JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies.The September 1991 military coup in Haiti interrupted the process of democratization begun in the mid-1980s and culminating with the uprooting of the thirty-year dictatorship of the Duvalier family and the first democratic election in 1990 with the victory of Aristide. The military intervention resulted in state-inflicted and state-sanctioned human and civil rights abuses, including political assassination, detention, massacres, torture of prisoners, and disappearances. Both women and men suffered these abuses because of their actual and imputed political beliefs and actions. Yet women, as many human rights groups in Haiti reported, were also subject to other forms of political violence, in particular, rape. Uniformed military personnel and their civilian allies systematically attacked women's organizations and individuals, inflicting on them sexspecific abuses.1The brutality of the repression against women was part of a strategy to intimidate, punish, and terrorize all women's organizations, groups, and individuals who fought against repression, defending women and other democratic rights. The terrifying assaults on women were part of a broad strategy to depoliticize society. However-as in other Latin American societies where the military exercises control through repression-the goal was also to destroy gender identity and to eliminate the women's movements that had emerged in the last two decades. In Haiti, that women's movement had played a crucial role in the 1990 election of the first democratic governFeminist Studies 21, no. 1 (spring 1995). ? 1995 by Feminist Studies Inc. 135 This content downloaded from 188.72.96.21 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 05:36:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsCarolle Charles ment in the country's history2 Indeed, during the 1980s, the political landscape in Haiti had undergone some fundamental changes, with the emergence of social movements comprising, among others, many women's organizations and feminist groups.3 Women organized food riots and school stoppages, mobilized in grassroots movements, and formed their own organizations. The period marked also the incorporation of women's demands into the political agenda, because the 1986 overthrow of the thirty-year dictatorship of the Duvalier regime opened a democratic space into which women could enter as a new collective subject. Women's increased mobilization even influenced a "feminism from above," with the 1990 nomination of an "interim" female president and three female secretaries of state in 1991.4The explosion of these new political forces, defined in the literature as "new...
