the same transports, and operate from the same 
bases.  Traditionally under International Humanitarian Law UN troops are peacekeepers, and as 
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such are not allowed to be targeted, because they are a non-party to the conflict.  The 
Intervention Brigade is a party to the conflict, and jeopardizes the safety of UN personnel 
operating alongside them, because they can be targeted as combatants.  Furthermore, civilians 
have a difficult time differentiating between different types of UN troops, and may not seek 
protection for fear of being caught up in battles.   
 Another hallmark of UN missions has been impartiality.  Neither MONUSCO nor the 
Intervention Brigade has remained impartial in DRC.   Since the arrival of UN troops they have 
been closely allied with the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC).  The 
FARDC is known for committing the same crimes against civilians as other rebel groups; 
including rape, looting, and torture.  By aligning themselves with this group citizens may 
perceive the UN as condoning or participating in these crimes, which continue to go unpunished 
due to the lack of judicial infrastructure.  In addition, remaining impartial allows the UN access 
into areas controlled by different rebel groups to administer aid to non-combatants, and create 
safety corridors for refugee return.  If MONUSCO is seen as an arm of the government military 
they will not be able to maintain relationships with all parties, and service their primary role as a 
safeguard for civilians.  
Historically, the protection of civilians has been the primary concern for UN troops.  
MONUSCO has chosen not to intervene during civilian massacres and blatant abuses of human 
rights despite their expanded mandate in the DRC.  On June 6, 2014 there was a civilian 
massacre in the town of Mutarule, and despite having just under 20,000 troops in the country no 
MONOSCO or Intervention Brigade officers were deployed to assist.  In September 2013, 941 
surrendered fighters were sent to Kotakoli Camp in Equateur Province in Northwestern Congo 
awaiting DDR.  By September 2014 none of the soldiers had been reintegrated, and forty-two of 
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the former combatants, five wives, and fifty-seven children had died at the camp from starvation.  
The camp is also being guarded by an FARDC army commander.  There are no medical supplies, 
it is a remote location, and in the past year the government has paid the equivalent of twenty 
dollars US twice to each man to afford food.  At the behest of Human Rights Watch the head of 
MONUSCO visited the camp on September 11, 2014, and hopefully the Intervention Brigade 
will see it fit to intervene to stop these blatant human rights violations.               
  Lastly, the use of force by UN troops has traditionally been reserved for self-defense.  
MONUSCO’s mandate has expanded the definition of self-defense to include “defense of the 
mission” as written in its Capstone Doctrine.  If this becomes the accepted definition of self-
defense then any UN mission under Chapter VI or VII could claim self-defense for the mission 
to validate use of force.  Claiming the mission is itself an entity that requires violence to ensure 
its success is a dangerous precedent to set.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER IV 
 (RE)PRESENTATIONS OF RAPE IN THE CONTEXT OF WAR IN CONGO     
“To produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will 
nullify explanation” ~ Robert Frank (as quoted in On Photography) 
“Language’s endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to 
dispossess.” ~ Frantz Fanon  
i. Introduction 
 The Democratic Republic of the Congo is not the only place branded by the media, 
governments, and aid organizations as the worst place on Earth to be a woman.  Other countries 
indicted include: India, South Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently Sweden.  Domestic 
violence and rape in South Africa are cited as evidence.  In Afghanistan, lack of access to 
education and ability to make choices over their lives earn women a nomination.  In India bride 
burning, dowry murder, and rape are exemplary qualifications.  Other factors cited include 
impunity for sexual violence, lack of healthcare services, human trafficking, son preference, and 
poverty.  Some or all of these conditions exist for women everywhere, but are reported to occur 
with higher frequency in these countries.  Sources for these claims are as diverse as the countries 
listed, ranging from women’s magazine Marie Claire to Amnesty International.          
Utilizing the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a case study, I employ content 
analysis and text mining to document media discourses of women’s bodies that will help increase 
our understanding of the ways in which media shape and are shaped by the fetishization of 
women as vulnerable.  Specifically I will analyze reporting and policy briefs on the DRC 
beginning in 1996 with the first Congo war and continuing through today to investigate how U.S. 
construction of gender informs coverage.  I anticipated finding that coverage is dominated by 
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narratives that construct women as alternatively pre-victims or victims, which reduces the 
agency of Congolese women representationally and discursively, and indicates larger structural 
bias toward men as agents.  Media analysis allows me to uncover how the media is in dialogue 
with theory and public policy, and how women’s bodies become a site where those relationships 
are acted out.  Further, it enables me to deconstruct taken-for-granted understandings of 
masculinity and femininity that continue to pervade American culture. 
I make use of content analysis, text mining, and discourse analysis to document how 
means of mass communication collectively regarded can describe the customs and practices of 
individual people and culture, and how they make meaning of/in the world (Macnamara, 2005).  
Media informs public opinion, and can operate to advocate or to disempower, but is always 
present in decision making.  Furthermore, media operates at the institutional level influencing the 
construction, understanding, and implementation of laws and policies that render salient 
gendered cultural messages.  It is widely understood that media influence is not unidimensional, 
and audiences have the power to (re)interpret and frame media within their lived experience, but 
this does not detract from the formative relationship between media and society (Easteal, 
Holland, Judd, 2014). How do we interact with media?  What is the relationship between 
knowledge and access to information?  Is this unidirectional or multifaceted?  What is the role of 
“the other” in storytelling/reporting?  How does othering make stories intelligible for a Western 
audience? 
It is my objective to think about and re-contest conventional understandings of rape as I 
conduct my analysis.  Rape is about power, and does not exclusively violate the body of a victim, 
but the larger body politic.  Farwell posits there is a tension between acknowledging rape in the 
context of war and accepting it as an inevitable component of war because, “women experience 
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rape in the context of war against themselves or their compatriots not as an individual crime or as 
medicalized symptoms, but within a sociopolitical-military context” (Farwell, 401, 2004).  In 
patriarchal society women are seen to embody the culture, religion, and state including the men 
who are also its subjects.  By strategically raping women you are pursuing a political objective.  
There seems to be a discontinuity expressed in literature and media on rape in the context of war 
that contradictorily recognizes rape as a weapon of war as a political tool, but insists uncritically 
that it be prosecuted as a sex crime.  In wartime rape is not sexual violence, but sexualized 
violence, and this nuance is lost when it is categorized as a sex crime.  The question for me 
became not why do soldiers rape, but what can be done to make women non-instrumental targets 
for rape in the context of war, and sexual violence more broadly.  
Why is rape an effective tool of war?  Through my research I have identified eight 
primary reasons women are effective and accessible targets for rape in the context of war.  
Women are seen culturally as mothers of the nation. Raping women terrorizes civilian 
populations into compliance, because it indiscriminately targets noncombatants.  Rape is an 
effective strategy for driving communities from their homes to conquer territory.  Rape continues 
to cause physical, emotional, psychological, and social harm to the survivor and the community 
after the initial attack.  The intention of some rape is to mutilate and sterilize the woman so that 
she can longer bear enemy children. Men are also targeted physically, and psychologically 
through women’s bodies.  Mass rape signals defeat, because the men are unable to protect their 
homes, and may humiliate men by depriving them of the ability to father children.  Rape attacks 
cultural norms and taboos regarding sexuality, particularly regarding incest and virginity, 
demoralizing and profaning communities, it creates mistrust and social alienation.  Finally rape 
is cheap, by which I mean it requires no capital or training.  
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Broadly, I will open up the conversation about rape in the context of war by suggesting 
that the recognition of rape as a weapon of war, while intended to be a positive step forward for 
women’s rights and recognition may serve to foreclose female agency (Buss, 147, 2009).  Does 
recognition of rape as a weapon of war institutionalize a discourse of women as pre-
victims/victims? What are the macro-structural problems related to simultaneous privileging of 
violence and masculinity in power relationships (Enloe, 2000)?   
Additionally, I am interested how media stories gesture towards instrumental narratives 
about women and/or what other narratives will be provided.  Instrumental narratives about 
women include women as embodiments of the nation, women as reproducing the home, and 
women as objects making them targets for violence directed at the state, which is largely 
spatially constructed as the domain of men, or a particular community.  An example of women as 
objects is the ubiquitous linking together of raping and looting in descriptions of wartime 
violence.  These narratives are part of larger power structures and cultural fetishes regulating 
gender and sexuality that go unexamined, and can be paradoxically reinforced by the media in 
the process of uncovering them (Buss, 2009).  Categories are intended to demystify, but the work 
they perform I argue does just the opposite.  
 My point of intervention is theoretical, and concerned with the production of knowledge 
about women’s bodies.  My results are intended to help increase understanding of sexual and 
gender based violence as part of larger structural forces that reinforce social constructions of 
gender and patriarchy.  Words matter, and while I am in no way under the naive impression that 
editorial boards are a secret cabal bent on the oppression of women worldwide, the stories they 
author and publish by design both inform and are informed by the world around them.  
Hopefully this intervention will lead to an improved understanding of this mutually constituent 
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relationship.  The stories we tell about ourselves and others in the media become fodder for 
policy recommendations and institutional pre-deployment and field gender training on how to 
approach gender in conflicts.  Currently NGOs, INGOs, governments and various international 
organizations, such as the United Nations and NATO, are incorporating gender training into their 
implementation policies and strategies.   
As I conducted my data analysis there were three areas I focused on: authorship, 
audience, and content.  Authorship refers to the publisher, author, source(s), and intent behind 
writing the piece.  Audience includes readership and why the issue and message presented 
matters to readers.  Content means the ideas, values, and points of view, both overt and implied, 
who or what is left out, and how might this affect interpretation.  I am operating from the 
premise culture creates common understandings of media messages.  Throughout my work I 
have referred to these common readings as culturally authorized narratives.  By combining my 
theoretical framework with the results of my data analysis I will demonstrate the representational 
work being done with awareness raising reporting.  
