The body weaponized: War, sexual violence and the uncanny

Abstract

It is today common to argue that rape is a weapon, tool or instrument of warfare. One implication is that armed groups marshal body parts for tactical and strategic ends. In this article, I interrogate this discourse of embodied mobilization to explore how body weaponry has been made intelligible as a medium for sexual violence. First, I show that, despite wide rejection of essentialist models, the penis and penis substitutes continue to occupy a constitutive role in discussions of sexual violence in both political and academic fora, where they are often said to be like weapons, a tendency I term ‘weapon talk’. Second, I trace the image of the body weapon in key threads of feminist theorizing and commentary, to show how the penis has appeared as a ‘basic weapon of force’ in various permutations. Third, I explore the weaponization of the body as it appears in military thought and in the cultural circulation of ideas about the soldiering body in which sexual pleasure and violence are frequently conflated. Building on this foundation, I propose that these literatures collectively describe an uncanny weapon object, and I draw out the significance of this term for feminist security studies and martial empiricism. In short, the uncanny haunts accounts of sexual violence in the collision of sexuality and machinery in the image of a body weapon, in the unsettling designation of sexuality as itself both familiar and dangerous, and in the strange movement of violent bodies across the boundary between wartime and peacetime. A concluding discussion draws out implications and challenges for thinking about embodied violence, advocating renewed attention to the history of weaponization as a fallible and confounding process.

Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism

“…To consider sleep or its privation as part of the formative milieu of war draws us to the rhythms and processes of the body that both set the stage for martial experience and themselves constitute sites of power and contestation. In turn, Kirby’s unsettling investigation into sexual violence (2020) troubles our understandings of corporeal investments and mobilizations in the most intimate and traumatic of encounters.…”

“She who would be king”: identity, dignity and women’s narrative

“…She recognises the contribution of feminist thought in viewing the body as a case study, referring to it as a "site" (Oyewumi, 1997:31). As evidence, women endured centuries of violence and invisibility when their bodies were used as weapons of war (Kirby, 2020). In contemporary South Africa, the most predominant patriarchal demonstration is gender-based violence, as gut-wrenching headlines and statistics increase at an alarming rate daily.…”

“…This is because their bodies become tools that are used to tame their activism and silence their voices. Thus, the female body is an emblem of women's experiences and acts as a reminder of their continued vulnerability in the face of current challenges (Kirby, 2020). In an analysis titled "the aftermath" (Gunkel, 2010:1), fragility also symbolises women whose sexual identity is violated, questioned and challenged by society.…”

Risky dis/entanglements: Torture and sexual violence in conflict

“…Forced feeding of prisoners on hunger strike is torture; forced ‘rectal feeding’ — where a ‘nutrient enema’ is forced into a hunger-striking inmate’s rectum — is rape (Mowlabocus, 2014). Moreover, in these accounts, sexual violence emerges as a particularly effective method of torture: ‘rape is a cheap form of torture which can leave little evidence while being brilliantly effective’ (Pearce, 2003: 540; for discussion, see Kirby, forthcoming). (Such a notion, of course, builds on gendered assumptions about the effects of rape (see Stern and Zalewski, 2009).…”

“…While there are many different ways of explaining wartime sexual violence, and, indeed, the ‘rape as a weapon of war’ narrative has been criticized for being both reductionist and universalizing (Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2013; Hoover Green, 2016; Kirby, 2012), this framing remains dominant in the policy arena, as the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize attests. As Eriksson Baaz and Stern explain, the ‘weapon of war’ discourse is held together by four nodal points: the assumption of ‘strategicness’; a rational, culpable perpetrator who acts with conscious intent; the idea that rape can be stopped; and the gendered understanding that a woman’s sexual ‘purity’ represents the sanctity and the borders of her collective, making an attack against her an attack on her collective as a whole (Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2013: 44–62; see also Hirschauer 2014: 187; for a discussion of how bodies and body parts come to be framed as weapons, see Kirby, forthcoming). Hence, the strategic analysis of torture is echoed to a certain extent in the framing of wartime rape as a ‘weapon’, which seeks to stop sexual violence by refuting it as inevitable and inherent in masculine heterosexuality and by building on an idea of the rationality of the agent of rape, be it either the perpetrator or commander.…”