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BOSNIA JUDY'S PUNCH * by Flick Ruby Making the World Safe for Patriarchal Capitalism The factors that inform and shape concepts of gender are; race, ethnicity, locale, sexuality and nationality amongst others. As gender is not one thing depending upon these variables, neither is war, so haw can we apply a gender analysis to war and militarism? Cooke states in Gendering War Talk that legitimised, psychotic violence depends upon a particular way of constructing and maintaining gender identities. By placing gender at the centre of an analysis of war, we begin to question the mythology : the mystique of the masculinity of soldiering and of the essential femininity of peace advocacy. After reproduction, war is perhaps the arena where division of labour along gender lines has been the most obvious, and thus where sexual difference has seemed the most absolute and natural.' I believe that it is in the interests of the military and the state to maintain notions of a warlike masculinity and a peace like femininity, for what better force maintains the status quo in international, domestic and private politics? War has traditionally been considered the quintessential proving ground for masculinity and femininity has been constructed in relation to this notion of masculinity. I believe that ideas about masculinity are validated and reproduced by militarism, that war experience is constructed according to culturally distinct gender expectation, that war is profoundly gendered and its violence is sexualised. This is not to say that there are inherent qualities in men or women because masculinity and femininity are not natural but socially constructed and can therefore be changed. Isn't theory beautiful? Let me take you to a place where theories hit history, passion and pain hits representations and politics and lives; the lounge room of my closest friend who is Bosnian. The family sit every night watching the news in a lounge room decorated with tapestries of bridges now bombed to smithereens. They listen to the radio during the day and wait each night to watch the ABC, the SBS, the CNN, the Derryn Hinch version of truth, the disinformation, the news. In one room , in one family, sit Croation, Bosnian, Catholic and Muslim, testament to the fallacy of the clear cut splits between racial and religious groups advertised as the Bosnian conflict. I sit with them sometimes, wincing pathetically, asking questions that betray the luxury of ignorance, asking questions about the Ottoman Empire and asking for theories to be answered through tears and frustration. Slavenka Drakulic, a writer from Zagrab says 'When you are forced to accept war as a fact, death becomes something you have to reckon with, a harsh reality that mangles you life even if it leaves you physically unharmed..war snaps your life in half, you you have to go on living as if you are still a whole person.' Drakulic goes on 'This war doesn't have only two warring sides. It is many sided, nasty and complex.' another Bosnian feminist says 'It seems impossible to over emphasise the complexity of the multi-ethnic, multinationality composition of the country and the intricacies involved..' It is precisely because this conflict has no obvious good and bad guys that the Western Hollywood enculturated mind cant grasp the realities. Instead, the 'it's too far away' mentality reigns under the banner of 'religious historical madness'. What is not mentioned is that two insane world wars have a lot to answer for here, what is not mentioned is that this is what happens in war, the terror, horror, gore and rape. What is not mentioned is that some people are profiting from this. Patriotic nationalism and militarism however are not far away at all. Australia spends $26 Million PER DAY on the military and conducts and participated in arms sales such as AIDEX and Aerospace. The complexity of affluent 'first world' patriarchal-capitalist nations like Australia in fuelling increasing global militarisation, in profiting from death and destruction, implicates every one of us. It's not so far away after all, when we realise that the relative freedom, the food and the secure well being we suck through the straw of 'democracy' is refined from the juices of the dying, the raped the tortured by profoundly gendered institutions - the military and the government. Okay, so Bosnia is far away, you might have to actually seek some information about the history, you might have to have a shit detector on when you watch the news but this is simply another event in the history of militarism. 'I used to think that war finally reached you through fear, the terror that seizes your whole being; wild heartbeats exploding, a wave of cold swear, when there is no longer any division between mind and body, and no help. But war is more perverse. It doesn't stop with the realisation of your victimisation, it goes deeper than that. War pushes you to the painful point where you are forced to realise and acknowledge the way you participate in it, become its accomplice. It may be a seemingly ordinary situation that makes you aware that you have become a collaborator.' from Bulkan Express, Drakulic. So what happens to women in war? Bodies are rendered passive and penetrable by a stronger force. The strict lines that create binary oppositions like women/man, nature/culture, irrationality/rationality, peace/war are extended to an us/them mentality. Certain ideas, concerns, interests, information, feelings and meanings are marked in national security language as feminine and are devalued, others are masculinised and are valued. 'Leave the soft life behind, join the army and become a real man.' As in all war, not just this war, women are raped systematically, used as a battle ground and defiled as the enemies property. This could be seen as simply an extension of the normal patriarchal peace-time war against women. Propaganda shows patriotic mothers and wives knitting socks by the fire, not the images of women in pieces, or of rape, torture and hunger; neither participation nor resistance is shown, just images of good women doing good deeds for the good men protecting the good state. Women are used as labour and as symbolic objects that bolster the idea that masculine, gallant men protect women from the enemy who are usually brutal sexual. In propaganda you can see how war planners manipulate allegedly private and sharply gendered relationships playing upon class interests, racial fears and sexual norms in order to recruit women's bodies, services and labour for military affairs. War and militarism distort the economy to such an extent that social justice or welfare goals are almost impossible. It is the services for women, if indeed they exist at all, that are the first to go when governments spends more on weapons in peace or in war. So war is not removed from women and children. If you are a 'third world' woman you have a greater chance of dying because of war than any soldier fighting in war machine. The 'soft targets' spoken of during the Gulf War were the 200,000 civilians, women and children killed by technological wizardry, the great wargasm. Military men give birth to wonderful explosions. Klaus Theweliet in Male Fantasies states, 'Men are being extended, transformed, reborn through the use of new technical media. The bomb was a new medium, like T.V.; it has become the ultimate medium of change through media - being (re) born without women. As one Bosnian feminist says 'these new nation states function over women's bodies. They need their national body and women to reproduce them. They are fed with hate, and with the saparation of women. They are based on violence against Others, but everyone is a potential Other, neither the 'sacred nationality' nor the 'sacred gender' is guaranteed any more. Nationalistic policy brought in the war, the death, the war rapes, the refugees, then the punishment of the ordinary people with an economic embargo' Feminist writers who spoke out against rape as a war crime against women, have been viciously accused of betraying their nation. Raped, murdered women will never be considered brave, except by us.' says Lepa Mladjenovic and Vera Litricin (Feminist Review Autumn 1993)