In total I compiled and analyzed 42 news articles, country reports, and policy briefings 
from sources including but not limited to: the New York Times, Time Magazine, The 
Washington Post, The Huffington Post, CNN, ABC News, Christian Science Monitor, Marie 
Claire, the United Nations, and International Red Cross. I compiled articles from a sampling of 
Western media outlets that reproduced the phrase "rape capital of the world" in reporting on the 
DRC over the period of 1996-2016.  I located sources online, through the University of Oregon 
library microfiche collections, and in current newsstand publications.  Once I had a diverse 
sample of articles meeting these conditions, I conducted a close reading of each text identifying 
and coding references to: gender, masculinity, femininity, SGBV, including but not limited to 
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rape as a weapon of war/war rape, and repetition of the phrase "rape capital of the world", "worst 
place on Earth to be a woman", and other similar narrative phrases.  Next I identified quotations 
within each text that spoke to these themes.  I then grouped the excerpts based on content into 
categories.  Based on these categories I mapped my theoretical framework onto the selections 
from my larger data set, and began to code for patterns of representation that linked the theory 
with the data.   
The articles I present do not represent a comprehensive analysis of all reporting on war in 
the Congo.  Instead I chose to conduct a systematic analysis of a sample of reporting that best 
captures the representational work being done in the circulation of awareness raising 
representations of rape in the context of war in the DR Congo.  I focused on American media 
outlets, because as an American, I am best able to speak to the context in which they produce and 
disseminate stories.  A limitation of my study is that I cannot say that all coverage does this 
work.  However, I was looking specifically for articles that have this kind of coverage to reveal 
how it works in practice.  The themes that emerged reflect the theoretical framework I have built, 
which represents a large part of my thesis work and the data analysis I did.  Further, the analysis 
of the articles I put forth is intended to demonstrate the circulation of discourse about rape in the 
context of war inflected by my theoretical analysis. 
Based on the articles and policy papers I compiled, I have identified five themes that 
capture aspects of representation that I have labeled: performativity (Butler), the single-story 
(Adichie), instrumentality (Branch), lootrapeandpillage (Enloe), and coming to voice.  Four are 
deductive, meaning they are defined in part by my theoretical framework, but came about 
through an interactive process putting the data and theory into conversation.  However coming to 
voice was inductive, because it emerged independently during the process of my data analysis.  
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Each of these themes represents an aspect of my theoretical framework and demonstrates the 
circulation of discourse about rape in the context of war. Performativity is deductive, and refers 
to identity construction as a result of reading from preauthorized cultural scripts that inform how 
to frame stories to make them legible for a Western audience. The single story is deductive, and 
is the thematization of the Congo wars around SGBV, specifically rape in the context of war.  
Instrumentality is deductive, and refers to the construction of masculinity and femininity that is 
uncritically (re)produced in narrative form. Lootrapeandpillage is deductive, and describes the 
repetition of the words rape, loot, and pillage in descriptions of wartime violence, “women who 
suffer rape in wartime usually remain faceless…they merge with the pockmarked landscape; 
they are put on the list of war damage along with gutted houses and mangled rail lines” (Enloe, 
108, 2000).  Coming to voice is inductive, and is the way Congolese women narrate their lives in 
reporting.  Commonalities between all five are the equation between woman and victim and the 
simultaneous privileging of violence and masculinity.  These themes emerged during my 
research and guided my data analysis.  Before I delve into the categories any further I would like 
to step back and look at the statistics reported by NGOs and reprinted by the media on the 
prevalence of rape in the context of war in the Congo.  These offer context for thinking through 
the way Congolese women are overwhelmingly portrayed as victims. 
Here is a sampling of the numbers published to convince Western audiences DRC is, “the 
worst place on Earth to be a woman”.  A 2011 study published by the American Journal of 
Public Health estimated 48 women are raped every hour in DR Congo (Time Magazine, Jessica 
Hatcher, 2012).   According to the UN Population Fund in 2009, 8,000 women were raped.  The 
UN Children’s Fund reported having treated 16,000 rape victims in 2010, half of whom were 
children.  Dr. Ange Rose Valimamdi, supervisor of Goma’s sexual violence prevention and 
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response organization, assesses the majority of rapes are never reported (Washington Times, 
Heather Murdock, 2011).  According to an article published in The Nation, “Tens of thousands 
of rape victims have survived” (Ann Jones, The Nation, 2008).  I decided to conduct a general 
comparison of the statistics on rape and sexual violence between the United States and DR 
Congo.  This comparison shows the link between awareness raising representations of rape in the 
context of war in the Congo, and American self-perception of sexual violence.  It is my belief 
that othering sexualized violence impacts self-perception, a discussion which I will go into 
further below.     
Before looking at the numbers it is important to understand exactly what is legally 
understood by the terms rape and sexual violence in America.  The US Department of Justice 
(USDOJ) defines rape as, “Forced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion as 
well as physical force. Forced sexual intercourse means penetration by the offender(s). Includes 
attempted rapes, male as well as female victims, and both heterosexual and same sex rape. 
Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape”.  The USDOJ defines sexual assault as, “A wide 
range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted rape.  These crimes include attacks or 
attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and 
offender.  Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or 
fondling.  It also includes verbal threats”.  According to the National Sexual Violence Research 
Center (NSVRC), 91% of all rape victims in the U.S. are women.  One in five women will be 
raped during their lifetime, and one in four girls will experience this rape before they turn 
eighteen (ibid).  Further, one in three women who are raped as girls will experience rape again as 
adults (NSVRC).  Rape is considered the most underreported crime (ibid).  It is estimated 63% of 
77 
 
sexual assaults are not reported (ibid).  In eight of ten cases the woman knew her rapist 
(NSVRC).  
Humanitarian organizations working in the DRC put the total number of women raped in 
Congo around 500,000. As of July 2016 the UN reports the population of the Congo is 
4,748,259; roughly half of whom are women.  If you do the math that puts the prevalence of 
rape among the female population at one in five.  This statistically matches U.S. rape figures.  If 
roughly the same number of women will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes in both the 
U.S. and DRC numbers alone cannot account for the distinction of world rape capital.  It was 
generative for me to keep this in mind as I attempted to find alternative accounts for this 
distinction.     
Throughout the articles, claims are made about SGBV and rape in the context of war that 
rely on socially constructed understandings of gender that go unacknowledged, but without 
which many of the conclusions drawn about victims, perpetrators, and cultural explanations for 
violence could not be drawn.  In order to illuminate covert assumptions about gender replicated 
in awareness raising reporting I mined the articles for examples of the performance of gender.  
The performance of gender includes descriptions of attributes ascribed to masculinity and 
femininity. In the figure below you will see examples of the performance of gender that include: 
women’s value is linked with their virginity, women discussed as cultural conduits, masculinity 
presented as inherently violent, male rape discussed by calling the survivors masculinity into 
question, and woman being equated with victim and man being equated with perpetrator.  I am 
using Judith Butler’s explanation of the link between language and speech, and the way we 
perform gender through our bodies.  This performance is based on heteronormative gender roles.  
She calls this performativity.  In other words, it is not just that I am labeled from birth as female 
78 
 
or male, but my lived experience reflects the doing of my gender.  Media reflects the 
performance of gender, and uses it as a justification for sexualized violence.  
ii. Thematic Analysis 
Now that I have framed how I am approaching my data selection and analysis I will move 
into showing how the data reveals the five themes I have identified.  Further, I will highlight 
quotations mined from the articles I selected that link my theoretical interventions with the work 
being done in awareness raising reporting on rape in the context of war in the DRC. 
a. Performativity 
In the section Gender & Human Rights I use Mann to explain how gender operates as a 
justificatory project in the United States parallel to Branch’s work on human rights as a 
mobilizing narrative.  Mann explains, “…gender is a structure of the social imaginary that binds 
us together in a community with others.  It is at the same time a structure of and operation of 
language that shapes how we think and what we can think” (Mann, 8, 2014).  We can see how 
language is operating in reporting on rape in the context of war that employs the structure of 
gender to shape how we think about the issue.  For example, “I’m working around the hypothesis 
that when men are not able to achieve what are often rigid standards of what makes successful 
manhood, they become extremely anxious and volatile, and they will revert to dangerous and 
violent behavior in order to try to assert themselves as men.” (Laurent, 2014)  Here gender is a 
justificatory project to explain why men commit rape, because they feel their manhood 
threatened.  Since gender is fundamental to our being in the world it generates feelings of social 
worth or worthlessness (ibid, 175).  In tandem with a perceived assault on manhood is the 
perception of femaleness as inherently vulnerable and in need of preservation. 
 
79 
 
 
The recognition of femaleness as vulnerable works together with the rejection of 
masculine vulnerability.  In the 2011 Washington Times article “Congo a Country of Rape and 
Ruin” Heather Murdock explains, ““Virginity is a precious thing,” she said.  “If she loses it, she 
loses a very important part of herself”.  This example shows how women are equated with their 
virginity, their sexuality, which is precarious and can be taken away from them.  Another 
Figure 1. Examples of Performativity in media data sample 
“Virginity is a precious thing,” she said.  “If she loses it, she loses a very important 
part of herself.” (Murdock, 2011) 
“I’m working around the hypothesis that when men are not able to achieve what are 
often rigid standards of what makes successful manhood, they become extremely anxious and 
volatile, and they will revert to dangerous and violent behavior in order to try to assert 
themselves as men.” (Laurent, 2014) 
“I think this issue is universal, “he says.  “Myself, I was raised to be quite masculine –
playing football, fist fighting.  It took me a long time to be in touch with myself and get away 
from that social posturing.” (ibid) 
“She had become a message to her people.” (Kristof, 2008). 
“In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a rape survivor is an outcast, blamed and 
shamed by local tradition and religion for the only crime pinned squarely on the victim.  She 
(my emphasis) is dirtied…”because rape is a crime women and girls (my emphasis) have 
learned to suffer in shame and silence…” (Jones, 2008) 
“As direct targets of men at war, women and girls suffer terribly…Men singly or in 
gangs’ rape women and girls…” (ibid) 
“It’s true that long before the war Congolese men treated women as lesser 
creatures…It’s true that Congolese men hold notions that promote rape: that having sex 
makes men stronger…And it’s true that child rape is traditionally considered an offense only 
against the father whose property is “spoiled”, an offense resolved by “compromise” – that is, 
a man-to-man payoff…” (ibid) 
“Cultural factors are insufficient to explain the frequency and unspeakable brutality of 
rape in the DRC…” (ibid) 
“Look at DRC from the outside and it’s hard to see it as anything but a war against 
women.” (ibid) 
“It is often said that raping women is intended to humiliate men.” (ibid) 
“Cultural norms die too when women are raped.” (ibid) 
“…the women of CFK broke the cultural silence and began to talk to survivors and 
their families about rape.” (ibid) 
“...culture of impunity” (ibid) 
“Men here, like anywhere, are reluctant to come forward.  Several who did said they 
instantly became castaways in their villages, lonely, ridiculed figures, derisively referred to as 
“bush wives”.” (Gettleman, 2009) 
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example of female vulnerability is presented by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times: “Men 
here, like anywhere, are reluctant to come forward.  Several who did said they instantly became 
castaways in their villages, lonely, ridiculed figures, derisively referred to as “bush wives”.”  In 
the articles I see two sides of the same coin, “…the injurability of the female body, its 
penetrability, its shame, and masculine invulnerability and pride are evoked by the same frame” 
(Mann, 2014, 147).  Male rape survivors have their masculinity called into question, because the 
act is equated with feminization.  For a man, rape is an act of power that affirms masculinity.  To 
be the victim of rape takes away access to male privilege, because the body is injured and 
vulnerable, which is seen as being feminized.  This equivalency shows the power gender has in 
producing and justifying violence, which is echoed in the line, “It is often said that raping 
women is intended to humiliate men” (Jones, 2008).  This signals the co-constitution of 
masculinity and femininity, and persistent vulnerability of women in the face of militarized 
masculinity.  However, it is important to remember Enloe’s caution against accepting ‘mere 
maleness as sufficient cause for wartime rape’ when there are multiple layers of power at work. 
b. The Single-Story  
I would like to return to a discussion I began in the introduction. Chimamanda Adichie 
succinctly and cogently reminds us that historically Africa has been spoken for and about, like 
Congolese women in these articles, but the words of Africans are omitted.  Adichie tells us 
instead of looking at the complexity of nations, cultures, and peoples we homogenize Africa and 
Africans in categories, for example as poor or ignorant.  She names this phenomenon the single 
story, “If all one hears about Africa is the people are poor, poverty becomes the single story 
about them” (Adichie, 2012).  As my analysis of reporting on DR Congo shows, victim has 
81 
 
become the single story told about Congolese women, and when you, “show people as one thing 
and only one thing over and over again,” that is all they become (ibid).  
The most prolific single-story told about the Democratic Republic of Congo is it is the 
rape capital of the world.  This phrase is reprinted in every one of the articles I compiled.  It is 
attributed to Margot Wallstrom, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence 
in Conflict, “Margot Wallstrom has called Congo the “rape capital of the world”. (Hatcher, 
2012).  The single-story is also another aspect of performativity whereby women are reduced to 
either pre-victims or victims of rape, because of their vulnerable status as women. In addition, 
the link between the reproduction of the phrase and its origin with the United Nations, which has 
the world’s largest troop presence in the Congo, is an example of instrumentalization.  
Instrumentalization is, according to Branch, and as discussed below, a global administrative 
dimension of power where human rights are actuated in policy decisions and funding allocations 
that become permanent and self-referential institutions.  The administrative dimension of power 
is another layer that operates along with gender, which, as Enloe reminds us, is one of many 
ways power can do work, and why masculinity alone cannot account for rape in the context of 
war.  
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Figure 2. Examples of the Single-Story in media data sample 
“…the women all across Africa –the worst place there is to be a woman – who 
somehow manage to carry that entire continent on their backs.” (Cooper, 2005) 
“The rape capital of the world is Eastern Congo…a former U.N. force 
commander there, Patrick Cammaert, says it is “more dangerous to be a woman than 
to be a soldier”.” (Kristof, 2008) 
“Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, former deputy U.N. force commander in the 
DRC, said, “It is more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier right now in 
eastern DRC”.” (Jones, 2008) 
“…the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman” (Radia and Hughes, 
2009) 
“…the use of rape as a weapon of war has affected hundreds of thousands of 
women (my emphasis)” (Kelemen, 2009) 
“Sexual violence against women has been a feature in most recent conflicts” 
(ibid) 
“The more we know about conflicts, the more we realize that women, who do 
not start conflicts, are often the victims.” (Hillary Clinton, as quoted by Kelemen, 
2009)  
“U.N. officials have called the rape capital of the world…” (ibid) 
“Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases.  The 
best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for 
armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.” 
(Gettleman, 2009) 
“The United Nations calls Congo the rape capital of the world” (Gettleman, 
2009) 
“…countless women, and recently many men, have been raped.” (ibid) 
“The United Nations has named the Democratic Republic of Congo the “rape 
capital of the world”.” (Elbagir, 2010) 
“…the UN calls it the “rape capital of the world”.” (Baldauf, 2010) 
“…the rape capital of the world…” (UN News Center, 2010) 
 
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In the section titled Gender & Sexuality I discuss Sharron Marcus’ concept of a rape 
script, which provides some context for how the repetition of the phrase “the rape capital of the 
world” in discussions about DRC frames women as pre-victims/victims of sexualized violence.  
Marcus explains a rape script is, “a scripted interaction which takes place in language and can be 
understood in terms of conventional masculinity and femininity…inscribed before an individual 
instance of rape” (Marcus, 390, 2002).  What Marcus is referring to are the ways in which before 
a rape occurs we have a culturally embedded understanding of who will be the victim and who 
Figure 3. Examples of the Single-Story in media data sample cont. 
 “If women continue to suffer sexual violence, it is not because the law is inadequate 
to protect them, but because it is inadequately enforced.” (ibid) 
“…the persistent scourge of violence against women, including sexual violence…” 
(ibid) 
“Congo is known as the rape capital of the world…” (Tovrov, 2011) 
“Congo a Country of Rape and Ruin” (Murdock, 2011) 
“…the rape capital of the world” (ibid) 
“Activists say rape in Congo…drives the people further into poverty…” (ibid) 
“…the rape capital of the world” (Seligson, 2011) 
“Nottage says.  Ruined “is the story of the Congo.”  Her Congo journey made her 
realize “that a war was being fought over the bodies of women.” (ibid) 
“I wanted to understand who these women were beyond their status as victims,” says 
Nottage.  Several of the women became the basis for the four characters in her 2009 Pulitzer 
Prize-winning play Ruined.” (ibid) 
“Speaking out on sexual violence doesn’t reflect the need for greater empowerment 
overall – “It really requires going beyond looking at women as victims.” (ibid) 
“Margot Wallstrom has called Congo the “rape capital of the world”.” (Hatcher, 2012) 
“It is as sure as the sun is shining in the sky that women are raped everyday”, says 
Vuhaka.” (ibid) 
“…rape capital of the world” (Meyer, 2012) 
“Congo itself, which is considered by many the rape capital of the world…” (Allimadi 
and Ngemi, 2012) 
“As the UK held the first-ever global summit aimed at ending sexual violence in 
conflict zones, Pete Muller was asked to present his portraits of Congolese women who had 
been victims of such crimes…Yet, he tells TIME, these photographs don’t tell the whole 
story…[Behind the story] of almost every brutalized women, there’s a man.  But somehow 
it’s become a women’s issue… ” (Laurent, 2014) 
“…says Muller.  “In society, a soldier with a gun is seen as a powerful man, but within 
the structure of the military, these guys are often unpaid for months at a time, they can’t 
provide for their families, they are often on combat operation consistently, sometimes for 
years.” (ibid) 
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will be the perpetrator informed by gender norms.  For example, in a piece aired on National 
Public Radio’s All Things Considered Michele Kelemen states, “…the use of rape as a weapon 
of war has affected hundreds of thousands of women (my emphasis)”.  This assumption that 
women are the exclusive victims is repeated by Jessica Hatcher in Time Magazine, who quotes 
an aid worker saying, “It is as sure as the sun is shining in the sky that women (my emphasis) are 
raped every day.”   
There are articles that mention male rape as well, but treat it as an aberration or exception 
to the rule.  Jeffery Gettleman writes about male rape for The New York Times claiming that, 
“Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases.  The best answer, they say, 
is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and 
demoralize Congolese communities into submission.” When a woman is the victim and a man is 
the perpetrator this is socially perceived as a legitimate act of violence (Marcus, 2002).  When a 
man is the victim or a woman the assailant it violates the culturally authorized narrative of 
sexualized violence or rape script.  This supports data gathered in the study by Desiree Lwambo 
I discuss in the same section where Congolese men surveyed stated the felt in gender training 
and sensitization programs gender was synonymous with woman, and, “while it is true that a 
great majority of individuals suffering from SGBV are female, a single focus on this group 
renders the equality aspect of programs obsolete” (Lwambo, 21, 2011).  Furthermore, 
“Legislation backs up the objectifying violence of the rape script by not defining rape as an 
assault, which would fall under the rubric of subject-subject violence against persons, but as a 
sexual offense” (ibid, 397).  Branch’s explanation of instrumental narratives helps us conceive of 
the link between single stories, the social construction of gender, and administrative and political 
structures, such as legislation.    
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c. Instrumentality 
Policy decisions, resource distribution, funding allocation, and laws are reactions to 
popular understandings of what is needed for redress in situations of conflict, political crisis, and 
human rights deprivations.  When one aspect is over emphasized it receives the largest share of 
money, resources, and institutional capacity to the detriment of other needs.  Humanitarianism 
can also become a regulatory mechanism whereby stereotypes about people as violent, lawless, 
and in need of saving become institutionalized.  When Branch discusses instrumentalization he is 
problematizing how human rights discourse is used to justify physical interventions.  In the 
International Business Times, for example, Daniel Tovrov writes, “170 women were raped…In 
response, the Security Council renewed the Peacekeeping mandate in the DRC…20,000 UN 
troops in the Congo, the biggest force anywhere in the world”.  In the course of this process the 
structures of power that author and authorize become “mystified” (Branch, 2011), and the 
administrative structures left behind normalize models that are not natural, but constructed.  
Nicholas Kristof writes about the need for intervention in the New York Times as well: “The 
United Nations Security Council will hold a special session on sexual violence…just may help 
mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign policy issue.”  The United 
Nations is not only in a position to disseminate information about rape in the context of war and 
support I/NGOs with their interventions, but creates international law. 
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In the section Rape in the Context of War & International Law, Nicola Henry, echoing 
concerns raised by Marcus with the rape script, suggests international law is not necessarily the 
most effective tool for addressing rape in the context of war, because, “law has the power to 
define and legitimate some narratives, while at the same time, silence and suppress other 
meanings and stories…” (Henry, 2014, 97).  She is concerned with the creation of victim 
hierarchies where, for example, intimate partner or civilian rape, may not garner as much support 
or attention in juridical structures compared to “war rape”.  Human rights intervention in the 
Congo utilizes “war rape” as one of the primary reasons for their continued mandate.  This is 
supported by media who rely heavily on awareness raising representations of raped Congolese 
women to tell the story of ongoing conflict in the DRC.  This is the closed loop where 
instrumental narratives do their work.  In Branches investigation he found, “In Uganda, human 
rights interventions, in pursuing their own goals, ended up providing tools useless against the 
Figure 4.  Examples of Instrumentality in media data set 
“The United Nations Security Council will hold a special session on sexual 
violence…just may help mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign 
policy issue.” (Kristof, 2008) 
“To help Fatuma’s group fund itself, IRC bought them a field and trained these 
experienced cultivators in some advanced farming techniques…Writer/photographer Ann 
Jones is working as a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee…” (Jones, 2008) 
“She announced that the American government would train doctors, supply rape 
victims with video cameras to document violence, send American military engineers to help 
build facilities and train Congolese police officers, especially female police officers, to crack 
down on rapists.” (Gettleman, 2009) 
“They are also distributing fuel-efficient stoves, since many sexual assaults occur 
when women leave their villages looking for firewood.” (Tovrov, 2011) 
“170 women were raped…In response, the Security Council renewed the 
Peacekeeping mandate in the DRC…20,000 UN troops in the Congo, the biggest force 
anywhere in the world.” (ibid) 
“Supported by Hope in Action and Norwegian aid, most of their money is used for 
taking problematic cases to hospitals where, in the absence of public health service, they pay 
for treatment and rehabilitation.” (Hatcher, 2012) 
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forms of domination people faced, and so ended up naturalizing that violence, domination, and 
inequality, putting it beyond question or contestation” (Branch, 153, 2011).     
In order for individuals to access the services provided by these various interventions 
they begin to self-regulate into the available categories.  One of the categories is victim, 
particularly rape victim: “Supported by Hope in Action and Norwegian aid, most of their money 
is used for taking problematic cases to hospitals where, in the absence of public health service, 
they pay for treatment and rehabilitation.” (Hatcher, 2012).  Offering medical services to 
Congolese is admirable work, and I am not questioning the need to offer health services to rape 
survivors.  However in a country without any public healthcare it is not just survivors of SGBV 
that are in need of care.  What can end up happening when rape in the context of war is 
overemphasized is other medical services are forgotten or funding is diverted away from them to 
address rape.  Not all Congolese are survivors of rape, but they are all survivors of war, and the 
ongoing conflict that creates conditions where the government incapable of offering public 
hospitals.    
In addition to creating a permanent need for outside intervention to provide public goods 
such as healthcare, conflict becomes the preeminent historical condition of Africa and Africans.  
This leads to an understanding of Africa as a continent of violence where, “intervention becomes 
highly self-referential and self-justifying” (Branch, 30, 2011).  In other words, human rights 
interventions rely on the single-story of Congolese women as victims for their legitimacy. 
Similar to medical interventions only assisting rape survivors, there are other much needed 
services that are directed as redress for SGBV.  For example in The Nation Ann Jones writes 
about funding directed to train rape survivors in farming, “To help Fatuma’s group fund itself, 
IRC bought them a field and trained these experienced cultivators in some advanced farming 
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techniques…Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the International 
Rescue Committee…” (Jones, 2008).  This example is especially poignant, because the author, 
Ann Jones, is also employed by the International Rescue Committee who is distributing aid to 
the Congolese rape survivors.  The link between the circulation of discourse about rape in the 
context of war and policy decisions could not be more overt.   
d. Lootrapeandpillage 
In descriptions of armed conflicts, more often than not, the words rape, loot, and pillage 
occur together with little to no distinction between the acts.  One of the numerous examples 
appears in Time Magazine article “Things Fall Apart: Masculinity and Violence in Congo” by 
Olivier Laurent, “The group carried out a mass rape and looting…”  Other examples can be 
found in the Christian Science Monitor, “Systematically looting local homes and gang-raping” 
(Baldauf, 2010) and the title of a 2016 NPR online article, “Ex-Congolese Vice President 
Convicted of Rape, Murder, and Pillage”.  When war includes assaults on individuals and their 
property how do you best situate rape in that context?  When rapes are committed to pursue a 
political objective is it still a sex crime?  Can it be both?  Although looting and rape are acts that 
often parallel one another, Enloe warns us that there is a danger in normalizing sexualized 
violence alongside property destruction and theft, “Rape evokes the nightmarishness of war, but 
it becomes just an indistinguishable part of a poisonous wartime stew called “lootrapeandpillage” 
(Enloe, 108, 2000).  It lends itself to the conceptualization of women as natural resources, which 
is an influential part of current thinking on war rape.   
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As I previously discussed, women are often metaphorically understood to be mothers of 
the nation, and literally (re)produce future generations as well as the home.  Targeting women 
within the confines of their normative womanhood achieves strategic objectives that are reified 
when rape in the context of war is discussed alongside looting and pillaging.  However, if rape in 
the context of war was not understood as a sex crime, but rather an act of sexualized aggression, 
it would make sense not to separate these acts, but to conceive of them within the larger context 
of conflict.    
Figure 5. Examples of Lootrapeandpillage in media data set 
“…systematically looting local homes and gang-raping.” (Baldauf, 2010) 
“During the attack [the rebels] looted [the] population’s houses and raped several 
women.” (ibid) 
“170 women were raped during a raid on a village…the paramilitary group also stole 
medicine, goats, motorcycles, and cell phones.” (Tovrov, 2011) 
“…militias continue to attack villages, looting and raping.” (Murdock, 2011) 
“Most of the women have been raped, and most of the homes have been looted bare.” 
(ibid) 
“…committing massacres and mass rapes while plundering resources.” (Allimadi and 
Ngemi, 2012) 
“The group carried out a mass rape and looting…” (Laurent, 2014) 
“MLC soldiers searched ‘house-to-house’ for remaining rebels, raping civilians, 
pillaging their belongings…” (Sieff, 2016) 
“Ex-Congolese Vice President Convicted of Rape, Murder, and Pillage” (Wagner, 
2016) 
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e. Coming to Voice 
 
Often missing in articles discussing SGBV in the DRC are the voices of Congolese 
women.  In place of survivors narrating their own experiences, we are supplied with quotations 
from aid workers, foreign diplomats, government officials, and celebrities.  It was important for 
me to identify and highlight when Congolese women’s voices were included.  Also, to look at 
how they explain and interpret their experiences in their own words, or how they come to voice 
in reporting.  I do this with the understanding that the quotations chosen are partial glimpses, that 
they have been excerpted from longer experiential narratives to frame and support the article’s 
objective.  All of the articles share the desire to raise awareness of rape in the context of war, and 
present Congolese women as victims in need of intervention.  I am troubled by the under-
representation of Congolese women telling the stories of their lives.  They are spoken for and 
about instead of with.  What do they say when their voices are present? 
Figure 6. Examples of Coming to Voice in media data set 
“Mr.Mukuli is now the lone man in the rape ward at Panzi Hospital, which is filled with 
hundreds of women recovering from rape-related injuries.  Many knit clothes and weave 
baskets to make a little money while their bodies heal.  But Mr.Mukuli is left out.  “I don’t 
know how to make baskets,” he said.” (Gettleman, 2009) 
“I’m laughed at,” Mr.Mukuli said.  “The people in my village say: ‘You’re no longer a 
man.  Those men in the bush made you their wife.’” (ibid) 
“One distraught Congolese woman had told her that “a dead rat is worth more than the 
body of a woman”.” (Elbagir, 2010) 
“Furaha, 25, said her rapists were men in uniform, but she doesn’t think the attack was 
an act of war.” (Murdock, 2011) 
“She worries how the attack will affect her life.  “I’m not sure I’ll find anyone to 
marry me because everyone knows,” she says.” (Hatcher, 2012) 
“Mama Fahida explains: “My job is to look for those who have been violated.” (ibid) 
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I also included two quotations from male rape survivors. One of my findings is the 
omission of male rape from awareness raising representations of rape in the context of war in the 
Congo.  The way men speak about rape when they are included in the articles may help explain 
why this is the case.  Jeffrey Gettleman shows this in the New York Times, “Mr.Mukuli is now 
the lone man in the rape ward at Panzi Hospital, which is filled with hundreds of women 
recovering from rape-related injuries.  Many knit clothes and weave baskets to make a little 
money while their bodies heal.  But Mr.Mukuli is left out.  “I don’t know how to make baskets,” 
he said.”  As previously detailed, constructions and performances of masculinity tell part of the 
story of the silence surrounding male rape, “I’m laughed at,” Mr.Mukuli said.  “The people in 
my village say: ‘You’re no longer a man.  Those men in the bush made you their wife.’” (ibid).    
When Congolese women are quoted they speak of being afraid to come forward and 
discuss their rape, because they worry about being stigmatized, and ostracized in their 
communities, “She worries how the attack will affect her life.  “I’m not sure I’ll find anyone to 
marry me because everyone knows,” she says.” (Hatcher, 2012).  Another woman quoted in 
Nima Elbagir’s piece for CNN feels women are devalued in the DR Congo stating, “…a dead rat 
is worth more than the body of a woman”.”  These quotes gesture toward cultural explanations 
for violence against women.  In many instances women and men who have been raped are forced 
out of their homes and communities.  Foundations like the Panzi Hospital, mentioned above, 
offer healthcare and psycho-social programs to help survivors recover from the physical trauma 
as well as the social alienation.  However, it is also worth noting that the protracted Congolese 
conflict has left over 2 million refugees and IDPs roaming the countryside.  Sexualized violence 
alone does not account for the millions of displaced people in Congo, and I am not implying 
these quotations suggest this.  Rather, it demonstrates how myopic focus on one aspect of 
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conflict narrowly directs much needed resources. This can be further elucidated by considering 
this quote from the Washington Times: “Furaha, 25, said her rapists were men in uniform, but 
she doesn’t think the attack was an act of war” (Murdock, 2011).    
Interestingly, there is no follow up by Murdock in her article “Congo a Country of Rape 
and Ruin” even though this Congolese woman seems to be speaking directly to concerns raised 
over the silences in the pervasive narrative of rape as a weapon of war.  We do not know why 
Furaha believes her attack was outside the scope of war.  Murdock does state that both soldiers 
and civilians rape in the article, but she does not explore why this may be the case.  There are 
eleven references to rape by militias and rape as a tactic of war, and only three references to 
civilian rape.  I am not refuting that soldiers rape, but I do question if it is productive to 
overemphasize that aspect of violence to the exclusion or silence of the violence of war.  
Understandably, news articles cannot exhaustively elaborate every frame of war, but there is an 
overwhelming pattern of representing the Congolese war as a war against women where rape is 
the primary weapon. 
Now that I have established pattered representation of women as victims and 
thematization of Congolese conflict around rape in the context of war in U.S. media coverage, I 
present an in depth analysis of three articles that both support and challenge my findings.  
iii. Narratives & Counter-Narratives  
To explore the way in which stories are told about rape in the context of war in the DRC I 
have chosen three case study articles to present in detail.  The first article was published in 
Glamour Magazine in May 2016.  It represents the problematic aspects of awareness raising 
representations discussed throughout my work.  The second and third articles were published in 
The Atlantic in 2011 and 2012.  These articles present a counter-narrative to the first, and hope 
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for the ways in which reporting can challenge accepted norms and stereotypes, and push beyond 
scripted roles to capture a complex portrait of sexualized violence.   
Before I delve into the textual analysis here are some facts about the audiences and 
publications.  According to Conde Nast, owner of Glamour Magazine, Glamour has 30 million 
readers, 85% of which are women. Glamour is published in eighteen countries only one of 
which, South Africa, is on the African continent.  The Atlantic was first published in 1857.  
According to The Atlantic’s managing editor 1.2 million people either subscribe to or purchase 
the magazine monthly; there are ten issues a year.  The average age of staff reporters for the 
magazine is 35.  Mark Twain’s stories were first published in The Atlantic as well as Martin 
Luther King Jr.’s now famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963.   
A special mention about publication and audience is necessary for The New York Times.  
Not only are nine of the articles I analyzed sourced from the NYT, but it is a standard bearer for 
news nationally and internationally.  Stories featured in the NYT are syndicated internationally 
and widely quoted by other news agencies.  For example an article from National Public Radio 
(NPR) online titled “Ex-Congolese Vice President Convicted of Rape, Murder, and Pillage” by 
Laura Wagner, from March 2016, excerpts the NYT: “The New York Times reports that "largely 
because of pressure from human rights advocates and women's groups, organized or mass rape is 
increasingly being recognized and prosecuted as a weapon of war, not as a byproduct of it."  The 
NYT Company reports having 1.1 million print and digital subscribers and 1 million digital only 
subscribers.  Its most prolific African correspondent, and author of five of the articles I analyzed, 
Jeffrey Gettleman, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for his reporting on conflict in Africa; one of a 
total 119 Pulitzer Prizes awarded to NYT reporting.  
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Glamour’s article on the Congo was printed in the magazine section titled: All about You.  
Genevieve Roth, the author, travelled to DRC with actor Ben Affleck to write her article.  The 
title of the piece is a quote from Affleck, “I’ve Never Seen Women so Brave”, and the photo 
below features a smiling Affleck with Christine Musaidizi, a Congolese woman who runs an 
organization to help child soldiers. This is one of four images accompanying the text.  Two 
feature Affleck, one depicts Lake Kivu, and the last and smallest image is of a Congolese woman 
farming coffee.   
The subtitle of the article reads, “Ben Affleck is Batman, and he may also be the 
strongest supporter the women of the Congo have ever had” (Roth, 150, 2016).  Focusing on 
Affleck as a superhero plays on Western cultural gendered stereotypes and popular folklore of 
men as heroic saviors, knights in armor, and women as weak damsels in need of saving.  The 
subtitle goes on, “Glamour’s Genevieve Roth traveled to Africa to get their story – and his” 
(ibid).  Referring to Africa instead of specifically the DR Congo continues the tradition of telling 
a single story about the continent as if it were one place and one people.  In addition, the fate of 
Congolese women is linked with the success and power of Affleck. Here Congolese women are 
coming to voice through a white, Western, male.  Affleck’s fame not only seems to qualify him 
to speak for and represent Congolese women in print, but has allowed him to speak before 
Congress four times directly impacting funding allocation and diplomacy (ibid, 152). This 
illustrates how discourse becomes instrumentalized as public policy.  Further, Affleck founded a 
non-profit organization that has more than ninety active projects in DRC (ibid, 151).  These 
projects range from training female journalists, to healthcare, and prosecuting SGBV cases 
(ibid). 
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In the articles “Do We Have the Rape Crisis All Wrong” by Laura Seay and “Gloria 
Steinem on Rape in War, Its Causes, and How to Stop It” by Lauren Wolfe, both featured in The 
Atlantic, a counter narrative is presented for making sense of rape in the context of war.  Both 
pieces question the dominant assumptions that women are always the victims, rapes only occur 
as a strategy of war, and the effectiveness of policy responses that are organized around these 
misunderstandings.  Furthermore, Steinem points to the social construction of gender as a means 
of deconstructing the motivations behind rape in the context of war.  While the majority of 
reporting failed to address these concerns, and the average consumer of media is not going to be 
compelled to invest energy and resources seeking them out, it is important to point out instances 
where alternate and more nuanced portraits are crafted to discuss war rape.  One obvious 
limitation is that neither Atlantic article features Congolese women speaking.  However, this is 
mitigated, because the subject is how Western media and awareness raising representations are 
telling an incomplete story. 
Seay begins by quoting the current statistics on the frequency of rape in the Congo, and 
inviting the reader to question why rapes are so frequent and how they can be stopped.  Then she 
says, “But the story on the ground may be far different than how it appears in studies and in the 
media” (Seay, 2011).  It is not Seay’s intention to question the prevalence of rape, but to 
challenge the single-story being perpetuated about women victims and rape used only as a tactic 
of war.  She goes on to say, “A growing body of literature suggests that the prevailing 
journalistic and activist accounts of the nature of rape in the Congo are often incomplete, and, in 
many cases, simply wrong.  While no one disputes that armed men engage in rape against 
civilian populations, the story of who is raping whom turns out to be significantly more 
complicated than the popular narrative suggests” (ibid).  Complications include rape by civilians 
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and intimate partners, “We have also learned that not all rapists in the Congo are men, and not all 
victims are women…women are committing acts of sexual violence against other women at a 
surprisingly high rate “(ibid).  This article is the only one to reference the prevalence of female 
perpetrators and one of the minority to discuss male rape.   
Additionally, Seay writes that rape is not the, “main mechanism of violence”, and, “the 
overwhelming international focus on rape also means that other services are shortchanged” 
(ibid).  When resource distribution and allocation goes toward war rape it does nothing to 
address intimate partner and civilian rape, or other medical needs.  In conclusion Seay 
encourages us to think through the way, “…humanitarian focus on rape…feeds into some of the 
worst popular stereotypes about Africa.  It makes it easier for policy makers to dismiss the 
Congolese crisis as savagery rather than the product of a political crisis in the midst of state 
failure” (ibid).  Gloria Steinem echoes these sentiments in her interview on rape in war. 
Lauren Wolf predicates the transcript of her interview with famed feminist Gloria 
Steinem by stating, “Across the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of thousands of 
women are suffering the fallout of the sexualized violence (my emphasis) that has torn apart their 
bodies, their families, and their communities” (Wolf, 2012).  Wolf is the only journalist from my 
sampling that refers to rape in the context of war as sexualized violence.  Steinem echoes this 
point, “There’s a reason why it’s a truism that rape is not sex, it’s violence” (ibid).  When asked 
why she employs the term sexualized violence Steinem replies, “Because there’s nothing sexual 
about violence…People, especially men addicted to “masculinity,” may think that inflicting pain 
is the only way they can get sexual pleasure” (ibid).  This rightly attributes sexualized violence 
to the socialization of masculinity and femininity.  However, Steinem is not opposed to 
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categorizing sexualized violence as a weapon of war, because she feels it is vital to raising 
consciousness. 
Steinem points to the public/private divide as a justification for the need to signal 
sexualized violence as a weapon of war, “In the past, what happened to men was political, but 
what happened to women was cultural.  The first was public and could be changed, and the 
second was private, off limits, even sacred.  By making clear that sexualized violence is political 
and public, it breaches that wall” (ibid).  Not only do we assign gender roles spaces in which 
they can act, but the way we construct masculinity, according to Steinem, is responsible for rape, 
“If you’re going to get groups of men to risk their humanity, health, and lives in wars of offense, 
the traditional way is not to pay them a lot, but to addict them to the “cult of masculinity”…at its 
most basic, “masculine” means not being “feminine” (ibid).  This is in line with both Enloe and 
Mann who do not believe sexualized violence in war is merely a tactic, but inflects soldier’s 
beliefs about their male privilege.  She goes on to point out that rape is committed in times of 
peace as a way to perform masculinity too, but during times of war, she suggests, it becomes a 
way of life (ibid).  “Violence in the home normalizes violence in the street and in foreign policy.  
Because we gender the study of childrearing as “feminine” and the study of conflict and foreign 
policy as “masculine,” we rarely see that the first causes the second” (ibid).   
In conclusion Wolfe asks Steinem to advise individuals who are under the illusion that 
sexualized violence only happens far away, “in societies beyond repair” (ibid).  Steinem says we 
must listen to the voices of women.  Also, “no society is beyond reproach...It’s wrong whether 
men or women are suffering.  It’s just that the suffering has to be visible and not called 
inevitable” (ibid).  Nowhere do male rape survivors make an appearance in this article before this 
brief mention in the second to last line.  However, Steinem and Wolfe do a good job 
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complicating the single-story being told about rape in the context of war, and the problems that 
can occur from instrumentalizing that narrative of violence in the DR Congo.    
By looking at a systematic analysis of these articles I hoped to demonstrate a “feminist 
curiosity” (Enloe, 236, 2000) about the representational work being done by the media in 
dialogue with public policy on rape in the context of war.  Five broad themes emerged that are in 
conversation with one another, and reveal how the theoretical interventions I have identified 
operate in practice via the circulation of discourse: performativity, the single-story, 
instrumentality, lootrapeandpillage, and coming to voice.  My selection process identified 
articles that illustrate the theoretical analysis I performed to best capture awareness raising 
representations as discursive.  While my data may not be generalizable, it clearly shows patterns 
of representation.   
As I conclude my study I remain curious as to whether sexual violence is overemphasized 
in war correspondence, and, if so, how does this underestimate the ways in which masculinity 
and violence interact by narrowing the conversation about forms of violence and war?  I believe 
this topic is rife for further investigation in light of the perpetual states of war across the globe, 
and ongoing conversations about how gender informs living.     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER V 
CONCLUSION 
“The Disciplinary power that inscribes femininity in the female body is everywhere and it is 
nowhere; the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular.” ~Sandra Bartky 
In Western culture, specifically the United States, we fetishize women’s bodies in 
multiple ways that share the particular characteristic of vulnerability.  This vulnerability fetish, 
the term I will employ as I continue to unpack this phenomenon, is evidenced in a myriad of 
cultural productions: pornography, dieting, advertising, legislation, and the military to name a 
few.  Evidence ranges from refusal to allow women to serve in military combat missions until 
the early 90’s, the preoccupation with thinness and subsequent body dysmorphias, to Row v. 
Wade, articles about “getting your body back after baby”(where did it go and how could women 
lose themselves), and the categorization of activities as “other” or “women’s” like sports.  As Iris 
Marion Young points out in her seminal essay “Throwing like a Girl,” “Women in sexist society 
are physically handicapped.  In so far as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the 
definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, 
and objectified” (Young, 42, 2005).  I believe it is important to expand the conversation 
surrounding female body experiences to encompass how sexuality in contemporary America is in 
an ambiguous, porous space where it may be used to empower or dispossess depending on the 
narratives we create and popularize.   
 At the intersection of human sexuality and womanhood too often the narrative is written 
around crime and victimization.  While awareness raising representations of SGBV are intended 
as socially conscious advocacy for the rights of women, often the very language crafted to 
protect infantilizes and constructs women as other; placing women in a precarious 
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representational borderland between rights and discourse.  I am borrowing the idea of a 
borderland from Gloria Anzaldua’s discussion in La Frontera of in-between-ness, or living in the 
cracks and gaps, as a conceptualization of Chicana Feminism where, “The new mestiza,” 
consciousness emerges, and, “copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for 
ambiguity…a plural personality…Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the 
ambivalence into something else” (Anzaldua, 101, 2007).  As I conducted my investigation into 
representational work of women in conflict I found this “something else” or plural 
space/identity/subjectivity intellectually productive for articulating my thinking and findings.  
Stories about the raped woman not only impose external boundaries, albeit indeterminate ones, 
but become internalized structures that influence self-definition.   
 Gender, specifically the feminization of female-identified bodies, is the primary 
foregrounding of this work.  Race as a social construct is engaged throughout, and also grounds 
my work, but less explicitly as gender.  As my research evolved it became really important for 
me that my inquiry originate from and speak back to my subject position.  It is disingenuous to 
critique representations of so called others while continuing to speak on their behalf.  I have 
arrived at the conclusion from my reading of feminist scholarship and American reportage that 
white, Western, middle-upper middle class, traditionally able bodied, and cis-gender women, like 
myself, access our identity, at least in part, by othering and hypersexualizing the bodies of 
women of color.  Dominant narratives, media, and awareness raising representations of the 
female body and rape in the context of war elucidate this connection.    
 In the United States women feel and are made to feel unsafe.  Women report feeling 
vulnerable much of the time: walking home alone, getting into their car at night, being the only 
woman on an elevator, behind a closed door in a male boss’s office, single at a bar, and crossing 
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the street.  Even inside the home can be an unsafe space.  It is easier to reconcile this uncertainty 
when a woman can imagine a community, a space even more hostile and dangerous exists, to 
which she may set apart her life.  This “other” woman, this “other” space eases her fear and 
anxiety by embodying a depravity beyond the bounds of her circumstances.  However, it is my 
contention that what may vary in degree does not vary in kind, and “the worst place on Earth to 
be a woman” illuminates what for women everywhere is a place that could exist or not at any 
moment, an identity we may claim or disavow, a borderland through which we come and go, but 
may never leave.  
 Awareness raising representations rely for their efficacy on cultural beliefs that facilitate 
physical and symbolic interactions, and identification of women’s bodies.  It is important and 
useful to distinguish between woman as symbol and actual women’s lived bodies and multiple 
subjectivities; both are co-constitutive.  As a result of their interconnectedness the textual 
advocacy for living bodies and thematization of symbolic bodies, i.e. the raped woman, 
simultaneously may mystify and disempower or demystify and empower.  Therefore it is both 
true that women are being raped in the DRC requiring knowledge dissemination, intervention, 
and redress, and that the very mechanisms for combatting SGBV make women symbolically 
vulnerable to sexualized aggression.  Femaleness and maleness are ideals not physical 
conditions, but they are performed on and through the body.  While arguably unintended on the 
part of the press, public, and I/NGOs the thematization of violence in the Congo based on rape in 
the context of war makes women into symbolic victims.  In order to help make sense of this I 
would like to front load the conclusions of my analysis for consideration throughout the 
subsequent discussion.   
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Elaborating rape in the context of war leads to a limited and myopic focus on one 
outcome of the violence and one avenue for conflict resolution and rebuilding that ignores other 
affected groups.  According to Baaz and Stern (2012) this creates a “perverse incentive 
structure” whereby funding allocation, distribution, and application is uneven, and 
disproportionately driven toward the cause celeb instead of based on needs assessments.  This 
does not eliminate or discredit the need for research and funding to treat and prevent SGBV, but 
calls attention to disconnects between what works for media narrative, and the multifaceted 
nature of conflict.  Further, it is easier to make decisions about “right” and “wrong” when 
violence portrayed is extreme and violates social taboos; in this case regulating normative gender 
roles and myths about female purity. 
 Additionally, Congolese women are reduced to being victims in the stories being told 
about sexual violence, which may normalize rape as an inevitable consequence of war.  Other 
survivor narratives that do not conform to idealized victim types and expectations, such as male 
rape survivor or female perpetrator, are silenced or marginalized.  In the Congo many rapes are 
being perpetrated by civilians as well as armed groups, but focusing on rape in the context of war 
mutes this reality.  When rapes continue beyond the end of the war and immediate post-conflict 
reconstruction they are ignored or misrepresented, because they do not fit the idealized victim.  
Finally, there is an unequal and unfair burden placed on survivors to be an ideal victim, and not 
enough emphasis on the political and economic motives behind SGBV both in conflict and 
peacetime.  Awareness raising representations rely on the ideal victim for narrative efficacy. 
In order to discuss the work being done by awareness raising representations I am going 
to begin by adapting and expanding on Susan Sontag’s way of thinking about photography.  
Reporting is a modality of vision (Sontag, 90).  Reporters see the world as an array of potential 
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stories that alienate them from “world” (ibid, 97).  This modality of vision relies on newness for 
its sustenance; it cannot be ordinary vision (ibid, 99).  Constantly seeking the new, the grotesque, 
the forbidden, the unknown distorts meaning (ibid, 106).  Stories become symbols of the world, 
and the more unforgettable, the more they are depoliticized (ibid, 107).  Discourse is partially 
constituted by how we digest the material; by this I am not referring to material conditions of 
living, but how information is sorted and selected for storytelling.  In turn, this both informs and 
is informed by our standard for approaching a subject at the outset. 
 In awareness raising representations Congolese women come to voice through the 
mouths of readers (ibid, 108).  In Marxian terms, they acquire a use-value that becomes 
constitutive of their general value.  However, the sounds being uttered are, “the essence of 
tragedy” (ibid, 109).  News makers and subsequently audiences are trying to get at the essence of 
the elusive and morbidly desirable tragedy.  Tragedy makes individuals feel secure in their 
positions; removed observers able to see, hear, and inform on, but not be seen, heard, or 
informed on.  It affirms our humanity by being a vehicle for righteous indignation.  We are 
allowed access to other worlds without asking permission, and removed observers are included 
in production and dissemination of “truth” about them, while being distanced from their own 
injurability and vulnerability.    
 This transaction, the acquisition and transferal of “truth”, or I will argue situated truths, 
“creates a confusion about the real” (ibid, 110).  The Western ideology of humanism justifies our 
entitlement to this transaction.  By disclosing human beings as know-able things, things with a 
use-value that supports the movement to symbolic representation, the human-ness of knowing 
things, stories transform reality into a tautology (ibid, 111).  Consumers unreflectively absorb 
information from media, “But the truths that can be rendered…have a very narrow relation to the 
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needs of understanding” (ibid, 112).   It is never the less true that awareness raising 
representations also educate and highlight injustice and impunity.  I would like to return to 
Anzaldua here to emphasize there are different types of work being done by awareness raising 
representations requiring a tolerance for ambiguity (Anzaldua, 101, 2007).  Rather than allowing 
what could be interpreted as contradictions to alienate us from continuing to better understand 
and question rape in the context of war, we must, “shift out of habitual formations; from 
convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move towards a single 
goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by a movement away from set 
patterns and goals” (ibid).    
 In media-systems of disclosures it is the case that stories resemble the world in partial 
glimpses or constitute what is world by framing and interpreting our vision and experience (ibid, 
119).  This is what I call alienated knowing and is the depoliticization of information.  A reporter 
goes into the field, an aid worker, a foreign diplomat, and accounts for what they perceive, which 
cannot be labeled as right or wrong, but is necessarily partial.  When that version of a world is 
disseminated it takes on the appearance of a whole truth, but it is a replication of an incomplete 
vision; one of multiple truths.  One’s subject position allows one to relate or disassociate with 
aspects of another subject position.  This is alienated knowing whereby both the process of 
coming to know and the subject position of the knower are separate from the object being made 
known.               
 As I endeavored to research SGBV in the DR Congo a pattern emerged that I could not 
ignore.  As I leafed through page after page of news articles the proverbial liberty leading the 
people was the raped Congolese woman.  There is truth there among the pages, but it needs 
unmasking.  Women are being raped at alarming levels, how many sexual assaults does it take to 
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qualify as alarming being open for debate.  Then there is discourse masquerading as objective 
truth, and remaining unquestioned in the process: women are rape-able because they are 
vulnerable and they are vulnerable because they are women. 
 The very idea of a rape capital of the world is exclusive and predatory.  It makes a 
competition of violence and insecurity, and implies the inevitability of rape.  The worst place on 
earth to be a woman is anywhere a woman is unable to reach her full potential, cannot make 
meaningful decisions over her daily life, is marginalized, is mentally, physically, and 
emotionally abused.  The worst place on Earth to be a woman is not a geographic distinction, but 
an individual place of being that can be simultaneously held by many women, but you cannot 
throw a dart at a map and hope to find it.  To make either allegation is to be careless with words 
and ignorant of meaning.  Further, when multiple countries are successively branded the rape 
capital it signals an ability to move beyond issues of SGBV that inaccurately reflects situations 
on the ground, but instead demonstrates the demand for new and ever more horrifying stories in 
the twenty-four hour news cycle.      
 If awareness raising is the aim let us not sloganize women’s flesh or brand them with an 
award no being would accept.  Beyond being macabre distinctions not worthy of merit they are 
impossible to measure or quantify.  Further, since inception their invocation does not appear to 
have accomplished any results beyond their own self-aggrandizing pronouncement.  In fact the 
adoption and repetition of this jargon to represent Congolese women, or women anywhere, dulls 
like a blade with its every utterance; making women’s suffering more palatable.  Western 
audiences become desensitized, resulting in the belief that women’s suffering is necessary to the 
maintenance of being a woman.  
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What are the effects of employing rape in the context of war to thematize the Congo war 
in the media?  First, and the central theme of my work, thematizing war in Congo around rape in 
the context of war erases female agency.  By focusing on women as victims instead of men as 
perpetrators, victim blaming is elevated to a new art, and the root of the problem, why men 
access power through violence, remains ignored.  Male rape is excluded or marginalized.  
Westerners are left with a partial understanding of the Congo war.  Problematic gendered notions 
of power are reified, whereby, ‘mere maleness becomes sufficient cause’ for wartime rape 
(Enloe).  Rape becomes an inevitable tactic of war.  Racist stereotypes about Africa and Africans 
are perpetuated.  When violence occurs in so many forms, and the common denominator is 
masculinity, why is SGBV used so effectively to make sense and meaning of war?  I would 
suggest it works in the maintenance of male power to see women as powerless in the face of the 
machinations of men.   
I am not suggesting rape is not used as a weapon of war.  I am not undermining the 
reality of rape in the Congo.  There is ample evidence to support the existence of both that my 
work does not desire or attempt to refute.  I am asking us to think about the work being done 
representationally by the Western media’s myopic focus on the rape of Congolese women, and 
what we can deduce about our own cultural and institutional values that make this story legible. 
How do Western constructions of gender cross borders? Are violence and gender co-
constitutive?  Media representations of rape in the context of war rely on the same thinking that 
creates the condition for rape in the first place.  
The same modality of power that authorizes masculinities co-constitution with violence, 
which relies on control over sexuality for its realization, is that which legitimizes telling the story 
of the Congo war through the lens of rape in the context of war.  Both rely on the vulnerability 
107 
 
and injurability of women for their authority.  Women are objectified as victims.  Women as 
objects, rape victims, can be deployed by Western media as a character type to elicit sympathy 
and make their stories legible/intelligible.  They reflect the status of women in the West as living 
precarious lives as well, but transfer the burden of that precariousness onto an “other” who can 
silently mirror western cultural values without self-reproach, “The feeling of being exempt from 
calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and 
strengthens the feeling that one is exempt.  Partly it is because one is “here,” not “there,” and 
partly it is the character of inevitability that all events acquire when they are transmuted into 
images” (Sontag, 168, 1973).  This non-white other is seated as the source of women’s 
disempowerment to mask the progenitor of the narrative.   
Commonalities exist across all the articles I analyzed.  The stories are framed through the 
eyes of outside observers: aid workers, politicians, and celebrities.  This pattern reflects less an 
ignorance of the Congolese experience than an intimate knowledge of Western culture.  It is 
necessary to render intelligible to readers Congolese experiences, and that is accomplished by 
molding them into aspects that are recognizable as right and wrong within the context of the 
United States.  When discussing women’s bodies in the United States the universally understood 
feature is vulnerability.  As previously discussed the vulnerability fetish coincides with 
traditional gender roles.   
At the end of the day what I was most fascinated by is how the stories we tell about 
others tell a story about ourselves.  Focusing on rape in the context of war as an extraordinary 
crime committed by an “other” allows us to deflect responsibility for the ways in which Western 
culture authorizes rape by constructing masculinity and femininity. 
108 
 
At the same time as I feel a responsibility to recuperate or somehow intellectually 
reanimate corporeal experience I must confess that is not the effect of my work.  Bodies are 
canvases for expressing ideas, and ideas become ideals that (de)limit bodily experience.  Rape in 
the context of war and sexual violence are not anomalies but rather are quotidian and should be 
discussed as such.  Why is it so easy to rape someone, but so difficult to talk about rape?  
Vocalizing SGBV without victim blaming, reducing all men to perpetrators and all women to 
victims, and accessing only the most barbaric and violent manifestations strips sexual violence of 
the power it confers.  Yet we seem to have a problem with upsetting sexuality as a tool of 
dominance, power, and control.  Women access power through sexuality too.  It may be a 
perversion of power-over as modeled by masculinity.  For women being fetishized as vulnerable 
is a knowable place, and as long as African and “other” women are portrayed as more rape-able 
American women are exercising power-over. 
I hope to have demonstrated that rape in the context of war is not a women’s issue. When 
women are made visible as victims and men are made visible as perpetrators neither is a natural 
condition nor a fixed category, “The body…is where we encounter a range of perspectives that 
may or may not be our own.  How I am encountered, and how I am sustained, depends 
fundamentally on the social and political networks in which this body lives…it follows then that 
certain kinds of bodies will appear more precariously than others…” (Butler, 53, 2009).  Telling 
a single-story about the Congo as a rape geography makes the bodies of Congolese men and 
women appear precarious, and strips them of their humanity.  It is part of a long tradition of 
representing Africans as savages who commit primal acts of violence.  This distances them from 
the presumed humanity of white Europeans and Americans who are not only human, but saviors.  
Recall Mutua’s “savage-victim-savior” structure where, “the savage is the African violator of 
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human rights…the victim is individualized but anonymous, defined in terms of a universally 
applicable set of basic rights…this depoliticized victim image, in need of outside intervention for 
its redemption…the savior is the self-proclaimed enforcer of global law” (Branch, 182, 2011).      
Further, there is no such place as the rape capital of the world.  The rape capital of the 
world is an effective narrative for justifying intervention in the Congo by (re)presenting African 
men as predators and African women as victims in need of saving.  The United Nations equates 
state sovereignty with the responsibility to protect citizens, and every nation is subject to outside 
intervention when they fail to do so (Branch, 2011).  When you equate vulnerability with 
femaleness and violence with maleness you gender both violence and sovereignty.  Sovereign 
masculinity, “…has such cultural purchase in the United States that it is central to both dominant 
modes of public discourse and, for many of us, for enough of us, private and personal strivings” 
(Mann, 207, 2014).  When the media frames the Congo war around rape it is evoking our 
personal and cultural investments in gender and statehood.   
In addition, when western media thematize reporting on Congo with rape in the context 
of war it incompletely captures the ongoing conflict, it causes, and possible solutions.  Congolese 
people, both women and men, are not treated as authorities in reporting on their lives.  I was able 
to demonstrate this by data mining and finding a paucity of quotations from Congolese in favor 
of the words of celebrities, aid workers, and Western officials.    
Since the International Criminal Court was created in 2002 it has successfully prosecuted 
one case where rape as a weapon of war was included in the charges of crimes against humanity.  
This conviction was Jean-Pierre Bemba, the former vice-president of the Congo, and leader of 
the rebel group called the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) (Sieff, 2016).  His trial began 
in November 2010 and took over four years to complete (ibid).  Not only does this reflect the 
110 
 
inadequacy of international legal mechanisms for combatting rape in the context of war, but it 
also signals a larger judicial bias towards looking at rape as a bi-product of war, and a crime 
committed by combatants against civilians.  We know this is not always the case.   
Lastly, the link between policy and discourse hinges on visibility. I have argued the male 
gaze is the location where gender is instrumentalized as political power.  Women and Africans in 
the United States are presented as vulnerable by the media.  In this dynamic there is an irrational 
commitment to maintaining the female body experience (Young, 2005) as an object of male 
desire and subject to male authority.  Male authority is actualized in men as viewer as women as 
“to-be-looked-at” (Mulvey, 1992). In awareness raising representations of rape in the context of 
war women are only visible as victims.      
My policy recommendation is to stop implementing laws that single out rape in the 
context of war as a unique form of assault, because they continue to enforce female vulnerability 
and injurability by representing women as victims or pre-victims of SGBV.  This 
(re)presentation supports American cultural beliefs organized around normative gender roles.  
American cultural narratives of gender tell us women make effective targets for violence directed 
at states and ethnic groups, because they are vulnerable, and they are vulnerable, because they 
are women.   
Gender is not synonymous with woman.  While legally and representationally men are 
assumed to be the perpetrators they are also survivors of SGBV, and this reality is at best 
relegated to the margins of our current thinking on rape in the context of war.  I conclude the 
current legal framework for understanding and prosecuting rape in the context of war 
institutionalizes a discourse of women as victims that limits their agency.  At the same time this 
discourse constructs a structural bias privileging masculinity with the ability to enforce.  By 
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singling out sexualized aggression apart from other forms of assault the conversation around 
wartime violence is foreclosed. Rape in the context of war occurs alongside armed conflict 
among state and non-state actors, resource exploitation, poverty, impunity, corruption, flows of 
refugees and internal population displacements none of which exist independently from one 
another, yet it is isolated and dislocated from the macro political climate fueling war and 
violence.  Repeatedly the literature and reporting on rape in the context of war points to war rape 
as a political tool, but insists contradictorily it be prosecuted as a sex crime.  This discontinuity 
depoliticizes rape in the context of war by narrowly focusing on one aspect of the assault.   
    “Perception and policy are but two modalities of the same process whereby the 
ontological status of a targeted population is compromised and suspended” (Butler, 29, 2009).  
Sexualized violence is a feature of war.  Women are targeted by combatants to be raped during 
times of conflict.  But women are not the only “victims” of rape in the context of war, and 
civilians as well as soldiers rape.  More critically, rape is one of a number of violent tools and 
tactics in war.  When the media, governments, and aid organizations endeavor to raise awareness 
of rape in the context of war by using it as a lens to tell the story of violence they discursively 
limit women’s agency by (re)presenting them as victims, reinforce damaging conceptualizations 
of masculinity as inherently violent, only partially capture the political reasons behind the 
conflict, and fail to address the many forms of violence.  While this may not be intentional on the 
part of individuals it acts in the service of patriarchal values that should be confronted instead of 
reinforced.  Furthermore, war, the progenitor of violence, goes unquestioned. 
As a consumer of awareness raising representations in the media I see there are two ways 
of receiving them.  One is as prescriptive narration, i.e. women are victims, and the other is an 
accounting, i.e. rape occurs in the context of war.  These two functions map on top of one 
112 
 
another, and complicate the story of rape in the context of war.  How we receive and think about 
this knowledge is predicated upon our understanding of masculinity and femininity, just as media 
reflect our living within these binary categories in reporting.  I did not explore the violence done 
to men as individuals when they are socialized to rape and kill, but I believe that is a form of 
trauma that needs exploration.  Perpetrator is a category too easily assigned without question just 
like victim.  Men are culturally expected to conform to violent masculinity, and their social 
status and bodily integrity rely on its performance.  What does this do to male agency?  What 
scars are left to these violent ends?  Until we are able to move beyond reflexively responding to 
violence through the lens of gender women will continue to be doubly victimized, when they are 
raped and when they are constructed as rape-able, because femaleness is vulnerability.  Until we 
stop gendering violence men will continue to have their manhood tethered to violent expression, 
and war will be inevitable. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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APPENDIX 
1. Allimadi, Milton and Ngemi, Yaa-lengi.  “Looking Beyond Kony 2012: We can do more 
to Help Uganda and its Neighbors.”  New York Daily News, 8 April 2012, 
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/kony-2012-article-1.1057526.  
2. “Atrocities beyond Words.” The Economist, 01 May 2008, 
http://www.economist.com/node/11294767. 
3. Baladauf, Scott.  “Mass Rape in Congo Reignites Questions on Efficacy of UN Force.”  
The Christian Science Monitor, 25 August 2010, 
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2010/0825/Mass-rape-in-Congo-reignites-
questions-on-efficacy-of-UN-force.  
4. “Conflict-related Rape the Focus of UN official’s Visit to DR Congo.” UN News Center, 
14 April 2010, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=34372#.WKInOvJtg04.  
5. Cooper, Helene.  “Waiting for Their Moment in the Worst Place on Earth to be a 
Woman.” The New York Times, 16 November 2005, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/opinion/waiting-for-their-moment-in-the-worst-
place-on-earth-to-be-a-woman.html. 
6. "DR Congo Mass Rape Verdicts Send Strong Signal to Perpetrators – UN Envoy." UN 
News Center, 2011, 
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37580#.VsYkAv5FAfE.  
7. Elbagir, Nima.  “Congolese Rape Victims Mach against Sexual Violence.” CNN, 17 
October 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/10/17/congo.rapes.march/.  
8. Gettleman, Jeffrey.  “Clinton Presents Plan to Fight Sexual Violence in Congo.”  New 
York Times, 11 August 2009, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/africa/12diplo.html.  
9. Gettleman, Jeffrey.  “Mas Rapes in Congo Reveals U.N. Weakness.”  The New York 
Times, 03 October 2010, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/world/africa/04congo.html. 
10. Gettleman, Jeffrey.  “Dire Scene in Congolese City as Rebels Begin to Leave.”  The New 
York Times, 30 November 2012, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/world/africa/alarming-picture-as-rebels-prepare-to-
leave-goma.html. 
11. Gettleman, Jeffrey.  “Congo Study Sets Estimates for Rapes Much Higher.”  The New 
York Times, 11 May 2011, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/africa/12congo.html. 
12. Gettleman, Jeffrey.  “Latest Tragic Symbol of an Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims.” 
The New York Times, Aug. 5, 2009, p. A1. 
13. Hatcher, Jessica.  “Congo’s ‘Mamas’ and their Campaign against Wartime Rape.”  Time 
Magazine, 30 November 2012, http://world.time.com/2012/11/30/congos-mamas-and-
their-campaign-against-wartime-rape/. 
114 
 
14. Halperin, Carrie and Mofidi, Mandana.  “Nearly Every Minute a Woman is Raped in the 
Congo.”  ABC News, 13 May 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/GlobalHealth/minute-
women-raped-congo/story?id=13592884. 
15. Hoge, Warren. “U.N. Relief Official Condemns Use of Rape in African Wars.” The New 
York Times, 22 June 2005, 
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E6DC103BF931A15755C0A9639
C8B63. 
16. Holmes, John.  “Congo’s Rape War.”  The L.A. Times, 11 October 2007, 
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-oe-holmes11oct11-story.html. 
17. Jones, Ann.  “Mass Rape in the Congo: A Crime against Society.” The Nation, 23 
December 2008, 
http://www.alternet.org/story/113782/mass_rape_in_the_congo%3A_a_crime_against_so
ciety.  
18. Kelemen, Michele.  “In War Zones, Rape is a Powerful Weapon.” NPR, 21 October 
2009, heard on All Things Considered.   
19. Kelly, Jocelyn.  “Men Who Rape Report.”  United States Institute of Peace, June 2010, 
Special Report 243.   
20. Kristof, Nicholas.  “The Weapon of Rape.” The New York Times, 15 June 2008, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/opinion/15kristof.html.  
21. Koinange, Jeff.  “Rape, Brutality Ignored to Aid Congo Peace.”  CNN, 26 May 2006, 
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/05/23/koinange.rape.war/index.html?iref=new
ssearch.  
22. Laurent, Olivier.  “Things Fall Apart: Masculinity and Violence in Congo.” Time 
Magazine, 21 July 2014, http://time.com/3387309/things-fall-apart-masculinity-and-
violence-in-congo/?iid=sr-link8. 
23. Lloyd-Davies, Fiona.  “Why Eastern Congo is the ‘Rape Capital of the World’.”  CNN, 
25 November 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/24/world/africa/democratic-congo-
rape/.  
24. Lwambo, Desiree.  “‘Before the War I was a Man’: Men and Masculinities in Eastern DR 
Congo.” HEAL Africa, 2011.  
25. MacCharles, Tonda.  Ottowa Bureau, Toronto Star, 07 May 2010. 
26. Meyer, Nathan William.  “Can China’s ‘Deal of the Century’ Save Congo?” World 
Policy Blog, 20 July 2012, http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2012/07/19/can-
china%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98deal-century%E2%80%99-save-congo.  
27. McCrummen, Stephanie.  “Congo's Women Treated as Spoils of War.” The Washington 
Post, Aug. 11, 2009, p. A1. 
28. McLaughlin, Jana Frazier.  “The Women of Africa”.  The New York Times, 18 November 
2005, 
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E6D6113EF93BA25752C1A9639C
8B63.  
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29. Murdock, Heather.  “Congo a Country of Rape and Ruin.”  The Washington Times, 26 
April 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/26/congo-a-country-of-
rape-and-ruin/. 
30. Nordland, Rod.  “Congo: More Vicious Than Rape.” Newsweek, 12 November 2006, 
http://www.newsweek.com/congo-more-vicious-rape-106653. 
31. Radia, Kirit and Hughes, Dana.  “Clinton Visits Most Dangerous Place on Earth to be a 
Woman.” ABC News, 11 August 2009, 
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/International/story?id=8305857.  
32. Roth, Genevieve.  “I’ve Never Seen Women So Brave: How Ben Affleck is Fighting for 
Women in the Congo.”  Glamour Magazine, 11 April 2016, pp. 150-152. 
33. Seay, Laura.  “Do We Have the Congo Rape Crisis all Wrong?”  The Atlantic, 24 May 
2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/do-we-have-the-congo-
rape-crisis-all-wrong/239328/.  
34. Seligson, Susan.  “Ruined Brings Congo Torment to Life: Huntington Stages Haunting, 
Hopeful Tale of Women Scarred by Rape.” Boston University News (BU Today), 18 
January 2011, https://www.bu.edu/today/2011/ruined-brings-congo-torment-to-life/. 
35. Sieff, Kevin.  “In Historic Ruling, International Court Cites Rape in War Crimes 
Conviction of ex-Congo Official.” The Washington Post, 21 March 2016, 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/international-court-adds-rape-to-war-
crimes-list-in-congo-conviction/2016/03/21/2e7f4320-ef72-11e5-85a6-
2132cf446d0a_story.html?utm_term=.bfbee1476835.  
36. “Tackling sexual violence must include prevention, ending impunity – UN official.” UN 
News Center, 27 April 2010, 
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=34502#.WJO-Q8lF2jY. 
37. Thompson, Lyric.  “The World’s Worst Places to be a Woman.”  Amnesty International, 
17 June 2011, http://blog.amnestyusa.org/africa/the-worlds-worst-places-to-be-a-woman/.   
38. Tovrov, Daniel.  “UN Renews Congo Peacekeepers in Light of Rape Epidemic.”  
International Business Times, 28 June 2011, http://www.ibtimes.com/un-renews-congo-
peacekeepers-light-rape-epidemic-294569. 
39. Wagner, Laura.  “Ex-Congolese Vice President Convicted of Rape, Murder, and Pillage.”  
NPR, 21 March 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/03/21/471088818/ex-congolese-vice-president-convicted-of-rape-murder-and-
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